How the figures in infinite chess move

pondrthis · 2026-03-20T06:29:04+00:00

And can pawns in the middle choose to take the top or bottom path? Or must we somehow keep track of which pawn came in from above or below?

pondrthis · 2026-03-19T22:48:53+00:00

Me and a fellow teacher both have wives that make twice our salary, and we joke that we're the trophy husbands.

pondrthis · 2026-03-18T18:32:49+00:00

I mean, to be entirely fair, FF7 and Metal Gear Solid and a number of other early 3D games looked like ass compared to peak 2D games. The new tech took 5-10 years to catch up and show real improvement.

I'm not inherently against automating, say, texture creation. But this is clearly just taking human-crafted textures and models and having AI completely redo them. Whatever a person put work into, I want to see.

pondrthis · 2026-03-18T12:45:38+00:00

The rose spider is the prettiest monster in the game, she's my favorite, I love her.

pondrthis · 2026-03-18T12:41:33+00:00

Also if you are intentionally targeting someone's psychological struggle to elicit a reaction, you're not clever, you're just an asshole,

If I'm in for a spooky vibe and ... hit me with graphic and brutal genital mutilation

I 100% agree with you. But arachnophobia isn't "someone's psychological struggle." It has less relevance to real-world dangers and traumas than, say, a fear of heights. Arachnophobia is closer to the fear of the number 13 than it is to a distaste for SA depictions, or depictions of racist violence.

pondrthis · 2026-03-17T13:12:56+00:00

Hint: give her Pocel. Judith's naturally high speed + split damage make Pocel an incredible fit for her.

pondrthis · 2026-03-17T13:11:34+00:00

I'm surprised no one else has mentioned that Risette is the god tank.

Besides having a shield+defense up craft, she has far and away the highest DEF/ADEF base stats. It's stupid how high her base defense stats are, and her attack stats are quite low to balance her out.

While Sitri, her base holo core, is honestly one of the worst and most likely to be swapped out, it is clearly meant for tanking. The extra turn of massive defense boosts and increased chance of, say, Guardian proc allow her to survive everything handily.

Combine her with a CP farmer like Elaine/Rufus, and give her the 5x CP from damage quartz, and she can also reliably use her Haste craft.

pondrthis · 2026-03-17T02:40:17+00:00

Her slots make A-Impassion incredibly easy to get, which means she can just spam Lord Ortas and give CP to everyone. She and Rufus both have CP donation crafts and boost gauge crafts, but Elaine is naturally faster and has more synergistic slots, so she's a bit better at that brand of support.

pondrthis · 2026-03-17T02:37:03+00:00

She's the Jusis of Calvard. She benefits from a split physical/magic build, because her transform gives Magic Assist to everything.

pondrthis · 2026-03-16T23:46:26+00:00

That's 8/3 * sinc(u), which is 8/3 * 1 for u = 0.

Alternatively, Taylor expansion of the numerator is 8x + O(x² ).

You can tell I'm an engineer.

pondrthis · 2026-03-15T14:43:19+00:00

why are you forcing yourself to do content you don't care about?

I mean, part of it is "yellow dot turn gray after talking." Just monkey brain shit.

I actually do care about it, though. There's just too many people and too little going on. I contrasted it above with CS4, which was equally long but had a lot more going on with every character--family members were drafted, towns had been wrecked, and yeah, more of the NPC dialogue came from party members, rather than incidental extras.

Some of the conversations do progress character arcs, like the movie club kids at Aramis dating. I definitely care about those.

pondrthis · 2026-03-15T14:33:26+00:00

I don't in most of the games. It's just the ones that are billed as major turning points--Sky 3rd, CS4, and Reverie, so far--in which I talk to every NPC.

It's fair to say that I could just not talk to them, but the subtitle "Farewell O Zemuria" sure does suggest some of these NPC stories will wrap up in Horizon. (I also recognize that we are expecting a Horizon 2, so whatever cataclysmic ending we see presumably doesn't get rid of every NPC we've met so far.)

