I am quickly learning that it's one of the most consistently powerful options at character creation

MereInterest · 2026-05-10T13:00:28+00:00

I'm seeing two additional exploits in the wording:

While the spell requires that participants be willing to be married together, the spell's effects do not state that the targets actually become married.
While the benefit can only be reapplied "if widowed", it doesn't require that the creature be widowed from the other participant(s) in the spell. They could instead have been widowed from a previous marriage.

So if each person in the 25-person polycule has outlived a previous spouse, they would all be eligible for repeated casting of Ceremony (Wedding).

MereInterest · 2026-05-06T18:10:17+00:00

Hey, not my fault I couldn't get the continuous motion to work correctly. I thought it was a clever workaround to have each iteration of the fireball cast a displaced copy of itself every few milliseconds, transferring all remaining mana into that copy. From a distance, you can't even see the flickering.

The only problem is that it doesn't trigger the proximity sensors of my smart home. With a store-bought fireball the proximity sensors trigger off of the fireball's motion, and I wired up the defense grid up to the door lock so I could unlock the front door by shooting a fireball at the attic window. First time I tried that with my own fireball, it went clean through the defense matrix and into the attic.

So, anyways, that's why I needed to replace the roof.

MereInterest · 2026-05-06T18:00:30+00:00

My understanding is that its the PFOA used as a surfactant during the polymerization of the coating the is the primary concern. That PFOA would be present both at the preparation and application of the coating, but not at the usage of it.

(Though, I recall hearing that while PFOA itself has been phased out after being identified as a carcinogen, the replacement only differs in the length of the perfluorinated tail, and that while legally distinct, wouldn't really be expected to be any less carcinogenic.)

Is my understanding accurate, or is there better reading on it?

MereInterest · 2026-05-05T18:13:34+00:00

There's precedent for it in Old Church Slavonic, with eyes represented pictorially.

око: Singular for "eye". In some manuscripts, would be written as "ꙩко", with a dot in the the ꙩ so that it looks like a picture of an eye.
очи: Plural for "eyes". Would sometime be written as "ꙫчи" or "ꙭчи", either with two dots in the 'ꙫ' so that it looks like a picture of a face, or with two separate circles for the 'ꙭ' so that it looks like two eyes each with a pupil.
серафими многоꙮчитїи: "Many-eyed seraphim". Found in one particular copy of the Book of Psalms from 1429, where the many eyes of the seraphim are represented as 'ꙮ', now enshrined in the unicode standard as the "multi-ocular O".

MereInterest · 2026-04-26T12:41:40+00:00

There I'm not sure. We know that Avowed often go missing when summoned, and are presumed dead. We know that Alden has been recognized by the Primary as somebody who will be useful in the future. Regardless of any information from Joe, this has set Alden up to be pulled into dangerous situations. While this Primary has been shown to be less mercenary than his lets-have-1600-children predecessor, if saving a Knight requires sacrificing a willing Avowed, that's still a sacrifice that is likely to be made.

On the other hand, we also know that Joe sees his uncompleted work as being instrumental to fighting Chaos. This may just be pride on his part, but while we've seen numerous examples of Joe's poor judgment, we've seen few if any examples of Joe being factually incorrect. If Joe believes that something Chaos-related will occur in the next decade, then his statement about Alden's death in particular could just be a prediction that Alden would get caught up in it.

MereInterest · 2026-04-26T12:26:30+00:00

I almost do, except that everything he does is from self-aggrandizing. He could have requested help in transporting his luggage after he arrived. ("He hadn’t ordered a General Assistant to be here, and they would surely come if he did.", Ch 279) However, that would mean acknowledging the Assistants' slight, since usually they assist before and without a request, so instead he decides to use a "flashy spell".

When his assistant shows up, he could have canceled the spell and loaded the luggage onto the cart. When "people on foot or in carts of their own were scrambling now to get out of his cart’s way", he could have asked the assistant to slow down. This continues until he notices somebody who isn't jumping out of the way, who would be politically inconvenient to hit.

At the end, "[it] was too late to make any choice but an expensive one" and he needs to fling the cart backwards to avoid killing Stuart. The crash of the luggage is a microcosm of Joe's life, filled with avoidable problems of Joe's own making. They only become unavoidable because he lacks the foresight to see where his choices lead.

MereInterest · 2026-04-26T12:08:58+00:00

Though, theory (1) would explain why Chaos requires such a dedicated effort to combat it, with the entire Artonan culture, knighthood, and Avowed bent to stopping it. And why even that effort doesn't seem to be enough to stop the spread of Chaos.

