Honestly now’s probably a good time to buy because after the current drama blows over they are still going to be the ones selling the shovels in the AI gold rush and will still be valuable

Recycling is a thing for metal, glass, and paper, but it’s not really a thing for plastic.

As a US citizen I liked Proton in part because it’s not a US company. I do not trust my government in matters of privacy.

No I don’t remember that, but codesigning doesn’t require all of your data to be shared remotely, just a few encryption keys. Not even enough to know what exactly you are running (although it’s likely something from the App Store in which case they have records of what you bought or downloaded in the App Store of course).

The Zelda games on DS are almost entirely touchscreen controlled

I turned off Siri on my MacBook so I could have the old spotlight search back.

You may not understand just how prevalent bot traffic is. I self-host a small personal website that real people only actually visit once in a blue moon, but I get constant attempts to access the Wordpress admin console (my website isn’t made with Wordpress lol)

The data in this case is local on the device, but I agree it’s still an invasion of privacy

Heat is atoms vibrating and bumping into each other. The way heat typically transfers and dissipates on earth is atoms bump into other atoms, transferring the energy to those. But this requires things to be in physical contact. If there is nothing to touch, heat can’t be dissipated the normal way. This is how thermoses work; there is a vacuum in between layers of metal, heat can’t cross the vacuum which makes it harder for heat to escape.

The glow you see from something “glowing hot” is black body radiation . Basically everything emits light at a wavelength dependent on how hot it is. Things that aren’t yet “glowing hot” are just emitting light that is at a lower wavelength than we can see, like infrared. That’s how some night vision googles work: they can detect the difference in infrared light emitted by something at body temperature and something at room temperature.

Black body radiation carries energy, cooling the thing that emitted it and warming whatever ends up absorbing it. In space, this is the only way to dissipate heat. Satellites often have large heat radiators designed to dissipate heat in this way as efficiently as possible, but it’s still much, much harder than on earth, because you basically have a hot thing you want to cool down but you’ve put it in a vacuum thermos.

Thanks for the recs, I do plan to look into them, but I also want to point out the main reason I stick to using DnD and ttrpgs that are very similar (e.g. pathfinder) as a framework is it lets your group get right into the game instead of spending a lot of time getting used to an unfamiliar system.

Imagine a scenario where the players encounter a group of goons blocking the road. If they want to get in a fight, D&D has a ton of rules. Movement, to-hit and damage, armor, saves. If they want to talk through it, the rules are comparably thread-bare. There's no social HP.

This would be mostly RP’d discussion, punctuated with rolls to represent luck and stats to represent how the character and player might differ.

It would be something like the player asking the goons to move, the goons saying no, the player asking why, the goons giving some answer, the player rolling insight and then deciding a follow up question, probably ending with a persuasion or intimidation check with a DC dependent on how well the rest of the discussion went, with the possibility for other shenanigans to influence as well (like maybe the party mage used minor illusion to fake a badge to pretend to be cops).

I honestly don’t think something like “social HP” would be better than RP and shenanigans, but idk, I would be curious to try.

Side note: because of how D&D's stats work, you end up with a lot of characters are mechanically bad at socializing, or underperform at their prescribed roles.

This is definitely a weakness of DnD. It helps if your party is more into the RP aspects than absolutely optimizing their characters for combat. Another thing I’ve done as DM is to give players a choice, like jumping across a gap could be acrobatics or athletics, so they can use the stats they are good at.

I was curious so I'm looking at a spell list on a dnd wiki. A majority of spells are for combat, followed by spells that also have exploration uses (eg: fly, alarm), and then there's everything else.

I think the issue with combat oriented spells is you have spells at each level that do “vaguely this level’s worth of damage” for every damage type so you get a nice progression curve. Out-of-combat spells are not so easily quantifiable. What is the level 4 version of minor illusion? (There are some answers to that tbh). There also are damaging spells that explicitly have non-combat purposes (one of the main ones I can think of is Phantasmal Force), as well as ones that may not explicitly say so but no DM would deny, like using fire bolt to light something on fire at a distance.

Also I’m not sure what you have against exploration and movement type spells because those are very useful in an intrigue heavy campaign.

Anyway, DnD does have a lot of combat mechanics, but it has plenty of non-combat mechanics too. The combat is more regimented and structured, but I don’t see that as a weakness, just the difference between combat and intrigue.

The stranger says you can trust him with the money

Player: I want to roll insight

(dm hidden roll: deception: 15)

Insight 14 -> “you aren’t sure he’s lying, but you feel very uneasy trusting him”

Insight 5 -> “you really can’t read his expression”

Insight 16 -> “you aren’t totally sure, but you think he’s going to betray you”

Insight 19 -> “yeah this guy is totally going to rip you off”

The game not being interesting is largely a DM problem regardless of the framework you use.