The popular view of Israel is as a modern state created with the backing of powerful western allies. This may be true of the current iteration of the state of Israel but the history is much older.
Jews have been living in Israel for thousands of years dating back to the Iron Age Kingdom of Israel, though for much of the intervening time the area was called Palestine (or other names). Owing to its long history of conquests and migration, many Jews left Palestine and migrated throughout Europe, forming diaspora communities (and frequently subject to antisemitism and violent pogroms).
Back in the 1500s the Ottoman Empire conquered Palestine and considered it part of Ottoman Syria. This lasted for centuries until the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
What Zionists want is the same thing that Palestinians want and the same thing that Chinese people already have (and Japanese and Korean and many other groups have): a homeland. Zionism as an idea goes back centuries, to the original departure of Jews and forming diaspora communities. The conflicts between Jews and other groups in Palestine (including Christians who migrated there in the Middle Ages) goes back centuries.
The main difference now is that Israel has an enormous amount of power due to their alliance with the UK and the US. The US in particular has a sizeable Jewish diaspora community that grew dramatically during the Holocaust. The cities of New York and Los Angeles are home to sizeable and highly influential Jewish communities, and many Hollywood executives, producers, actors, and comedians are Jewish. Jewish culture therefore forms a very substantial part of American culture (through TV shows like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and many movies) and many American non-Jews are politically friendly to the Zionist cause.
I, personally, don’t have a stake in the outcome. I want the violence to stop but I have no idea how that’s going to happen. The most recent conflict really has been going on for over a century. At one time even Nazi Germany had a side in it, supporting Arabic Palestinians. There have been many pogroms and genocides over the centuries, targeting both Jews and other groups. The Ottoman Empire committed genocides as well. It’s horrific but it’s so difficult to imagine a scenario where it will stop.
Yeah, like you could say the exact same thing about gardening or painting or knitting. Taking up a hobby and learning how to do something can be really relaxing and beneficial to your mental health. Gender has nothing to do with it.
I’m a man. I’ve been to therapy. I went back to university and got my degree in my 30’s. Now I’m happy with who I am as a person. My hobbies are gardening, coffee, video games, and electronics. I volunteer as a tutor twice a week helping high school kids with their home work. Are you saying I should give all that stuff up and go back to therapy?
I’m not defensive about a meme. I’m challenging the assertion that everyone needs therapy. Therapy is what you need when you don’t know how to make yourself happy. If you don’t have a problem with that then you don’t need therapy. Telling people they need therapy when you don’t know anything about them is what offends me.
Not at all. I just resent the implication that someone having a hobby needs therapy and that this has anything to do with gender at all.
There’s also the connotation that this is somehow not the “right” hobby to have, and that’s also couched in offensive gender-laden language. That is simply uncalled for. It doesn’t matter what your gender is nor what hobby you enjoy nor any combination of gender and hobby thereof. Do what you love and anyone who tells you to stop can take a long walk off a short pier.
In therapy I learned all about mindfulness. About living in the moment and really paying attention to what I’m doing and really enjoying the activities I’m participating in. Lots of people figure that stuff out on their own, without therapy. I believe that if you figure that out and it makes you happy then you probably don’t need therapy.
I take it you’re not a challenge runner. At higher numbers of challenges it becomes essentially mandatory to use alchemy to survive. I am finishing up 6-challenge wins with every class (just need to do Huntress) and I use alchemy a TON. If you’ll note one of the alchemy changes is that alchemy pots now only spawn on either the 3rd or 4th floor of each area (instead of possibly the 2nd). This is actually a BUFF to alchemy that makes a big difference for challenge players. Why would we want alchemy pots to come later? Because it reduces the amount of backtracking we need to do and backtracking is really expensive with only 1/3 the usual amount of food (On Diet challenge).
Potion of cleansing (exotic purity) removes all debuffs including hunger/starvation. This means potions of purity become a major food source when On Diet is turned on.
