Connections
Puzzle #701
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Skill 90/99
Uniqueness 1 in a Million

HAHAHA! 🤣 Those character descriptions are brilliant!

Weapon durability is frustrating, but it ties into what I think is so awesome about Dark Cloud. That being that its RPG mechanics are based not around your character but around your weapons. With upgrading the weapons’ different stats, doing a status break, and building them up into completely new weapons. It’s really unique and I think it’s a shame that I’ve never seen it done elsewhere.

A little off topic, but if you’re interested in recs for other games from that era, I highly recommend the early PS2 title Dark Cloud. It’s not exactly a mascot game like the ones you named, but it’s kinda close; the biggest comparison it had at the time of release was the Zelda series.

Not always. The vast majority of the time the police never bother to charge the actual criminal, in part because of their bias against the victim, and thus there’s no room for anyone else to step in. In other cases, the justice system fails. Richard Pollett’s killer is still walking free. So is Richard Burden’s. Chris Culver and Geoff Havill’s killer wasn’t even acquitted by a jury, but by professionally-appointed judges.

I’m not 100% sure but I think PNG might be light orange too?

Police said he can do what he likes in his own living room

In my experience the police would find a way to blame the victim, because car drivers can do no wrong in a motornormative society.

Connections
Puzzle #700
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Skill 98/99
Uniqueness 1 in 236

I just click the “Connections Bot” button:

Sometimes it tries to get me to create an account and log in, but I can use the browser inspector to delete the overlay that does that and get to the analysis anyway. Unfortunately it always pops up on my phone, and I don’t have a browser inspector there. So if I ever share a result without the skill & uniqueness scores, you know I’ve been on my phone instead of computer.

How is that first example better than traditional Google Translate?

Connections
Puzzle #699
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Skill 99/99
Uniqueness 1 in 206

I don’t think I’d agree you must believe in the Nicene Creed to be Christian. Did Christians not exist prior to 325? Or perhaps even 381, when its current amended form was created?

I’d definitely say being non-Nicene puts a bit of an asterisk on claims and opens you up to discussion about whether or not you’re truly Christian, but I wouldn’t say it’s a clear-cut thing.

Mormons are non-trinitarian, so I’d say people trying to claim that they’re not Christian have a much better case than protestants saying Catholics aren’t Christian.

I clicked on the “3” on the page I was on when it suggested “1 Park per Day”, which I thought was meant to be 3 days. Not 100% sure though. 'twas late last night.

Uh uh, I specifically said I was only talking about how each religion got started. So in Scientology we’re talking about a science fiction author who had previously said the way to get rich is to start a religion. The nature of that religion is irrelevant.

For Mormonism, we’ve got an American treasure hunter who happened to find American-Jesus fanfiction written on some plates, translated them by looking into a hot with a rock, and then when asked to repeat it to verify it said “whoops, I lost the plates, but here’s some other ones that tell the same story but slightly differently”. And nobody outside his inner circle was ever allowed to actually see the plates to verify their existence.

So in one we’ve got a wild story full of very lucky coincidences and circumstantially-suspicious claims. And in the other we’ve got a much simpler story, but it’s pretty explicitly telling us it’s a scam.

Let’s do a quick hypothetical. A solo traveller from De Moines, Iowa going to Disney Orlando. We’ll be leaving on 28th July and returning 30th, giving us one full day at the park. I picked those dates for being approximately the cheapest option on an Expedia search for flights.

• Flights: $357 return
• Hotel (at Disney): $288
• Park entry (using the “1 Park per Day” option I got when trying to book the hotel): $823

That’s $1468, before you add in even basic meals, let alone snacks and souvenirs a person is likely to want on a theme park holiday, or travel to and from the airport. And I chose there to look for dates that were cheaper. A real person might not have that option.

Connections
Puzzle #698
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Super easy today. Took me about a minute to solve. Struggled guessing what order to put them in though. Order I actually found them was yellow, purple, blue, green.

It’s a phenomenon that has been studied by psephologists and political scientists. Ultimately, it’s because IRV is a single-winner system. And single-winner systems have a strong preference for 2 party systems because at the end of the day, if one person wins, it’s likely to be from one of the largest groups.

Our Senate doesn’t use a single-winner system. It uses STV, which is a proportional system. Unfortunately because we only elect 6 Senators per state, there’s not a lot of room to create proportionality, so there are still only a relatively small number of groups represented. Contrast with the MMP system used in New Zealand and Germany, or direct proportional systems like the Netherlands and Norway, and you get much better truly proportional results.

I don’t know which has a more absurd origin story, in terms of how ridiculous it is to believe it given the history of how it started (irrespective of the actual dogmas), Mormonism or Scientology.

It seems fair to compare Taiwan to Austria pre-1938, IMO. Not a perfect parallel for a variety of reasons, but a few obvious similarities exist.