After 6 hours of being with other teenagers my age, the last thing I wanted was forced social interaction just as I was getting ready to unwind. For the first half of high school, I was at the train station reading a book. The second half, I had the good sense to start using a phone.

These pods are only used on rails with very low ridership. They would switch to a train if ridership increased.

Look at it this way: you can have a train that has a capacity of 100 people, but it only runs once a day due to the low demand, and only 2 people want to ride it at that time of day…Or you can have 10 pods, which do not require as much railway maintenance, and they can carry the 10 people who actually want to use this railway, completely on demand.

Yeah, a train is better if you want to move ten thousand people a day at peak hour. But this is a cheaper way to move ten people at different times across a day. And it’s a cheaper way of inducing the demand that would justify the more efficient kind of expansion.

The pun works equally well in English. “Aw, man!” has the same meaning as Ach mensch.

Does it have a headphone jack

When I first got into D&D I didn’t know what edition I was playing. I knew there were multiple editions, but I couldn’t find the edition number. The box just said Dungeons and Dragons.

It was 4E, and I played multiple other systems before I finally got into 5E.

The red circle is helpful for me because Stack Overflow’s UI is garbage. I always read the post, and then read the thing under the post, which is a bunch of nerds nitpicking over TLAs instead of an actual answer. Every time I open that site I forget that the answers are underneath the neckbeards, because it’s so unintuitive.

Narcisstic Personality Disorder is a lifelong disability with no cure. You can be a nice person with NPD. You can be a wise person with NPD. You can even be a healthy person with NPD, because disorders and illnesses are two different things. Having NPD is like having type 1 diabetes. You can live a normal life, but it’s still going to take constant attention to treat, and some stuff is always going to be just a bit harder for you. The myth that people with NPD are abusers is pseudoscientific bigotry. There are plenty of self aware people with NPD and there are plenty of non-abusers with NPD. People with NPD are most likely to be the victims of abuse compared to the abuser, but the kind of people who prey on the disabled to satisfy their own desire for cruelty don’t want you to believe that.

It sounds like you don’t want capitalism. It sounds like you want market anarchism. Look up mutualism some time.

WOW is proof that human beings are biologically programmed to work together to achieve goals. It’s a shame capitalism suppresses this desire in people and forces them to only let it out in games. Imagine if we had a society where people’s work was properly valued, where they could self organise to accomplish great things.

The “thousands of people” watching your “stream” are bots. They can respond to what’s going on in the video in real time because they’re bots. Actually I technically think this would be more efficient and therefore is probably designed so that it’s only one LLM pretending to be thousands of people, but I’ll call it bots because that’s easier to visualise. The bots know what’s going on in the “stream” because they can understand what the “streamer” is saying, which means the pickup artist can put on a convincing performance to trick the mark. If it was just a recording, it wouldn’t be able to respond to novel situations caused by the mark’s behaviour.

I don’t actually know if this technology even works, but that would be the intent used to sell it to pickup artist bros.

“Maybe if I date someone who’s famous, they’ll have enough money that I won’t have to worry about paying for medical bills or groceries anymore. Gee, maybe we could even buy a house and raise kids.”

We live in a capitalist hellscape where such things are no longer taken for granted, and are now associated with the heights of success.

For those who don’t want to read the article but do want to understand what it’s about:

1. You download an app on your phone that makes it look like you’re streaming to thousands of people
2. You go to a bar and show your phone to a woman “look, I’m famous”
3. The woman fucks you because she thinks you’re famous or something

The creator of this app is a misogynist scumbag who edits interviews with journalists to erase criticism and promote his app.

While mundane fire can’t burn underwater, the sudden appearance of magically produced fire underwater would cause instant vaporisation, filling the affected area with bubbles of scalding hot steam. The sudden increase in water pressure from the vaporisation would have an impact like a small bomb, increasing the amount of disorientation and potential damage. In engineering, this is called cavitation and is significantly damaging to machinery. It’s the reason a mantis shrimp can kill its prey with a punch that doesn’t hit.

TL;DR: you can absolutely kill someone with an underwater fireball. Though you might want to convert half the dice to thunder damage.

Man, it’s just, it dang ol’ complicated, you know, man, like a dang ol’ Rubik’s cube, man. Talkin’ like blue, red, man then you get the one side and then like messed, messed up the other side, man.

Bathes as frequently as she hunts fish.

Bruh she has two toned hair and it looks good. That woman knows how to use hair dye well. I bet she bathes every day. Or every second day, goblins probably have healthier bathing habits than humans. Humans are so obsessed with cleanliness they don’t give their bodies time to apply its own natural measures. You’re not supposed to wash your hair with shampoo every day, you’ll damage it. And no conditioner above the neck. Your hair’s natural oils will come in and you’ll have healthy locks that shine. Constantly stripping your hair’s natural oils away will just make you dependent on shampoo and conditioner.

Wouldn’t it be eat your cake and still have it? Typically you have cake before you eat it, but you don’t have cake after you eat it. So the eating would go first in the sentence, right? Unless the saying is that you want to have your cake after eating it. Either way you gotta use a word that implies the directional flow of time, because technically you do have cake for most of the duration that you’re eating it.

Actual Plays can introduce you to new styles of playing and DMing and improve your skills at the table. For example many people started running planescape campaigns due to Rolling With Difficulty. Before RWD, lots of people had no idea that D&D has spaceships and what is essentially a sci-fi setting. If you’re a GM who wants to get better at running the game, then obviously my first recommendation is Matt Colville’s videos, but try listening to a few different actual plays and learning from the styles of different GMs. Maybe you hate the way Matt Mercer runs the game, but you really like how Brennan Lee Mulligan does it. Maybe you didn’t know it was possible to run the game in a different way than how Matt Mercer does it. If you don’t have three decades of experience playing with diverse tables, then actual plays provide a substitute for that experience.

Technically if magic were real, then the rules of magic would be the rules of physics. Plus any rules of nonmagical physics.

This is invoked hilariously in Harry Potter and the Natural 20, which involves a D&D 3.5e character being portalled to Magical England. His name is Milo, and he works a little differently than the people native to this universe. For example, he takes actions over the course of exact 6 second increments. And he can heal almost any wound with 8 hours of sleep, with his body magically knitting itself back to full health at the moment 8 hours have passed. He’s not capable of learning new skills over time, his level of proficiency stays exactly the same in all tasks into he levels up, at which point improving his abilities requires investing skill points. He finds the idea of learning and healing gradually to be ridiculous and silly. Also, he can move faster going at a diagonal than a cardinal.

GNU Terry Pratchett