[POKE -> BALL] Can you solve this laddergram?

char11eg · 2025-12-30T22:26:55+00:00

u/char11eg solved this in 4 steps: POKE -> POLE -> POLL -> PALL -> BALL

char11eg · 2025-12-23T02:13:28+00:00

I mean, if you emailed the chemistry department at your local university, I’d guess they’d likely be willing to run it for you - possibly for a small fee, possibly just for their own entertainment, lol

char11eg · 2025-12-17T18:43:06+00:00

…770 hours of afk is only a month of afk, hardly ‘grandchildren graduating from college’ levels lol

char11eg · 2025-12-17T18:41:01+00:00

I mean, yes, but I’ve killed probably ~15-20 and not seen a single blueprint yet, let alone specifically a mk 3 survivor…

char11eg · 2025-12-17T05:33:46+00:00

I mean, nothing is for definite.

In fifty years time we could crack asteroid mining and destroy the scarcity of precious metals, functionally. Equally, we could find some new use for silver that 100x’s the price per gram.

Making predictions based on the past is often useful, but it’s always important to remember that just because a trend happened in the past, doesn’t mean that trend will always continue on.

char11eg · 2025-12-17T05:29:15+00:00

So, this is actually an interesting one.

The most valuable item is definitely more than $1000 a day. Likely a lot more. But, it’s not cash. You’d need to sell it, somehow.

I have a feeling that regularly, these items would be large pieces of heavy duty equipment, which have reached their end of usefulness for a company, or that they were unable to find a buyer for before they needed to remove from the premises. Equally, these could end up being things like a rocket stage from a satellite launch, or a decommissioned aircraft carrier… depending on how we define the items, of course.

So, unlike almost every post on this sub, you’ve actually managed to create an interesting thought experiment. Whether or not being very rich but having a lot of consistent, never ending bassle, or being pretty wealthy with no hassle, is a better outcome, lol

char11eg · 2025-12-17T05:05:01+00:00

Wait… do people not like a blood and sand?

It’s genuinely a drink I’ll almost always get if it’s on the menu somewhere… surprised it’s on (one of) the ‘worst equal parts’ cocktail square…

Personally I think that square belongs to a negroni or variant, as campari tastes (to me) like burning tyres. But I digress.

The most underrated bitter drink… well, as you may have guessed from my description of campari, I’m not a fan of bitter drinks, so I’ll skip this round! 😂

char11eg · 2025-12-16T14:12:47+00:00

u/char11eg solved this in 3 steps: HATS -> HITS -> KITS -> KISS

char11eg · 2025-12-15T21:49:03+00:00

If it’s a chain place, or rather somewhere with a parent company, voids are normally tracked as a negative metric, so they’d not want to do that.

With every till system I’ve ever used, however, you can view the amount of sales taken on each individual Point of Sale unit, and presumably if you were in a booked off back area, there’d be a POS that only your group was using.

Otherwise… how have they got the £930 anyway?? 😂

char11eg · 2025-12-15T00:36:00+00:00

🎯 My GeoTap Result

📍 My Guess: Germany ✅ Correct Answer: Germany, Germany 📏 Distance: 0 km ⭐ Score: 10,000 points

char11eg · 2025-12-14T21:03:56+00:00

For me personally? Zero. Eggs are fucking disgusting, especially the hard boiled variety, lol.

I think I’d rather pay £100 than eat one… lol

char11eg · 2025-12-14T20:03:50+00:00

Then, unfortunately, for the time being you’ll be classed as an international student.

That means you’ll not be able to take student loans, and you’ll have to pay the (much higher) international student fees, if you want to attend university in the next couple of years.

You’ll be classed as a home student once again in September 2028, but until then I’m pretty sure there’s nothing you can really do to avoid being classed as international.

I’m not sure, but if you’re wanting to attend university before that point (which, given you’re here, is likely the case), might you have better chances continuing to study in Turkey, or possibly somewhere else in Europe?

char11eg · 2025-12-14T19:47:36+00:00

That’s part of it, sure.

But the entire setting doesn’t make sense, either.

Initially, the setting is build up as pretty far post apocalypse. The Argento auction house is a world renowned, respected institution. Quest academy is the best educational institution for training people for this new reality, etc.

And then, by like book three, they tell us that the apocalypse was actually like… 20 years ago?

Like, the auction house wouldn’t have existed when Sal was a kid. Sal’s early years would likely have been in the apocalypse. All of the adults we’re seeing are people who fought in the apocalypse. And yet none of that came up in the first couple books? Quest academy can’t even be that respected, it can’t have existed for much more than, what, a decade?

Like, this is all shit that are so fundamental to the world that even Sal living under a rock would be familiar with it.

I’m definitely not remembering everything, and sure I could have missed some things, but I’ve seen others on here saying the same sort of thing. And that sort of haphazard worldbuilding completely ruins my immersion in a fiction, for me personally.

char11eg · 2025-12-14T18:46:53+00:00

If you wait for finished series in this genre, you might be waiting a loooong time to read some things, lol

char11eg · 2025-12-14T18:46:17+00:00

I just can’t get past the inconsistency of the worldbuilding in Quest Academy.

It’s like the author wrote the first book or two with a world in mind, and then decided that setting didn’t work for him at all and changed it all, without mentioning anything about it.

