It’s always good to support the original publisher and encourage local libraries by reading a hard copy, so I could never endorse piracy, even for people who can’t get their hands on a physical copy. Even though it’s true that both libgen and annas-archive have ebook copies of this particular book (and can easily be found via google), I could never in good conscience direct anyone to such a site.

The linked article mentions that one of the predator types merged into the dragon is raptors (as in birds of prey, not velociraptors)

part of the appeal is how bad I am at both the gameplay and the lore

Yeah, I suspect it’s a jerboa problem. I’ve posted about it on the jerboa community now.

Edit: Confirmed. Jerboa’s source code uses a plugin to force all links to be opened as https.

under what circumstances have you peeled a lemon

Super late, but I figured it out because it happened again in a more recent comment. Lemmy seems to automatically change the links to https instead of http, even when http was explicitly included in the url. Somehow, xkcdsw is a completely different site on https than on http. If you copy the link into an external browser and remove the s, the link works as intended. I can only assume this is a behavior of the lemmy app(s), which is why it didn’t affect some users. Were you using jerboa?

Relevant xkcdsw (the first link in the comment): https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2wx9ws/today_i_discovered_xkcdsw/covb60y/

Now, why the hell would I link to a reddit comment instead of directly to the comic? Because for some reason, xkcdsw links on lemmy turn into links to a dodgy crypto site: http://xkcdsw.com/687

No idea why this happens - I remember this happening a few months back and I assumed that somehow xkcdsw had gotten hacked in between me fetching the link and other people replying, but just now I discovered that it works fine as long as you’re not following the link from my lemmy comment. Also, judging by replies the last time it happened, the direct link from lemmy does still work for some people. I assumed those people on the previous thread got in before the site got hacked, but now I wonder if it’s instance-specific. Is my instance just redirecting certain links to a crypto site for some reason? Or my app (jerboa)?

For those not seeing the redirect, the address bar claims it’s still xkcdsw, but the content appears to be from dogecoinaverage

The actual xkcdsw is just a shitpost, barely worth the two words and one link in my original comment, but the redirect is weird.

Edit: the fact that the link in the reddit comment works even via jerboa’s internal browser makes me think it’s the instance.

Edit 2: previous occurrence of this: https://lemmy.ml/comment/5379893 - it doesn’t seem to be instance-based, as someone on Feddit.de saw the redirect, but someone else on my instance did not

Edit 3: mystery solved(ish) - lemmy is silently changing the http to https (for some reason), which results in a different site (for some reason). I’ve alerted the xkcdsw owner to the problem via mastodon.

Edit 4: this is gonna look really confusing now that two9a has fixed the xkcdsw https situation. Like “what is this comment even talking about?” Trust me, it made sense up until about 10 minutes ago. Oh, also I confirmed that jerboa is the what changes all http links to https.

deleted by creator

Weird - I’m seeing that now too. But I wasn’t at the time that I copy and pasted the links, and you can see from the other replies around 8 hours ago that other people were also seeing a site hosting edited versions of xkcd comics. I guess it has suddenly changed, after years of being up, in the few hours after I posted it? I have no idea what happened there.

I could have sworn there was an xkcdsw exactly like that, but there doesn’t seem to be. Some of them are a bit happier though

E.g. http://xkcdsw.com/3968 , http://xkcdsw.com/2485 , and others if you click “browse by source” at the bottom and search for “spirit”

Talking to people and examining writing will usually drop references to a couple of other places to explore, or to unanswered questions that are worth looking into. Even if they seem minor, these almost inevitably lead to putting together pieces of the larger story, regardless of which pieces you start with. I don’t specifically remember what whistling guy talks about, but it sounds like that’s the only potential lead you’ve found so far. It’s certainly possible to make progress without ever talking to him, via all kinds of things that can be independently stumbled on, but if you haven’t found anything else I bet revisiting his dialogue will give you an idea on where to search next.

(Okay, I checked the wiki and can confirm that, while Esker is not the richest source of new options in the game, his dialogue does include instructions that lead to new threads for you to pull on)

Where have you visited so far? Usually I’d think you’ve encountered something other than the ship within a few hours, and most of the things you can encounter should give you ideas as to what else to explore. Have you literally only floated around in the ship, or is that a way of saying that the things you’ve found aren’t interesting to you?

It’s a fictional diary entry, from The Prestige. The next entry is 2 months later, when he’s fallen in love with a different woman.