"Is the text too readable? Colors too pleasant? Not enough whimsy?"
I found text in the theming section quite funny. I think most custom themes for many different pieces of software manage to provide solutions to at least the first two of those questions.
I think the prompts being "easy" in this way is sort of the point. An applicant can demonstrate their mastery of language and the topics they select, producing an essay that goes far beyond the obvious leading direction (which most of the questions have).
The examiners are, I imagine, quite good at the close reading of essays which this sort of question produces. That ought to address your second point.
Same problem here in NZ - they only ship to AUS, despite lots of people here being keen on their laptops. I know multiple people who have made it a point to time a trip to AUS with buying a Framework so they can pick it up while they're over there.
As an aside, this company's services seem incredibly sketchy - they let you have fake residential or commercial addresses so you can pretend to have a US office or other address
My MTG playgroup kept taking too long to play rounds because of indecision on which cards to play, and we consistently ran out of time part-way through games.
A proven solution to this problem already existed - chess clocks. However, those only work for two-player games, and we play games with the number of players ranging from 2 to 6.
So I made a little web app that's like a chess clock but supports several players rather than just 2. It's designed to be used on a phone and put between the players on the table. Your turn ends when you tap your clock. There's also a pause button for during combat so that you can't unfairly run down another player's time while deciding which creatures to block with. The KO button distributes a defeated player's remaining time amongst the players who are still in the game.
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