It’s always good to support the original publisher and encourage local libraries by reading a hard copy, so I could never endorse piracy, even for people who can’t get their hands on a physical copy. Even though it’s true that both libgen and annas-archive have ebook copies of this particular book (and can easily be found via google), I could never in good conscience direct anyone to such a site.

She looks great. And powerful.

This has been pretty widely discussed under the name “the double empathy problem”, although as always it’s good to have more actual data. The general gist in the existing discussion is that autistic people and allistic people have trouble with each other’s communication styles, but this is treated as a communication deficit in autistic people rather than two different styles that have difficulty understanding each other. An analogy might be a minority that (poorly) speaks the language of the majority, and then is considered stupid despite the fact that they are bilingual and none of the people they’re speaking to have made an effort to learn the minority language.

I wasn’t sure to what extent this was autistic community in-group jargon, so I spent time trying to loosely explain it, when it turns out that a quick Google to check whether I’m crazy indicates it’s pretty well established and I could probably have just linked the Wikipedia page.

Tl;Dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

For anyone else who was curious about lichens covering “a not insignificant amount” of the earth’s surface, a quick google tells me it’s about 7% (according to e.g. new york times, scientific american, etc)

Edit: oh and estimating the age of an exposed surface by lichen diameter is called lichenometry. I’m seeing stuff about it being used in geological contexts but it makes sense that it could work for old buildings too

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I came to the comments looking for context, but since nobody has provided it yet, did some googling. I believe this is the reference: https://news.sky.com/story/tyrannosaurus-rex-could-have-been-even-bigger-than-previously-thought-study-suggests-13184470

You need to prompt your party to roleplay as non-idiots and think through their solution step-by-step. Of course, it’s possible your party is also running an outdated model.

I see a lot of cages there - is Scootaloo your only pet that can’t fly?

“Inconvenience” would be the verb for causing an inconvenience. So in the sentence you’re going for, “inconvene” would have to be replaced with the passive “be inconvenienced” (“we’ve gotta be inconvenienced and grovel to google a bit”). I don’t believe we have a separate word for “endure an inconvenience”, although it seems like the kind of thing some languages might have a single word for. Stylistically I’d probably restructure the sentence to “we’ve gotta put up with the inconvenience” rather than just using the passive verb, but yeah.

I think you’d most often see this verb in the stock phrase “Sorry to inconvenience you”.

missed opportunity to mention to volume of a pizza pie with radius z and depth a

When you say 2.5, do you mean 3.5? 3.5 was an actual edition, still widely played (what I started on, even though 5e existed at the time). I’ve heard some people refer to late 2nd edition (I think particularly after the combat and tactics optional material) as 2.5e, but only in a very informal sense as an acknowledgment of how much one of those later supplements changed the game. Second edition is a hard sell for a modern audience, as you have to think about THAC0, to-hit tables, weird saves vs specific things, etc. It’s what Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 run on.

3.5 is much more intuitive than second edition in terms of its core mechanics, but had a huge amount of supplementary material released for it. It’s still a detailed and crunchy system, and usually if you hear people talking about crazy character builds where they figured out how to become omnipotent at level 5 or used metamagic to wipe out a 200 mile radius with a level 4 spell, they’re probably talking about 3.5. It’s also what pathfinder is based on - you can basically play pathfinder 1 and d&d 3.5 if you’ve learned to play one of them, they’re not identical but they’re closer than any actual editions.

5 is much less crunchy than 3.5 or 2, and easier to learn, while still having good systems in place. I’ve heard it referred to as “everyone’s second favorite system”, on the basis that it’s so well-rounded (of course, in practice it’s plenty of people’s favorite or only system). I think it leans a bit more on dungeon master (referee) interpretation/judgment, which might make it less viable for a video game, but clearly Baldur’s Gate 3 works just fine using it. I’ve been curious since BG3 was announced how they went about fully mechanising parts of it, but haven’t yet gotten around to checking it out.

If you’re new to tabletop RPGs and just looking for inspiration and only looking at one system, 5 is probably your best bet - and if you run into part of it and wonder how this could translate to a computer context, you can always check what BG3 did for reference.

Actually, now that I’ve said that though, 4e is worth mentioning too. It’s usually not in the discussion for most tabletop group discussions, because of how video gamey it is, but a) that works in your favor here, and b) it does introduce some good stealable ideas, in addition to the video-gamey combat overhaul. Notably skill challenges and minion-type enemies. Another comment already gave a good discussion of 4e though, I just wanted to acknowledge that it’s a decent contender in spite of what I said about 5e being your best bet. The only reason it’s an afterthought is that it’s sort of the black sheep of the d&d family for tabletop purposes.

Edit: you know what, just since I ended up addressing every mainline numbered edition except 1, I’ll give a quick note on that. It’s basically 2 but worse. The change from 1st to 2nd was a much smaller change than all the other ones, so people basically treat them as the same thing. But 2nd edition is the finished one. It’s a bit more complicated than that and there’s a few other versions from around that time, plus modern attempts to replicate the feel of that time, but I feel like for your purposes nothing before 3.5 is likely to be worth thinking too hard about.

I’m open to follow-up questions if any part of this rambling comment needs elaboration or clarification. I intended to just clarify the 2.5 vs 3.5 thing but it kind of got away from me.

this seems like something that would get built in dwarf fortress

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Do you have any additional info about the changes they’re making to the mission? I didn’t see that in the article

Fittingly enough, this is called the Square-Cube law

I remember being very interested in them back in the early 2010s, but progress has been very slow. They’re more or less at the same point now as they were then, as far as I can tell, apart from minor updates. It’s hard to be sure though because their site updates so rarely. I clicked through to it just now and there were some machine pages talking about what they hope to accomplish in 2014, and others being proud of their progress so far in 2018. It’s hard to tell exactly where they’re at when their site is so inconsistently updated.

If there’s a source showing a clearer and more complete picture of their status I’d love to see it, as I do find the idea interesting.

This stuff is generally archived and indexed elsewhere, that’s just where the main request threads are

Google “da archive” and be prepared for a rabbit hole of archived 4chan threads and indexes that probably have whatever games you’re looking for if you’re willing to dig long enough

Talking to people and examining writing will usually drop references to a couple of other places to explore, or to unanswered questions that are worth looking into. Even if they seem minor, these almost inevitably lead to putting together pieces of the larger story, regardless of which pieces you start with. I don’t specifically remember what whistling guy talks about, but it sounds like that’s the only potential lead you’ve found so far. It’s certainly possible to make progress without ever talking to him, via all kinds of things that can be independently stumbled on, but if you haven’t found anything else I bet revisiting his dialogue will give you an idea on where to search next.

(Okay, I checked the wiki and can confirm that, while Esker is not the richest source of new options in the game, his dialogue does include instructions that lead to new threads for you to pull on)

Where have you visited so far? Usually I’d think you’ve encountered something other than the ship within a few hours, and most of the things you can encounter should give you ideas as to what else to explore. Have you literally only floated around in the ship, or is that a way of saying that the things you’ve found aren’t interesting to you?