I was impressed by an earlier mod along similar lines, Portal Stories: Mel. Hope this one is as well-done.

The paper (linked from the article) has a photo of the actual tablet in question, which was apparently discovered circa 1900.

As a fan of Ms. Marvel, I enjoyed the main campaign well enough, but all the MMO stuff is obnoxious. Luckily you can mostly ignore it and go through the campaign missions single-player. I uninstalled it after getting to the end of the story.

This is spot on. I would add one little wrinkle: you not only have to accept that not everything works like it does in your home country, but also that not everything should.

You can be the kind of expat who spends all day griping about how much worse things are in your new home than your old one, or you can be the kind who shifts their mindset such that the new country’s ways become second nature.

I think the value of standups depends a ton on the team’s composition and maturity.

On a team with a lot of junior or low-performing devs who don’t have the experience or the ability to keep themselves on track, or a team with a culture that discourages asking for help as needed, a daily standup can keep people from going down useless rabbit holes or unwittingly blocking one another or slacking off every day without anyone noticing.

On a team of mostly mid-level and senior devs who are experienced enough to work autonomously and who have a culture of communicating in real time as problems and updates come up, a daily standup is pure ceremony with no informational value. It breaks flow and reduces people’s schedule flexibility for no benefit.

When I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to advocate for or against daily standups on a team, one angle I look at is aggregate time. On a team of, say, 6 people, a 15-minute daily standup eats 7.5 hours of engineering time a week just on the meetings themselves. The interruption and loss of focus is harder to quantify, but in some cases I don’t even need to try to quantify it: when I ask myself, “Is the daily standup consistently saving us a full person-day of engineering time every week?” the answer is often such a clear “yes” or “no” that accounting for the cost of interruptions wouldn’t change it.

Especially infuriating when the other person is in a very different time zone. I once worked on a project with a partner company in a time zone 10 hours ahead of mine and it was common for trivial things to take days purely because the other person insisted on typing “Hi,” waiting for my “Hi, what’s up?” response (which they didn’t see until the next day since our hours didn’t overlap), and then replying with their question, which I didn’t see until my next day. Answering the actual question often took like 30 seconds, but in the meantime two or three days had gone by.

I came to believe they were doing it on purpose so they could constantly slack off and tell their boss they were blocked waiting for my answer.

My frustration is less with the people who are late and more with the meeting host making the rest of the attendees sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the late person. Unless the late person’s presence is the point of the meeting, just get started and let them catch up.

“We’ll wait a few more minutes for person X to join, then get the meeting started,” like the other ten people who made the effort to show up on time deserve to be punished with extra meeting time for being responsible. Bonus points if this causes the meeting to run a few minutes long.

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Not the person you’re replying to, but I’m also a “try the local cuisine” person. A good percentage of the places I’ve visited have had some local thing that you’d have to really look for to find elsewhere. I don’t end up liking all of them, but I like the experience of trying something new. Some specific examples:

• St. Louis, MO, USA: Gooey butter cake which is as gross and as delicious as it sounds.
• Changsha, Hunan, China: Stinky tofu. The local Changsha style of stinky tofu is completely unlike the more common style you’d find in night markets in Taiwan or elsewhere; it’s only a little stinky but is dense, savory, and spicy.
• Singapore: Kaya toast. Kaya is a sweet coconut-based spread and they put it on buttery thick toast. I was addicted to this when I was in Singapore for work.
• Scotland: Haggis. It was… okay? Didn’t love it, didn’t hate it, don’t see why it has the reputation it has.
• Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, China: Jiaoziba, which is a little local style of dumpling that’s rich and quite spicy.
• Hiroshima, Japan: Okonomiyaki, a kind of savory pancake. Okonomiyaki is common in Japan but it’s usually Osaka-style. The version they make in Hiroshima includes noodles in the dough.

In my experience, if you talk to a few locals, one of them will usually think of a local specialty and tell you where to try it.

I think this is a more subtle question than it appears on the surface, especially if you don’t think of it as a one-off.

Whether or not Scientology deserves to be called a “religion,” it’s a safe bet there will be new religions with varying levels of legitimacy popping up in the future. And chances are some of them will have core beliefs that are related to the technology of the day, because it would be weird if that weren’t the case. “Swords” and “plowshares” are technological artifacts, after all.

Leaving aside the specific case of Scientology, the question becomes, how do laws that apply to classes of technology interact with laws that treat religious practices as highly protected activities? We’ve seen this kind of question come up in the context of otherwise illegal drugs that are used in traditional rituals. But religious-tech questions seem like they could have a bunch of unique wrinkles.

Depends on where I’m going, whether I’ve been there before, and how long my trip is, but as a rule I’ll always seek out the local food and try to see a mix of famous big-name sights and weird niche things that interest me. For example, when I was in Tokyo last, I went to the top of Tokyo Tower at sunset (normal tourist sightseeing thing) and also went to see their underground flood-control tunnels.

I don’t enjoy “sit on a beach and do nothing” vacations, but more power to you if that’s your style.

I haven’t run into too many bugs in the game, but in combat it’s frequent for the game to have to sit there for several seconds thinking about what an enemy should do next. Hope that’s one of the performance improvements they’re working on.

lemm.ee’s admin is Estonian, so that one at least makes sense.

I’ve been under a few times but the most memorable (in one sense) was when I had some minor surgery as a kid. From my point of view, it was like teleportation: I was in the operating room, I blinked, and I was suddenly on a bed in a completely different room. No sense of the passage of time.

Tunic, but that was kind of the point.

Yes, and I even have it as an automatic scheduled payment so I don’t forget. Even with its flaws, it remains one of the shining gems of the Internet, and a resource I use frequently in both my professional life and my personal one. I remember how it was to suddenly want to learn more about a random topic before Wikipedia and I don’t want to go back.

I also donate to The Internet Archive.

No, just broadcast thinly-veiled resentment at them (in my experience having been the person with allergies in that situation).

Probably true for most languages. The one that bugs me is when they hire a Chinese-American actor to speak Mandarin but the actor doesn’t actually speak Mandarin fluently or speaks it with such a thick accent that I stop being able to believe the character is from China.

You’ll start to get hints of it later in Heavensward, but I’d say the second expansion (Stormblood) is where you start to really get a strong sense that the story has a destination in mind, and especially that the recurring villains have a more specific motivation than “serve the dark god.”

The next expansion (Shadowbringers) starts off feeling like an unrelated side story, but then you realize that it’s actually tying together some of the seemingly unrelated plot threads from earlier in the game by showing you a different perspective on the lore and some of the characters.

The last current expansion (Endwalker) is where you have to address the reason the villains have been doing what they’ve been doing, and it ties a lot of things together including the part of the story you’re on right now. Without spoiling any details, suffice to say that Ishgard isn’t the only nation that has a history with dragons.

There’s always going to be a certain amount of anime craziness, but the big picture does come together much more than is apparent from where you are in the story right now.