I tried punching in 243 and it gave me an equation that resolves to 235.
Tried it a few other times and it seems to sometimes like giving something that results in 3^5 (which would be 243 on its own) followed by subtracting a bit from it, which ends up making it the wrong answer. In the link above, it basically goes (3^5) - (8 - (1 - 1)), so if you only keep the first brackets it would be correct.
I believe the point is that the speaker typically doesn’t vote unless needed to break a tie. So if the NDP select one of their own as the speaker, they would have 46 votes, to the 44 Con and 2 Green votes, an exact tie. Of course, they would still have the speaker as tiebreaker, so it doesn’t really make a huge difference, but it’s seen as a bit more tenuous than actually having the 47 votes in the typical fashion, which they could accomplish if a conservative or green MLA takes the role of speaker.
To be honest, I’m not 100% sure on why the tiebreaker is seen as worse exactly. I understand there’s an expectation for the speaker to act neutrally, so maybe it’s just an unpleasant look if the speaker is regularly voting in favour of the NDP to break ties.
Regardless, it wouldn’t technically be a minority government as I understand it. It’s not as though the NDP couldn’t rely on their own speaker in matters of confidence. It just would give Rustad something else to rant about.
It seems feasible if you don’t imagine they’re all big novels. A lot of nonfiction you might borrow several of in one visit and not read front to back. Think recipe books, handicrafts, anything along those lines. Could also be smaller things like children’s books, poetry collections, etc., or some of the books were unusually expensive.
We already got to those ones.
This made me curious so I looked a bit into it. Seems that milquetoast as an insult originates from an old comic character of the same name, and it’s at least feasible (and perhaps likely) that said character was named after milk toast.
I think there’s a couple reasons they do it this way.
One is that the pre-order bonus is still available despite the game effectively being out. I imagine they spare themselves some unwanted difficulty or dissatisfied responses from people who otherwise would have missed it.
The other is this very thread. Server issues are common on an expansion pack release. This gives them a convenient excuse to put in the apology announcement. It’s a small thing but who knows, maybe it has some impact.
It’s definitely a silly twisting of words (and their double key system for the pre-order and full purchase only sillier).
I spent a few months in Germany years ago, and “Americans” (Amerikaner) tended to be used to refer to people from the Americas (either NA specifically or NA and SA collectively) in my experience. If you wanted to say someone was from the US, you’d say something more like “aus den USA.”
The Founders Trilogy (book 1: Foundryside) by Robert Jackson Bennett uses a system of magic called Scriving wherein objects have written upon them instructions that sort of convince the objects that the laws of physics work in different ways. Over long ages engineers found ways to build engines for scriving that had commonly used instructions and essentially allowed more advanced technologies by creating “programming languages” of a sort, if you will, that work in proximity to the engines. So you get this very advanced society with technology built over this magic system, and a main character whose MacGuffin allows for messing with others’ scriving as your setting.
I quite enjoyed the trilogy, and they seem to fit the kind of vibe you’re looking for. Over the course of the books they dive a lot into both the way the magic functions and the history behind how it came to be as it is.
I’m personally skipping because I already have what I’d want from this one, but I will say P4G is my favorite of the Persona series, and one of the few long JRPGs I’ve actually finished in the last several years. (P5R is also great, but 4’s more grounded story and characters, relatively speaking, give it the edge for me.)
And Cassette Beasts is a truly great Pokemon-like that has so much going for it. If you feel out of love with the Pokemon franchise, or if you still enjoy it but would want more, this is a really fun game with its own take on a lot of the mechanics. Lots of depth combined with customizable difficulty.