Elixir of aquatic rejuvenation gives more healing than a regular healing potion and allows you to control when and how much healing to apply (by standing in water) to let you avoid wasting healing at full health. This is crucial with On Diet + Barren Land because food is a scarce and precious form of healing, dew drops and sungrass are out of the picture, so you don’t want to be sitting at full health unless you’re starving.
Elixir of honeyed healing is another source of nutrition.
Elixir of dragon’s breath makes you immune to fire and imbues your attacks with fire. This is extremely useful against the fire hand and the grass hand in the final boss fight.
Elixir of toxic essence makes you immune to poison gas and causes you to constantly emit toxic gas. This protects you against the toxic gas hand and also gives you more damage against some of the other hands.
Transforming unidentified scrolls into runestones in order to identify the scrolls. Once you have scrolls of upgrade and remove curse safely identified it’s generally a good idea to turn all unidentified scrolls into runestones. Many of the scrolls are actually more useful in runestone form (especially rage and teleport) and getting all scrolls identified quickly gives you more options.
Upgrading unidentified potions into their exotic form. Once you have potions of healing identified (which you can do by observing flies/necromancers/vampire bats drop them) you are safe to turn all unidentified potions into their exotic form. This allows you to identify potions by drinking them in exotic form which is much safer to do. The only dangerous exotic potion is corrosive gas which you can mitigate by standing diagonal to a door and running out of the room to escape the gas (which will stop spreading when the door closes). If you wait until you’re starving and moderately low health to identify your unknown exotic potions then you won’t waste a potion of cleansing should you happen to have one.
Aqua blast spell (crafted starting with a potion of levitation) gives you 8 charges of a spell that lets you create pools of water anywhere. This is extremely useful for getting rid of traps. 2 casts will clear the toxic gas vents in the treasure room, letting you loot a bunch of gold without spending your potion of purity (which is much more valuable as a food source). Aqua blast is also great against blazing champions, fire elementals, and the fire hand.
Feather fall spell (also from levitation) gives you 2 charges that let you loot the drop-down rooms without spending any healing or food resources.
Beacons of returning (crafted from scrolls of teleport). You get 5 of these which are basically get out of jail free cards that will save your life. They are also great for backtracking to a shop without spending tons of food running there. Even more powerful is to combine one of these with a scroll of passage (exotic teleport). First you save the current location (using the beacon), then scroll of passage to get back to the shop, then use the beacon to return to where you started. An expensive use of scrolls but saves a ton of food. Very powerful use for the Unstable Spellbook (which can basically give you a free scroll of passage) but you need to be prepared for it.
Potion of Divine Inspiration (exotic experience) gives you 2 bonus talent points in a tier of your choice. Extremely good! From T2 onward you generally want as many talents as you can get!
Scroll of Metamorphosis (exotic transmutation) lets you swap out any talent for a random talent of the same tier for another class. Very good for swapping out situational or obsolete talents (extra food or identify faster T1 talents) for something more useful!
There’s far more stuff than all this. Pretty much everything in alchemy is useful if you’re creative enough about it. This is really important as you add more and more challenges because resources become scarce, damage you take increases (a lot), and a lot of easy strategies are disabled.
Turning a scroll into runestones positively identifies the scroll in the game so that you’ll recognize it automatically the next time you see it. This is because each scroll turns into the same runestones every time and runestones are always identified.
The same is not true for potions. You have to actually drink the exotic potion to identify it. Making it exotic just makes that task safer (and avoids wasting a precious cleansing potion).
You can however identify potions via alchemy another way: turn 3 seeds of the same type into a potion will identify that potion for you. This can be an absolute game changer if you find 3 seeds of mageroyal early on but that’s rare. Getting any potion identified for free is valuable though, and using seeds to do it is totally free (doesn’t cost any energy) plus with the Barren Land challenge you can’t plant seeds anyway.
