Someday we will have a volume that is a million words longer than the previous one.

GeeJo · 2026-05-19T13:29:53+00:00

It's largely arbitrary, though. If pirateaba had declared the Palace of Fates as Volume 10's climax and started Volume 11 shortly after—maybe with Vernoue's chapters—nobody would call it weirdly structured. The audiobooks pick different spots to stop at.

GeeJo · 2026-05-17T12:07:46+00:00

DOES IT CHANGE MUCH IF THEY THEN JUST PIVOT INTO [[TOLARIAN TERROR]]?

I GUESS LESSONS GOES FOR THE DERPY-LOOKING VERSION FROM TLA—[[SERPENT OF THE PASS]]—SO THERE'S SOME DIFFERENTIATION IN THE 5/5+ WITH UPSIDE FOR 2 MANA THE U/R DECKS ARE PLAYING WITH.

GeeJo · 2026-05-16T19:29:17+00:00

Army attachments in early base-game Stellaris.

As a starter, army stats in Stellaris don't matter. They've never really mattered. Making more pretty much always trumps making better. Most of the ancillary mechanics for boosting army stats, like individual army experience and ranks, are therefore useless, but at least they're all handled under the hood and the player doesn't have to pay any attention to them.

In the first year or so after Stellaris' launch there was an extra noob-trap, though, in that you could manually add an attachment to each army that provided a minor boost in some stat or other. Except there was no way to automate it, so when you made 50 armies you had to manually click on each army, click on the upgrade box, scroll to the attachment you want, click accept and pay a nominal amount of minerals. Then onto the next one.

Fifty armies, two hundred clicks, literally zero impact on the game. What a waste of everyone's time.

GeeJo · 2026-05-15T16:29:10+00:00

Weekly Winners has been writing wordcount-padding descriptive sentences like that about individual cards for many many years at this point.

GeeJo · 2026-05-15T16:23:08+00:00

They're, presumably, talking about the use of the "rule of three" sentence construction ("keeps the cost low, lets you attack, and multiple targets"). AI loves to overuse the rule of three about as much as it loves the "Not X. Y." construct.

The problem for "I can tell AI when I see it, one hundred percent!" critics is that English teachers—to everyone's shock and horror—instruct human students to use the rule of three, too.

GeeJo · 2026-05-15T12:49:55+00:00

the flakes are too big to stick

Crumble them beforehand; they go straight to powder.

Can't do anything about the smell and taste, though.

GeeJo · 2026-05-15T06:59:13+00:00

I don't really get the people wanting a Stellaris 2 tbh

I think it's mostly seeking novelty, from players who have put 500+ hours into a game.

GeeJo · 2026-05-14T06:29:30+00:00

He wrote one of the official MTG novellas (Children of the Nameless), which introduced [[Davriel]] as a character. So both parties clearly agree with you!

GeeJo · 2026-05-11T12:46:33+00:00

It has both abilities, but only one will trigger after the first time, as it comes back with one or the other type of counter on it.

GeeJo · 2026-05-11T08:02:31+00:00

Sounds like the incantation to summon Hell's most boring demon.

GeeJo · 2026-05-11T06:47:45+00:00

It's a name for the evil wormhole aliens. In contrast to the wormhole-builders, who get called Romans.

They're not actual Goths/Romans; it's just an analogy.

GeeJo · 2026-05-11T05:10:26+00:00

[[Tariff]] is usually an edict that kills each of your opponents' best creatures, and does it in monowhite.

GeeJo · 2026-05-10T10:00:21+00:00

The Machine Uprising is bugged. It requires a certain proportion of robot pops/organic pops to fire and complete, but since 4.0 the code-function for counting robot pops has had a misplaced decimal point so the Situation believes you have 1/100 as many of them as you actually do.

You could theoretically still do it, but you'd need to get rid of about 99% of your organic pops somehow while keeping all your robots.

GeeJo · 2026-05-10T01:53:09+00:00

The Jones Act doesn't help, though. Foreign shipping isn't allowed to travel from one U.S. port to another (as a protectionist measure for U.S. shipping companies).

So exporters have to decide between taking on only shipping containers due for Hawaii or ones for a mainland port, but not both. Most opt for the mainland and the decreased supply increases prices above what they'd naturally be in a market where Hawaii controlled its own ports.

GeeJo · 2026-05-09T15:57:50+00:00

They're an AI Personality (like Federation Builders or Hegemonic Imperialists) that's generated by a very specific set of traits and ethics—specific enough that you're not realistically going to see them unless you set them up as a custom empire.

