This recently happened in my campaign.

We were fighting a dragon, and it kept flying around its lair, making it very hard for my Barbarian to hit it. We ultimately won, but 3 of the party of 5 died.

Later, while dividing loot, I saw that I had been carrying a Potion of Flying the whole time, and the fight probably would have gone better if I had used it.

I met my partner through a dating site. In the two years prior to that, I had used the site to meet over two dozen other women, which led to no long-term relationships but did result in a few short flings.

I can say that what helped me was expectation management. This was actually my second time using a dating site, and the first time around I was super picky, looking for “green flags.” Correspondingly, I messaged very few women, and met even fewer (four in two years). The second time, I realized that someone having a sparse profile didn’t mean they were a boring or lazy person. Sometimes it does, but other times it just means they aren’t very good at writing about themselves.

I’ll also say there’s only so much the metrics of dating sites can tell you about someone and your compatibility with them. There’s a level of response bias to the questionnaires on these sites, i.e. people answer the questions based on what they think a potential partner might like, not their genuine beliefs and preferences. You’ll never discover your actual compatibility with someone unless you talk to them, so I took the approach of, “unless there are explicit deal breakers in your profile, I’ll ask you on a date and we’ll see how things go.”

There’s also the expectation management for the frequency of matches, responses to messages, dates, and beyond. Dating apps aren’t magic machines that will get you hooked up in hours. They take work, and you’ll see a lot of rejection (most of it just utter silence). There can be long dry spells. Sometimes you’ll need to take a break because you’ve literally messaged everyone on the site and you need to wait for more members. And sometimes, they just won’t work for some people. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. Success for many of these sites and apps is highly dependent on one’s physical attractiveness, and some people simply did not win the genetic lottery.

It’s stereotypical, but I want to continue getting fit.

After decades is putting it off, I finally felt inspired to start exercising regularly back in September. I’m going to try to keep that up, and I know it’s going to be hard because we’ll be welcoming a child into the world early in the new year.

I guess another resolution would be, “try not to lose my sanity dealing with a newborn and toddler at the same time.”

Any ____son is a last name. FYI the etymology is son of Jack, son of ____.

There’s something similar in Slavic languages with suffixes like -ovic, -ic, -icz, -ich, etc. So “Djokovic” means “little son of Djoko.”

That I will never enjoy the taste of wine.

I figured out I would never like coffee in my teens, and had the same realization about beer in my 20s.

But it wasn’t until this year, in my mid-thirties, that I finally accepted that I don’t like the taste of wine and probably never will. After years of trying the full spectrum of wines, I had to admit that it wasn’t the “notes” that were turning me off, nor was it a problem with the quality of the wine. It was the fundamental “wine-ness” that I disliked, the same as I don’t like the “beer-ness” of beer or the “coffee-ness” of coffee.

The emotional part of my brain is telling me to buy this ASAP, because the N64 was such a formative part of my adolescence.

The logical part of my brain is reminding me of all my other nostalgia-fueled purchases that subsequently failed to spark the joy of youth.

Anxious Times by The Luka State or Hardship to Sail by Excuses Excuses.

I’ve spent some time with the first three, so I can give my opinion on those.

The FF1 remake is very different experience than the NES original. That version had a ton of minor bugs that gave that gave it a unique balance. Every subsequent remake, including the pixel remaster, has been an attempt to fix those bugs, and add modem QoL features, and then rebalance the game to try to keep the same feel. I think the pixel remaster is a good game, and comes closer to the feel of the original than some other remakes, but it is still a distinctly different experience. I’d characterize it as a different game wearing the same clothes.

The FF2 remaster, on the other hand, is probably the best way to experience that game. The Famicom original is notoriously unbalanced and player-hostile, but those problems are effectively bypassed by the simple inclusion of two QoL features: a map, and a one-button autobattle. It took decades, but FF2 is finally worth recommending to more than hardcore fans.

