Back with Challenge 5 done. Imgur is saying it’s 18+, idk. A rather underwhelming finale, though I suppose that’s easier for less invested players to break into.

Character builds here.

5-1: Pyro hilichurls, Pyro slimes, Pyro spectres, and a Dendro samachurl. Lots of mooks and you get a +30% ATK buff, so bring characters that scale with ATK. I went with Quickbloom but Hydro/Cryo heavy teams will do well in general.

5-2: Electro slimes plus Cryo slimes, spectres, and whoppers. A potent Swirl buff is added so Pyro + Anemo anything (excluding Traveler, who prioritizes Cryo absorption) crushes this floor. I went with an Air Fryer variant. National with Sucrose should also be fine.

5-3: Treasure hoarders and Fatui? What is this, the VV artifact domain? You get another Swirl buff and every enemy on this floor is weak to Venti, so there isn’t much to discuss.

Teams I used for Challenges 1-4.

1-1: Eremite mooks + elites. Anything with suction will do. I used Thoma Burgeon with Venti flex so I could use stronger teams for other floors, but National variants, Freeze or Raiden Hyper should also do well.

1-2: Hilichurl mooks, just blew them up with Rational.

1-3: Slimes and Geovishaps. Used Freeze because Geovishaps are annoying but frankly they’re weak af.

2-1: Eremite elites and Fatui. The elite enemies on this floor cast hazards, and some of them have earthquake so watch your step. Not much trouble, Freeze was fine for grouping and lockdown.

2-2: Electro hilichurls and mages. Trash mob floor. International mopped them up.

2-3: Geo hilichurls. Bring somebody with a shield to get some extra damage from the buff. Shield mitachurls are annoying so you’ll probably want someone who can pierce like Nahida or Yelan, but anyone else you want will do okay here. Keqing Aggravate was comfy so I just ran that.

3-1: Oops, all Hydro Mimics! Quickbloom blows this whole floor apart so you really only need one EM Electro + Dendro driver. I brought Kuki and Alhaitham for those roles, with Beidou for extra damage and Yaoyao as a panic heal.

3-2: 2 waves of Eremites, followed by Dendro Tiger + Electro Scorpion. Fuck these guys. Freeze locks them down but you need a lot of investment/good rotations with cooperative grouping to kill them in time. National might work if you never ever get hit by the scorpion, because if that shithead even scratches your character they’ll be flying over to Celestia.

3-3: Eremites and Primal Doritos. Uhh bring Quicken, whatever.

4-1: Hilichurl Rogues + hilimooks. Freeze was good for lockdown but this is fairly straightforward for any team.

4-2: Ruin bots, Kequeen delivered again. Bring anybody decent, focus down the doritos first and you’re good.

4-3: Fungi and Cryo whoppers. Venti is wonderful but these weeds are obscenely tanky. International works here, note that Childe’s bow burst can reliably hit inside Venti’s burst and refunds energy, which is good for secure rotations. Be careful when the whoppers spawn since Reverse Melt + obscenely boosted attack can get one of your teammates killed easily.

The difficulty’s mostly frontloaded on the first part because you need enough firepower to take out 3-4 waves of elite mobs. Challenge #3 mixes it up with the Constipated Beasts on the second part causing a time crunch (and also setting up stunlocks that will TPK if you don’t time out first). The ranged basic mobs are the second most annoying enemy after the beasts, because they will attempt to moonwalk as far away from you as possible and waste more time. Stick to ranged enemies like glue and bait Ruin doritos’ teleports towards their friends, because you can hit them together with approaching melee enemies and remove distractions.

In general, you need as much consistent AoE as you can get. Most quickswap teams that include Sucrose/Kazuha should stomp each first part. For F2P, National is the bread and butter. An invested Ayaka + Shenhe Freeze can do work on annoying floors you’d prefer to skip thinking on. Nilou Bloom and Thoma Burgeon are workable depending on the matchup. Beidou enjoys floors with lots of enemies, and her counter is potentially useful against the beasts. Keqing/Cyno/Alhaitham Quicken have passable AoE + ST focus which I’ve enjoyed using on a few of the third parts.

Meaning one could hypothetically spray a tomato with dioxins up to 5% of its body weight and it would still qualify as organic.

And slip some cash over to the FDA when one of their interns asks too many questions.

Okbuddygenshin is leaking again.

