ChronosCat

Oh yeah, I remember how sometimes you could see the shrine through the bars, but had to find another way in. Still, the hidden paths weren't very far away from the central building (or if I remember correctly, sometimes they were still at the base of said building, just in a spot not visible from above), so cutting across to the center still saved a lot of time and effort. One of the things I love about BotW and TotK is all the ways there are to play them. I learned where the Master Sword was from the Dragon Tears flashbacks, and very soon afterwards built a high-flying Zonai device to go retrieve it (and succeeded). I had no idea at the time that I was skipping a quest in doing so. A bit later, I stumbled upon the area leading up to the final boss while exploring, and decided to challenge him despite the main quest not having directed me there yet. I had an extra boss to fight first (which I assume is the boss of a dungeon I haven't been to yet), but I still managed to win.

I don't remember any barricades; in fact my in BotW my strategy for the labyrinths was to climb to the top (using climbing gear and stamina-enhancing food/potions), navigate to the center on the top of the maze, look around to see which side of the central building had a door, then drop down there. Of course it wasn't always quite that simple, as some of the labyrinths had a mini-maze inside the central building, or hid the entrance into said building, but walking across the the labyrinth still saved a lot of time. (And then I would render my time-saving pointless by thoroughly exploring the labyrinth to find all the treasure and gear hidden in the maze.)

I'm sure a big part of the problem is Dan's writing process. Based on commentary, social media posts, etc., while he plans out stories in advance he doesn't nail down every detail, and he rarely has the final script worked out more than a couple pages in advance. This means he doesn't have much of a chance to go over what he's already written looking for what can be cut.

The point of the ball is to find a woman who can produce an heir for the Prince. Now with magic Cinderella's birth sex can be worked around, but until Cinderella has confirmed that she would be willing to stay in feminine form for nine months or so (or we learn there is a convenient Uryuom egg they can make use of), it remains to be seen whether Cinderella is the sort of match for Prince Elliot that Adrian is looking for.

My guess is the entirety of False Kings will be before the finals, and some of the cast not having met Hope yet will be an important plot point (one which makes dealing with Voltaire's plans more challenging).

As of this month, GoComics no longer allows people to read strips more than two weeks old without a subscription... and I had been in the middle of reading the archives of a couple comics (and was planning on reading more in the future). To be fair, in the old days you would have had to buy a newspaper or comic collection to read comics (barring borrowing one from someone else or the library), and they aren't charging all that much. But on the other hand, with the way things are going in the US these days I expect my finances to become very tight pretty soon...

I've also heard he declared tariffs on Antarctic islands inhabited only by penguins.

While cover art not matching the story of the book is nothing new, in the case of the Dragonriders series the early editions tended to have pretty accurate art, so it's even more annoying that the art for more recent reprints is less faithful to the books.

Way back when the Will of Magic was giving Grace dreams to warn her about what Pandora had been doing, Grace was given a set of images referencing various magic marks Pandora had given people. I seem to recall one of the implying size/shrinking magic, and that Grace somehow deduced that Rhoda had it - but couldn't prove it. While Dan does usually draw them chronologically, not only are there exceptions, but the "Hope" storyline started well before the Double Date. For that reason I suspect the Double Date hasn't happened yet. (Though I suppose it could have happened during Hope.) It seems to be becoming increasingly common (or at least is in style) for dragons to be depicted with four limbs, the front ones being wings. (One of the many things that bugged me about the Hobbit movie trilogy was that Smaug was given that body design when he really should have had the classic dragon design; Tolkien even drew him with six limbs in his own illustrations! Also I was recently looking to replace one of my Dragonriders of Pern books and was frustrated to see the cover-art for the latest reprint give the dragons and fire-lizards only four limbs when it's made very clear in the text of the books that they have six limbs.) As for your PS, there unfortunately isn't any central place we all hang out besides this forum, and there are only a couple people here I personally have other ways of getting in contact with. At any rate, it's barely alive; last I knew it's still not possible for anyone new to sign up, and it's been well over five years since we've had any contact with anyone higher up than The Old Hack. (I suspect those times the forums were down for days, weeks, or months were because it took that long for anyone with the power to do anything about it to notice anything was wrong.)

I generally think of Brown Dwarfs as planet-like objects, or perhaps a third category of object in between planets and stars. Also, from what I've read about brown dwarfs (admittedly not a ton) most don't have any fusion going on in them (so by star standards would be considered "dead"), and those that do perform fusion do so for only a few million years (10 at most), putting them in with the very shortest lived of stars. Is there an alternate theory suggesting there are brown dwarfs that sustain fusion for billions of years (and if so, do you have any suggestions where I might learn about it)?

We had about a foot of snow yesterday into last night. It was the biggest storm of the season so far, but up until a few years ago it wasn't uncommon for us to get a foot and a half of snow in a single storm (and I remember back when I was a kid there was an occasional storm that dropped a few feet of snow). To make things more "fun", it was cold and windy today (temperatures in the teens F; the wind-chill was predicted to be below zero though it didn't feel quite that bad, perhaps because it was sunny). I had to really bundle up when I did the snow removal.

On the positive side of things, red dwarfs are the longest lived of stars.

I don't have any practical experience, but I've read enough written by people who do to say: It depends on the scenario, but they generally do their affection/cuddling/etc. after the intense stuff. (Also, this only applies to when they're actually doing BDSM things; just because someone is into such things doesn't mean they don't also like to do it vanilla sometimes.)

I used an iBook through most of the 00s, and loved it. The only reason I didn't stick with Apple is the price. Unfortunately since I haven't used one in over a decade I can't really say much about the current Mac experience. I can say that I found most programs for Windows had versions or equivalent programs for Mac (there were even a few Mac-exclusive programs I found back then that I've had a hard time finding replacements for on Windows). My solution for the occasional program that didn't have a Mac version/equivalent was a Windows Virtual Machine; however that ran really slowly. On the down side, my iBook was not entirely free from crashes and freezes (I still remember the "Spinning Beach Ball of Doom"). So don't assume getting a Mac will mean it always runs smoothly.

Trump and his allies have far more bad ideas than they have time and resources to implement. So, many of those ideas won't come to pass... at least not right away. (Of course that's only because they are working on implementing different bad ideas first, so we're still in trouble.)