so the title’s left unresolved, and next episode there could either be an unnecessary killing, or a killing to prevent an unnecessary killing – with the obvious question in the latter case of “was that a necessary killing?”

until recently the series has been war between humans and demons, and they go out of their way to convince the viewer that the villains (demons) really are inhuman: creatures incapable of feeling empathy toward anyone and therefore not worth your own empathy. and the heroes (at least in the ideal) are those who do exactly what’s necessary, but no more, when it comes to violence. i don’t know that the story can veer too far from that ideal framing of heroism without losing its charm, but they may be setting up to challenge that framing of villainy.

also, seems it’s becoming a pattern that Fern’s opponents are caught off-guard by her speed & stamina. when she fought the demon in episode 10, that was explained as her suppressing her mana, and the demon being careless/overconfident against such a technique. but here in ep 20 everyone is familiar with mana suppression: that Fern’s overwhelming experienced mages with just raw speed/stamina has me suspicious.

i switched all my devices to UTC about a year ago when a surprise DST transition caught me in a pissy mood.

it’s fairly internalized by now. i don’t think it’s that much harder than developing an intuition for both Celcuis and Fahreinheit temperatures. sometimes i’ll glance at the clock while at a friend’s house and it says 09:00 and i do a double-take because “how is it already going-to-bed time?” before i realize it meant 9PM local time, not 09:00 UTC (1AM local).

but it’s the things you don’t think about that make it difficult. set your phone to UTC and 24hr time. first thing you’ll notice is that every weather app blissfully ignores your settings, because they’re showing you weather for a specific place, and assume you care about the time local to that place. second thing you’ll notice is that half your IM apps are going to actually be using AM/PM still. they’ll even mix AM/PM with 24hr within the same app. you read “message received 11:20” and it could mean like 3 different things.

not to mention all the physical stuff: car clocks, oven/microwave clocks, … a lot of these in the US don’t even give an option for 24hr time, and “11:20 PM UTC” is just so cursed.

well that settles it: Cascadia is the land of weebs.

easy to query other regions, e.g. Sweden, England

not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers like this. in a healthy ecosystem we’d leverage more formal channels to help direct the development. if you haven’t already, it might be good to document the regressions and start/join the discussions on github or matrix (link for it can be found on the Lemmy github page). i’ve used these in the past for this project and the devs were reasonably quick to reply and apply fixes.

yes! i landed on reddit twice during the last couple days that way.

• the NixOS sub wasn’t dark, but users were asking about that and some were dropping the lemmy link.
• the selfhosted sub (or one adjacent to it, don’t remember) was dark, and for this query i actually could not find the info i needed written anywhere else. that was a wakeup call.