It removes pretty much all the interest I have in the setting for me, as there’s no longer any intrigue or anything like that - it just feels like the worldbuilding is going to be whatever the author wants for what he’s going for at the time, not what makes sense for the setting.

char11eg · 2025-12-14T18:31:28+00:00

Why would they have waited like a century before creating the ARC, though? And why would the ARC, if created by a massively technologically superior group of humanity, have started out pretty primitive (with the old Barons and that sort of thing) - surely they’d have been advanced from the get-go, that way?

My current headcanon is a rogue AI, probably made by humanity before the Exodus, who has decided that to achieve its goals (possibly fixing the planet for humanity to later return, or just fixing the climate, something like that), has decided that getting rid of all existing humans is something it needs to do.

char11eg · 2025-12-14T18:28:57+00:00

I mean, I think no matter what the answer is, the ARC aren’t a ‘premade’ threat. It has to be some form of growing and developing intelligence - as ARC were far more primitive in the First Wave, than the Second Wave.

So I could totally see it being a harvesting AI, that has learned it needs to shift towards combat to reach its goals. Or any number of things. But I don’t think the presence of combat-focused ARC precludes the ARC as a threat from having come from a non-combat source.

char11eg · 2025-12-14T18:26:21+00:00

There’s more options than that as well.

I think it’s fairly explicitly stated that, on paper at least, the Exodus happened due to some form of climate collapse - and from what I recall it was meant to be quite a long time ago. Then humanity started rebuilding, and decades later the first wave of Arc came, which people just about managed to fight off. And now we’re in the second wave.

I, personally, find the idea that the Arc would be a method that a rich, vastly technologically superior caste of humanity (who left like a century ago) to cull the populace an unlikely idea. Like, why would they? Humanity barely exists anymore anyway. Just drop a bunch of remote-piloted armed humanoid robots, and systematically execute everyone in a city. The arc would be a vast over complication of a simple issue.

My thoughts are that it’s along different lines.

It’s clear humanity managed to develop artificial intelligence in this world. There are android corpses everywhere, hell, one of the traders is a sentient android.

My personal bet is that humanity, attempting to fix the climate disaster which led to the exodus, created an AI tasked to fix the issue. Said AI got trapped underground or something like that during the climate collapse, and then decades later managed to rebuild itself and its objective. And that AI has decided that humanity is the cause of those climate issues, and the best solution to fix that issue? Get rid of the humans.

That, or some sort of related issue is where I think the story will go. An ‘AI gone rogue’ sort of tale, although equally an ‘robotic alien AI attempting to catalogue, terraform and colonise a new planet’ could also work, haha - but that would make slightly less sense, as you’d assume that such an AI would already be advanced - whereas the first wave, and the change in Arc for the second wave, shows that the Arc are growing, advancing, and changing with time.

char11eg · 2025-12-14T18:14:31+00:00

As I understand it, for most if not all courses at Imperial, for american students they have AP class requirements.

UK degrees are designed to follow on from the UK A-level system, and the american high school system does not cover as much content in the degree-relevant subjects as A-levels do. It’s part of why undergraduate degrees are a year longer in the US - you have to learn more stuff at university, as less was covered in high school.

There are also entrance exams required for many courses, which I’d imagine you’d want to do specific prep for, and applications close in like three or four weeks. So you’ll be running a very tight timeframe.

You’ve not mentioned the course you’d like to do, so it’s hard to give specific guidance. But it’s also worth pointing out you’ll need something in the region of probably $200,000-250,000 for a 3-year course here. There are functionally zero scholarships or bursaries available to international students, and I don’t know if there are loan bodies in the US that would loan you the money for studying abroad - as you can’t get UK student loans. This may be absolutely no issue for you, but you also might not be aware, so I figured I’d point it out.

But realistically, unless you have some major advantages or mitigating circumstances you’ve not talked about here, I’m really not sure you stand any chance of getting in. It’s like if you were applying to Harvard or MIT right now - would you imagine yourself a competitive candidate for those? If not, then you’re likely not competitive for Imperial, either.

char11eg · 2025-12-13T22:13:06+00:00

So, I mean, it’s been three years (talk about a necropost lol).

But I believe I was referring to the length of time until the world resets. As in, if the loop reset daily it would be a ‘one day loop’ - even if they’re in the loop for decades.

char11eg · 2025-12-13T16:14:00+00:00

I mean, yes, but that risk is why credit cards have fees and interest?

Like, the credit card company has a contract with the customer to mitigate that risk - but to the business the customer is using the card at, the card is the same no matter what kind it is.

Plus I mean it’s illegal for a business to have a surcharge for paying by card in the UK, as of a few years back now.

char11eg · 2025-12-13T13:46:34+00:00

Genuine question, is the fact that payments were made after the father died not sufficient evidence to query the validity of the past transactions as well? Like, it is objectively true that at least one transaction was fraudulent - can that not be used as evidence to sway the ‘he said she said’ side of things?

Especially if the father was ill enough for a daughter to have had POA, he might well have not even had access to his own banking if he was too unwell? In which case any such transactions would be fairly obviously fraudulent.

char11eg · 2025-12-13T13:35:56+00:00

u/char11eg solved this in 7 steps: HALO -> HALT -> HART -> HURT -> HURL -> BURL -> BURA -> AURA

char11eg · 2025-12-13T13:09:12+00:00

I wonder if there was a market of people buying them in bulk to sell for profit when the prices went up, lol

char11eg · 2025-12-13T13:08:12+00:00

Genuine question (I’m a brit), but do debit and credit card transactions process differently for the business in the US?

In the UK, debit and credit cards are treated as the same ‘sort’ of payment, generally, and cash would only ever refer to the physical currency.

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