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Hi! Short answer: yes.

Very long answer: Yeah, but also I also think that if Sera knew that John was going to be heavily injured, she would've rushed to help him sooner. But considering that she came to help not too long after Valorian was taken hostage, there is a good chance that she was watching them fight and waited until she had an opportunity to act. I do also think that Sera must've taken the time to head back to the motel to grab two of the disablers to use on Scorch and Cinder, but it probably only delayed her slightly in coming to assist John.

In episode 377, she didn't really seem all too worried about how John was faring on his own because she knew he wouldn't be struggling with using his ability. She assumed John would've been fine against those EMBER agents, so she wasn't rushing to go help him. On the other hand, you can see how worried she is for him in ep 379 as she tears down the road to get him healed as soon as possible.

She definitely didn't foresee John taking so much damage against Scorch and Cinder because if she had, she would've intervened much sooner and taken them out before they would've had the chance to hurt John even more. Neither of them are in a position to be letting the other act recklessly, especially now that they're in the real world away from Wellston, the protection of their friends, and support from Darren (which John points out in episode 380).

While John has definitely grown as a person since the start of the series, you can still see that some bad habits of his persist even up to this point in the series. In this case, John is still looking for excuses to hurt other people, but he is able to better justify his ruthlessness against EMBER and the authorities. All because they're horrible people upholding a corrupt system that only benefits a select group of the power-hungry.

Unlike his senseless violence streak pre-season 2 part 2, John actually has a valid reason to go after the authorities and EMBER: they ruined the lives of everyone he knows, especially his family's, Sera's, and his own. Sera's absence in that turbulent part of John's life lead him to almost throw his life away in an attempt to take down as many feds as he could (though it's unknown if he actually managed to kill anyone... I'm sure Uru would've mentioned it in the story by now if John actually killed a bunch of people). She wasn't there to actually stop him from losing himself, and John had made a deliberate choice to not "bother" her with more "unneeded" stress.

Old habits really do die hard... The most unfortunate part of that arc is that Sera definitely would've risked getting caught if it meant she could support John when he really needed her the most. But John chose not to seek Sera for reassurance and it led him spiraling once more (though he does notably treat his friends a lot better since the last time his mental health took a nosedive).

Obviously in episode 346, we see that hearing about John's self-destructive behavior ended up adding to Sera's stress greatly, and I doubt she is going to be willing to peel away from him any time soon, knowing full well that she remains his tether to sanity while he still grieves William's death. So now that John is within her reach once again, Sera is back to watching over John and upholding that promise she made to him way back in episode 230:

((Side note: Uru-chan makes it very clear that the main characters of unOrdinary are deliberately choosing a less violent way of solving their societal issues, in which I mean that the children are NOT killing anyone in their quest to make their world a better place. Kuyo and Blysenmi nearly kill Byron (Kuyo cuts down Arnold and that lady in ep. 333), Arlo and Blysenmi almost kill Farrah, and John and friends blow up a bunch of feds many times. Yet no one in the main cast has killed anyone as of the time I am currently writing this post (June 1, 2026). I'm glad that no one has actually killed anyone so far considering that our protagonists are 17-18 year old children who really shouldn't be desensitized to murder in a world already filled with so much violence. I enjoy that the children have more empathy to spare than the adults running around killing people without giving a fuck.))

Okay, back to John vs Scorch + Cinder fight:

With Sera's constant consideration of John and his needs in mind, I do think that she chose to give John an "out" when it came to dealing with Scorch and Cinder. John has every reason to be enraged at EMBER and the authorities, and Sera knows this as well. He brutalizes Cinder the most because she was within reach, and I know he would've done the same to Scorch if he was the one to get baited instead during the fight in episode 377. I really do think John meant what he said when he stated that he didn't care if Valorian got killed or not because it would've given him an excuse to kill both Scorch and Cinder. Considering he already broke Cinder's arms and shattered a bunch of her ribs (and did considerable damage to Scorch before Cinder got involved), I'd say this John is fully capable of killing people.

Sera intervening and giving John a disabler to use lets him remain "innocent" in the way that he wouldn't be haunted by the fact that he had taken lives during one of the worst periods of his life. The fact that John is an 18 year old teenager means that anything rash he does now would definitely end up weighing on him when he hopefully mellows out and his brain finishes developing. Sera is now around to pull John out of making extremely violent and rash decisions, so that's exactly what she does. Sera would never kill anyone, so she obviously wouldn't want John killing anyone either, no matter how angry and vindicated he'd feel after the fact. Wanting the best for someone is natural when you love them after all.

While I don't think Scorch and Cinder necessarily "got off easy" since they're now disabled and in Spectre's hands, they deserve every horrible thing that's bound to happen to them. After all, they did endanger a bunch of innocent civilian lives for the sole purpose of luring out and killing Valorian, who is also probably also a child or a young adult at most. If they can stomach killing children and innocent people, then they can stomach being lab rats or repenting for their actions that led them up to this point of their lives.

Judging from Leilah's reaction, you can tell that Sera and John both probably didn't think about the aftermath of protecting Eastbrook Town. Sera could only come up with the most convenient solution that would both spare John from becoming a murderer and ensure the two of them wouldn't be in danger after capturing Cinder and Scorch. It's an imperfect plan since Sera does dump the responsibility of dealing with Cinder and Scorch onto Leilah, but in Sera's defense, she is also a kid who sometimes will act rashly if it's in her current best interest (which is prioritizing John's wishes and well-being).