The FF3 remaster is in an odd situation, in that this is the first time a close approximation of the Famicom original is officially available outside of Japan. The DS remake from 2006 is a significantly different game, especially in the first couple of hours. I didn’t play as much of this one as the other two, but I can’t imagine it deviates too much in the later parts of the game. I would guess, though, that the more flexible save mechanics make the notoriously difficult final three dungeons much more manageable, though maybe more prone to soft-locking.

The Stone Angel.

It’s a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It’s also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.

And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was “hope” and docked marks for having any other interpretation.

Protip: jump back in the water after you raise the level for the first time.

If that doesn’t make sense right now, it will in a few hours.

I’m 188cm (6’2") and grew up in a fairly insular community of Dutch people and their descendants. I thought I was average height until I left that bubble went to university.

It took a lot of inspiration from Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, but the two games had basically the same creative team anyway.

I think those screenshots look like something closer to Ogre Battle or the recently released Unicorn Overlord rather than any RTS.

The story seems generic at first, but it goes places later.

One feature I really liked about this game was that you can adjust the encounter rate, even down to 0%. No in-game consumables or equipment needed, just an option in the menu. If you want to gain a few levels, you can crank it up. If you just want to revisit an old location because you missed an item, you can turn it off.

The hardest part of the Water Temple is that one of the keys is hidden way better than the others, and if you start opening doors in the wrong direction you will run out of keys without it. Combine that with the clunkiness of swapping to/from the Iron Boots and raising/lowering the water level, and the place quickly grew tedious and frustrating.

The 3DS remake added an extra camera sweep and some decor highlighting the hidden passage where that key is found.

Briefly: I didn’t.

More substantively: I never owned a cell phone growing up, even though I was at the right age when they became a common thing for teenagers to have. It wasn’t a money thing, nor household rule, as my sisters got phones when they were in high school. The biggest reason was probably just how I communicate. I wasn’t big into IM services either, and I preferred email or face-to-face, or a (landline) phone call if it was an urgent matter.

Then there was also my adolescent brain thinking I was making a bold counter-culture statement by steadfastly resisting the march of technology. In reality, I was probably just being a pain in the neck for my friends and family, and I probably unnecessarily endangered myself at least once.

I did finally, begrudgingly, get an old hand-me-down flip-phone in my final year of university, but that was out of necessity, and I used it to make maybe only a dozen calls the 2.5 years I had it before getting a smart device.

To bring it full circle: I did try sending a text message with that flip-phone exactly once, at the insistence of my family. That message was predictably a garbled mess, and to this day my sisters still wonder how I managed to get a number to appear in the middle of the “word”.

I have a number of other somewhat amusing stories about people’s reactions to my lack of a cellphone, but this post is long enough already.

Am I the only person in my generation who never learned to type on a number pad? It wasn’t the only thing I didn’t recognize from the “test”, but it stuck out to me.

My wife and I had this conversation the other day. Our kid is only two right now, but as we’ve learned, these milestones sneak up on you.

I used my own life as a guide to my opinion, and so landed on age eight or so. That’s around the age I remember being able to go to the park or to a friend’s house within the neighbourhood on my own.

Other questions about how much functionality the phone would have and how much access they would have to it at home are still to be determined.

You are welcome.

Pointers do make more sense to me now than two decades ago, mostly owing to me being married to a computer scientist. But I always go back the fact that for the purposes of my first year programming course, pointers were (probably) unnecessary and thus confusing. I have a hard time understanding things if not given an immediate and tangible use case, and pointers didn’t really help me when most of my programs used a bare few functions and some globally defined variables to solve simple physics problems.

EDIT: I’ll also say that pointers alone weren’t what sunk my interested in programming, they’re just an easily identifiable concept that sticks out as “not making sense.” At around the same time we had the lesson on pointers, our programs were also starting to reach a critical mass of complexity, and the amount of mental work I had to do to follow along became more than I was willing to put into it - it wasn’t “fun” anymore. I only did well on my final project because a friend patiently sat in my dorm room for a few hours and talked me through each step of the program, and then fed me enough vocabulary to convince the TA that I knew what I was doing.

I doubt that you’re missing anything about pointers themselves. I may not have done a good job articulating why non-programmers have a hard time understanding them.