Incremental games are a bit of an "I know it when I see it" grouping, but two typical characteristics are progression systems nested within each other and game loops that start simple but "flower" into a number of more detailed and mutually interacting ones over the course of play.
Universal Paperclips is a nice example, casting you as a newly built AI with the goal of making as many paperclips as you can. You start out able to make paperclips and sell them to humans for funds you can then use to invest in more capabilities. You work on building trust with the humans so they'll let you do more things, and on making more clips faster, and there is a lot of escalation from these humble beginnings.
Some other good ones are Cookie Clicker and, if you're into programming puzzles, Bitburner.
MagosInformaticus
This is definitely important in making the very most engaging base-builders - a pleasing mixture of longer term goals (manufacture this piece that I can eventually put in a future science pack or whatnot) and under-performing pieces of your older infrastructure that you have to scale up or re-plan is just so helpful for getting you into that flow state.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.
Anatole France
This is pretty much the underpinning question of the entire field of evolutionary developmental biology, so naturally any answer is going to be a bit surface level, and I get out of my depth fairly rapidly to be honest. Still, it is quite interesting.
One of the central ideas is that as an embryo grows, its cells go from being all equivalent multipotent stem cells into being different from each other - at first more specialized types of stem cell that can only turn into certain tissues and gradually specializing more and more. Since these cells are differentiated and expressing different genes from one another, they can then start to co-ordinate with each other using chemical markers and gradients of concentration of those markers across space to regulate what types of cells should be growing/dividing, where in the embryo they should be doing it and at what time they should be doing it.
That signaling is in turn controlled by some often complicated networks of regulatory genes - ones which when they are expressed make proteins that selectively attach to other bits of the DNA in that cell and make the genes there more or less likely to be expressed themselves. A lot of evolutionary variation is actually focused on these regulatory systems rather than on the genes which they are switching on and off.
So to my knowledge, something like nose shape likely comes down to some of those regulatory genes controlling where the cells that will eventually be forming the cartilage get placed relative to the skull etc.
Or sometimes fold them over trees of objects!
make reapportion something that happens every 10 years with the census
That's... the current state of affairs? New apportionments of Rep seats to states take effect on the 4th year of each decade and have done so consistently since 1933 and in particular the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. It also does little for the major structural issues with voting, which are much more about voting method and the drawing of voting district lines.
It's the typical phrasing of social pressures to not stand out in Scandinavia, drawing from a book where the author phrases the "rules" somewhat as a legal code. Tall poppy syndrome is an overlapping idea that might be more familiar to English speakers.
I'd say this is a fairly good spot to focus an investigation. Buddhism can sometimes be orientalized and idealized by westerners, and it's not good to let that blind us to when someone like Ashin Wirathu claims it in order to stoke Islamophobia, Imperial Japan used it in nationalist propaganda, or some traditions use it to denigrate women.
Any belief system will likely have some power-hungry bastards try to use it in these kinds of ways, I think.
Personally I do usually see myself as a secular buddhist - I am agnostic on the truth of the longer arcs most schools draw regarding rebirth etc., but I know experiences within a human lifetime include suffering, change, the pain of grasping etc. which the teachings offer some understanding of and tools for dealing with that have helped me. And from the suttas I've read, that appears to be the thing the Sakyamuni Buddha returned to a fair bit - the purpose of practice is to reduce suffering, not metaphysical musings.
Shout out to Retro Video Game Mechanics Explained for his explanation of the entire construction of the cries.
It's genuinely funny to me that one of O'Keefe's major sins in the eyes of his conservative donors was being such a theater kid he staged a musical hagiography of himself.
It's also my favourite place to kill monsters, take their stuff and use it to get better at killing monsters and taking their stuff. I do feel like it has so much build space to explore I find building without some reference to a guide frustrating, but it manages that progression well and the atlas passive trees are a neat way to let you customize what content you want to engage with.