u/Simon_Drake

'the3million is ready to take the government to court over a Home Office practice: deciding there was a mistake in the initial grant of status, then simply allowing the status and rights of EU citizens and their family members to fall off a cliff - with no decision, no proportionality assessment and no right of appeal. 

In many cases the Home Office is actually wrong to say there was a mistake! So people whose status was properly granted are now fighting not to lose it - this is a clear breach of the Withdrawal Agreement."

The problem

Millions of EU citizens made the UK their home before Brexit, and under the EU Settlement Scheme we were told our rights would be protected. For a growing number of people that promise is being broken.

The Home Office has begun telling people that the status it granted them years ago was apparently granted by mistake - that they apparently never qualified in the first place. Nobody is accused of lying. It is simply that a caseworker looking at the same papers today would reach a different conclusion. And when that happens, the Home Office does not take the status away: it just lets the status run out instead.

That seemingly technical difference is the whole problem. If the Home Office decides you were correctly granted status but have since stopped qualifying, it has to write to you, hear your side, weigh up whether taking your status away is proportionate to your circumstances, and give you a decision you can appeal. If it decides you never qualified, you get none of that. In this new practice we are seeing, there is no decision, nobody weighing up your circumstances, and there is nothing to appeal. Your status stays valid until the day it expires - and then it is gone, and you are considered to be in the UK unlawfully.

Now here is the really worrying bit - this policy is being applied to people where there was no mistake when the original status was granted. The person met the requirements, and they were properly granted status under the EU Settlement Scheme. Many years later the Home Office is now saying the grant was by mistake, even in cases where it was not. 

In the House of Lords last November, Baroness Ludford described the Home Office letting someone's status "simply ... expire - to fall off a cliff" as a practice that is "frankly, sneaky". Baroness Ladford made it clear that "when it falls off a cliff, there are no rights and there is no due process." 

The Independent Monitoring Authority - the watchdog set up after Brexit to oversee citizens’ rights - has told the Home Office that this policy may be incompatible with the Withdrawal Agreement, and that the people affected are not given a clear and direct right of appeal.

The government has not accepted the criticism. The practice continues, and it is happening to more people.'

The long chain of dominoes that lead to the Apollo 13 incident started with electrical interference caused by the vacuum ion pump to maintain the vacuum between the walls of the cryogenic oxygen tanks of the service module. NASA had to dismantle the service module to upgrade the electronics which is when the plumbing was damaged and the chain of dominoes continues from there.

But I don't think modern spacecraft use double-walled vacuum chambers with a dedicated high pressure pump to maintain the vacuum between the walls. Why did Apollo have that and modern spacecraft don't?

Is it because by 1960s standards this was a very very long duration mission and they took an extra cautious approach to being absolutely certain the tanks were properly insulated?

The Androids Saga established 4 different timelines including Trunks' Timeline, the Prime Timeline, Cell's Timeline which we only see in flashbacks and what's called The Unseen Timeline.

Chronologically, it starts in Timeline 1 when the Androids kill everyone and Trunks goes back in time to Timeline 2 to warn them to train. Goku survives the heart virus, together they defeat the Androids in Timeline 2, the opportunity to train with Vegeta and Goku lets Trunks get a lot stronger too. Trunks goes home and kills Androids 17 and 18.

Later, Cell emerges and kills Trunks but can't find the Androids to reach his perfect form so he steals the time machine to go back to change things. This makes Timeline 3, our Prime Timeline, where 17 and 18 aren't the only threat and Cell makes things a lot tougher. Ultimately the heroes prevail and Trunks trains a lot to become even stronger, this time when he returns to the future he beats Cell and establishes his future as Timeline 4.

After that we see mostly the Prime Timeline and Trunks' Timeline. But there's also a messed up timeline where everyone is dead and Bulma is the strongest fighter on the planet. The Androids are dead and Cell is gone but what if some remnant of the Freeza force came back, even Kwi or Appule could conquer the planet. How would they handle the Buu Saga? Could Buu even break free without anyone to get energy from?

