I loved act 1 of this game, but the rest seemed scattered and unfocused. I would have loved if the story from act 1 developed further over the course of the game, instead of ending abruptly with a boss fight and then basically never mentioning anything in the act again.

This IS the descriptive approach. Trying to wrangle fish out of ghoti is simply not how people read.

Reminder that according to the actual rules of English orthography, “ghoti” can never be pronounced as “fish”, because said rules feature “position within a word/syllable” very prominently. An onset g simply can’t be pronounced the same way as a final gh, and in fact, any “gh” followed immediately by a vowel must be pronounced with the hard /g/ sound. “ti” is only ever allowed to fricitize to the “sh” sound if it’s followed by another vowel. Ghoti can only be pronounced the same as “goatee”, and English speakers know this intuitively even if they can’t articulate why they know this, the same as we internalize hundreds of other language rules without knowing that we know them.

No. Enshittification has a very specific definition. It’s a business model that follows exactly these steps:

Step 1: make a product or service of high quality to users, offered for free, to gather a large user base.

Step 2: slowly optimize the platform for “business users”, aka advertisers. The service now starts to become worse for the original user base.

Step 3: make the product worse for both end users and businesses in order to squeeze more short-term profits.

It’s not a general term for “things getting worse”, it describes exactly these three steps, in this order, exactly as stated. Any variation would need a new term… except we have enough examples of this playbook that no such variations have been spotted.

Personally, I describe the word as basically being every language spoken at once, yet you hear it most clearly in whatever language you understand best, and more to the point, it speaks most clearly to your soul, which (on a failed save) cannot help but to obey and thus perish. Even on a save I try to describe just how creepy and horrifyingly eldritch it is.

I dm’d a steady group at my FLGS for a couple years with people I didn’t already know. It took an embarrassingly long time to learn some of their real names. Definitely that last one for me.

Yes, TLA is a three letter acronym. A four letter acronym, on the other hand, is an ETLA, or “Enhanced Three Letter Acronym”. For advanced cases, you can get an EETLA (or XETLA) for Expanded/Extended Enhanced Three Letter Acronym.

Just so you know.

I suspected as such, that’s why I asked for clarification.

Did you mistype, employ sarcasm, or were you not aware that the genre is named after Metroid, not the other way around? Metroidvania— games employing similar experiences to Metroid and some of the more notable Castlevania games.

Because it became wildly successful. Success brings notice.

Did you know that elevator operator used to be a job that people had to be employed to do? No one says hiring a person to operate an elevator is more cost effective than installing a push button system for people to do it themselves. The cost really wasn’t prohibitive to move away from human labor here.

This is not the only case, I’m just bringing up an example. The thing is, when a job is replaced by technology, you don’t even think about it anymore. Yes, there are also jobs that CAN be replaced by technology, where the tech is more expensive… but that’s not the rule, that’s just the leading edge.

I agree with you, except that I think the time system is great. It was deliberately designed to be maximally divisible, and makes a lot of sense in that manner. 12 hours of daylight— a highly divisible number, with 60 small (minuscule, or “minute”) divisions of the hour, which is even MORE divisible than 12. Then when time keeping got more accurate, they added a second division of 60 more parts, and… well, called ‘em seconds.

Basically, 12 and 60 are just so divisible they make really good bases.

Some key software I need to use doesn’t work on Linux, and is unlikely to be able to in the near future, sorry. I did use Linux for a while, mind you, and I more or less like it… but a computer is only useful if it runs the software you need to do the things you want to do with it.

I don’t want to downgrade to windows 11, but I’m going to be forced to. And to even do that I’m going to need to bypass the hardware authenticator, as I’m apparently ever so slightly behind their so-called minimum requirements, which aren’t really minimum requirements but just a push to get me to buy a new PC I don’t need.