The base game comes with Fall of the Trident, The Golden Gift, and The New Atlantis campaigns, which all existed previously but have been remastered in terms of balance. The Freyr expansion additionally comes with "Reginleif's Rally", which I haven't done yet but from its description I think is set in the middle of Fall of the Trident, as an explanation for why the Norse party was sent down to Egypt.

If you're someone who mainly likes to play single player, one specific change you might really like is that you can now build 16 houses, up from the previous limit of 10 (8 manors for Atlanteans, up from 5), and Fortified Town Centres now provide 25 population (up from 20). That, plus myth units getting automatic bonuses when you age up (so Classical Age MUs are still relevant in Mythic Age), and the reusability of god powers (for a Favour cost) mean you can get some big armies doing big dramatic battles, way more than you ever could before.

I'm absolutely loving it. In the time since it's come out a month ago, I've played 42 ranked 1v1 matches and I'm a little over 50% of the way through the first campaign. From a total of 64 hours played.

I'm really taking my time with the campaign, because I know I can only go through it for the first time (well, first time in Retold...) once. So I've set myself the challenge of doing every level on maximum difficulty. At first they were really quite easy, but the difficulty since I got towards the end of the Egyptian portion of the campaign has really ramped up.

And the competitive feels really good. The quality of life improvements with things like hotkeys is so nice, and the new civ bonuses etc. really feel like they fit in so well, unlike some of the changes which Extended Edition brought.

I would definitely highly recommend getting the game. And not just that, I'd recommend getting the Premium Edition. You've already missed the opportunity to get one of the bonuses of the Premium Edition (that being 1 week early access), but it also will give you the first 2 expansions (one of which is Chinese, and should be out before the end of the year) and the brand new Freyr 4th major god for the Norse. The cost of buying those separately is quite a bit more than the cost difference of Premium Edition.

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Puzzle #481
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It’s actually mainly about hating car-dependent infrastructure. The stuff that makes cities impossible to conveniently get around unless you’re in a car, because cycling distances are too far and force you to mix with fast-moving cars due to lack of separated paths. And public transport is expensive and slow, if it exists at all, because cities choose not to invest in it and even if they wanted to it’d be more expensive for them than if cities were planned better.

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Fark. I thought today's was easy and that I had it all solved before I even started. Then error after error...

Oh I see, interesting. I guess they're named after the fact that normally they're at a restaurant?

The Wikipedia article was...interesting. The first paragraph of the "history" section seemed like someone had removed a sentence at random. "After that initial meeting", without ever having described any first meeting, but having set the stage where such a first meeting might take place. If someone has knowledge & sources about that first meeting, that'd be a great opportunity to improve Wikipedia.

I hate both teams. I'll probably be going for Melbourne, but mainly I'm just hoping for a good game.

How does one munch at a library? Isn't that usually frowned upon?

That link 404s.

Edit: did it explain why they had to remove donation links? That seems unfortunate.

We could have used the tilde, which has been used in formal logic & maths for negation in very many contexts for a long time.

It's used instead in C and many C-like languages for the far less useful bitwise negation. Of course, we could have had it work in the same way as bitwise vs logical and & or, by dialling up the symbol. Which would have massively improved its visibility compared to the bang.

But for some reason, no. They chose the bang instead.

It means slightly better than—but just slightly—America's Democrats.

Though fyi in Australia we spell it Labor. It's labour in any other context, but our political party is Labor.

I went on a long run on the 1st September. First day of Spring down here in the southern hemisphere. Basically still winter. And it was 32 °C by the time I finished at 10 am. Over 30. In the morning. Just one day after winter. Wtf.

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Puzzle #479
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Maybe Mossad shouldn't be using civilians as human shields then.

I'm aware that that's a show that existed, but was completely incapable of falling for the trick because I couldn't name a single character in it (and could only name a single actor).

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According to what I read on another site:

If your PayPal is officially a "business" account rather than a "personal" account, this doesn't apply.

Not a scam. Higher prices give other benefits outside of safety. Better venting or aerodynamics. More fashionable. Might be more likely to have a "free replacement if you crash" type of deal.

I am surprised that the article has no mention of MIPS, Wavecel, or Kineticore, because looking at the study itself I found its discussion of rotational vs linear injury to be the most interesting bit, in relation to popular discussions in the cycling community. It points out that

Nine best performing helmets were equipped with the rotation management technology MIPS, but not all helmets equipped with MIPS were among the best performing helmets. Our comparison of three tested helmets which have MIPS and no-MIPS versions showed that MIPS reduced rotational kinematics, but not linear kinematics.

Which is pretty in line with my expectations. They only had one Wavecel helmet to test unfortunately, but had this observation:

Interestingly, the helmet with the Wavecel technology, designed for rotational risk mitigation, produced the lowest linear risk (0.141) in our cohort of 30 helmets, although its overall rank was #13 due to the high rotational risk (0.301)

Which is very counterintuitive. And no Kineticore mention, though they do say

There are several other helmet technologies that are currently available in commercially available helmets. Although these technologies were not within the helmets selected here, they warrant testing according to the protocol used in this study

Yeah the going theory seems to be the death of classic Reddit.

Why are you conflating criticism of a genocidal regime with racism?