I think speculation and guesswork is perfectly fine. It’s part of a path towards an answer. However, that speculation and guesswork needs to have its uncertainty clearly indicated.

Make guesses. Speculate. But make it clear (to others, and yourself) what you’re doing so the guesses aren’t given more weight than they deserve.

All the time.

Pretty much never intentionally, though. I’m just bad at keeping up with people.

Your general explanation is all good, but it never seems like any of the platforms built for live events really have issues delivering content. I don’t think the issue is so much that streaming live broadcasts is insurmountable as it is that Netflix specifically doesn’t have their architecture managed in a way that works well with big live events. They lean heavily on having their content cached close to the end users and don’t have a lot of experience at real time.

I said it elsewhere but it felt like he meant for the final empire to be standalone, then was scrambling a bit in the well of ascension to keep the plot going.

But then some of the part I thought felt slow paid off in the conclusion, so IDK. I like the pacing in most of the rest of the stuff. It’s just the introductions. Like Tress of the Emerald Sea, for example, it took so long for her to actually start her adventure.

I love his work and bought physical copies of all of Stormlight, Mistborn, and just a couple days ago the pretty “premium” hardcovers for the secret projects, just to have on my shelves.

My one thing is that his introductions are almost always slower than I’d like. Though ironically he did better in the Wax and Wayne Mistborn arc and I like the Vin arc more.

Right now I’m way down a Brandon Sanderson rabbit hole, so I guess the Cosmere? I’d say Stormlight Archive, but Mistborn is really cool because they’re set at the inflection points in the planet’s history. The first arc is excellent, and it changes the world. The second arc is set in the future, with mythologies based on the first arc and scientific progress based on secrets uncovered in the first. The changes in the use of magic are really cool. There’s a third arc planned to be set in the future from there.

But the Cosmere as a whole shares some core concepts and characters can move across it, and that comes into other standalone works like (3 of 4) secret projects and a bunch of other stuff.

Not at random retailers anywhere in the world, but yes, if you get the same quality story for a third of the launch price, that matters.

It’s half the reason I never buy Nintendo games. Metroid isn’t inherently “worse” than indie metroidvanias, but it’s the same caliber game for twice the price (and the sales are less discounted by dollar value than the indies are on top of it). That does make it a much worse game for gamers, and it should get heavily docked for that.

Anything with microtransactions is cancer no matter how good the underlying mechanics are and should be completely banned from consideration.

Why wouldn’t it be taken into consideration?

Bad monetization and excessively high pricing change the experience for gamers. There’s not a lot of chance they’re willing to say “microtransactions make a game ineligible” like they should, but cash grubbing microtransactions change what a game is, and they can’t just not acknowledge that at all.

TorrentFreak has really been spoonfeeding Nintendo’s nonsense positions about emulation everywhere lately.

I’m not an Xbox guy.

But if the PS Portal was $400 and played PS4 games natively plus did streaming like it does now, I would have been all over it. I like my steam deck, but there’s a benefit to games hyper optimized to one system.

Mostly audiobooks, 2x speed, a lot of hours a day. I do use an ereader sometimes. I’ve started collecting (just regular hardcover, mostly) physical copies of some of my favorites, but I don’t really read them like that. When possible I read entire series from beginning to end consecutively. Audiobooks and visual reading are generally different books.

Mostly mystery, in a wide variety of settings, tones, levels of intensity, but some pure fantasy. Nonfiction is mostly psychology, but some science, other stuff as well. (180 new books this year), but I re-read as much as I read new. I don’t set goals or anything, just use the “goal” to see the number each year out of curiosity.

Mid-30s, IDK. I read a bunch as a kid, then stopped the habit through high school and college and took a while to get back into heavy reading.

Just for the hell of it, if you want a well researched book about the value of all sorts of Rest to dispute that specific point.

It’s a decent book overall. If you’re interested in the theory behind choice architecture it’s worth a read.

But yeah, read it a couple months ago and remembered it specifically addressed this question.

In fact, the truth is surprisingly simple: much depends merely on what happens if people don’t make a decision, something called a no-action default, or simply a default. The countries on the left of the graph ask you to choose to be an organ donor, and those on the right ask you to choose not to be a donor. If you do not make an active choice, you are, by default, a nondonor in Germany and a donor in Austria.

Dan and I wanted to understand this. We started by asking a sample of Americans whether they would be donors or not by presenting them with a choice on a webpage. One group, the opt-in condition, was told that they had just moved to a new state where the default was not to be an organ donor, and they were given a chance to change that status with a simple click of a mouse. A second group, the opt-out condition, saw an identical scenario, except the default was to be a donor. They could indicate that they did not want to be a donor with a mouse click. The third group was simply required to choose; they needed to check one box or the other to go on to the next page. This neutral ques-tion, with nothing prechecked, is a mandated-choice condi-tion; it’s important, because it shows what people do when they are forced to choose.

The effect of the default was remarkably strong: when they had to opt in, only 42 percent agreed to donate, but when they had to opt out, 82 percent agreed to donate. The most interesting result was from those forced to make a choice: 79 percent said they would be a donor, almost the same percentage of donors as in the opt-out condition. The only difference between the group that was asked to opt out and those who were forced to make a choice was that we forced the respondents in the mandated-choice condition to pick either box before they could go forward. It shows that if forced to make a choice, most participants would become donors. Otherwise, if they were given a default, most simply took it, whatever it was.

From The Elements of Choice by Eric Johnson

It’s more complicated than the one example, and he covers it further, but as a rough guideline, it looks like forced choice and opt out are similar in this case. Which would make sense because the opposition is mostly religious and strict religious people are more motivated to opt out.

Every single thing you’ve said is factually incorrect.

There is no debate about that fact that people historically thought gods would strike people down for words; it’s abundant historical record.

And nobody anywhere near this thread said anything anyone could possibly interpret to mean that words are the same as physical assault.

I will always downvote comments using ridiculous nonsense to justify slurs.

No, they literally believed that using the name of gods could get you struck down, cursed, etc. by those gods.

And nobody is claiming words are physical weapons.

Both sides of your argument are wild mischaracterizations of reality and neither could plausibly be done in good faith.

No it isn’t. You’ve already acknowledged that many more words were historically viewed as damaging.

Acknowledging the harm of hate is more modern, but the evidence behind it is pretty much indisputable.

The context doesn’t matter because the literal only reason to use the words is to cause harm.

Magic damage felt spikier than other classes to me in Elden Ring, to the point early and mid-game where there were segments where I would run out of magic before getting through crowds even with all blue flasks.

Hogwarts Legacy. Combat is fast and brutal.

The side stuff feels kind of bland mechanically and something about the open world doesn’t capture me like I want it to, but it’s pretty good pure magic combat.