Or what about the timeline we never see. Where the Androids Saga is just 17 and 18, maybe 19 and 20. But no 16 and no Cell. Probably no Hyperbolic Time Chamber but also no Goku sacrificing himself to stop a kamikaze Cell. That could be an interesting timeline. Would Piccolo and Kami still fuse, it was Cell's presence that inspired it in the prime timeline. Can they beat 17 and 18 without Kamiccolo or the training in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber? It would be a lot of fun to find out.

I thought it might be fun to list the things that we would like to see in an Elementallis 2 if the developers are thinking of making a sequel.

- More nuance to the combat than chop chop chop and pew pew pew. Maybe a charge slash or a spin attack with a cooldown time, special moves you need to unlock.

- Upgradable shield. Maybe a basic shield can deflect solid objects but a magic shield can bounce back fireballs.

- Better fast travel. The obelisks are good but compared it to Hollow Knight where there's the main fast travel (stag) and also a couple of location specific fast travel methods, a train and some elevators. Also shortcuts and backroads between old locations. The teleporter from the end of dungeons to the beginning is very useful. But in endgame it would be great to have a shorter way to get to the Wind Temple or Ice Temple than going through the whole mountain region again.

- Another non-magic way to improve exploration. The ropes are a great idea, it lets you build two-way paths but only after getting up there manually. But there should be more. Maybe a pickaxe that lets you break small rocks blocking your path just to give another way to open up new routes later in the game.

- A qualitative upgrade to magic spells. It's good that the spells can be upgraded but it's all just numbers, longer range, more damage, longer healing, more lightning bolts. Ice and Wind go from 0 damage to dealing damage. But none of them actually change or do something new with the upgrade. Like throw a spread of three fireballs or a circle of ice around you or a homing lightning bolt.

- More than one upgrade per element. Perhaps the previous suggestion should be a secondary upgrade, first is extra damage, second is wide beam or something. Or you have to choose between the two options, do you want damage or do you want the changed outcome. Then maybe endgame you can do a better upgrade that gives you both.

- Split New Game Plus into two modes. One with harder enemies and one where you can keep your gear/abilities, or the option to choose. I'd love to play the game with all elements but basic gear and need to fight through the dungeons to beat the bosses but I've already got all the magic.

- More content / variety in towns. Not necessarily full on side quests in a quest log where Olaf wants you to collect ten Frogs or whatever. But if you use fire magic to warm the old man's house he gives you a letter to his daughter in the next village. Like the stuff in the Wind Village but optional and across the whole map. Just something to do besides kill enemies, buy upgrades, backtrack with the new spell to unlock that heart piece you couldn't reach before.

- A proper villain to hate. For most of Elementallis you're just wandering about and going to temples because it's a game and that's what you do in RPGs. I know to some extent that's thematically relevant but these games work better if there's a big bad guy you need to chase down or someone to rescue / avenge.

- Something else to collect. I don't care what just something worth getting other than another heart piece / mana shard / bag upgrade / bunch of coins. Maybe a Golden Key that is super rare and opens loot chests, another reason to backtrack to old dungeons. Or the 50 lost Dragon Coins and every time you collect five the wize old man will give you a prize. Just something for random NPC to give as a reward beyond coins.

- Another challenge dungeon. The Well was great but that was more of a puzzle or test of skill. How about a dungeon you find early on and all the enemies kick your backside effortlessly. So you need to come back when you're stronger or test your luck if you think you're good enough. Then midgame you give it a try and get halfway through but the enemies get too tough and you can't make it. Something to keep you striving to get stronger.

- Purple Pots. I liked the idea of purple enemies that are a lot stronger and give loads of coins. This idea should be extended to pots so when there's a set of 8 pots maybe one of them is purple and gives a whole bunch of hearts. I pitched this idea in a suggestion of making Hero Mode less frustrating, perhaps having only specific pots in dungeons be purple so there's SOME healing rather than zero healing, just to cut the time spent messing around with nature magic.

Just some ideas.

What would everyone else like to see in Elementallis 2?

Has anyone actually put the electromagnetic interference issues of pacemakers to the test to see what the limits are?

Ideally you wouldn't do this to a real person, you could put a pacemaker in a silicone test container with electrodes to measure the output then see how it responds to being near a microwave oven or resting a smartphone on your chest while lying down etc.

