The hardest part of the Water Temple is that one of the keys is hidden way better than the others, and if you start opening doors in the wrong direction you will run out of keys without it. Combine that with the clunkiness of swapping to/from the Iron Boots and raising/lowering the water level, and the place quickly grew tedious and frustrating.
The 3DS remake added an extra camera sweep and some decor highlighting the hidden passage where that key is found.
I only ever got one ad in RIF, repeated in every spot. I think it was an app for organizing decks in TGCs, but as I don’t play any TGCs, I never bothered to investigate. As with every other ad on the internet, I only interacted with it by accident.
It’s the most accessible Paradox grand strategy game I’ve played.
That still means it’s as dense as pea soup, but its nested tooltip system makes learning the game’s key terms much easier.
At least last time I donated blood in my country (Canada), you could discretely indicate “do not use” by applying a different sticker to the bag. This was done in case someone got peer pressured into donating but didn’t want to reveal something private that would have disqualified them otherwise.
You are welcome.
Pointers do make more sense to me now than two decades ago, mostly owing to me being married to a computer scientist. But I always go back the fact that for the purposes of my first year programming course, pointers were (probably) unnecessary and thus confusing. I have a hard time understanding things if not given an immediate and tangible use case, and pointers didn’t really help me when most of my programs used a bare few functions and some globally defined variables to solve simple physics problems.
EDIT: I’ll also say that pointers alone weren’t what sunk my interested in programming, they’re just an easily identifiable concept that sticks out as “not making sense.” At around the same time we had the lesson on pointers, our programs were also starting to reach a critical mass of complexity, and the amount of mental work I had to do to follow along became more than I was willing to put into it - it wasn’t “fun” anymore. I only did well on my final project because a friend patiently sat in my dorm room for a few hours and talked me through each step of the program, and then fed me enough vocabulary to convince the TA that I knew what I was doing.
I doubt that you’re missing anything about pointers themselves. I may not have done a good job articulating why non-programmers have a hard time understanding them.
I am but one man whose only education in programming was a first year university course in C from almost two decades ago (and thus I am liable to completely botch any explanation of CS concepts and/or may just have faulty memories), but I can offer my own opinion.
Most basic programming concepts I was taught had easily understood use cases and produced observable effects. There were a lot of analogous concepts to algebra, and functions like printf did things that were concrete and could be immediately evaluated visually.
Pointers, on the other hand, felt designed purely of and for programming. Instead of directly defining a variable by some real-world concept I was already familiar with, it was a variable defined by a property of another variable, and it took some thinking to even comprehend what that meant. Even reading the Wikipedia page today I’m not sure if I completely understand.
Pointers also didn’t appear to have an immediate use case. We had been primarily concerned with using the value of a variable to perform basic tasks, but none of those tasks ever required the location of a variable to complete the calculations. We were never offered any functions that used pointers for anything, either before or after, so including them felt like busywork.
It also didn’t help that my professor basically refused to offer any explanation beyond a basic definition. We were just told to arbitrarily include pointers in our work even though they didn’t seem to contribute to anything, and I really resented that fact. We were assured that we would eventually understand if we continued to take programming courses, but that wasn’t much comfort to first year students who just wanted to pass the introductory class they were already in.
And if what you said is true, that later courses are built on the assumption that one understands the function and usefulness of pointers despite the poor explanations, then its no wonder so many people bounce off of computer science at such a low level.
I definitely feel this. I had to take a programing course in university and I was easily able to follow along up until the lesson on pointers, whereupon I completely lost the thread and never recovered.
I’ve known a good number of computer scientists over the years, and the general consensus I got from them is that my story is neither unique nor uncommon.
My version of this story happened in the gymnasium. My class, along with the students from three other classes, were all formed up as a choir and had just wrapped up practicing a song for the school’s Christmas play. One kid let loose, and the whole assembly made a very hasty (and disorderly) retreat, leaving the poor guy standing in a puddle of his own vomit.
I think their situation is somewhat akin to where Bethesda was c2012: they’ve just released the most talked‐about game of the year, a game that was a critical and commercial success despite not being of the general gaming zeitgeist.
I really hope they don’t follow Bethesda’s path.
When I was learning French I was told penser and croire were interchangeable in this context.
When I was growing up, my two sisters and I decided what to watch on TV pretty much by pure, brutal democracy. They formed a bloc against me and I always got outvoted, so it was Little House on the Prairie (and The Waltons) every day after school.
I feel this in my soul. My university house had mould on the bathroom ceiling, and one of my roommates was allergic - they went into violent sneezing fits every time they showered.
Our landlords tried everything to avoid addressing it, up to claiming that, "people couldn't be allergic to mould like that."
They only "fixed" it after one of my other roommates threatened to talk to his father who was a lawyer. Their "fix" was to paste over the ceiling with vinyl plates.
Don’t forget every magical staff , necklace, and ring that casts a spell.
Will I ever use Create Water from the Rain Dancer? Probably not, especially with Shadowheart lugging around more than a dozen bottles of water. But what if I really need it?
Bit of an obscure one, but Fire Emblem Gaiden.
There is a miniscule (0.014%) chance for the very first enemies in the game to drop an extremely powerful item that normally isn’t available until much later. Getting it early is absolutely wild because one of its effects is doubling stat gains when leveling up, which can quickly snowball your characters into godhood.
My personal pet peeve is when they play an ad before giving you the menu options.
First, wait thirty seconds for them to tell me how great their mobile app is. Then listen to the options, pick one, find out I picked the wrong one, and have to go back up one level. Now I have to listen to the ad again before I can hear the options.
I don’t care how proud you are of your app, I wouldn’t be calling you if I could solve my problem with it.
teenage_wasteland_the_who.mp3
Different problem, same vibe.
I believe it’s 8000 in the manga.
“Jesus wants a hug!”
I’m 188cm (6’2") and grew up in a fairly insular community of Dutch people and their descendants. I thought I was average height until I left that bubble went to university.