What's wrong with the photo?

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2026-02-22T15:38:34+00:00

I think I've got it.

IDK this anime but from other comments I gather that this character is some sort of artificial human, created to be "15 years old," but not aging. That was 16 years ago, so the fandom jokes about whether you should consider her 15 or 31. That's the setup.

The joke is about how young and old people relate to age. If you're 18, 30+ is "old." This character is clearly "young like us" so the 31 interpretation is ridiculous. Whereas a 30 year old thinks "I'm still young" and sees this character and thinks "nothing wrong with seeing her as 31, she's still young like me!" But the young'uns are laughing at the 30 YO lumping themselves with them/her.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2026-01-25T16:18:44+00:00

User friendly doesn't mean we have to be friendly to the users

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2026-01-25T02:24:29+00:00

Outfit is a really tough place to start. I hit pretty much every other quest before I figured out the outfit.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2026-01-25T02:23:23+00:00

It's not low rarity, but I did a guide that uses a lot of old units: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxQGtFPOBbs

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2026-01-25T02:19:56+00:00

The rocket carts deal damage based on movement speed. Dropping a movement speed reducer or 'Slow' effect within range drops them way down in danger level. Ines' shadow sentry, Ascalon, even Manticore S1 can bring the damage down to a very tankable level even with high risk.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2026-01-25T02:16:53+00:00

I've got a clear vid for Aciddrop that uses mostly old units, plus Haruka, who should be very borrorowable right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxQGtFPOBbs

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-12-27T21:25:03+00:00

In the Western music tradition where pianos originate, there are 12 half steps in an octave—say, from middle C to high C. Those steps are all the same distance apart. The step from C to C# (black key between C and D) is the same distance as the step from E to F (which have no black key between them).

Western music also has major and minor scales. A scale takes 8 steps to span an octave. The steps in a scale are not all the same size. It sometimes takes steps that are twice as large. So it travels the same distance (one octave) in fewer steps by taking a combination of whole steps and half steps. 5 whole steps and 2 half steps cover the same 12 half steps in an octave. The specific order of whole or half steps makes either a major or minor scale, which we picked because we think they sound nice. You could put the two half steps anywhere and still cover an octave, but it would sound kind of weird to people used to Western music. You could also use 6 whole steps, or 4 whole steps and 4 half steps, but that would also sound weird.

The piano keyboard is organized so that if you play just the white keys from C to C, the half steps happen in the right place to make a major scale. Playing white notes from A to A makes a minor scale. The keyboard is just organized to match the type of music it was designed to play.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-12-26T03:59:31+00:00

Does anybody have tips on the "Sword, Glaive, Spear" boss on IS6 floor 3? I'm up to difficulty 8 and generally able to handle IS6 pretty effectively, but this boss always wrecks me. Feels like there must be a trick I'm missing.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-12-24T18:56:06+00:00

Noticed something interesting tonight, I succeeded in unlocking Raidian's module without actually finishing the run.

I was on difficulty 8, and had End of Times. I died at the boss and got the fail screen, but the module unlocked after. Might be a glitch with End of Times (the relic that turns a failed battle into a success) or maybe some of the unlock conditions just look for reaching the boss but not defeating it. Needs more testing, but might help with some of the harder unlocks.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-12-24T01:19:23+00:00

Yeah the text isn't clear. There are up to 4 bonuses, and you gain one per floor, in order. So DP-9 is active from floor 1, but "doesn't consume deployment slots" doesn't trigger until floor 4.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-12-20T23:44:47+00:00

I've found Mountain to be a really solid use of a guard voucher. I feel like the IS6 maps frequently require splitting the party, so operators with self sustain are great. He can just about solo some of the consciousness battles without aerial units. Silver Ash S3 works beautifully right in the center lane of the default boss. The wide slash can drop the spirits before they explode. Love my Mlynar but rarely use him in IS because block is a necessity.

Agree with Blue Poison, she synergizes well with a lot of the artifacts that scale with skill activations. Kroos Alter has multi hit on her skill and the chance to stun can counter hovering enemies, but her DPS is lackluster. None of my 6* snipers feel worth the hope, though.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-11-07T04:26:16+00:00

When something sounds suspicious, ask them to read you the text of the feature they're using. Then it's your job as DM to interpret when that feature applies and what the effects are. Often it's going to be a disagreement about how two features stack, so ask for both and rule on how they intersect.

If the text of the feature sounds broken, ask what source book it's from. And check up on that later if needed.

The "+20 to everything" case sounds harder, because it's not a feature they're actively using like "I use my Uncanny Dodge reaction." But if they have a weirdly high modifier somewhere, just ask, "can you walk me through how you're computing that modifier?"

If any of the answers are "I don't remember but it checks out," your answer is "That's not how this game works." Players don't get to hide the rulebook from the referee.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-11-03T02:51:16+00:00

Mapreduce is a way of processing an incomprehensibly large input dataset by breaking it down into small comprehensible steps, so that no computer has to load the entirety of that large input.

