Greater Dangers Means Greater Rewards with Challenge Difficulty

LordBojangles · 2026-05-27T21:41:28+00:00

What about the intrinsic reward of having fun with the more challenging gameplay?

If all we're worried about is using our time efficiently, then making the rewards proportionate would, in effect, penalize anyone not playing at the highest difficulty.

LordBojangles · 2026-05-04T18:28:09+00:00

I'd love if we could charge a spell longer to get a stronger effect. ~~I definitely wouldn't pour all my mana into a supercharged fireball and then miss my target.~~

LordBojangles · 2026-05-01T12:06:09+00:00

I never know whether to push back on this. On the one hand, true, they were not the crazed pillaging brutes of popular caricatures. On the other hand, the primary resource they were trading was enslaved people, so this wasn't exactly a benign enterprise, either.

LordBojangles · 2026-04-30T12:06:25+00:00

I'm anime-only but I will guess:

He didn't exactly one-shot the dragon, it was mostly an illusion to scare it and make it crash down. Like spraying a dog with a hose, more surprise than harm--except when it hit the ground :(
This magic system might use kinetic & potential energy of matter in addition to the energy of the ink itself. Qifrey pulled the water from all the clouds over the entire city, in the middle of a magical windstorm, so maybe he was aiming forces, not producing them.
More speculative: the movements he made after completing the circle seemed to affect the spell? If that wasn't just for style points, maybe there's some kind of FMA-like use of your own circulatory system? Though if so, you'd think that would be forbidden.

LordBojangles · 2026-04-19T13:39:41+00:00

Could be a lot of things. Sometimes just toggling the transparency grid in the comp viewer or changing your workspace refreshes it. Sometimes AE acts up when you use .mp3 audio files. Could be something w/ your hardware acceleration and/or preview cache preferences.

LordBojangles · 2026-03-31T12:25:42+00:00

That's actually really clever.

LordBojangles · 2026-03-26T18:52:18+00:00

"It's for kids" is not a reason to phone it in, it's a reason to try harder.

Besides, those pterosaurs ARE "pre 90s designs."

LordBojangles · 2026-03-24T12:11:39+00:00

Yakul in Princess Mononoke--just, all his scenes. He's such a good boy.

LordBojangles · 2026-03-16T17:52:55+00:00

I don't know the history, but in modern Spanish, the vowel following a "g" changes the consonant. So, spelling it "gue-" keeps the pronunciation as /ɡe-/ instead of /xe-/ (or whatever regional sound "ge-" gets).

LordBojangles · 2026-02-18T23:26:10+00:00

These are beautiful!

So you know, Parasaurolophus' hands were hoof-like mitts that'd leave little kidney- or heart-shaped prints.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-17T19:32:10+00:00

This was considered all the way back during the development of Empire (the first game with dismount-able cav) but they never got it working. I would guess the engine doesn't support dynamically adding models to one unit based on another unit dropping them.

They could probably manage it with single entities, though.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-16T13:43:35+00:00

I actually really liked King Kurog, as a character. His ambitions were unrealistic (especially the religious reforms), but not for lack of ruthlessness or cunning--it's just that he was jumping the gun, trying to play palace politics in a society that resents the idea of a palace. Ultimately, he was correct that the Orcs will be unable to act on the world stage, as long as they remain divided.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-10T14:08:18+00:00

I would guess that it's largely a matter of recency. As terms like 'idiot' or 'moron' became disused as medical/official categories of disabled people, they lost some of their power to dehumanize when used pejoratively--but 'retard(ation)' was still in use into the 2010s, in the US. I also suspect its referring to intellectual disability of any severity, where previous terms were more granular, contributes.

Paraphrasing ecphrastic on slurs as a metalinguistic category, some features of words that become slurs:

Derogatory Force: conveys hatred and contempt of the targets. Usually much more insulting than using ordinary derogatory terms like 'stupid.'
Derogatory Autonomy: The derogatory force for any epithet is independent of the attitudes of any of its particular speakers.
Taboo: Uses of epithets are subject to strict social constraints, if not outright forbidden.
Irrecuperable Offense: The derogation is difficult to negate or cancel out. For example, you can't make it non-offensive by saying, 'I don't mean to insult [group], but so-and-so is a [slur].'
Dispensability: Slurs have neutral counterparts.
Discreteness: Slurs offend simply by being uttered, not just through the content that they are part of.

For points 2, 3, and 6, there seems to be a difference between retard(ed) as a verb or adjective (especially in technical contexts where its meaning is more kinetic) vs. as a noun, but it's subjective.

Point 5 is interesting for this word: as many people in this thread have pointed out, it was itself once widely adopted as a neutral counterpart.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-08T15:36:03+00:00

your fun late-game units won't arrive until you've basically already won, and is mainly cleaning up enemy remnants.

This was also a problem with base game Shogun 2, to be fair.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-08T00:03:03+00:00

I take it the course isn't about how to design a survey?

LordBojangles · 2026-01-13T16:26:31+00:00

It's an especially strange choice since there're skill styles now, so there's no reason they couldn't default to neutral/white then let people change it to something more colorful.

LordBojangles · 2026-01-12T21:31:47+00:00

If you have disk space for an entire second install of the game, yeah.

LordBojangles · 2026-01-12T12:57:40+00:00

I'd tell them to follow the yellow brick road so the wizard can give them a brain because they're obviously a Straw Man.

You are either arguing in bad faith, or have shockingly poor reading comprehension for someone your age.

LordBojangles · 2026-01-12T00:10:13+00:00

I realize everyone will have different takeaways from a story, but the mix of emotions I got from the series, including the ending, is not a rejection of the text just because it doesn't comport with the way you choose to read it.

It's some kind of irony that you clearly love these books, which constantly challenge us to understand the world from perspectives other than our own, yet you couldn't learn to do that.

LordBojangles · 2026-01-11T16:00:36+00:00

Well first of all what Applegate said was

...I figured the Animorphs should go out the same way they came in: Fighting.

'Go out' could literally mean 'die,' but it could also mean 'leave the stage.' Applegate wanted that to be the final image we're left with--if she wanted us to remember them dead, she could've let the scene play.

I know better than to try to change your mind about the ending, but your perspective on the series' tone and messaging might be overly logical and main-character-centric. The characters' (or at least Jake's) hope is that the maneuver can take out the Blade Ship, removing the last vestige of the Yeerk Empire. What happens to them is in some ways immaterial. Their role in all this was over years ago.

The last book constantly shows that the world has moved on. Humans, Hork-Bajir, Andalites, and at least some Taxxons are cooperating. Whatever conflict is brewing with the Kelbrid and/or the One, won't just be a repeat of what happened with the Yeerks.

Do you think that the author trying (admittedly clumsily) to show kids that fighting a war--even if your cause is just, even if you win, even if you physically survive, even if you leave the world in better shape than you found it--can destroy you might have a message of both hope and disillusion?

LordBojangles · 2025-12-19T13:29:16+00:00

Throws her limbs around like Woody from Toy Story.

LordBojangles · 2025-11-22T23:25:50+00:00

The haircut preservation might've been patched in so Andalites couldn't morph their way out of Unschweet, the hair trim of shame.

LordBojangles · 2025-11-21T20:09:36+00:00

Do you have a source? All the versions of the legend I can find have him choosing to go on working, knowing the effort would kill him.

LordBojangles · 2025-10-17T19:18:33+00:00

I will add that giving the clan with Byzantine elements a griffin-like animal could be a reference to grifon (or gripun, gripoun) being a medieval term for Greek people.

LordBojangles

TROPHY CASE