Noah is great. I Finished a Video Game also hits this sweet spot very well.

Fun fact, snakes’ adaptations to their feeding style are actually not about the way the jaw hinges. Instead, their lower jaw is two separately moving bones held together with stretchy ligament tissue so that each side of the mouth can be “walked along” the prey item separately.
So the chef could eat the burger… but would follow along its longest dimension to do it, laying it down sideways.

Not one I’ve watched yet, but there definitely is some magic to listening to someone talking about something they really care about, if you connect with them as a communicator.
Like, I don’t have any relationship to Disney’s Buzzy animatronic myself, but I’ve rewatched Jenny Nicholson ranting about it more than once because it’s fun. Captain Disillusion talking about the effects work that inspired him also feels kinda similar.

Really appreciate her work - the educational stuff is good at putting things into a context and giving laypeople some mental coathooks to hang things off of, and I like how she emphasizes the video explainer format is a provider of jumping off points more than a source of real understanding.
Her discussion of media and news is maybe not as relevant here but still pretty on point in my experience.

It’s the parts of a program’s concepts, rules and behaviours that are specific to the program’s task. For instance

• Items, a shopping cart and the conversion of such a cart into an order at checkout in an e-commerce application.
• Clips of video and audio, static images etc. and the compiling of these into a single output video for a video editor.
• Vertices, triangles, meshes, animation rigs etc. for a 3d editing program.
• Accounting standards and tax laws for an accounting system.

When developing software you deal both with these kinds of specifics and generically reusable concepts that are more purely computational science, so a term to distinguish them is handy.

Some computing problems are “easy”* to solve. We call these P.
Some problems let us easily check a proposed solution if we’re given one. We call these NP.
All problems in P are also in NP, since checking a solution proposal works is never harder than solving the problem starting from nothing.
We suspect but can’t prove that some problems in NP are not in P.

It turns out that it’s possible to translate any problem in NP into the boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) using an easy algorithm, so this problem effectively is an upper bound on how hard it could be to solve problems in NP - we could always translate them into SAT and solve that instead if that sequence is easier.
We call SAT, and any problem that it can be translated into easily in the same way, the problem class NP-hard.
NP-complete is just those NP-hard problems which are also in NP, which is many but not all of them.

*: require asymptotically polynomial running time

Bugsnax also does this a bit with creatures like the Fryder.

The use of “alumni” in the singular. A person is an alumnus or an alumna, the alumni are always a group. Seems to be a very American usage, and I don’t know why it feels aggravating where other Americanisms like positive anymore don’t.

Or sometimes fold them over trees of objects!

Nobody ever considers Eve’s side.

As a package, I feel they slot in well next to Jagged Earth.

• Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine - like I said my favourite among the Incarnas so far. The value you get from catching Invaders alone means you see the island kinda differently than most spirits. Control powers become really handy for setting yourself up, and powers with 1 damage can let you abduct entire Cities if used right. At the same time, you’re always needing to think about Growth letting pieces escape and planning where you could put them. Your teamwork unique power Reach From the Infinite Darkness is both a really neat tool there and can be a great help to spirits like Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds who have bigger mobility and range limitations.
• Dances Up Earthquakes - Definitely a spirit I feel I need more experience with to really get. The core concept of needing to play some cards now to set up quake tokens and get Defend, and some to the future to get your Major power effects and big innate damage out works out interestingly, but seeing the good combos needs more experience than I’ve picked up I think.
• Ember-Eyed Behemoth - I’ve not gotten many plays of this one, but it seems like a solid straightforward offense spirit with opportunities for mastery around its particular timing and mobility constraints.
• Hearth-Vigil - A really solid defensive spirit, who with some planning can marshal a lot of counterattack damage and/or destroy Invaders added by a Build as they go up. I find I really appreciate that Fortify Heart and Hearth gives Dahan in your lands immunity to destruction/damage by event, since those few times I’ve taken a lot of losses to disease as Thunderspeaker it’s felt pretty bad.
• Relentless Gaze of the Sun - Another I’ve not gotten many plays of. The Repeat mechanic seems solid, and particularly nice to combo with control-focused teammates, a bit like Lure of the Deep Wilderness.
• Towering Roots of the Jungle - I was kinda looking forward to this one but haven’t particularly felt the spark of connection yet. Rushing to an empowered Incarna is particularly easy for it, but empowering also only suppresses Builds in one land. If you can draft a blight-removal or moving power it’s quite handy for improving the defensive uses of Vitality. If your heartland does Ravage into a Blight, it creates a kinda neat sacrifice combo where when the Invaders deal damage, Heart-Tree Guards the Land means Dahan are immune to damage, then you can choose the Incarna as the presence lost to Blight meaning the Dahan get to damage the Invaders back after all.
• Wandering Voice Keens Delirium - A pretty interesting approach to control play. The amount of Strife you spit out really is extreme and comes with pushes by default thanks to Senseless Roaming. The Incarna limiting where Dahan get to participate in Ravage means you can’t really play too defensively with Strife, but have to look for some damage powers too. Mind-Shattering Song is a solid innate to help with that and can be targeted from the incarna or normal sacred sites. Turmoil’s Touch is a teamwork unique that I find particularly interesting - 0 cost, targeted spirits can pay 1 energy or discard a card to Take the top minor power and put it into their discard pile, and Wandering Voice can do likewise. Obviously it’s less directly helpful than something like Gift of Power which offers a choice of cards for relevancy, but even if you only use them once the improvements to your Reclaim cycles can really help the more card-starved spirits. If the card Taken is really bad, you have a natural pick for Forgetting when you gain a Major.
• Wounded Waters Bleeding - Definitely conceptually interesting, with a lot of choices to make through each game. Similar to Starlight Seeks its Form it feels like you want to Forget a solid portion of your uniques in the early game. You can choose to forgo board presence instead but that can be pretty limiting for your range and ability to affect the island. Once you heal though, destroyed presence is less of an issue than for most spirits. So far I’ve tended towards Roiling Waters builds and Beasts-focused power drafts personally. The ability to gather Blight from turn 2 has neat applications both to prevent cascades and for power targeting.

Of the many new Aspects, the ones that stick out in my memory are Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves’ ones. Unconstrained is a neat variant that makes Sharp Fangs less sensitive to those same Blight targeting issues, but also makes your creation of Beasts a bit more constrained. I’ve not yet played any games with Encircle but it looks to tap into some of the feel of a good Shroud of Silent Mist offensive - smothering the Invaders by putting Beasts in neighbouring lands rather than concentrating them in the land you’re targeting.

It’s an unfortunate situation, for sure. I’m glad to have found a digital option to play around with the new spirits and aspects while the red tape is resolved on my physical copy. Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine is so far my favourite of the Incarna spirits, but there’s still tons of things left to try. My limited plays of Dances Up Earthquakes indicate it’s definitely as brain-burning as the preview made it look.

I think it’s the transition from a broad search pattern to a focused get-ahead-of-Dracula formation that’s the trickiest step to learn for me on the Hunter side. It always feels like there’s just a bit too many options open for me to surge forward and box him in.