It’s the parts of a program’s concepts, rules and behaviours that are specific to the program’s task. For instance

• Items, a shopping cart and the conversion of such a cart into an order at checkout in an e-commerce application.
• Clips of video and audio, static images etc. and the compiling of these into a single output video for a video editor.
• Vertices, triangles, meshes, animation rigs etc. for a 3d editing program.
• Accounting standards and tax laws for an accounting system.

When developing software you deal both with these kinds of specifics and generically reusable concepts that are more purely computational science, so a term to distinguish them is handy.

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

Bugsnax also does this a bit with creatures like the Fryder.

The use of “alumni” in the singular. A person is an alumnus or an alumna, the alumni are always a group. Seems to be a very American usage, and I don’t know why it feels aggravating where other Americanisms like positive anymore don’t.

Federal election times are set by 2 U.S. Code § 7 as 1 day after the 1st Monday in November (of even numbered years). The law is from 1875 and from what I can tell is indeed nominally motivated by the voters’ need to first observe rest day on Sunday and then travel to their polling place. Keeping it and not having a federal holiday coinciding with it is largely aimed at keeping voter turnout low.

It’s also my favourite place to kill monsters, take their stuff and use it to get better at killing monsters and taking their stuff. I do feel like it has so much build space to explore I find building without some reference to a guide frustrating, but it manages that progression well and the atlas passive trees are a neat way to let you customize what content you want to engage with.

Incremental games are a bit of an “I know it when I see it” grouping, but two typical characteristics are progression systems nested within each other and game loops that start simple but “flower” into a number of more detailed and mutually interacting ones over the course of play.
Universal Paperclips is a nice example, casting you as a newly built AI with the goal of making as many paperclips as you can. You start out able to make paperclips and sell them to humans for funds you can then use to invest in more capabilities. You work on building trust with the humans so they’ll let you do more things, and on making more clips faster, and there is a lot of escalation from these humble beginnings. Some other good ones are Cookie Clicker and, if you’re into programming puzzles, Bitburner.

This is definitely important in making the very most engaging base-builders - a pleasing mixture of longer term goals (manufacture this piece that I can eventually put in a future science pack or whatnot) and under-performing pieces of your older infrastructure that you have to scale up or re-plan is just so helpful for getting you into that flow state.

This is pretty much the underpinning question of the entire field of evolutionary developmental biology, so naturally any answer is going to be a bit surface level, and I get out of my depth fairly rapidly to be honest. Still, it is quite interesting.

One of the central ideas is that as an embryo grows, its cells go from being all equivalent multipotent stem cells into being different from each other - at first more specialized types of stem cell that can only turn into certain tissues and gradually specializing more and more. Since these cells are differentiated and expressing different genes from one another, they can then start to co-ordinate with each other using chemical markers and gradients of concentration of those markers across space to regulate what types of cells should be growing/dividing, where in the embryo they should be doing it and at what time they should be doing it.

That signaling is in turn controlled by some often complicated networks of regulatory genes - ones which when they are expressed make proteins that selectively attach to other bits of the DNA in that cell and make the genes there more or less likely to be expressed themselves. A lot of evolutionary variation is actually focused on these regulatory systems rather than on the genes which they are switching on and off.

So to my knowledge, something like nose shape likely comes down to some of those regulatory genes controlling where the cells that will eventually be forming the cartilage get placed relative to the skull etc.

Shout out to Retro Video Game Mechanics Explained for his explanation of the entire construction of the cries.

That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

• Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government’s authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
• People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under “natural law”.
• People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
Primarily it’s a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it’s a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

You might enjoy münecat’s longer form explanation.

If I describe someone as a “tall man” or “clever man”, do those qualifiers/subcategorizations call into question whether he is a “man”?
If they don’t, I’m genuinely interested in hearing what distinction you apparently see between those two and saying he is a “trans man”.

As a package, I feel they slot in well next to Jagged Earth.

• Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine - like I said my favourite among the Incarnas so far. The value you get from catching Invaders alone means you see the island kinda differently than most spirits. Control powers become really handy for setting yourself up, and powers with 1 damage can let you abduct entire Cities if used right. At the same time, you’re always needing to think about Growth letting pieces escape and planning where you could put them. Your teamwork unique power Reach From the Infinite Darkness is both a really neat tool there and can be a great help to spirits like Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds who have bigger mobility and range limitations.
• Dances Up Earthquakes - Definitely a spirit I feel I need more experience with to really get. The core concept of needing to play some cards now to set up quake tokens and get Defend, and some to the future to get your Major power effects and big innate damage out works out interestingly, but seeing the good combos needs more experience than I’ve picked up I think.
• Ember-Eyed Behemoth - I’ve not gotten many plays of this one, but it seems like a solid straightforward offense spirit with opportunities for mastery around its particular timing and mobility constraints.
• Hearth-Vigil - A really solid defensive spirit, who with some planning can marshal a lot of counterattack damage and/or destroy Invaders added by a Build as they go up. I find I really appreciate that Fortify Heart and Hearth gives Dahan in your lands immunity to destruction/damage by event, since those few times I’ve taken a lot of losses to disease as Thunderspeaker it’s felt pretty bad.
• Relentless Gaze of the Sun - Another I’ve not gotten many plays of. The Repeat mechanic seems solid, and particularly nice to combo with control-focused teammates, a bit like Lure of the Deep Wilderness.
• Towering Roots of the Jungle - I was kinda looking forward to this one but haven’t particularly felt the spark of connection yet. Rushing to an empowered Incarna is particularly easy for it, but empowering also only suppresses Builds in one land. If you can draft a blight-removal or moving power it’s quite handy for improving the defensive uses of Vitality. If your heartland does Ravage into a Blight, it creates a kinda neat sacrifice combo where when the Invaders deal damage, Heart-Tree Guards the Land means Dahan are immune to damage, then you can choose the Incarna as the presence lost to Blight meaning the Dahan get to damage the Invaders back after all.
• Wandering Voice Keens Delirium - A pretty interesting approach to control play. The amount of Strife you spit out really is extreme and comes with pushes by default thanks to Senseless Roaming. The Incarna limiting where Dahan get to participate in Ravage means you can’t really play too defensively with Strife, but have to look for some damage powers too. Mind-Shattering Song is a solid innate to help with that and can be targeted from the incarna or normal sacred sites. Turmoil’s Touch is a teamwork unique that I find particularly interesting - 0 cost, targeted spirits can pay 1 energy or discard a card to Take the top minor power and put it into their discard pile, and Wandering Voice can do likewise. Obviously it’s less directly helpful than something like Gift of Power which offers a choice of cards for relevancy, but even if you only use them once the improvements to your Reclaim cycles can really help the more card-starved spirits. If the card Taken is really bad, you have a natural pick for Forgetting when you gain a Major.
• Wounded Waters Bleeding - Definitely conceptually interesting, with a lot of choices to make through each game. Similar to Starlight Seeks its Form it feels like you want to Forget a solid portion of your uniques in the early game. You can choose to forgo board presence instead but that can be pretty limiting for your range and ability to affect the island. Once you heal though, destroyed presence is less of an issue than for most spirits. So far I’ve tended towards Roiling Waters builds and Beasts-focused power drafts personally. The ability to gather Blight from turn 2 has neat applications both to prevent cascades and for power targeting.

Of the many new Aspects, the ones that stick out in my memory are Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves’ ones. Unconstrained is a neat variant that makes Sharp Fangs less sensitive to those same Blight targeting issues, but also makes your creation of Beasts a bit more constrained. I’ve not yet played any games with Encircle but it looks to tap into some of the feel of a good Shroud of Silent Mist offensive - smothering the Invaders by putting Beasts in neighbouring lands rather than concentrating them in the land you’re targeting.

It’s an unfortunate situation, for sure. I’m glad to have found a digital option to play around with the new spirits and aspects while the red tape is resolved on my physical copy. Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine is so far my favourite of the Incarna spirits, but there’s still tons of things left to try. My limited plays of Dances Up Earthquakes indicate it’s definitely as brain-burning as the preview made it look.

I think it’s the transition from a broad search pattern to a focused get-ahead-of-Dracula formation that’s the trickiest step to learn for me on the Hunter side. It always feels like there’s just a bit too many options open for me to surge forward and box him in.

I’d say the key insight with quantum computing is that its algorithms are about choreographing interference patterns among qubits such that wrong answers cancel each other out but right answers reinforce one another. It’s not just a matter of trying possibilities in parallel or “running different probabilities simultaneously” - the qubits’ states are complex combinations of 0 and 1 states, and they interact with and change one another. Simulating those interactions on a classical computer requires exponentially growing amounts of memory space and time as the quantum computation gets bigger. Trying to divide-and-conquer this simulation over multiple classical computers runs into the need for different parts of the circuit to know about each others’ state, limiting how much work can be sectioned off to be done by each computer in the group.

I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you there, as my time with Skyrim is getting to be long ago. Hope someone else has a ballpark figure for you.

The extreme version of this is called the Alchemy/Enchantment loop where you feed two skill-improving skills into one another. But be aware, this is the kind of thing that can end up taking the fun out of a game for some people.

Also, it’s worth being aware that because of the way later Elder Scrolls games scale enemies, any time you’re working on a noncombat skill the draugr are training.