Seeds do have other uses besides making potions. Using them to tip darts is another extremely useful thing to do in challenges (and can be totally ignored otherwise). Seeds of blindweed and earthroot are especially valuable for tipping darts because they give you blinding and paralyzing darts respectively. Those two darts can save you from a lot of damage at the hands of annoying ranged attackers like gnoll shamans and dwarf warlocks.
I actually don’t use aqua blast against Tengu. There’s another potion you can make which is extremely valuable for that fight (and 2 other boss fights): shrouding fog. This is the exotic version of invisibility and it’s extremely good at protecting you from ranged attacks while still letting you fight normally (unlike invisibility which goes away the instant you attack someone).
Aqua blast pays for itself even if you use it to loot just one of those poison gas treasure rooms. Its other uses for putting out fires, attacking flaming enemies, and creating water (which you can use with aquatic rejuvenation and/or glyph of flow) are more specialized uses but super strong if used correctly. If you have a wand of lightning then aqua blast becomes extremely strong as a combo to get enemies into water so you can fry them all with lightning arcs.
Returning to shops is the only way to buy stuff from them. Going forward to a future shop will not get you the items in the previous shop. When you play with a lot of challenges you tend to want to get as much value as you possibly can out of each shop. Plus the prices at the shops increase the deeper you go into the dungeon. Buying anything from the first shop (in the prisons) is far far cheaper than it is from the ambitious imp (last shop in the game). A potion of healing costs 300 in the first shop but 750 in the last shop (goes up by 150 each chapter).
Oh I forgot to mention: the poison gas rooms aren’t the only rooms where you can use aqua blast to get loot! You can also use aqua blast to clear traps in those rooms that are completely full of traps instead of using a potion of levitation (which you could make into another aqua blast)! If you aim it correctly you can usually clear a path to the treasure with only one charge of aqua blast!
Darts never break. They have infinite durability. Only the tips wear out, which can be easily replaced by using another seed. Darts with no tips can be thrown an infinite number of times but the damage is low with T1 scaling.
If you wield a crossbow then darts you throw use the crossbow’s damage instead of the dart damage. A highly upgraded crossbow can do a ton of damage with plain (untipped) darts, and tipped darts do the crossbow damage plus the effect of the tip.
Each of the 4 shops in the game always sells one pair of darts for a total of 8 darts in the game. If you buy all 4 pairs then you’ll have 8 darts for the rest of the game and can throw them as much as you want. If you use a ring of sharpshooting or play as a huntress (especially warden) then you can increase the durability of the dart tips so that you get more throws out of each tip, helping you conserve seeds.
Basic blender went bad (motor ran but spindle wasn’t rotating). I wanted to disassemble to see if it could be repaired. Three of the four screws were Phillips head. I had to cut the casing open in order to discover why I couldn’t unscrew the fourth. It was a slotted spanner.
(Content warning, discussions of SA and misogyny, mods I might mention politics a bit but I hope this can be taken outside the context of politics and understood as a discussion of basic human decency)...
I don’t know how you can solve this. Lemmy has become a refuge for outcasts. Men with social/personality issues are the biggest group of outcasts. Women are much less likely to be outcasts and so have far less interest in being here.
To create an environment that is welcoming to a particular group takes a certain critical mass of people from that group. If you’re such an extremely small minority you’re going to have a very difficult time reaching that critical mass and the negative environment further discourages people from joining.
There are player-run servers for MMORPGs such as Ultima Online and EverQuest. If the developers released the server software the fans wouldn’t have to implement their own (which they did for those two games). If the company is no longer running their own servers they are no longer making money from subscriptions so they won’t lose money to competition from player-run servers.
The more enchantments and more curses trinket has a downside: it costs a lot of energy to upgrade! If you can’t afford to upgrade it to +3 right away then you’re going to get extra curses over time which end up costing more resources to remove!
A roguelike without procedural generation is like Tetris where the order of the pieces is the same every time. Some roguelikes let you save the seed and replay the same run but this is generally referred to as cheating and done for recreation/research purposes, not for seriously attempting to win the game.
