The Selfish Gene (Dawkins): a very readable explanation of evolution that covers some key principles which even college-level classes tend to miss. Don’t let the author’s later, unsophisticated books about religion scare you away; this book is good.
Black Holes and Time Warps (Thorne): a bit dated now, but still a fun journey through what we know about black holes and how it was discovered. Almost as much a history book as a physics book, written by someone who was personally involved in the process of discovery.
How do adults find a group? I haven’t played in 15 years (since I graduated from college). In theory I’m willing to DM, but I never have before so I’m afraid that I’d be terrible. I’m not sure I’m willing to risk embarrassing myself like that in front of people I don’t know.
A guy I know says he does free-form roleplaying with ChatGPT but that seems kind of sad - I’m not ready to give up on having a human connection.
We don’t have to look too deeply into history to find parallels to this kind of worldview. Simply put, it is the worldview of colonialism: it sees both nature and other people as domains to be conquered and exploited for “growth”.
I’ve always been curious, because I’m not fond of underwear, but I don’t know how people make it work. Wouldn’t you have to wash the trousers every single day? How else would you keep them fresh? Do you use special deodorant for the area or panty liners on the trousers?...
I have no clue how people would do it, since I don’t even understand how other men can wear boxers without accidentally giving their nuts a good squeeze sometimes. Tight briefs keep those out of harm’s way.
Eighty national public health groups, including the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Preventative Medicine, placed a full-page ad in Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post in support of a federal ban on menthol in cigarettes and all...
If we don’t stand with smokers and stop the American Heart Association now, then by the time it comes to force us to eat right and exercise, it’ll be too late.
This is a pet peeve of mine: my character is a professional adventurer in an area known to be dangerous. He’s always checking for traps and I shouldn’t have to say so over and over. I can accept that in certain scenarios, either he looks for traps or he does something else important like chasing the villain, but he’s never going to simply forget all his training and experience just because I forgot to say “I check for traps.”
It’s like jumping out of a car at highway speeds vs. jumping out of a car at highway speeds, tucking, and rolling. Either way, you’ll be seriously hurt or killed, but one way is a little more likely to seriously hurt you and a little less likely to kill you than the other.
You’re all going to be so jealous when you end up in the afterlife without a computer, you see me wasting all of eternity using mine, and you realize that you should have included one in your pyramid along with the rest of your treasure.
Well, those are some fancy burgers… Worth the money if you have it, IMO, but not something I’d buy on a budget. I usually get the Morningstar Farms chipotle black bean burgers, which Costco sells in a big box for a good price. They aren’t trying to be indistinguishable from meat (which isn’t a priority for me anyway) but they’re greasy (in a good way) and delicious.
Plus the Morningstar burgers have the rare advantage of being microwaveable. (I suppose you can technically microwave anything, but they’re good after being microwaved.) I’m not just saying that because I’m lazy - I have a little electric grill I can use, but I don’t need to for them and it’s nice to save a little bit of time that way.
unlocked with a stupid password isn’t even close to hacked
It’s hacking in the same sense that stealing stuff from a house after the owner left the door unlocked is burglary, with that sense being the legal sense.
I find it funny that leftists are suddenly against cancel culture. With that said, I’m against cancel culture even in these circumstances. I find it difficult to sympathize with the people being targeted here, but my principle remains that a private individual should not experience mass harassment or lose his job for expressing views which, however offensive, are not related to that job.
I admit I would have a hard time interacting, even in a professional capacity, with someone I knew held such views. (I’m surprised by that - I thought I was almost unphasable.) I can see why that would play a role in a company’s hiring decisions. I’m not sure how to reconcile that (and the general principle that as a private individual, I don’t have the obligation to interact with someone I don’t like) with my belief that a culture of protecting free speech requires that people’s careers won’t be destroyed for what they might say outside of work.
Leftists have ever been for (so-called) “cancel culture”? Since when?