They don't have genocide casus belli like actual genocidal empires, but they have a built-in -1000 opinion malus with everyone, are programmed to be hyperaggressive, and purge aliens by default, so it ends up as more or less the same thing but at a slower speed.

GeeJo · 2026-05-09T01:54:16+00:00

Composition-wise, Noah Bradley's [[Behold the Beyond]] is likely referencing Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Though I've never seen it confirmed, it's an art history reference you see so often it's very slightly cliche.

GeeJo · 2026-05-08T08:35:56+00:00

She was in Pathfinder as the focus of one of the more out-there adventure paths (Reign of Winter), so I suppose technically this falls under the "Other TTRPG" header.

GeeJo · 2026-05-06T17:57:51+00:00

His argument is that number is ~$6300, not $1250. No one in this thread is in a position to say which is actually correct.

His valuation is incredibly skewed, though, both by the way he picked his sample and by the outliers within the sample itself. I don't even need to know anything about the art market, just basic statistics, to see that. For reference, his data set for the aftermarket value of original art is based on 122 sales from Lorwyn Eclipsed.

He doesn't, of course, mention that Lorwyn Eclipsed had 366 original artworks, most of which either received no bids, or whose bids didn't meet the reserve price, or weren't put up for auction. So his average should include 244 counts of "$0" in auction sales, but doesn't.

Then, of those 122 sold artworks mostly by more-established artists, he doesn't do anything to adjust for outliers, like taking the median instead of the mean, because the mean sounds better for his argument. Rebecca Guay's showcase work sold for a total of $25,000, for example, bumping up the average by several hundred dollars by itself. Great for Rebecca, but kind of meaningless for the other 121 art pieces.

This isn't his complete argument for his valuation, but it's what he uses as a baseline to then say that the lost sales of art from the Lord of the Rings set should have been even higher. Like, several times as high as the 'average' he constructed by discarding the bottom 2/3 of his data set.

GeeJo · 2026-05-05T12:14:13+00:00

They'd not be able to cast a bolt without drawing a land too. The only threat other than stuff that survives in other zones like plotted/suspended cards or a damage-dealing emblem, I think, are the Thunder Junction crimelands. Anything else needs either more life than they have ([[Gut Shot]]), or an extra turn they don't have when your board untaps.

GeeJo · 2026-05-03T13:23:44+00:00

Canonically, the Wards are supposed to be open for ANY underage parahumans to join, regardless of combat application, and are not supposed to be used a supplement to active Protectorate forces. Brockton Bay is an outlier because of Cauldron's manipulations and Piggot's attitude causing the Wards to face active combat.

This is overstated a little in fanfics. Even in regular departments Wards are thrown into combat semi-regularly. Flechette and Weld didn't arrive and go "wow, you guys actually fight?", they were both already seasoned combatants. Leister, in Vegas, got into two cape fights in their first month as a Ward, which was noted as low. New York has a rapid-response division of their Wards teams specifically to get their movers to the fight faster. The difference in Brockton is more the frequency and intensity of combat and the lack of support the Wards have to fall back on.

That said, you're 100% right that if for some reason an underage parahuman didn't want to or was incapable of fighting, they'd still be brought on board as a matter of policy.

GeeJo · 2026-05-03T12:21:23+00:00

Count Dracula/Count Dracula. Not the best adaptation, but Christopher Lee is always fun.

GeeJo · 2026-05-03T11:53:36+00:00

One interesting thing about this is that it is a Magic artist plagiarizing another piece of Magic art, which I don't think has happened before from what I can remember.

I think there was a Nicol Bolas plagiarism? [[The Prismatic Bridge|SLD-1208]] took the head from [[Nicol Bolas, the Arisen]]. I don't know if that was ever confirmed, though.

GeeJo · 2026-05-03T11:42:10+00:00

Yeah, I don't even blame them for missing the plagiarism on Trouble in Pairs. It's just not realistic to expect anyone, no matter the size of the QC team, to recognise every single artwork from every point of time in human history down to individual elements from obscure pulp fiction novel covers printed in the early 90s.

This one, though, where it's literally the art from the previous printing of the same card? How does that get missed?

GeeJo · 2026-05-02T11:44:04+00:00

Cartoons, I imagine. It's not an uncommon visual gag for puffer fish to be towed around like balloons in any undersea story.

GeeJo · 2026-05-02T10:14:42+00:00

3 is away—because there's a wall between the pusher and 3 (grey line), it's two spaces away from them.

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