VoxAdActa

It’s news that occurred somewhere in the world, I guess. That’s what all the “US news is world news!” people were saying in the meta thread.

And from images of ice cascading into the sea, you genuinely drew the conclusion that Antarctica would be completely ice-free in less than 12 years?

So, nobody actually told you that, you just decided it was true after seeing video of ice falling into the sea. But that decision was firm enough in your mind to cause you to believe that, since there is still some ice in 2023, the doom-sayers of the Discovery channel were wrong and we had nothing to worry about?

Fascinating. I wish I had the ability to make those kinds of amazing leaps of reasoning on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and then believe them hard enough to post snarky shit in public.

What was the name of that program?

Who told you that? Name, quote, date, and source, please.

Oh, but you do! I’m one of those autistic people who can’t fucking stand flaming red notification icons and have to make them go away.

There’s no way to turn off the notification without either clicking “Ignore” or “Reply” (maybe it’s “Accept”). It doesn’t go away just from reading the message. I even tried to disable the element in my browser, which worked, but then it disabled the normal notification icon too.

a fucking chat on fucking reddit are you kidding me what?

RIGHT? AND, AND! It’s a chat where you can’t get rid of the bright flaming red notification until you make the neigh-irreversible decision to either shun a person forever or reply to them.

I know at least one is getting frustrated with combat because he can’t roll to save his life.

Yeah, that’s a feature of 5e combat, not a bug. It’s what makes me despise combat. I miss three times, wait 20 minutes for my turn to come back around, miss three more times, wait 18 minutes, and then combat is over.

Some of us are just cursed. The only workarounds I’ve found so far are:

1. Specialize in making the DM roll saving throws, rather than me rolling attack rolls. A spellcaster who focuses on save-for-half spells feels so much better (because even when the monsters pass the save, the player still get to feel useful).

2. Specialize in party buffs and reaction spells. They don’t have to roll anything to Enlarge or Dragon’s Breath their friends, and they get to feel like they helped. Also, never underestimate how good it can feel to make a Counterspell bot. Even if the bad guys start upcasting their spells and your player always fails the check, they still made them waste a higher-level spell slot than they’d have used otherwise.

3. Halfling Divination Wizard with the Lucky feat. Three re-rolls, two portent dice, and rerolling all 1s once really helps brute force one’s way through being cursed. And it’s not broken when people like us play it, because we end up finally managing to get around the same number of successes that non-cursed people get normally.

Notice that none of these solutions are possible with pure martial classes. Steer your player away from those, maybe even let him make a new character. Martials are totally at the mercy of the dice.

My ultimate solution was to switch systems and play FATE instead. But that’s an extreme reaction to an extreme level of frustration.

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

In August, for the first time in my adult life, I’ll be living in a solid blue city in a reasonably blue state. I’m super excited that I can have a pride bumper sticker finally. I’ve always wanted one, but I’ve never lived anywhere it was even reasonably safe to have one. I’m not a coward; I just can’t afford to replace slashed tires or broken-off side mirrors.

Got to the one where I had to include an emoji. I know I can get them on desktop, but I wasn’t willing to learn how tonight.

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

Which minority communities are the supporters and politicians of the Democrat party calling for the extermination of? I know Republicans and their surrogates have started talking about “hunting Democrats with dogs” and having gay people “line up against the wall”, but I must have missed that rhetoric from the Democrats. Do you have a link or something I could check out?

So, see, here’s the thing. Most countries don’t do birthright citizenship (that is, you’re automatically a citizen if you were born in the country). They trace it by pedigree; some combination of your parents, grandparents, and, possibly, great-grandparents have to have been citizens in order for you to be born a citizen.

THE PROBLEM IN AMERICA, tho, is that we had slavery for 200 years (as America). So when the slaves were freed, guess what? Their parents, grandparents, etc., were never citizens, says (mostly) The South. So sure, they’re free, but they can’t hold office or vote or anything, because they’re not citizens. Ever heard the term “Grandfathered in” or “Grandfather clause”? That comes from the test that Jim Crow states used to determine who could vote (for free, or without jumping through hoops, or, in some cases, at all). If your grandpa could vote, you can vote. Guess whose grandpas couldn’t vote? Yup.

So we had to drop a ban hammer on that in the form of writing birthright citizenship directly into the constitution. Because the people who were crying into their grits that they lost all their slaves just wouldn’t get the fucking hint.

Do we necessarily need birthright citizenship anymore? Absolutely we do. 100%. Because as soon as the GOP decides to trash it, they’ll come up with some Neo-Jim-Crow shit fucking immediately.

It doesn’t help that a bunch of influencers descended on YouTube one day selling classes for how to get rich quick with drop-shipping. A couple thousand gullible dipshits emptied their wallets and dumped a load of cheap crap onto Etsy, with product descriptions that read like they were written by Skaven.

yeah I’m not a climate change denier but neither was Crichton.

That dirty motherfucker wrote a whole-ass book denying climate change.

Can we please keep the Reddit spam in the specific Reddit-centered communities? I’m trying to stop paying attention to Reddit.

That’s 1 string theorist, Brian Greene. It is absurd to call all string theorists liars. Are all psychologists liars because they had a reproducibility crisis?

That’s like saying NDT is “one astrophysicist” or Freud is “one psychologist”. We’re talking about the guy who brought the entire concept to the public, and he’s sure as shit not the only guy who wrote fantastically optimistic treatises about a concept that real physicists didn’t bother with because it was inherently unfalsifiable due to being entirely untestable.

None of them wrote books that said “Yeah, this is a cool thought experiment that will never be able to do anything scientific hypotheses are supposed to be able to do”. Fuck, just make another thread asking “What do y’all think about the Many Worlds hypothesis?” and you’ll get a hundred comments talking about how cool it is as they walk straight out of the real of science and into the realm of crackpot woo-woo speculation. BECAUSE OF THESE PEOPLE.

Yeah, I agree with the video. After a certain point (I’ll be generous and say that point was 2000-2005), it was a lie. A scam. A con. No different from the guys who say the pyramids were alien landing markers and Stonehenge was built by fairies. It was a load of people saying nonsense stuff to sell books and speaking engagements.

Like, ok, at first? Sure, I can go with “it’s not a lie if you actually believe it,” in 1985 or even 1995. But by 2010? Come on. And then in 2020, to be like “Well, I mean, I never specifically said I believed in it, just that, you know, it was a thing…” is so gross. It’s like some shit my ex-wife would have said after a three-day-long running argument about some basic fact of the universe.

I still think we’ll see TES6 around the same time we see Half-Life 3 and the next Game of Thrones book.

It’s 2030. The world has changed. Russia has fallen. Ralph Nader’s reanimated cyborg-corpse is president. Britain is back in the EU. And Lemmy is known everywhere as “The Poop Site”.