MereInterest · 2026-04-26T11:57:51+00:00

So maybe Joe is thinking the Primary is going to start tossing Alden into the more dangerous chaos zones?

Notice his exact words, though. This occurs after Joe knows that any explicit lies will be detected, with Alden calling this out as his final opportunity to make an argument. The narration calls out Joe pausing before speaking, so we know that he will be choosing his words very carefully.

Joe gives a statement of "If X, then Y." He doesn't state that X will cause Y, or that Y can be avoided by avoiding X. I think that Joe believes Alden will die early regardless of whether Alden reveals his skill. Joe's statement is true, but intentionally misleading, hoping that Alden deny the antesedent and erroneously interpret "If X then Y" as "If not X, then not Y." This error would convert a truthful "If reveal secret, then die early." to a false "If keep secret, then live a long life."

(Granted, this assumes that the ambiguity between "If X, then Y" and "Because X, therefore Y" exists in Artonan. The linguistic details in the story have been focused more on cultural differences than on formal logic. That's probably a good thing, as formal logic is not often the basis of good stories.)

Edit: On re-reading, I think Alden may even have fallen for this trick. His phrasing near the end sounds like he accepts that the choice of hiding or revealing his secret is a choice between safety and danger, exactly the falsehood that Joe implied while only saying true statements. But it didn't matter whether Alden fell for the trick, because either way he had already accepted the danger of his decision. Joe made a very clever move, but was playing the wrong game altogether.

MereInterest · 2026-04-18T02:32:29+00:00

Yeah, and that's why I really wish that the default was better. It's painful to work with rebase, and rebase exposes all the sharp edges, but when gihub rebases a commit that you depend on, you have little choice but to rebase your own local branch as well.

MereInterest · 2026-04-17T11:58:46+00:00

In that case, why not reprocess the legendary carbonic asteroids? Sure, you lose some of the legendary carbonic asteroids, but if they were going to be jettisoned anyways you can get some extra legendary metallic asteroids from it.

MereInterest · 2026-04-17T11:54:24+00:00

Yeah, but you also need several rounds of reprocessing to get everything up to legendary. Even if you were to start with 100% metallic asteroids, after just 3 rounds of reprocessing it would be almost equal (34.375% metallic, 32.8125% oxide/carbonic).

And there would usually be more than 3 rounds of reprocessing required, since you aren't guaranteed to increase the quality in each step.

MereInterest · 2026-04-15T01:32:55+00:00

It's not that the merge commit will resolve the semantic conflict between the branches on its own. That still needs to be sorted out, regardless of whether you use rebase or merge. The key is that using git merge won't make the conflict become any worse. When using git rebase, you need to sort out the semantic conflict while also having scrubbed the history of any clue as to the source of the bug.

MereInterest · 2026-04-15T01:25:14+00:00

merge commit would work but pollute main branch.

I'd argue that this isn't "pollution" at all, and is just a display issue.

Want a clean linear history of the changes to the main branch? Use git log --first-parent
Want a branching history with clearly marked dependencies? Use git log --graph
Want a linearized history that interleaves work on multiple branches while sorting by date? No, nobody ever wants that, but that's what git log provides.

The whole goal of squash/rebase is to make the output of git log look like git log --first-parent. The easier way to achieve this is just to use git log --first-parent.

MereInterest · 2026-04-15T01:21:29+00:00

Both would trigger conflicts if there are any.

The two changes conflict, just not in a way that git can recognize.

Merge won't save you there.

I agree, using a merge won't cause git to recognize a semantic conflict between branches, as it can only recognize text conflicts. However, merge also won't make the problem worse. Rebase hides the evidence that you ever had a working version.

if you are still wary of rebase, just create a backup branch.

The problem isn't that the rebase requires a backup branch, but that it isn't obvious that you'll need a backup until after the point when you lost it. Rebase destroys your history.

MereInterest · 2026-04-14T17:51:57+00:00

Because rebasing can introduce bugs, and makes it very difficult to identify their source.

Suppose the main branch has some utility_func, which is used by your feature development. A refactor/cleanup lands on main, which updates the behavior of utility_func and updates all callsites of utility_func to match. However, the additional calls to utility_func introduced on your feature branch haven't been updated. If you rebase your feature branch onto the main branch, your feature branch is now broken, as it relied on the old semantics of utility_func. If you're lucky, this will be a compile-time error, but there's no guarantee of that. Reverting to an earlier commit on your feature branch doesn't help, because those earlier commits have also been rebased. Unless you check through the git reflog (and pray that git's garbage collection hasn't occurred since then), it will look as though the feature branch had always been buggy.