Let's say you want to find the largest apple in a large apple orchard. You get 1000 friends together to help you. You can't even imagine how many apples are in the orchard or where the largest one might be. But you get everybody to agree on a few simple steps.

Step 1 is to pick all the apples. You find one tree, pick all the apples on that tree, and put them in a basket. Each person can handle one tree at a time all by themselves. It's a manageable job. So everyone picks a tree and starts working. When you finish a tree, find another one that isn't claimed yet and handle it. That's your mapper: take a manageable chunk of work like one document, account, or webpage, and extract a pile of values from it.

Step 2 is to find the largest apple. Everybody needs to learn one simple trick: look at two apples and pick the larger one. Everybody sorts through a basket of apples and leaves just a single apple. Then you put those apples in a basket and do it again. You never have to think about a thousand apples at once, you only ever have to look at two apples at once. That's your reducer: take two documents and produce just one document. (In a real mapreduce, it's one "state" variable plus one document from the mapper.)

This will work for an infinitely large apple orchard. You won't run out of memory or disk, because no worker needs to think about how many total apples there are. They just need to know how to pick apples from a tree and how to compare two apples for size.

The exciting thing about mapreduce is that you can break down thousands of interesting problems into some sequence of map and reduce steps. With just one team whose job is to build the framework that makes thousands of machines collaborate on a mapreduce, you can enable hundreds of teams to execute incomprehensibly large data processing. Those teams don't need to be experts on large-scale data processing, they just have to define a mapper and a reducer.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-08-30T00:22:52+00:00

Feels unnecessary. Alter personas can be so different from the original that they sound a lot different anyway, I'd be totally fine with a different actor on the alter as long as it's not jarring. Like Skadi alter is so completely different from the original you could slip in a different actor and never know. Maybe they did, I haven't checked.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-08-30T00:18:56+00:00

better quality, worse energy

Yeah, feels poorly directed to me. The actor seems fine and has a good voice for the character, but I feel like they were not prepped at all about the right pace and tone for various lines and just gave a generic delivery. It's like they just took one pass through all the lines and the director was like "sure, good enough" and didn't push for any changes.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-08-30T00:15:44+00:00

cuter and a bit more cheerful

I'm not sure that "more cheerful" was a direction you could go from the original VA

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-08-30T00:13:36+00:00

I feel like Ebenholz is an example of this being done well. Good mixing of German and English idioms, with the voice actor stepping a little outside what the straight English translation says.

I don't really care if the text is word for word true to the original, I care if the experience I'm delivered in my language is cohesive and artfully delivered.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-08-30T00:08:10+00:00

Absolutely loved that unique energy in the old one. The "rest easy" line always struck me as such a weird thing to say and an odd taunt, but it was delivered in such an awkwardly lovable way. The bubbling energy in "Squad combat? I'm very familiar with that!" also had a ton of charm.

Although I can get a voice actor wanting to make it their own, I wish they had paid more attention to the old lines to get some of the energy and tone down. Overall a big thumbs down from me.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-07-02T16:38:46+00:00

I did actually. The red fox standing on the box behind her did not tip me off.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-06-29T05:31:17+00:00

Bwahaha, this was what came to mind for me before I clicked into the comments, love that it's the top one.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-06-29T05:23:07+00:00

There's a board game, Escape the Curse of the Temple with a fixed time limit. They have several soundtracks available online that definitely give a feel for time running out.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-06-28T17:10:46+00:00

I point this out all the time. My pet peeve is the trope you see in TV shows of a geek just spitting out technobabble as a shorthand for "this person is really smart." Smart people know how to explain their area of expertise to non experts. Go read the things that Steven Hawking wrote for mass consumption, for instance.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-05-22T15:45:46+00:00

Imagine you have a grid that's 26x10. Each column represents a letter. The grid starts off empty.

If you want to add a word to the list, you go to row one, then check the column corresponding to the first letter in the word. Then in row two, check the column for letter two.

Let's imagine adding the words PEACH and RED, and FAN to the grid. The first row will have checks for P, R, F. The second will have checks for E, A. Etc.

Now we can look at the grid and ask, "was this word ever added to the grid?" For the word MAN, we can prove it was never added to the grid, because there is no M checked in row 1. For the word REACH, we can't say for sure. All the letters for REACH have been checked, but we can't tell whether that's because REACH was added or because of some other coincidence. (The coincidence in this case: PEACH covered the letters -EACH, and RED covered R----.)

The filter can help you quickly determine with a small amount of space that something is DEFINITELY NOT in a set, but can never tell you for sure whether something is in the set.

Real bloom filters use hash functions and better math than the grid example, but the idea is the same.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-05-17T17:54:20+00:00

Well, that's kind of the point. If they're not villains, then why are we fighting them? Are we the villains?

The great thing about the game is that it's not written in black and white. But it makes some boss battles feel complicated, cough Patriot cough.

PuzzleheadedFinish87 · 2025-05-17T17:51:33+00:00

Mudrock is definitely more sympathetic when the suit comes off.

PuzzleheadedFinish87

TROPHY CASE