According to this survey by the Pew Research Center, liberal Democrats are much more likely to consider “cancel culture” to mean “actions taken to hold others accountable” and conservative Republicans are much more likely to consider it to mean “censorship of speech or history”.
So you only associate with your fellow Klan members?
Suddenly I’m much less certain that people getting fired for “racism” were actually being racist. But I’m not lonely - I think you’ll find that your position regarding this issue is actually much less popular among the general public than it is in certain specific spaces (such as Lemmy).
You can’t create calories that way, only transfer them. But if you have a skinny bard and a fat minotaur, it can work and also is definitely someone’s fetish.
This is simply not true. The Ukrainian government (which I trust a little more than I trust Hamas) claims that approximately 25,000 civilians died in the siege of Mariupol alone.
Ultimately D&D is about telling stories. Does the player want to tell a story about having his character lose those powers temporarily? If not, you can just say that the contract is to sow chaos or something else vague and almost impossible for an adventurer to fail at.
(Or maybe have a supernaturally evil entity simply grant the magic for free, no strings attached. Having Satan give you great power with no explanation might seem even more menacing than a conventional agreement to do evil.)
Beyond that, game rules can’t fix bad roleplaying. The right answer to immersion-ruining, unfun in-game behavior is an out-of-game conversation with the player, which might need to end with “…and stay out!”
You’re presupposing that a way to kill him without killing civilians existed, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many civilians just happened to be around him. As long as he’s near civilians, Israel either has to avoid killing him or triggers international outrage, so of course he’s going to stay near civilians.
Almost one in five men in IT explain why fewer females work in the profession by arguing that “women are naturally less well suited to tech roles than men.”...
I’ll bite. This sort of ultra-shallow analysis fails to explain why the sexism of software developers today is apparently harder to overcome than the sexism of medical doctors and lawyers was decades ago. Somehow women managed to break into those fields, so that in the present day almost 40% of doctors and lawyers (and more than half of medical and law students) are women. I don’t see a consensus on what fraction of software developers are women (presumably because there’s no official license to be a software developer) but the numbers appear to range from 10% to 20%. That’s what the fraction of women lawyers was in the late 80’s, and I think it’s going to be hard to claim that today’s software developers are better at excluding women than 80’s lawyers were.
I believe that the claims about sexist treatment are real - even if software developers were much less sexist than average, one woman in a group with nine men would experience more sexism than she would in a less unbalanced environment. I don’t believe that sexism is what keeps most women out of software development; if it could do that, it would have kept them out of medicine and law too.
A lucky dog has never experienced life without these things, so it doesn’t know that it wouldn’t have them in the outside world. It just thinks that outside, there’s unlimited food, water, shelter, love, and running around.
It’s funny to me that some of the most judgmental people are also some of the ones who seem to believe dogs are all just basic automatons. They have personalities, many of them try to get loose simply because they enjoy it and not as some sort of pathology, and not all of them can be reliably trained not to do that.
(I wonder if some of this attitude comes from people who own guarding breeds which tend not to want to run away. My sister’s pitbull wouldn’t voluntarily leave her side, leash or no leash. My terrier mix would forget everything else if he saw a small animal.)
The covid vaccines I have gotten each made me sick for two days. That’s not a lot in the big picture but it is enough to make me unenthusiastic about getting another booster that may well be ineffective. For now I’m sticking with my trusty N95.
I often wonder how the general population will react when they truly realize the impacts of climate change. I’d imagine there could be three reactions:...
First-world countries will be able to afford relocating farmland, building sea walls, and otherwise mitigating the effects of climate change. Once that gets too expensive, they will resort to geoengineering like deliberately releasing large amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight or crushing rock to speed up chemical weathering that traps atmospheric carbon dioxide as limestone. People might wish that they had reduced carbon dioxide output in the past, but reducing carbon dioxide output in the present will remain unappealing. Even the absolute worst-case scenario, a return to the climate of the Cretaceous period when all the world’s ice had melted and large regions of the continents (not just the coasts) were flooded, would not be the end of technological civilization.
