The way you used italics, I gotta ask, is excommunication coming from the Presbyterians unusual compared to other Christian groups?

…by coming back as a yurei to haunt the people who wronged you? I’m not following.

…I’m out of the loop, are sorcerers somehow less effective in social and/or combat encounters with specifically blue and bronze dragons?

“Oh, no, those powers require being the kid in that situation…”

Yeah, you could easily reflavor component-requiring Animal Friendship as “just feeding the animal and somehow flawlessly avoiding harm”, just to make it ambiguous whether this is actually magic or just mundane.

I haven’t actually seen this being used, but since Hypnotic Pattern in DND5E can require a stick of incense as a component if you’re using spell components, I imagined someone casting that by twirling a thurible (incense burner on a chain) above their head, and somehow physically throwing the scent into the targeted area, and then a (mostly) harmless explosion of colorful, sparkly gas charms any affected targets through sheer fascination.

Yeah, I think there’s a vast difference between what we have now (ChatGPT and whatnot), vs the theoretical possibility of an AGI (artificial general intelligence), or even an AI based entirely off of human neural patterns. Mind you, brain uploading sounds hard, so maybe I’d see a completely synthetic AGI as more likely.

But if we were ever to develop an AGI, we’d better start giving those things humanesque rights fast.

I mean, I agree with the meme completely, but I’d also want to turn around in their arms and cuddle them right back. I’m a fan of both hugging and being hugged, and it might be a sensory thing.

The first sentence made me think “alright, Kingdom of Loathing”, but I don’t know if goblins in that universe imprint on people.

Come to think of it, there may have been one character in West of Loathing that popped, respawned, and had no memory loss at all, so never mind.

I was thinking something like a chisel, but yeah, these comments suggest even that would break before the ice.

One one hand, I don’t trust Kotaku articles as far as I can throw them. On the other hand, I’m hoping the “major games going out of stock” part isn’t gonna be a problem in terms of historical preservation of these games.

So I’m guessing the chart is telling me that non-phone-nor-Switch/Deck handhelds don’t even have a niche scene, by comparison?

And oddly, it also seems like handheld dipped into near-nothingness even sooner than arcades (perhaps due to things like the Switch and the Steam Deck merging the former field into PCs and consoles, I guess?). How common were arcades when the original version of the Nintendo Switch came out (2017-ish)?

Is it already out? Or did the store page update prior to release?

I am especially bad about the “clenched jaw” part, so thanks much for the reminder

Yeah, probably less “revenge” in a human sense, and more “treating a tiger that badly drives you way up on the tiger’s ‘prey priority list’”

Fair, and what I had in mind was a case of an actual tiger that got severely wounded by a human, with said human stealing its food, and the tiger responding by killing said human (and maybe his dog), but not before camping out at his lodging and waiting for him to return there. Almost like vengeful stalking behavior in particularly creepy humans, but probably a lot more mentally simple for the tiger.

So yeah, I could see spite being a better description.

I was talking about Sinnoh/Hisui, but the other region I was thinking of was Kitikami (from Scarlet/Violet’s Teal Mask DLC), as white-stripe Basculin seem to show up in the latter’s waterways.

But yeah, migrations between Hisui and Johto might still have happened, considering that Sinnoh still has Sneasel in the modern day, but only the Johtonian subspecies.

Mostly asking because this appears to have happened in a fictional world’s ecology (Pokemon, oddly enough), and I have no idea if the concept has any basis in reality.

(In Pokemon, some subspecies seem to have gone extinct in their equivalent of Hokkaido, but some remained extant in the prefecture/region just to the south in-universe)

And in IRL taxonomy, they’re more closely related to animals than plants, but probably diverged long before sponges came about, let alone other animals.