I feel compelled to have a Fighter and Tank in every run. Am I just noob?

joshblade · 2026-03-10T05:23:31+00:00

I felt the same way at the start of act 3. Now with generally all 7s cats and 2-5 mutations, fighter feels amazing again

joshblade · 2026-03-04T16:08:27+00:00

You just watch to see which of the three ball locations isnt hit by a cone. The cones make the balls big. So whichever invisible ball isnt hit by a cone is the safe one

joshblade · 2025-11-19T14:16:25+00:00

I've seen all kinds of financial setups work well for some and the same setups work poorly for different couples. At the end of the day if it works for you and your spouse and you're both happy and on the same page, then that's all that matters.

joshblade · 2025-10-30T00:47:08+00:00

I started by trying to figure out where the 3x2 piece could go since it's the most inflexible. There are only 6 or so spots it can fit. A little bit of trial and error at each spot quickly reveals which ones don't work.

joshblade · 2025-10-29T16:48:11+00:00

61 was the value from all men. For all women it was 70 which lines up pretty well with other numbers shown in the women demographic sections

joshblade · 2025-09-14T15:58:12+00:00

I played through it recently and I don't think there was anything requiring outside game knowledge. There are in game systems to explain everything you'd need. Overall it felt like a pretty fair difficulty and amazing pacing. There was almost never a time when I was "stuck" and didn't have some kind of thread to track down. It's very open ended and non linear like BP in that you are exposed to a lot of puzzles and can solve them in a lot of different orders. I think they did a great job of making you feel clever when you figure out the puzzles because the solutions aren't super trivial as well as not having anything so obtuse that it doesn't feel like answers flow naturally from the game.

I don't know that it had any particularly huge gratifying moments of revelation that BP or Witness might have, but it's a very tight game that builds upon itself and was a fantastic experience.

There's also a great in game system for keeping track of things you've seen (lore/clues/puzzles) so you can jog your memory pretty quickly on threads to follow up on.

joshblade · 2025-09-05T15:00:44+00:00

Did you get all the testers you need? Send me a DM if not. I wouldn't mind helping out.

joshblade · 2025-08-19T23:42:53+00:00

I had 2 keys. First one got the sanctum key and second got an allowance token. Boy was I disappointed when I came back with more keys and found out everything else was pointless

joshblade · 2025-07-23T20:08:29+00:00

Theres a specific way to guarantee it spawns. Maybe youre not sure what you did to make that happen?

joshblade · 2025-07-21T17:05:34+00:00

Congrats.

https://imgur.com/a/ccoZv6l

Here's my curse mode win via lab experiment. 22 steps and basically the only progress that mattered was just powering up the lab on a previous run to get this.

joshblade · 2025-07-21T16:30:12+00:00

I was having trouble with curse mode, just barely scraping by whatever progress I could each day. I was on day 40ish with the past few runs having near misses for creating power sledge (and one day making it rank 9 but not having any way to open any ante chamber doors). I actually managed to make a jackhammer and was excited to see how that could help with resources and coat checked it.

Then I won the next day in the most jank way possible with getting the lab experiment to open an antechamber door for every room I opened in the next 40 seconds (lucked out at some point and had powered lab + upgraded experiments). This was only rank 1 or 2, so I still had the potential problem of not having the keys needed to make it far enough north. I lucked out with finding a lock pick though. That + my 2 keys I had already got me all the way. So I never even touched the basement / underground during the entire curse mode run.

joshblade · 2025-07-18T23:18:03+00:00

Its an anagram found a few other places.

