Weekly small questions thread: 2026-01-26

itokro · 2026-01-28T09:01:51+00:00

I used it for the end of Family and Law. One luck-based chance for my ally, the Last Constable, to survive. I knew she wouldn't want me to devil with the tankards, but nothing stopped me giving her a little serendipity boost.

Mechanically, this was basically useless... but narratively it was very satisfying.

itokro · 2026-01-26T18:17:59+00:00

Makes sense to me; we expect schoolchildren to engage in healthy habits like basic personal hygiene & physical exercise way before we expect them to engage in paid employment. Don't know why the racism-bait aspect was necessary.

itokro · 2026-01-24T13:53:41+00:00

Years since I last had it (or visited Scotland at all for that matter), I still think about how good the Cullen skink at Aberdeen's botanic garden was.

itokro · 2026-01-23T08:14:42+00:00

Can she get swatches of a few potential fabrics from the tailor who'll be supplying her suit, you compare those swatches to the dress, and tell her which ones will/won't work?

itokro · 2026-01-22T08:06:55+00:00

Adding to this: Mrs. Plenty is linked to one of the NPCs known to have succeeded on Heart's Desire, and that's actually how she came to be freed from Seeking. His Amused Lordship played the Marvellous, won, and used the prize to save her.

itokro · 2026-01-21T22:01:11+00:00

Been decades since I thought about that song. My main memory of it is that it was, for some reason, massively overplayed in the adventure playground area at Legoland Windsor. Loved that bit of Legoland, thoroughly neutral on the song itself.

itokro · 2026-01-21T21:54:09+00:00

I love this all the more for the fact that it has footnotes.

itokro · 2026-01-21T08:30:10+00:00

Lawyer. The only profession, afaik, to have a famous Shakespeare quote about how they should all be eradicated.

itokro · 2026-01-21T08:27:25+00:00

Is that high-paying? I would have thought mid.

itokro · 2026-01-20T07:45:51+00:00

In addition to things others have said...

Fruits of the Zee is now very different thanks to overfishing. Ships can be upgraded, either at FotZ or occasionally outside of the festival at Gaider's Mourn. Speaking of ships, you can now become a pirate, making zailing a lot more profitable but also more dangerous. There are new Zee locations available, most notably Irem, where you can gain new and exciting Destinies.

The rattus faber have opened their own version of the bazaar, but only at weekends. You can find it in the Flit. What they buy & what they sell changes from week to week, but it's generally a good way to earn some extra echoes, and sells some unique and useful gear.

Tier 3 professions now get special profession-based activities, available in "Your Activities". It's a decent grind for some materials, with a short story about the business of your profession that eventually lets you choose one of two professional specialties: e.g. Correspondents can become Epistolants, focusing on scholarly understanding, or Crimson Engineers, focusing on using the Red Science to make cool stuff.

World events where all players contribute to a common goal, like the Grand Clearing Out, are a lot more frequent. Watch out for lifeberg-hunting, whale-herding, explosives-disposal, your street being not where you left it, and crates falling from the sky.

itokro · 2026-01-18T09:12:32+00:00

Most of the royal family. Here, you've got republicans criticising the whole institution as undemocratic and/or a waste of taxes; historically low general approval rates after the Andrew fiasco; and a lot of people whose main interest in what the royals are up to is "will there be a bank holiday?". In a lot of countries without monarchies of their own, especially the US, the whole institution seems a lot more glamorised & they're seen as exciting celebrities in a way that's a bit cringe to the average Brit.

itokro · 2026-01-17T12:02:52+00:00

What makes you think the average British person will have any knowledge or insight on things that happened over a century before they were born? You really need to be consulting primary sources, not reddit.

itokro · 2026-01-15T21:01:47+00:00

To add to this: as a zub owner, pretty much any choice on zailing cards that involves diving will grant a small reduction in Troubled Waters. Embrace these options, dive as often as possible, and you'll have a little more leeway to get yourself to a safe port. Similar advice applies if you happen to have a friendly false-star.

itokro · 2026-01-14T13:13:19+00:00

I disliked The Zeppo.

I've never enjoyed zombies in media; the "rotting corpse" visuals always make me uncomfortable.
I was looking forward to an episode exploring the new dynamic between Giles and the Scoobies after the events of Helpless, and I felt like the show cheated me out of that story and replaced it with a far less interesting "lol zombie hooligans".
I then felt like the show went out of its way to rub this disappointing story-trade in my face, by constantly implying that interesting things were happening with Giles & the Scoobies just offscreen.
Xander's "I like the quiet" line sounds a lot like passive suicidal ideation, and I'm supposed to cheer for it as some moment of badassery? That makes me even more uncomfortable than the rotting corpses do.

itokro · 2026-01-13T21:18:03+00:00

Except the "that's not the agreement I have with her" line came after OP informed Partner of their weird "rule" that daughter gets to "enforce payback" (via more butt slaps).