Villifying plants is on the nonsensical agenda as well (i.e. making mountains out of molehills over soy/phytoestrogens). But Tofu and other soybean foods have been staples across a huge chunk of East Asia for centuries and nobody’s been worse off for it (besides unlucky allergies). Funny enough, East Asia also has a few niche recipes for cooking bugs, and since my parents are from South Korea I occasionally ate steamed silkworm pupae as a kid (they sell them here in cans as 번데기/beondegi). The weird earthy taste and general phobia of creepy crawlies is the reason it’s not too popular nowadays. I wasn’t a huge fan myself but I do see bug meat as a potential resource.

So it’s just the usual fearmongering over made-up problems. Plant protein is good, bug protein has existed as something I wouldn’t mind if it tastes alright, and the meat industry’s going to lobby for more subsidies and thrive regardless of what happens.

Russian army: Bombs and kidnaps children

Government: Special military exercise, totally justified.

Trans people: Exist

Government: How horrible! Won’t anyone think of the children?

And then they just organize on Facebook or WhatsApp instead. Monopoly 101 failed.

Now you’ve convinced me! I really ought to have been the bigger man when my mom called me in the middle of the night to tell me that Trump’s a martyr like Jesus and that the Democrats are performing demonic baby-eating rituals inside underground tunnels, and just let her keep screaming about me being a brainwashed woke communist because we just have little differences and we all need to get along.

Haha, nope. I want scorched earth on every one of those conspiracy nut fuckers holding right-wing parties around the balls, since they went after my family with their brainrot. I don’t give a shit that a handful of people exist who don’t explicitly support Jewish Space Laser Marge or Venmo Bribes Clarence, because y’all still vote lock step to keep these crazy loons around because Roe v. Wade is worth killing for $300 extra on next year’s tax return.

Of course not, helping priests climb to heaven is the altar boy’s job.

An asshole who primarily courts right-wingers an inch to the left of Neo-Nazis by making them feel logical and superior for denying basic facts about reality, while the mask-off Neo-Nazis repeatedly send death threats to his family because they’re culturally Jewish.

I don’t pity him. He dug his hole by choice, and it is a very comfy hole in upper-class Los Angeles where he won’t experience the consequences of societal collapse that he encourages poorer right-wingers to spread around. Tough for his kids, I’d imagine, since they’ll be growing up in a world with all those oven-fanatic redcaps crawling out of the woodwork that their dad turned a blind eye to for clout.

To know better about religion*

Patching it up some more. Stay informed and spread the news of religion’s intrinsic failings, so the next generation doesn’t repeat the mistakes of today.

The one on the upper right-hand corner of the recommended watch sidebar always manages to sneak past my multiple adblockers. I’m tired of having my eyes seared by massive anime tiddies (Queen’s Blade ads) just because I sometimes watch anime and the monkeys working in the algorithm machine greenlit softcore pornography to be plastered all over their platform. But I sure as shit ain’t paying them $170 a year to get those idiots to stop.

You mean rejecting both popular and representative democracy by attempting to kidnap and execute Congress?

This isn’t some event in 1850 that you can pretend was about state’s rights or some bullshit like that, since you dumbasses recorded the event and voiced the motives yourselves. There wasn’t any goal of making America a better place to live, just pure spite to punish everyone who said no to an openly shitty demagogue. Fuckin’ pathetic.

Excuse me, but genocidal baby oven enjoyers belong in compost, not landfill.

“If you punch a Nazi, the number of Nazis in the world remains the same!”

“Punch two.”

They rennovated it too. How much could a starter home cost, $1.5 million lump sum?

I’d be lucky to dream about having the funds to get a mortgage 1 home 15 years from now. All I want is a place I can live in and call my own for 40-odd years until I kick the bucket, then my future nephews and nieces can have a catfight over how to carve it up for coin assuming global warming hasn’t decisively fucked everyone over by then.

Of course I wouldn’t be able to comprehend the mindset of affluenza-huffers who can’t live without cutting out the biggest slice of pie even if it means breaking the oven and starving out everyone else.

Limited subscriptions can go to hell as well. Sure, I could pay $50/yr for a Switch Online + Expansion Pack (not featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series) so I can temporarily play GBA games and lose access to them forever when the service is eventually discontinued… or I could just emulate them on my smartphone/jailbroken consoles for free.

Hand sanitizer is ~120 proof alcohol. (Not a recommendation to drink it, since it’s usually spiked with bad-tasting additives to keep people from doing just that. Some commercial hand sanitizers swap out ethanol for isopropyl alcohol, i.e. rubbing alcohol, which is more toxic when ingested.)

I’m a chemist, we’re basically glued to our jeans regardless of gender. Yes, summer is hell for us.