It's really fun not knowing how deep this game goes. Every time I solve a mystery I end up with two more, and my handwritten journal is turning into some mad scrawling necronomicon shit. I spend time away thinking about these puzzles. I bring my journal to work so I can overanalyze the in-game books I've copied down, illustrations and all. I think some of these puzzles I've created solutions for, might not actually exist.
Game is hard (the fuck you mean I gotta use math?), but also hits that rare itch I've had since beating Outer Wilds, where I figure out a puzzle or two and it ends up completely recontextualizing the game and making me want to go back and look everything over again.
That fucking boiler room - lab connection! The hardest part of this game is when you think you figured out a puzzle but just need things to line up just right so you can test your theory.
As for tips, start a physical journal if you haven't yet. Take tons of notes. Draw pictures. Copy whole books if you need to. The lore matters so learn it. Don't be afraid of time limits in reaching the end, just keep making progress and taking good notes to review later.
Yeah, if someone's pronouns are gated behind a link, it just becomes easier to play the Pronoun Game (avoiding using someone's pronouns at all) than it is to learn how to actually refer to someone respectfully.
I never look at bios and don't think doing so should become a necessary part of having a conversation.
As an extra option in addition to visible pronouns? Hell yeah why not.
I started playing Blue Prince. It's a puzzle game where you have inherited your uncle's 45-room mansion, but only if you can find the 46th room in it. And every day, the layout changes.
At the start it's kinda like a map building roguelike where you pick which room is behind each door from a few choices, and try to gather resources and explore further, but that's barely scratching the surface.
This puzzle goes so deep. I have a journal full of clues, in-game books that I have copied in hopes that there are more clues, pages with in-depth descriptions of every room, family trees, weird interactions that I haven't fully figured out yet... There's all sorts of lore about this fictional world that I have been writing down just in case. I don't even know how deep this mystery goes, but I hope to be well-armed when I finally do.
It's the first game that's scratched the same itch that Outer Wilds does, where you occasionally discover something that forces you to reevaluate everything you saw before, but it's much harder. Also the in-game notekeeping is incredibly limited so you really need to keep your own journal to play.
Do you know if you'll be doing monthly Service Projects with a bigger AmeriCorps team? That was my favorite part of AmeriCorps. Sometimes we just did trash cleanup and stuff but one time I helped build a playground.
You tell the firing squad that one of the guns has a blank, so that afterwards they can convince themselves that they didn't actually kill the guy ("the recoil of my shot felt a little soft. I must have fired the blank. I did not kill this person, my colleagues did.")
They were previously looking at jobs with AmeriCorps (national service thingy where they put you on a year long contract doing nonprofit or environmental work) and now they might be getting something that isn't tied to that program.
Which is fucking fantastic. I have real fond memories of my two AmeriCorps terms, but from a workers' rights perspective they were kind of a nightmare.
If it was actually about having a burning Israeli flag emoji, there could probably be a pretty interesting discussion with actual points being made. The last discussion about it happened in a very different context at a different point in the genocide, and I'm sure the average hexbear now has a much more negative opinion of Israel and Israelis as a whole (not just the IDF or Lehi or whatever).
But that's not what this was. She didn't take long at all to accuse Jews of starting the Holocaust. It was just antisemitism and she couldn't keep her mask on for even a couple hours.
A burning flag isn't a reference to death camps jfc