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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • If you only ever use services that let you sign up with arbitrary addresses, then sure, you gain resilience against mail provider shenanigans at the expense of exposing a non-agile identifier — the domain name you bought — to any third party you provide with an address.

    However, in a confused attempt to stamp out single-use mail services, some sites are rejecting mail addresses that don’t originate from one of the big mail providers, like Gmail, iCloud, Outlook. ‘Please provide your real mail address’, they’d say.

    If you aren’t using any such service, you can use your own domain. Be wary of services that bounce messages to your “actual” inbox without rewriting the involved addresses (Cloudflare offers something like this, I don’t get why though), as that can lead to deliverability issues due to DMARC.

    The IAB publishes some Gmail-specific guidance on how to ‘normalize’ plus-addresses to ‘real’ inboxes, so that’s something that doesn’t really do anything for you anymore. Out of the large mail services, iCloud is somewhat notable for offering single-use addresses under the same @icloud.com domain name they use for standard addresses, without having to register extra accounts or other annoying requirements. So websites that want to lock out single-use iCloud addresses would have to block iCloud addresses entirely, which is something they’ll most probably refrain from doing.









  • If, from your perspective, a Zelda game distinguishes itself primarily by how good of a puzzle delivery platform it is, then sure, larger scale puzzles beyond the scope of a single shrine are sort of absent from the “of the Wild” era games. I suspect this was a conscious design decision, because once a player has to hold significant state in their head, any interruption (this is a mobile console after all) will lead to a number of players being stumped and not completing the game. The same idea applies to tasks with multiple solutions, funneling players by only allowing one solution, one path through the game will mostly just lead to gatekeeping and exclusion. You can see that kind of thinking exemplified in the design of the TotK dungeons, each of which are basically half a dozen independent puzzles leading up to some unrelated boss fight.

    Personally, to me puzzles are a fun diversion and not very important at all. What the original Zelda was amazing for was its hardcore exploration. After being more and more limited and railroaded in LttP, then LA, OoT went too far for me. It never clicked for me, even after trying several times, and I left the franchise basically until BotW, with exploration once again being front and center of the Zelda experience.

    I agree that everything after LA and before BotW could have been its own franchise. But BotW is more “Zelda” than basically every other Zelda before it, and I’m happy it has returned the franchise to its original, “proper” form.