Shapez 2 is a very worthy sequel, IMO. Adding logistics beyond conveyor belts is quite nice, and 3 levels of height give quite a bit more options when building. You do often benefit from a build staying at one level since it makes platform blueprints that consume 12n belts of input to make 12 belts of output quite a bit easier, but several buildings are intentionally impossible to do that with for challenge.

The difficulty levels are also pretty well done - I got some fun learning moments out of Insane in particular. Hexagonal mode is also interesting.

I very much lean towards the microfactory approach - locate a cluster of resources within reasonable belting/piping distances, design a factory which can consume the cluster’s entire production of the limiting resource (clocking others to match) to make 1 output or maybe 2, then provide that output to the rail network. Some production chains make it easier to have certain inputs taken from the rail network.

Within one of these factories, items are refined further for each floor they ascend but I rarely enforce a 1 product/floor rule - in particular I find it convenient with many Assembler/Manufacturer recipes to have an input that is directly fed from a single Constructor using clock speed to match production with consumption. This usually means each microfactory underclocks its most power hungry buildings a fair bit which keeps their consumption moderate. Each microfactory ideally has a single priority power switch to turn off its entire production chain if its consumption is becoming a problem and I set up a priority sequence for them.

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.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.
Anatole France

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.

Or sometimes fold them over trees of objects!

make reapportion something that happens every 10 years with the census

That’s… the current state of affairs? New apportionments of Rep seats to states take effect on the 4th year of each decade and have done so consistently since 1933 and in particular the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. It also does little for the major structural issues with voting, which are much more about voting method and the drawing of voting district lines.

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

Nobody ever considers Eve’s side.

It’s genuinely funny to me that one of O’Keefe’s major sins in the eyes of his conservative donors was being such a theater kid he staged a musical hagiography of himself.

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.

Interesting. I guess for me the “trans” bit just isn’t as strongly coupled to the person - that it’s natural to use “man” for such a person in general, and it’s a context (e.g. healthcare or the politics of it) that can make the subcategory be relevant.

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”.

It becomes inherently difficult to make datasets actually anonymous the more data points they have about a given individual - it doesn’t much matter whether names and such are listed data points if they can be inferred from the rest. This investigation by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes, for instance, managed to identify a named German member of parliament (Valerie Wilms) and other public functionaries within a data set on web browsing habits they received from data brokers.

Most countries do have data privacy legislation and relevant regulatory/enforcement agencies, but the data brokerage business is big and intensely international so the picture on audits is kind of unavoidably complicated.

FIDE has two competitive circuits - the open circuit where men and women (cis or trans) can compete, and the women’s circuit. Players can (and commonly do) compete in both circuits. Ultimately the goal of the women’s circuit is to boost recruitment of female players and make competitive chess less of a boys’ club. Opinions are divided on whether it’s the most effective method.
The recent decision affects AMAB people who want to play in the women’s circuit, but does not bar them from the open circuit.

It’s a pretty shit decision as far as I can see, but it’s good to make judgments on the facts.

Overfitting is the normal term.

Ah yes, the Bismarck solution.

It’s only 1 year ago Biden signed legislation forcing the railroad unions back to work with only 1 day of paid sick leave per worker per year. While as the author says it “One party is capable of rallying to labor’s side”, that feels very much like putting the bar on the ground.

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.