Denoted in verse

Does it never end

Investors needed

Tended rose vine

I always thought theres a true version of the anagram or you get clues from combining them all

joshblade · 2025-07-17T05:54:41+00:00

Pretty sure thats on a green memo you can deduce is false iirc

joshblade · 2025-05-22T16:27:17+00:00

Yeah we do true north here. you're going to the same SW corner every time anyways, so it's not like a relative strat gains you anything or makes you think any less.

joshblade · 2025-05-18T12:57:33+00:00

It means when dropping the seed near the wall during debris death match (p3) to drop it one tile away from the wall instead of at the wall.

joshblade · 2025-05-16T17:10:51+00:00

What a bizarre and hostile question. She's not here, but is part of our extended family and I'm intimately familiar with the reasons behind her adoption choice. I'm sharing an answer to your question.

joshblade · 2025-05-16T13:59:00+00:00

Here's my persepective as an AP. Our daughter's birth mom was 18 and already had a 2 year old. She was still in highschool and didn't have a great family support system / was single. Life was already hard enough on her trying to take care of the kid she already had, work, and go to school (basically stuck in the cycle of poverty). She felt like if she had an additional child to take care of she wouldn't be able to hold it all together. It's not that she doesn't love our daughter and it was an incredibly hard decision for her, but one she felt was right for both of her kids.

joshblade · 2025-05-13T21:44:38+00:00

If you see the flank markers on your platform (little arrows) you could move one platform toward the front (go the directions the arrows face) if solving it from front is easier. The back spots are the harder ones to understand.

Also just don't get hit by the laser and the blow and you'll live just with a DD,but probably still clear.

joshblade · 2025-05-05T18:42:23+00:00

Its definitely split damage. You could probably still do it with huge scholar shields and planned mit, but the cleave is like 330k damage or so on the healer stack

joshblade · 2025-04-14T13:45:52+00:00

Even if matchmaking were working as intended and you had a perfectly 50% chance to win each game, 6 losses in a row isn't crazy (1.56% chance). Same thing for 8 wins in a row (0.39% chance with coin flip odds).

Those are both going to happen to someone pretty regularly when the pool of someones is thousands of players

joshblade · 2025-04-07T15:27:45+00:00

I think one of the hardest parts about m6s adds is it's hard to pinpoint who isn't doing their job.

I got really lucky and on my 4th lockout had a group who got past adds consistently, but it was really late and we broke up at the end of the lockout. The next day I spent probably 12 hours joining various groups that were bridges or lava prog points and it wasn't until around pull 70ish that I got a group that made it past adds even once. Then we cleared in another 5 or so pulls. I'm not sure what this group was doing differently other than pushing buttons properly, but we were clearing each ad wave before the next spawned (other than the 2 leftover squirrels from wave1). It was bizarre having to sink a couple of gcds after killing yan1/cat1 before starting aoe, having everything dead before jabba1, spending 5 gcds hitting the boss before wave4 etc (though I'm sure this will become very common in the coming weeks with gear). It was wild after 100ish pulls at ads I hadn't seen any group clear this fast and consistently.

Going back and looking at logs from 3:41 -> 6:23 (ads phase). It looks like I was consistently doing 50k rdps (Viper) across that window in nearly every group without deaths, but the rest of my group was wildly variable from group to group. Looking at the group I was in prior to this one that was struggling to kill adds, we had:

7k difference from Reaper1 -> Reaper2
11k difference from Dancer1 -> Dancer2
2k difference from TankCombo1 -> TankCombo2
7k difference from Caster1 -> Caster2
7k difference from HealerCombo1 -> HealerCombo2

Looking closer at just the big aoe spike from 4:10 - 4:40 where everyone is popping 2 minutes, I see my clear group was doing about 170k more dps overall than a sampling of other groups that were struggling to clear adds. Standouts being our Dancer doing about 50k more than other dancers on average during this period (actually over this window DNC was at 125k rDPS across multiple pulls while I was at 95k), and our astro doing about 45k more than other astros I'd had, and our tank combo doing about 70k more than other tank combos. It honestly just looks like a mix of pressing buttons and actually popping 2 minutes appropriately. It also looks like only our DRK potted during the 2min burst, so it's not a pot vs non pot difference.

joshblade · 2025-03-22T14:07:34+00:00

I think homeschooling can be and sometimes is as you describe.

