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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Incremental games are a bit of an “I know it when I see it” grouping, but two typical characteristics are progression systems nested within each other and game loops that start simple but “flower” into a number of more detailed and mutually interacting ones over the course of play.
    Universal Paperclips is a nice example, casting you as a newly built AI with the goal of making as many paperclips as you can. You start out able to make paperclips and sell them to humans for funds you can then use to invest in more capabilities. You work on building trust with the humans so they’ll let you do more things, and on making more clips faster, and there is a lot of escalation from these humble beginnings. Some other good ones are Cookie Clicker and, if you’re into programming puzzles, Bitburner.







  • That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

    • Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government’s authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
    • People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under “natural law”.
    • People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

    Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
    Primarily it’s a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it’s a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

    You might enjoy münecat’s longer form explanation.





  • My only experience is with methylphenidate (the generic term for Ritalin), but I’ve not found anything like that personally.
    In fact, I’d say I’ve felt more like myself and able to actively choose what I do than I was. This is related to also working through depression, but getting medicated has allowed me to much more often weigh up long term goals like exercise vs stimulating activities like video games and make an actual choice. Before, almost every such time I’d default to the stimulation because it took all my willpower for the day not to.


  • As a package, I feel they slot in well next to Jagged Earth.

    • Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine - like I said my favourite among the Incarnas so far. The value you get from catching Invaders alone means you see the island kinda differently than most spirits. Control powers become really handy for setting yourself up, and powers with 1 damage can let you abduct entire Cities if used right. At the same time, you’re always needing to think about Growth letting pieces escape and planning where you could put them. Your teamwork unique power Reach From the Infinite Darkness is both a really neat tool there and can be a great help to spirits like Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds who have bigger mobility and range limitations.
    • Dances Up Earthquakes - Definitely a spirit I feel I need more experience with to really get. The core concept of needing to play some cards now to set up quake tokens and get Defend, and some to the future to get your Major power effects and big innate damage out works out interestingly, but seeing the good combos needs more experience than I’ve picked up I think.
    • Ember-Eyed Behemoth - I’ve not gotten many plays of this one, but it seems like a solid straightforward offense spirit with opportunities for mastery around its particular timing and mobility constraints.
    • Hearth-Vigil - A really solid defensive spirit, who with some planning can marshal a lot of counterattack damage and/or destroy Invaders added by a Build as they go up. I find I really appreciate that Fortify Heart and Hearth gives Dahan in your lands immunity to destruction/damage by event, since those few times I’ve taken a lot of losses to disease as Thunderspeaker it’s felt pretty bad.
    • Relentless Gaze of the Sun - Another I’ve not gotten many plays of. The Repeat mechanic seems solid, and particularly nice to combo with control-focused teammates, a bit like Lure of the Deep Wilderness.
    • Towering Roots of the Jungle - I was kinda looking forward to this one but haven’t particularly felt the spark of connection yet. Rushing to an empowered Incarna is particularly easy for it, but empowering also only suppresses Builds in one land. If you can draft a blight-removal or moving power it’s quite handy for improving the defensive uses of Vitality. If your heartland does Ravage into a Blight, it creates a kinda neat sacrifice combo where when the Invaders deal damage, Heart-Tree Guards the Land means Dahan are immune to damage, then you can choose the Incarna as the presence lost to Blight meaning the Dahan get to damage the Invaders back after all.
    • Wandering Voice Keens Delirium - A pretty interesting approach to control play. The amount of Strife you spit out really is extreme and comes with pushes by default thanks to Senseless Roaming. The Incarna limiting where Dahan get to participate in Ravage means you can’t really play too defensively with Strife, but have to look for some damage powers too. Mind-Shattering Song is a solid innate to help with that and can be targeted from the incarna or normal sacred sites. Turmoil’s Touch is a teamwork unique that I find particularly interesting - 0 cost, targeted spirits can pay 1 energy or discard a card to Take the top minor power and put it into their discard pile, and Wandering Voice can do likewise. Obviously it’s less directly helpful than something like Gift of Power which offers a choice of cards for relevancy, but even if you only use them once the improvements to your Reclaim cycles can really help the more card-starved spirits. If the card Taken is really bad, you have a natural pick for Forgetting when you gain a Major.
    • Wounded Waters Bleeding - Definitely conceptually interesting, with a lot of choices to make through each game. Similar to Starlight Seeks its Form it feels like you want to Forget a solid portion of your uniques in the early game. You can choose to forgo board presence instead but that can be pretty limiting for your range and ability to affect the island. Once you heal though, destroyed presence is less of an issue than for most spirits. So far I’ve tended towards Roiling Waters builds and Beasts-focused power drafts personally. The ability to gather Blight from turn 2 has neat applications both to prevent cascades and for power targeting.

    Of the many new Aspects, the ones that stick out in my memory are Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves’ ones. Unconstrained is a neat variant that makes Sharp Fangs less sensitive to those same Blight targeting issues, but also makes your creation of Beasts a bit more constrained. I’ve not yet played any games with Encircle but it looks to tap into some of the feel of a good Shroud of Silent Mist offensive - smothering the Invaders by putting Beasts in neighbouring lands rather than concentrating them in the land you’re targeting.