A lot of the advice on avoiding interference is contradictory and says things like "Arc welders are fine as long as they're more than 1 foot away, but don't put the wires of headphones from an MP3 player near your heart" Really? Headphone wires might be enough EM to cause interference? Or is that just being overly cautious because of the context, we're not trying to protect a wireless mouse from receiving interference inputs, this is quite an important device.

My dad often lies down and rests the TV remote on his chest and my parents are worried it might cause an issue. I said it's probably fine for several reasons, it's an IR transmitter not bluetooth or wifi so it's only sending light pulses not radio waves, it only sends anything when you press a button and come on it's only a TV remote that's pretty minor, it can probably resist that much interference.

But has anyone put it to the test?

Obviously they do very different jobs but I think an Induction Hob and a Stud Finder are essentially distant cousins, like a cat to a lion. I'm trying to understand two pieces of electrical magic where the online explanations of how they work from a scientific context are often lost behind instructions on how to use them in a practical context. Also I'm hoping to explain how they work to my mother so I'll need to understand it well enough to form a cogent analogy for how they work.

I've got a background in computer science so I'm much more comfortable thinking about 5V DC than 120/240v AC and some of the nuances go over my head.

This might be a dumb question but do dehydrated fruits and meats burn well? They have a lot of sugars and fats, they're made of hydrocarbons and organic compounds that should burn after the water has been removed. But I've never tried it.

Like could you use a strip of beer jerky as a taper to light candles or make a really odd BBQ using dried apricots instead of charcoal. Obviously it's not going to be a good fuel source but in an abnormal scenario, would it burn?

Wind And Truth revealed two facts about highly invested objects we didn't know previously:

1. Honourblades aren't just Shardblades that grant you special abilities, they are also sentient beings like Nightblood that you can talk to if the circumstances are right,
2. Nightblood isn't just a modified talking Shardblade, it can grant you special abilities just like Honourblades. In fact he can learn from the Honourblades to grant their surges.

In the wider Cosmere we know about another highly invested object that also grants special abiltiies. The Bands Of Mourning. If Nightblood met the Bands Of Mourning, maybe we will learn that the Bands Of Mourning is sentient all along too? And more terrifying, can Nightblood learn to grant the full gamut of Allomancy and Feruchemy abilities just like it learned to grant all the Surges?

When you think about it, Nightblood and the Honourblades are a lot like Medallions, granting invested arts to whoever holds them, except Nightblood is some sort of smart medallion that can learn to grant new powers. Maybe that's limited to just learning from Shardblades or maybe it's a wider skillset and it could learn all sorts of powers.

If someone could tank Nightblood's mana drain debuff they'd have access to all 10 Surges and in theory all 16 Allomantic abilities and all 16 Feruchemical abilities. Which would include Soulcasting their breakfast into Bendalloy or whatever (non-God) metal they need to burn at that moment. If they had the investiture to fuel it they'd be unstoppable.

I was thinking about how in Final Fantasy XV you store magical energy then infuse it into a baseball sized sphere that you throw at the enemy as a grenade. Then over time you get more of these spheres so you can have ten different spells ready to go. But it's always just a ball you throw and it causes an area of effect, the form factor never changes. So I came up with a new plan.

You have a Flag or Marker or Steak you can drive into the ground. You charge it up with magical energy, get to a safe distance then trigger the effect, maybe a fireball or a lightning strike. Later you get another Marker and can prep an Ice Spell and a Fire Spell etc. or if you're smart you can pair them and have TWO Markers for a single Lightning Spell.

Now you place two flags in the ground, get to a safe distance and it summons a powerful bolt of lighting between them, or a wall of fire or an ice barrier etc. the spell format has changed from a point source to a line and it's up to you to choose a good place to put it.

Next you get three Markers. You put them on the battlefield in a triangle and stand back, now that region between the markers is engulfed in flames or frozen solid. You know exactly where it is and can stand on the outside and use ranged weapons while the enemies get hurt.

Four markers maybe you combine them into a block like a bundle of dynamite and make a giant explosion of magical energy.

That's all I've got. I don't really have the rest of the magic system to go with it, just a fragment of an idea I thought was neat.