Funny you should bring up Caves of Qud. That game is pushing the envelope in terms of procedural generation. They want to do a ton of the world building and background stories with procedural generation while leaving the main plot hand-crafted. They also do a really fun procedural detective story with one of the quests, so the clues and evidence you find when investigating the crime are different every time.
I think a lot of the fun of that game is with exploring the procedurally generated environments and doing the random quests. There just needs to be more research into generating branching plots and simulating events, with chains of causality. Dwarf Fortress does a lot of this in its world generation, for example.
I think what works for Minecraft is the spatial nature of the game. Procedural generation gives the player a new environment in which they can role play as an architect and engineer. While nothing stops you from building exactly the same structure every time — block for block — it’s more fun to design your structures into the landscape itself, like a real architect would! The same goes for Daarf Fortress and the like. It scratches an engineering/managerial itch.
The trouble I have with statements like this is that “as we know it” is doing so much of the heavy lifting. We don’t have any experience with extraterrestrial life so it’s difficult to imagine how different or similar it may be to our own. We have a sample size of 1 with a completely unknown population. The best we can do right now look at line spectra and make inferences from organic chemistry. But that tells us very little about the potential forms life may take.
I spent roughly 5 hours on this one. Am I the only one who thinks that plain green mushrooms on mine floors are a little boring? Like if you have underground fungi why can’t it be blue or purple or glowing or just don’t look like a grass? And this is based on my last terrible run, this guy has no rings, no wands, no good...
I love the variety and strategy trinkets are bringing to the game in 2.4! They do add to early game inventory pressure, which for me is the most frustrating part of the game (juggling a full inventory, throwing stuff down pits, running back and forth)....
That would be ideal but I think Evan is worried about changing the UI and increasing clutter. My suggestion to move trinkets to the velvet pouch is just about as minimal a change as you can possibly make. It gets the extra item out of the main inventory at the cost of a very minor code change.
I still remember (lemmy.world)
ENDLESS Legend is Currently Free to Claim on Steam (store.steampowered.com)
Offer ends on May 23rd.
China is burning all its bridges with Israel (asia.nikkei.com)
BBC thinks we might as well get comfortable, fellow Zoomers. (lemmy.world)
Therapy (lemmy.world)
[DEV] Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.4.0! (shatteredpixel.com)
Hey Dungeoneers, Shattered v2.4.0 has been released!...
Obscure screw added so appliance cannot be disassembled (lemmy.world)
Basic blender went bad (motor ran but spindle wasn’t rotating). I wanted to disassemble to see if it could be repaired. Three of the four screws were Phillips head. I had to cut the casing open in order to discover why I couldn’t unscrew the fourth. It was a slotted spanner.
Red Lobster is abruptly closing dozens of restaurants | CNN Business (www.cnn.com)
48/650 locations so it’s not bad YET. But generally these things don’t get better.
Lemmy is a worse platform for women than Reddit was
(Content warning, discussions of SA and misogyny, mods I might mention politics a bit but I hope this can be taken outside the context of politics and understood as a discussion of basic human decency)...
Stop Killing Games Canadian Petition - Now Open For Signature (www.ourcommons.ca)
cross-posted from: lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/441893...
[DEV] Shattered v2.4 Releasing Soon! (lemmy.world)
Hey rat punchers, Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.4.0 is going to be releasing to everyone around the middle of this coming week!...
Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated” (mynintendonews.com)
Stop right there (mander.xyz)
[OC] rogue in the mines (lemmy.world)
I spent roughly 5 hours on this one. Am I the only one who thinks that plain green mushrooms on mine floors are a little boring? Like if you have underground fungi why can’t it be blue or purple or glowing or just don’t look like a grass? And this is based on my last terrible run, this guy has no rings, no wands, no good...
Small Suggestion: Store Trinkets in Velvet Pouch (lemmy.world)
I love the variety and strategy trinkets are bringing to the game in 2.4! They do add to early game inventory pressure, which for me is the most frustrating part of the game (juggling a full inventory, throwing stuff down pits, running back and forth)....