A character misunderstanding the meaning of "high-octane fuel" and filling their car up with pure octane from the chemical factory sounds like a gag from a cartoon. I found myself wondering what would happen if you did that in real life. Would it work fine or would the lack of other compounds/additives cause other problems with the engine?
Because I want to get these thoughts out of my head on to paper.
The Great Sink: This was shorter than I expected for London's first apocalypse. Perhaps it's an artefact of it being a 'testing ground' for Estival in general? A quick round of saving London from collapse felt nice, but I feel parts of the plot were left out. No mention of the Viscountess' responsibility at all. Didn't expect the encounter with December though, that was fun. At least it doesn't drag on. Thanks for the work gloves!
F.F. Gebrandt's Prelapsarian Exhibition: I love how this one makes use of the dreamy nature of the waswood, the way your POV switches between being "on the ground" and looking over London from above like you're the camera in a strategy game. It displays the Empress well: Hidden emotion as the image of her consort, and a reminder of how feared she is when Gebrandt keeps the machine on by her command despite the disaster it will cause. Overall, short and sweet, and I'm glad to be in her address book!
The Starved War: The intro drags on a bit, but then it's a fairly fun experience. All the checks, even if they're not that consequential in a dream, put you into the feet of someone desperately fighting for London. But man, was the initial defense really lead almost exclusively by Sinning Jenny and a reluctant admiralty? I feel the consequence of the war was too glossed over though. Not the buildings, those always get fixed (except Hater's Bridge), but the people. What happened to everyone that had their skeleton turned into wood or their hands melted into stubs by Amber? Did they just go to the boatman and come back out right as rain? Also, I wish the way we convinced the various factions of the Neath to join the final offensive was slightly less glossed over.
The Sixth Coil (played it once a few months ago, again this summer): I really enjoy this one. Choosing between teams to back reminds me of the elections, adds some replayability and there's plenty of lore around them. The interludes between tournaments with Mr Huffman are well done, giving satisfying summaries of just how and where the players uncovered the mysteries of the Coilheart Games, at good pacing. My one gripe is that the choice of champion has too small impact on the event text during the final rescue mission. There's a few cases where the impact is noticeable such as the very different ways the winner of the Tournament of Intellect break the 7th Coil's hold over the past tribute, but in many cases it just slots the winner's name into identical text, which limits how much their personalities can show (and creates the weird image of a big tiger that somehow "flattens against a column").
Hell is Missing: Mixed feelings about this one. Starts strong with the display of reality falling apart, the big pile of qualities the "—WHAT—" event gives you certainly impresses that a lot is going on. The middle part feels less engaging, I feel it skims over how the Londoners figured out how to treat all the many symptoms in the first place. I still have no clue what the "Seven" or "Affair of the Severed Twelve" quality meant. And I'll forever be salty we did not see anything of the personality of Mr Dinners' fellow urchins-turned Misters of the Bizzare. The finale though locks in. It becomes an emotional quest to save Reggie's former comrades who, however unjust London's old war was, could not possibly deserve the endless Torment hell inflicts on them. Plus, mysteries for later remain: Just who and why helped the prisoners get to a Law-Furnace? And What is Milton's whole business? I feel sometimes things drag on, taking many actions to get through a conversation, IIRC this was a complaint about the original last year too.
Month and a half ago I made a soap mostly out of purified bacon fat with some canola. When I removed it from the mold three days later it looked totally normal. Cut the loaf into bars and let sit. About 3 weeks later it seemed oddly waxy but nothing raised alarms. Then I forgot it on the kitchen shelf for a while as life hit me hard. Finally took a proper look at it today, and the bars were VERY greasy. Enough fluid at the surface to visibly wet a piece of paper pressed against it. I've wiped off what I can, but is is the bars are in no way presentable to friends. Frustratingly, last time I tried this no such thing happened.
Has anyone else had an issue like this happen to them? How to salvage this, if possible?
It seems it passes the zap test, but I'm never sure what is sodium hydroxide and what is just my tongue violently rejecting the taste of soap in general.
My recipe was 700 g tallow, 100 g canola oil, 16 g peppermint oil, 161 g water, 107 g sodium hydroxide (aiming for 4% superfat, 40% lye concentration). It was supposed to be a scaled down batch of a near-identical recipe I made last year so I don't know what went sideways. Two things come to mind as different from last year:
Google is little help, mostly it yields forum posts about soap that's oily from the start after taking it out of the mold, but in my case it seemed normal and only got weird a month in.
The "Out you go, longshanks" on their faction card says that urchins only survive long enough to get cast out "occasionally". The urchin gangs we see seem to do pretty well for themselves, and a lot of the things that would usually kill a Victorian Child will only kill them temporarily with the loose nature of death in Fallen London. So why the mortality?
I like these Urchins I don't want to think about how most of them will die over the next 10 years.
The verb endings seem to have an unusual amount of silent letters even by French standards.
Something I noticed going through it again for the estival: At the end when your airship does an A-wing maneuver and the FLPC ends up on the slow boat, the Boatman says this: "I know what it looks like when a city ends. It looks worse than this from here."
The implication is that if the city ends, the slow boat would have a LOT more people, and since the crowd is small it's just the Airship crews that died and not all of London. What's tripping me up is: The Starved Men wanted to blow up London with sunlight, and my understanding was that Sunlight doesn't so much kill you conventionally as much as it deletes you for violating nature's laws.
Because of that, I assumed that Neathers killed by sunlight just stop existing instead of going to the slow boat. So how can the Boatman tell that didn't get killed? Do I understand wrong, and those hit by sunlight do go to the slow boat, destined for the far shore with their bodies gone? I had assumed the Boatman, the river, the far shore, etc, was just part of the Neath's supernatural weirdness. If the sun-dead still go there, does that mean they are part of the "proper" natural order of things after all?
Out of universe the elections stopped in favor of Estival was because the devs did not like the acrid effect they had on the community. In-universe this was justified as the Masters thinking letting London's leadership do its own thing was too dangerous after the disaster that was the Viscountess of the Viric Jungle awakening the stone pigs.
Presumably the elections would have ended even if the 1898 victor was different. So, I'd like some theories as to what shenanigans the other two would have terrified the Masters with in stead of the Grand Clearing Out. Gebrandt I can see poking something dangerous (maybe even the same Stone Pigs) in pursuit of SCIENCE!, but what could the Tentacled Entrepreneur have done? He does not seem like the sort to poke at things recklessly.
Perhaps more of a military question than a history one I admit. I am trying to get a better understand of what made an individual general good at something. What was Model so good at that another field Marshall like Rundstedt or Manstein couldn't recreate?
I understand that Muslims consider female hair and some other parts of the body of both sexes such as the midriff to be sexual or at least very intimate. Many North American cities have large Muslim populations. Downtown during summer seeing a woman with a long dress and headscarf walking next to a woman with a miniskirt and exposed midriff is an everyday occurrence. And I can't help but wonder, what goes through the minds of the Muslims, going about their day in place where the average dress is what they'd normally consider shockingly obscene?
Part of what collapsed the Latin case system was a combo of final consonant loss and vowel mergers, which for example caused most cases in the first declension to become indistinguishable.
This made me wonder: Did having grammatical distinctions depending on fine vowel distinctions make Latin less "likely" to have such final loss or mergers catch on among speakers than a language where such changes wouldn't have changed much (though not immune of course)? Assuming there's enough statistical data about sound changes to draw any conclusions at all of course.