People in poorer countries will not be able to afford such mitigation but their suffering will be largely irrelevant to global climate policy.
During this whole time almost no one denying climate change now will admit to making a mistake.
For context, they managed to successfully accomplish an impossible task (defeating a Lich with it’s minions) to save their tribe’s armoury and magical item stash. So their master, an Ancient Red Dragon, will give them an item from his own collection
deleted_by_author
I'm going to sit down and actually learn git this week (midwest.social)
Finding a group (lemmy.world)
"Tie me up and do whatever you want" (lemmy.world)
Alternatively: NO (startrek.website)
A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry (theconversation.com)
We don’t have to look too deeply into history to find parallels to this kind of worldview. Simply put, it is the worldview of colonialism: it sees both nature and other people as domains to be conquered and exploited for “growth”.
People who go commando (don't wear underwear), how do you make it work?
I’ve always been curious, because I’m not fond of underwear, but I don’t know how people make it work. Wouldn’t you have to wash the trousers every single day? How else would you keep them fresh? Do you use special deodorant for the area or panty liners on the trousers?...
Dozens of health organizations pledge ‘full support’ for federal ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars (www.cnn.com)
Eighty national public health groups, including the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Preventative Medicine, placed a full-page ad in Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post in support of a federal ban on menthol in cigarettes and all...
unabashedly stolen meme (ttrpg.network)
Yeah lemme just dodge this real quick (startrek.website)
Do it while you can. (startrek.website)
Maybe this isn't proper shopping but $18.50 for four veggie burgers, buns, and danish seems like a lot (lemmy.world)
Drivers Stunned To See Racial Slur On Digital Sign In North Carolina (jalopnik.com)
NCDOT says the sign was hacked, but the roadside display wasn't even locked.
Daytime launch of three ATACMS missiles (streamable.com)
Mirror: files.catbox.moe/lfnhk9.mp4...
Is... Is that the Pink Displacer Beast theme song? (startrek.website)
The Canary Mission’s doxxing needs to stop (dailycollegian.com)
Speech is being discouraged and student’s futures threatened
Am*rica lost a real one today 😔 RIPS IN PEACE NASA HEROS 🚀🙏 (files.catbox.moe)
I hope I don’t have to explain this one. No, NASA is not fighting Russia. It’s just vatnik cope
Wait wait wait (startrek.website)
Israel managed to kill a comparable number of civilians in just 25 days as have died in the war in Ukraine in 563 days (lemmy.ml)
press.un.org/en/2023/gapal1456.doc.htm...
Totally calling my shillelagh this (startrek.website)
I don't care. Eldritch Repo folks are being sent (startrek.website)
CNN Host Left Stunned As IDF Confirms Israel Hit Refugee Camp With Airstrike (newrepublic.com)
NewRepublic.com
Tech bros' attitude to female colleagues stuck in dark ages (www.theregister.com)
Almost one in five men in IT explain why fewer females work in the profession by arguing that “women are naturally less well suited to tech roles than men.”...
Freedom! (startrek.website)
Vaccine data shows rates for latest COVID-19 booster is 'abysmal', only 7 percent of U.S. adults with shot (www.pbs.org)
This is why you don't murderhobo (startrek.website)
Feel old yet? (startrek.website)
Ancient Egypt (startrek.website)
What is going to happen when people realize the true consequences of climate change?
I often wonder how the general population will react when they truly realize the impacts of climate change. I’d imagine there could be three reactions:...
Free disposal? (startrek.website)
Me to my players tonight, they deserve it (ttrpg.network)
For context, they managed to successfully accomplish an impossible task (defeating a Lich with it’s minions) to save their tribe’s armoury and magical item stash. So their master, an Ancient Red Dragon, will give them an item from his own collection