u/futuraprime

The point is to have fun and tell a good story. If the characters forgetting would add to the story and make my players go "oh my god, I totally forgot about that and it's so cool", I'll happily let them forget. If them forgetting is going to elicit a "ugh, come on, my character wouldn't have forgotten that, this is stupid", remind them.

My experience is that the difference is really obvious. The cases where I don't remind are usually cases where the connection is more flavour than substance.

Just read one today:  https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/review-apples-hyper-pricey-m5-ultra-mac-studio-made-me-into-a-vibe-coder/

You’re insecure, bro.

I’m really sorry, I didn’t realise. You don’t need to think less of yourself. You’re great as you are!

I wonder if there will be any news on the game coming to Mac? (Some of us need real computers for work and can't afford a toy PC as well.)

There's a lot of downtime crunch, but this is pretty easy to automate—there are a lot of good Google Sheets that handle most of it, and anyway it's something you can work out by email or Discord in between sessions.

The big crunchy bit is the magic system. "Spontaneous" casting takes you twenty minutes, requires cross-referencing several pages across multiple books, and usually features at least one heated philosophical argument about the nature of reality according to 13th century Christian theology (your copy of Aquinas should be thoroughly indexed and bookmarked).

If you are attracted to Ars Magica in the first place, you probably will find that fun (I do!). But it is not fast.

(I am joking about the Aquinas. Mostly.)

Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake. The Gormenghast trilogy is uneven, but the first book is a towering castle of imagination, drawn from spires to foundation in loving detail. There are few books whose setting I remember so vividly, from the dust-beams in the Hall of Bright Carvings to the owls in the Tower of Flints to the Countess' endless mass of cats.

Underrated and brilliant.

I remember finding Tombs tedious when I read it as a kid. I read it to my son a few months ago and it blew me away. It holds up, and (unlike The Farthest Shore) it doesn't feel at all simplified just because it's a children's book. The tensions in Tenar/Arha's character arc are sharp and bright. And the way the book ends by leaning into an ambiguous future, with character's fates unresolved, is fantastic.

Got it, thanks! There's no connection with Savoy then? As far as I can tell the Savoys used this cross as their emblem back into the middle ages (though flags came a bit later).

I suppose it's fitting that the French and English cross banners from the Hundred Years War were the reverse of one another...

American who's lived in London for over a decade now. There's lots of good advice in this thread already. A few bits and bobs:

• Definitely have a roast dinner (lunch) at a pub of a Sunday. It's a treat.
• Supermarkets are mostly all fine. Of the big national chains: Tesco/Morrisons are cheaper, Sainsbury's is in the middle, Waitrose/M&S Food are higher end. Aldi/Lidl are discount grocers and a bit less common.
• As you're military I assume you'll have an American school available? If not and your kids are in British schools—a lot of terminology and such is different. (US "Kindergarten" -> UK "Reception"; US "public school" -> UK "state school" — UK "public schools" are private and extremely exclusive.) Religious education is mandatory in state schools here, and explicitly religious (Anglican or Catholic) schools are also state-sponsored.
• Britain has a really sharp social and class hierarchy than America. There are a lot of signifiers of station (accent, word choice, dress sense, etc). As an American, Brits generally place you outside of this system entirely so you don't have to learn it, but it's interesting.
• Britons (and other native-English transplants like Aussies) will twig you're American pretty quickly. Non-Anglophone immigrants generally assume you're British. This may cause some confusion.

Also: visit London! It's an amazing city. The British Museum and the V&A are both stunning, and the Science Museum and Natural History Museum are great for kids (and they're all free). The West End is about on par with Broadway for theatre. (Take the train in though, it's not worth it trying to drive in London.)

At a guess: the last Latin emperors of Byzantium (the Courteneys) were Capetians, so in 1337 it’s only about 65 years removed from a Capetian monarch ruling in Constantinople.

Oh you might be right! We started from two years.

It’s not on your list, but  1st Stepping Stones on Coleridge Road is in the middle of your search area, and it was great for my kid. It’s tiny and cozy and he really enjoyed it, and the staff were really good.

Enamelled cast-iron pans are really good too, though not cheap. The enamel can chip, so avoid bashing them about, but otherwise it's long lasting and cleans fairly easily (Barkeeper's Friend works well). Le Creuset and Staub are good makes. Staub makes wood-handled enamelled iron skillets which are fantastic: you can't put them in the oven, but the long handle makes the pan much easier to manoeuvre and it stays cool to the touch.

Yep, I was thinking of this one. If it was just Alex destroying everyone it’s sort of boring. You’re braced for Armando to fail extravagantly—it’s not the sort of thing he does well in. When he breaks the task with aplomb instead, it becomes a classic.

The Sound and the Fury. I surely would have bounced off this if it hadn't been assigned and had our teacher not painstakingly walked us through the first two sections of the book, which are incredibly difficult to follow. If you can follow these sections (a guide really helps) the book is astonishingly good (and very disturbing).

I have an M3 Mac and use Crossover. The game is playable, it leaks memory quite badly, and I have to restart it pretty regularly. It's not a great result. Given other games are fine on Crossover, I think it's just that the game isn't very well optimised (Windows users complain a good deal about the memory leaks too).

I think I'd go with GeForce Now or an equivalent.

It's not profound, but I've always admired this one: "Fingers-Mazda, the first thief in the world, stole fire from the gods. But he was unable to fence it. It was too hot.*

*He got really burned on that deal."

(Men at Arms, I believe)

I'm very confused. "Great Britain" is clearly a region in France.

Yep, there was a “pops” file in there that had all of this. Deleted it and things are looking much more normal now.

This is great, I've been looking for something like this for a while. I can't find it in the community plugins though—is there something special I have to do in order to find it there?

Ok, ok, you magyar point.

Timberborn is great. No warfare at all, it’s all about strategically planning for intermittent droughts. Lots of reshaping the environment (building dams, planning irrigation, etc) and getting your beaver-city working like a well-oiled machine. Really fun, quite zen once you get a handle on it. I come back to it pretty regularly. (It’s in early access but on the cusp of a 1.0 release.)