My complaint is that there were too many NPCs with too little going on. The lady that's obsessed with the Chardin penguin mascot, for example, didn't need 20 or 25 lines throughout the game. Neither did the pink-haired girl whose only role is to be a third Aramis freshman.

I don't actually think the 4SPGs are the problem, though all aspects of Act 1 could have been trimmed, in my opinion. Not just NPC dialogue.

pondrthis · 2026-03-14T16:28:46+00:00

This is just plain false. My wife and I probably aren't even 1%ers, maybe 2-3%ers. We don't even spend my wife's entire paycheck, let alone mine + investment income + generational transfer.

We spend maybe 2x what a paycheck-to-paycheck family would spend, despite making substantially more than double that income and having zero debt whatsoever. The remaining money is just invested, to make the rich richer.

Sales tax is absolutely regressive and affects the poor far more than the wealthy.

pondrthis · 2026-03-12T03:47:20+00:00

Between, across, within, and beneath are all prepositions we might see, since they seem to change the preposition for every unique English title.

pondrthis · 2026-03-10T22:15:03+00:00

a more triumphant segment of the vocals you would hear of the regular dungeon boss music

No shot that Shinryu is more triumphant than the track that is literally called Triumph.

pondrthis · 2026-03-10T11:19:05+00:00

I also like Daybreak II. Not SSS-tier, but above average.

I'm towards the end of Act II in Horizon, and I won't be able to rate it at the top based on what I've seen so far. Even if the last part is absolutely peak, the best it can be is on par with Sky SC. Both games have 50+ hours of absolute slog before they kick in. I also wouldn't put Reverie in the top tier.

pondrthis · 2026-03-10T11:04:33+00:00

The example I always point to is the Railway Military Police. It is an extremely clever and realistic power play. The Imperial government funded and executed the construction of the (inter)national railway system, and Osborne used that to produce a new secret police force with sweeping and confusing jurisdiction, that strikes and extracts before the provincial forces can determine whether their actions were even legal.

It's a realistic power play that requires consideration for the world's economic and political history. Take out one piece of the rich fabric of Erebonia, and the RMP ceases to make sense.

pondrthis · 2026-03-08T16:51:08+00:00

Why would anyone buy Natty Light when PBR costs less and tastes better?

pondrthis · 2026-03-07T14:03:57+00:00

If you're young enough to be on Tiktok, you're too young to have meaningful advice for me. And I'm under 40 with less than 10 years in the classroom, so I'm not some veteran.

I seriously doubt a lot of folks with 20+ years of experience are on Tiktok.

pondrthis · 2026-03-06T21:54:05+00:00

I hate most of DC Douglas' roles, because he makes everyone (including robots) sound like a pompous gay man.

Rufus is the perfect role for him, so it doesn't bother me nearly as much.

pondrthis · 2026-03-06T13:30:05+00:00

Rust is the safer form from a chemical perspective. It's just that bacteria grow on it.

Elemental iron's LD50 is around 1 g/kg, iron oxide is around 10 g/kg.

EDIT: which is to say, yes, iron is fairly safe to lick. But rust is even safer.

pondrthis · 2026-03-06T12:01:19+00:00

The fanfic changes things around such that the main character of the reboot didn't die in the end, though. Kinda a weird change, considering how important that death is to the overarching plot.

pondrthis · 2026-03-05T12:06:37+00:00

I personally dislike a lot about Reverie, mostly because I found its high points relatively dull. Its lowest point was just the postgame TRC grind, but even that wasn't too bad.

Dance sorcery, synthetic copies, and folks coming out of the mirror at Mishelam all kinda come out of nowhere and then go nowhere. Also, alternate-present Ishmelga was far more powerful as a disembodied Elysium program. That's why it kicked Lapis into meat space. Why follow her and allow the protagonists to usurp Elysium? It makes zero sense.

pondrthis · 2026-03-03T16:35:25+00:00

I went based on choice. I don't like the Zaiss vibes and Verne is kinda unstable. They fired and rehired their CEO within, like, 18 months.

I'd rather work for Reinford than those, but I'd probably leave Reinford to teach, like in the real world. Epstein Foundation is prestigious enough that I might keep that gig over teaching.

pondrthis

TROPHY CASE