Locuas

Soulslike where as you complete various objectives it gradually becomes clear that your camp is accumulating conspicuously barefoot level up maidens.

Each has her own distinct advancement paradigm which would offer some truly disgusting cross-class builds, except how well they synergise depends on their relationship levels with each other rather than with you. Advanced buildcraft thus obliges you to play level up maiden matchmaker.

Each maiden is also awful at their respective class-focus. If you go with the warrior maiden, congrats, you are now a squishy wizard who, for some reason, can do jumps good.

House martins are the cutest because they have fuzzy lion paws that make them look like fierce little griffins.

The whole "but what about making sure artists receive credit for their work?" objection to copyright reform is especially irritating because treating moral rights (i.e., the right to attribution, etc.) as descending from or strictly subordinate to commercial exploitation rights is a uniquely American perspective. Not only are these two things separable, they are in fact separated in the vast majority of intellectual property regimes – it's basically just the United States that treats attribution rights as a strict subset of commercial rights. Hell, the US schema is arguably worse in terms of ensuring that artists are properly credited than nearly any conceivable alternative, as treating the right to attribution as a subset of commercial rights means that the right to attribution can be signed away. There are lots of places where it's simply inalienable!

(Of course, this also goes for US copyright abolitionists banging on about how giving up the right to attribution is a necessary sacrifice – like, no, it isn't. These things are separable. Treating them like the one inherently descends from the other is literally just you guys.)

a really really really underrated feeling in learning a different language is when you start to hear words. as in it's no longer a string of sounds, you can parse through where words start and stop as you're hearing them. even words that you don't know what they mean yet but you can distinctly hear it as a whole word

there is nothing a corporation hates more than having employees, but a close second is having to provide a good or service in order to make money. these two reasons concisely explain is why the ai bubble formed in the first place.

(As an aside, a claim you might bump into in some sources is that Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series is the ultimate inspiration for D&D's chromatic dragons; however, while the first Pern novel does pre-date OD&D by six years, as far as I know there's no evidence that D&D's creators were aware of McCaffrey's work. Gygax in particular wasn't keen on "women's fantasy", for reasons I trust are obvious!)

Story-driven roguelike where you actually resolve the central problem with no contrived shooting-our-own-themes-in-the-foot excuse for why you just keep iterating on it forever after the credits roll, and any runs after that are framed as PTSD dreams about all the shit the protagonist went through.

Just imagine all the fucked up postgame difficulty modifiers you could easily justify in this framing. Nightmare mode mod where all the trash mobs have the face of your dad.

Is this a dig on Hades 2 or is "shooting-our-own-themes-in-the-foot" really that common in roguelike narrative games?

Since Prokopetz likes to speak broadly when speaking about multiple things and not wanting to single-out the obvious example, I will assume you can say any roguelike that feels the need to have an in-universe explanation as to how you keep playing despite the credits rolling is guilty of this, regardless of some being better at handling it than others.

Miss Piggy tied to the mast while Statler and Waldorf heckle her from the sea

But who is the single human cast member in this tale? Who gets to put in an Oscar-worthy performance alongside the Muppets and what role are they to play?

There’s no single human, everyone is a Muppet except for one scene. Circe, played by Janice, turns Odysseus’s crew into humans who still behave animalistic and are all played by Academy Award winning actors.