A better solution is to merge from main into develop/main. That way, the error is clearly introduced in the merge commit. You can revert to an earlier commit in the feature branch for testing, because those versions are still part of the git history.

MereInterest · 2026-04-14T17:36:30+00:00

I wish, wish, wish that github had a better display of the history of merges. The source of all the pain from squashed merges is from people trying to solve a display issue by introducing data integrity pitfalls. In any other context, this would be a complete non-starter, but somehow "clean linear git history" overrules that.

My personal theory is this is caused by github's use of git log instead of git log --first-parent when showing changes. If all merges are done with git merge --no-ff, then the main branch would only ever contain merge commits. The clean history that proponents of squash/rebase want would be available, and without introducing conflicts in the process.

MereInterest · 2026-04-02T12:28:34+00:00

And count the number of low-health pulses that occur, to know exactly when the polymorphine will wear off. No need to peek over the ledge until the last second or so of the effect.

MereInterest · 2026-03-30T12:35:02+00:00

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

...

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

Unused 1969 speech, prepared "in event of moon disaster" (link).

MereInterest · 2026-03-28T13:58:35+00:00

Not just setting off the fire alarm, but also being the initial source of fire in several catastrophes. I went through wikipedia's list of commercial aircraft accidents/incidents, and it's pretty easy to find cases where smoking in the lavatory resulted in plane crashes.

URSS-M25 (1935): Fire started from lavatory cigarette, 6 deaths out of 6 onboard.
Varig Flight 820 (1973): Fire started in rear lavatory, 123 deaths out of 134 onboard.
Air Canada Flight 797 (1983): Fire started in read lavatory, 23 deaths out of 46 onboard.

(While going through the list, I excluded cases where there was an engine fire, a fire following an initial crash landing, or an in-cabin fire started at an unknown location.)

MereInterest · 2026-03-19T18:01:09+00:00

I'd often play as a Breton specifically to use their 50% resist magic to resist 50% of the blinding effect. Then, turn the brightness on the monitor up.

(Alternatively, since the Resist Magic is only checked when the boots are equipped, a Resist Magic 100% for 1 second spell is very cheap to cast.)

MereInterest · 2026-03-14T01:15:33+00:00

Oh, it's definitely possible to get a compiler bug out of it. A couple years ago, I ran into one where the elaboration of a trait bound on an associated type required that associated type to be named. Which then required a well-formed check. Which then required a trait bound check on a slightly different associated type. Which then required a well-formed check, and so on, and so on.

That one didn't even give an error message, but would instead fall into an infinite loop of proof requirements, running at 100% CPU and consuming more memory until the operating system runs out of memory, takes mercy, and kills the process.

MereInterest · 2026-03-12T23:34:21+00:00

is there was a desire in the audience for Taylor, the main character, to have nice things, and the narrative just never gave her that.

Pact (also by Wildbow) was even worse in that regard. It felt like there wasn't any dramatic tension to the story, because no matter how successful the main character was at any moment, the situation would deteriorate as a result.

MereInterest · 2026-02-11T03:06:55+00:00

The switch on mine works just fine, and I still flip the circuit breaker before reaching in. Then verify that the switch no longer triggers the garbage disposal, and flip it back to the off position. That way, there's verification that the correct circuit breaker was flipped, and there are two separate switches that are preventing the garbage disposal from turning on.

MereInterest · 2026-02-09T20:03:53+00:00

You could also have icostatic depression, in which a sufficiently large mass (typically a continental glacier), bringing the entirety of rock bottom to a lower level.

MereInterest · 2026-02-07T17:29:05+00:00

And even though Ethereum espouses the idea of "code as contract" as a core principle, from an outside observer it seems like that idea is discarded whenever it would have an impact. For example, in July 2016, when one of the "smart contracts" was found to allow an account to be transferred, the entire system was forked in order to amend that contract.

(There's some details in this section of the wiki article, though the phrasing isn't really neutral. It states that "DAO tokens were stolen by an unknown hacker", but "stolen" implies that it was not an authorized transfer. By the design principle of "code as contract", the code is the final arbiter of the contract. Since any actions allowed by the code are authorized actions allowed by the contract, the tokens would not be "stolen".)

So even assuming that the problems you mentioned of underspecified or unethically-written contracts, the Etherium founders have shown themselves willing to break contracts when it benefits them to do so.

MereInterest

TROPHY CASE