John does calm down very quickly after he disables Cinder, which does show that the development John's been having since season 2 part 1 ended continues to show the fruits of his and Sera's labor. The old John probably would've tried to kill Scorch and Cinder even if Sera tried to stop him, but our current John does a better job at listening to Sera and remaining rational despite the circumstances. I am proud of him!

Will Sera continue to try her best to be John's moral compass while keeping them both safe? I'd hope so! Even now she's still worrying about him because she feels responsible to keep steering him in the right direction, which includes telling him that he needs to ask Cameron for advice since he's vulnerable against EMBER agents and can't copy Time Manipulation.

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

Microsoft is ending its Claude Code licenses because it no longer wants to rent the intelligence inside its own products. Instead, it is pushing developers onto a homegrown coding model built for Copilot, a shift that signals where the company believes power in AI will actually accrue. In San Francisco this week, at its Build developer conference, Microsoft will show off that model — a coding system it build for one purpose: to sit at the center of GitHub Copilot. For two years Copilot was the default AI coding assistant, bundled into the platform most of the world’s developers already use. Then the market moved. In the nine months after Anthropic released Claude Code in May 2025, developers followed it, and in one major survey nearly half of respondents named it a favorite. The incumbent got overtaken. Here is the part worth slowing down on. Microsoft lost on model quality. Instead of putting the better model inside Copilot, Microsoft is building its own. That choice only makes sense if you believe the thing that decides this market is not the model. Microsoft is betting that distribution beats the best model, and the early enterprise data says the bet is reasonable.

Well I don't like how it feels. I don't feel cleaner without body hair. I don't prefer not having body hair. But who will advocate for women like me, but me? For women who do like hair removal, they are advocated for every time they step out of the house and see 99% of the female population also conforming to that standard, or when they watch a movie and see all the shaved actresses, or view an advertisment, or open a magazine, or watch a music video, or scroll through social media, or walk down the streets without receiving insults and glares for having a completely normal bodily feature.

May I present the best apple:

apparently the murder happened in 2023 after doing some research but the murderer has been found not guilty.

The store owner got his gun out, and he and his son started chasing the 14-year-old boy, because they FALSELY believed he stole FOUR BOTTLES OF WATER.

The boy who was being CHASED WITH A GUN FOR NO REASON did carry a gun, and it would have been very much justified to actually take it out (because he feared for his life since he was being CHASED WITH A GUN FOR NO REASON), but witnesses never saw it in his hands, and at no point did he actually point it at his two pursuers. He had his back towards them the entire time because he was FLEEING.

The kid stumbled and fell, dropping his gun in the process. The gun was only ever seen on the ground next to his body, it probably fell from his waistband or pocket or whatever, not his hands. And since it was dropped, he did not have it on him AT ALL when he was murdered. He was SHOT IN THE BACK WHILE LYING UNARMED ON THE GROUND.

The sheriff's report written in 2023 said that this was "not a bias-motivated incident" even though there is literally zero ambiguity that this man was just itching to shoot a Black kid. There is no other explanation for why you would take your gun out and chase him more than 100 yards over a vague, weak, unfounded suspicion that he might have stolen four (4) bottles of water. In and of itself, the train of thought "this Black kid was holding four bottles of water at some point, and now he's leaving the store, clearly there's no chance that he simply put them back, he must have stolen them" is already racist as hell. But the cops say "well there's absolutely no indication that shooting an unarmed 14-year-old Black boy because you falsely suspected him of stealing a few dollars worth of water was motivated by bias" because of fucking course they do.

This is a change to the interpretation and implementation of the equalities act which legally prevents any trans person from using the correct changing rooms, toilets, or even attending gym classes.

It’s more than a bathroom ban. It’s something that will prevent us living our lives.

And, as it stands, the guidance is markedly worse for trans men than it is for trans women.

Taken from page 268 of the pdf linked above:

This guidance sets out, in a legally binding code, that trans men can be barred from both men’s and women’s facilities.

While it does go on to say that preventing us from accessing any services might be grounds for a discrimination claim, that’s in direct contradiction to the paragraphs shown above, and right now is purely hypothetical until tested in a court of law.

As the news of the government’s decision to enforce this guidance spreads, a lot is going to be said about the impact on trans women. That’s good, a lot needs to be said.

I doubt, though, that as much will be said about the impact on trans men. I doubt it because when this guidance was first released as a draft I saw dozens of not hundreds of comments talking about how the only impact was to trans women, joking that trans men should use the women’s toilets to make transphobes uncomfortable.

Please don’t fall into that pattern this time, not now this is really happening.

Protect trans women, please, but I am begging you, protect trans men, too.

This guidance systematically erases us from public life. It is deliberate. We are not collateral damage, we are the target.

- Was eventually trialed by governments of the world as a scapegoat and sent to prison

- She somehow BROKE out of said prison and currently commandeers a rogue paramilitary faction of Project Hail Mary loyalists who believe in her over world governments, who presumably are still hunting her down

- She currently is on the run and staying mobile on an ice breaker ship like some kind of james bond villain base (but you know, good) while STILL working on project hail mary the whole time

- Her rogue loyalist faction controlled enough resources they could go to space and collect the beetles Grace had sent. Alternatively, it was the world government that collected the beetles, and Stratt had a whole ass heist movie to steal them, which is why she had the little xenonite figure at the end of the movie. Either ways she was running circles around them.