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Are there any rewards for ranking well, or is it just a flat "50 BP participation prize" across the board?

The new Magic The Gathering set, War of the Spark, is now out on Magic Arena. (Sealed events now playable for 2000 gems, drafts will start in 4 days. I'd like to be playing in the sealed event right now, but I need to run shortly to catch a 7 PM showtime for Avengers Endgame.) It might be the...

The mistake that these parents made was bribing boots on the ground instead of bribing the institution directly. When a Harvard grad donates seven figures to the university endowment and then their kid gets in with sub-par test scores, they're called a "legacy admission." It's only when the...

Dan Wells' I Am Not a Serial Killer series ended last year (he finished the "sequel trilogy"). A short and mildly-spoilery pitch for the series would be that it's about a . A less-brief pitch for the first book (that doesn't really spoil anything beyond the first chapter) is this: John Wayne...

Years of constantly bombarding myself with alerts from messaging services and constantly exposing myself to new content from dawn to dusk of every day poisoned my brain's ability to focus on a single passive task for any reasonable amount of time. Consuming long-form audio content sort of...

Some podcasts I've picked up since the last time I posted here: Very Bad Wizards is, to quote the source, "a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to...

Magic Arena is now public and they did the final collection wipe with the release of GRN (so any cards you collect from this point forward are for keeps). I've been jamming sealed events pretty much non-stop since GRN dropped and I'm not sure if it's just the fact that sealed tends to be a...

Since no one else has brought it up -- Artifact (Valve's trading card game, featuring the lore/characters of Dota and designed by Richard Garfield of MTG and Netrunner fame) was playable last weekend at PAX West, along with four days of streamed coverage for the viewers at home, so all the...

Oh, I agree that RTR was the definition of "playing it safe" from a design standpoint, and GRN seems to be following the same pattern, but honestly I am totally okay with that, I feel like the time between RTR and GRN has been a series of "design experiments" that have all backfired drastically...

Return to Ravnica, boring? INN-RTR standard was a bit of a drag (though technically the Thragtusk menace was from a core set, not RTR) but I have very fond memories of Return to Ravnica, both as a draft format, and as part of RTR-THS standard. RTR-THS standard was when I really got into...

My thoughts on Core 19 after several more weeks of drafting it at FNM (and maybe around 20-30 drafts online): I like it way more than I expected to. I felt that way early on, and that opinion has not changed. My enjoyment mainly for the reason that it is a slower format. I think you can...

My thoughts on Core 19 draft so far: White is my least-drafted color. This is not because I think white is bad (quite the opposite, I think white is actually quite good), but more due to the fact that everyone else seems to draft white quite highly, probably more highly than I do. My two...

Guys, I know this take is coming late, but the limited format for the latest Magic: The Gathering set, Dominaria, is really good. Like, really, really good. Like, the best experience I've ever had playing a card game, as someone who has played both limited and constructed Magic competitively...

For me, the term "role model" is much less about how impressed I am with a person's achievements and much more about how much I'd like to model my life after theirs. You know, that's kind of what's implied by the word "role model." But there are a lot of people who I respect or admire while...

Gah! I would have submitted something to this contest if I had known it was going on, hopefully it wasn't the last since I'd like to participate in the future (and hopefully see wider participation from others as well).

Popping in for a bit of self-promotion for several projects I've been working on: I recently started a web serial titled "Re:Dragonize," which is my own spin on the reincarnation isekai LitRPG concept; I'm currently publishing the story on Royal Road and Sufficient Velocity. The story is...

This is sort of an adjacent topic, but I feel like most of the series most memorable lines are memorable mostly because of repetition, rather than due to any inherent funniness. For example, there's nothing particularly funny about "Yo, champ in making" or "technology is incredible," but...

One thing I'm kind of curious about is which characters are actually the most memorable -- especially among the characters that are essentially nameless (at least in gen 1, before they started giving names to NPC trainers). It seems like there are a lot of characters/quotes that people...

New show to check out: A Very Fatal Murder by the brilliant satirists at The Onion, it's a shockingly hilarious parody of "true crime" style shows like Serial, and one of the most scathing critiques of NPR's reporting I've seen as we follow the journey New York reporter venturing into an...

This is somewhat similar to my own experience. The prevailing sentiment in this thread seems to be "moving out is overrated," but for me, moving out has been a big important step in my personal development. I also had the experience of moving back in with my parents (about a year after I first...