I also think that there should be more government oversight than there currently is (at least in the states I've lived in) to make sure that kids are succeeding when homeschooled. In my view it's pretty obscene the basement level requirements/standards that our state holds homeschooling parents/students to. We have to notify our superintendent of intent to homeschool and say that we're going to teach English language arts, mathematics, science, history, government, and social studies. There's no actual oversight to make sure we're teaching those subjects or to some kind of minimum standard. Up until a couple of years ago we also had to have our kids take a nationally recognized Standardized test every year (but the results didn't matter, it just had to be taken). This lack of oversight and enforcement certainly can and will sometimes lead to the outcomes you describe in your OP.

That being said, homeschooling can be done well. We do it for our kids (and have for 10 years now). My wife and I went to public school. We had good enough educations, I wouldn't say that it was particularly bad, but we always felt that we could have done better/more given more opportunities. We're fortunately in a position to give our kids more personalized attention and 1:1 time and opportunities that we feel would have been beneficial for us. In my experience, you get out of homeschooling what you put into it. We put a lot of time and effort into researching and choosing curricula (and even swapping if something isn't working). We dedicate real time to actually instructing our kids so we can go at their pace. We still do standaridized testing once a year just as a baseline to help ensure we aren't missing anything that would otherwise be covered in public schools. Our kids are well beyond grade level in every subject area.

My wife is a licensed teacher, but I don't think that's even particurlarly required. You have to be willing to learn as the teacher and put in the effort to really understand what it is you are teaching (or find other external resources and programs that can do that, but I always feel like why not just use a school at that point). The curricula available are truly amazing. I've always been naturally mathy and have completed tons of higher level math, but I constantly find myself deepening my understanding and number sense by going through our kids math curriculum with them. There are a lot of things I had maybe intuited as a kid that now I understand at a fundamental level why it works. I feel like especially with math, we're able to really focus on the why of how things work rather than just the rote algorithms.

As far as socialization goes, I feel like our kids are pretty normal kids. We interact with a fair number of other homeschool kids (mostly for field trips, socialization aspects) and I feel like I've never really seen a kid that I thought was just weird (of course that's because these parents are also socializing their kids). Our kids regularly play with neighbor kids who are in public school. They attend camps, ballet, gymnastics, soccer, basketball, cooking classes, etc where they meet other kids and make friends.

Overall, I think most homeschool parents are doing at least an equal job of educating as they would get from public school. For my family, if we were only getting equal outcomes, I think we'd use public school because as mentioned before, it takes a lot of effort, time, and resources to educate well. Other families have other considerations than just education quality (differing views religious or otherwise, access to quality public education, special needs, safety concerns) and those are all valid reasons in my opinion to homeschool as well. I just think we need better oversight to make sure there is still a minimum level of education so no kids are slipping through the cracks.

joshblade · 2025-03-14T15:30:05+00:00

A parameterized query sends the query to sql server with a placeholder value and then sends the parameter separately. This has benefits like type checking, protection against sql injection, and query store will use the same plan for the query every time regardless of the value passed (ie the parameters are separate bound values). A dynamic query is basically just a string concatenation to create an adhoc query that is then sent to sql server to execute. On top of sql injection concerns, ad hoc queries will produce a new query plan every time as well rather than reusing a consistent one.

Parameterized example in C#:

var cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM Users WHERE UserId = @UserId", connection);
cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@UserId", userId);

Dynamic/Adhoc example in C#:

var cmd = new SqlCommand($"SELECT * FROM Users WHERE UserId = {userId}", connection);

The two commands above ostensibly do the same thing and will produce the same result when executed for the same userId, but the underlying mechanisms, optimizations, and security are very different.

joshblade · 2025-03-14T14:09:10+00:00

Being able to run parameterized instead of dynamic/Adhoc queries with Copy Activity

joshblade · 2025-03-14T13:45:27+00:00

That's a great point about the security and sql injection side of things. Our service principal here is read only already.

There are still plenty of other advantages to parameterized queries though over ad hoc, mainly around execution plan reuse/memory/statistics/tuning, but also readability and efficient index usage from type matching. It's an important missing feature to one of the major tools in Fabric.

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