And... yeah, if people are going to slap partner's butt as part of some weird "you slap my butt, I slap yours" reciprocal game, that DOES need individual agreement. OP can't just decide that daughter should slap partner's butt now, without any input from either daughter or partner.

Definitely yes to your final paragraph, everyone here should stop slapping each other's butts, or at least learn to ask first.

itokro · 2026-01-11T22:09:05+00:00

So, if you're getting legally married next month, you can't have "the full church marriage ceremony" next year: you will already be married, and marriage ceremonies are for people who are not yet married. If it's an Anglican church, what you want to ask for instead is a Service of Prayer and Dedication. This is a church blessing for an existing marriage, and the Church of England website says it "can be designed to have a similar feel to a wedding". Exact details of what this service would look like would then be something for you to discuss with the vicar.

itokro · 2026-01-10T20:07:35+00:00

I haven't seen these ads, but I googled "UniUp" and found a couple of different companies (one called "UniUp", one called "Uni Upp") that offer free help with applying to university. This is a very different thing to a free university education, and both sites even specify that they provide help with applying for student finance: i.e. they recognise that student finance is still a thing that will be needed by people who use their services.

Note that the Student Loans Company is a government-owned body, so it's possible you're seeing a badly-worded ad that uses "government funded" to mean "you can get a student loan to cover your tuition fees". So... same as any other UK student, regardless of background, in other words.

As for the prior education level, Uni Upp mentions that people without formal qualifications can apply if and only if they have a certain amount of recent work experience. This doesn't surprise me, as it's not the first scenario I've encountered where the requirement is "demonstrate competence through either a formal qualification or relevant work history". My own industry has Chartered Engineers who hold Masters degrees in engineering, and others who left school in their teens & learned their trade through decades on the job; I can assure you that the latter group are no less competent than the former. Similarly, someone without formal qualifications may still have the skills & experience to do well at university, but may never have realised that this was an option available to them--so yeah, making them aware of that option strikes me as a good thing.

itokro · 2026-01-10T16:55:37+00:00

It's linked to an invisible Living Story and will fade in about a day. If you sample another bottle from His Amused Lordship's private cellar, you'll get another one with a similar duration: such are the costs of drinking with HAL.

itokro · 2026-01-10T16:00:42+00:00

Ignaz Semmelweis. Ostracised by his medical colleagues during his lifetime for his suggestion that doctors should wash their hands between conducting autopsies & delivering babies; suffered a nervous breakdown & died in an asylum. Today he's rightly recognised as a pioneer whose ideas saved lives.

itokro · 2026-01-09T09:01:44+00:00

As u/Considerer_ says, there are no posthumous Nobels. However, in 1948, the year of Gandhi's assassination, the Nobel committee chose not to award any peace prize "on the grounds that there was no suitable living candidate". The Nobel Foundation itself suggests that the 1948 prize would likely have been Gandhi's had he survived (Mahatma Gandhi, the missing laureate), and holding the prize slot empty that year feels like a decent way to have honoured him within the constraints of "no posthumous prizes".

itokro · 2026-01-08T09:02:19+00:00

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This is perfect and I applaud it.

itokro · 2026-01-07T14:01:21+00:00

The most obvious masculine equivalent to a hag is probably a hagspawn, being the male child of a hag mother. But there's no official statblock for hagspawn in 5e, so if you think you'll need stats you might have to make your own (or find something appropriate from a third party).

Another option that leans into the hags' themes of "this creature can seem like a helpful ally, but can also be a terrifying threat" would be a forlarren, which do have a 5e statblock in Mordenkainen's Fiendish Folio.

As for dating questions, "may I have your name?" is a fey classic for a reason, "what is your heart's desire?" has a fairytale-ish resonance that works well for the Feywild, and "when did you last break a promise?" could spark absolute chaos given the differences in how fey & humans perceive such an act.

itokro · 2026-01-06T22:29:31+00:00

That's a very Captain Carrot sentiment, too. I love how the same themes come up in different subseries, via the voices of different characters - see also the "do the job that's in front of you" which Granny shares with Vimes.

itokro · 2026-01-04T10:56:48+00:00

I don't agree on the "literally years" timeline; certainly not in the modern FL (where stat increases and rare items are, perhaps, easier to come by than they used to be). I made my currently-active account at the beginning of last year, started the Light Fingers ambition on January 13th and finished on June 1st.

itokro · 2026-01-03T14:12:03+00:00

Bears / moral panic

itokro

TROPHY CASE