Oldmandan

Oldmandan, 6 months ago

The human propensity for ignorance should never be underestimated; I can also see the possibility (to use an example product from the antihate article) someone somehow stumbled into buying shotglasses with norse runes on them because they thought they were cool, not realizing the broader context of the site. Is that likely? No, but again, people are really good at doing dumb shit. :P

Oldmandan, 6 months ago

TBH my guy, while OP’s comment was a non-sequitur and there is a lot of value to posting articles like this and making sure people are aware and stay vigilant of antisemitism and other issues within our own borders, your post history is kinda sus. Like, 90% reasonable and then 10% weirdly pro Russia/China.

Oldmandan, 7 months ago

Eh… I’d need to look into this specific one more, and it’s a bit weirder than ‘normal’ given this is a drug for a common physiological symptom, but there was a lot of bad medical science done from roughly WWI to the turn of the millennium that nonetheless still underpins some of our commonly available medicines. Clinical psych has it especially bad, but the replication crisis is a problem everywhere.

Oldmandan, 7 months ago

It feels like every time I go on the internet, I get reminded I need to be very explicit about what I’m saying. (Or develop a thicker skin. :P) Apologies if I sounded dismissive, I was just trying to say that I don’t know exactly how it was approved as I haven’t done the research to know, but that wasn’t surprised it had been, given the overarching issue with medical studies from the last century failing to be replicated. I’m not trying to imply that I’ll somehow dig up the absolute truth of the situation that was previously unknown, I just know I’m making a statement with incomplete information.

Oldmandan, 7 months ago

Yeah, post-shaving alopecia is a thing, especially in double coated breeds. (Which is part of the reason you’re supposed to avoid shaving them.)

Oldmandan, 7 months ago

If you want Canadian but about nerdy things instead of politics, LoadingReadyRun (Victoria BC) has a few, some actual-play tabletop stuff, some Magic the Gathering, some sketch and improv comedy (although they haven’t made a new one of those in a while, sadly), etc.

Oldmandan, 7 months ago

While not representing a majority of Canadians, there are people living in regions that get regularly cold enough for heat pumps to be inadequate. Which means running a standard electric furnace (expensive and inefficient) during the coldest months of the year. Which… is not ideal, especially for lower-income rural persons. (IE, most people living in these regions of Canada.)

The rebate is great, but there are persons for whom it is insufficient.

Do I think that’s a good reason to remove the carbon tax from heating fuels? No, not really. (Assuming I understand how the tax works, it really isn’t the burden people expect it to be. (You can debate about inefficiencies, but as far as manipulating economics to incentivize transfer away from fossil fuels without harming the general public, it’s reasonably sound.)) But people do have legitimate concerns that shouldn’t be trivially dismissed.

Oldmandan, 7 months ago

That is a true statistic, yes. Without a ton of relevance to the discussion at hand unfortunately. Most of Scandinavia is coastal, and while cold compared to the rest of Europe, has quite mild winters compared to the northern Canadian interior. Additionally, popular in this context is about a 50% adoption rate by household, without much information (that I can find, at least) on distrobution; I suspect most of those are in southern and costal areas, and the (less populated) northern interior primarily relies on other heating methods.

Oldmandan, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I think perhaps you misread what I said (or I communicated poorly). I’m speaking about the funding incentive to purchase a heat pump. The carbon tax rebates, as you say, are designed to break even by or better for the majority of the population; I’ve got no issues with that. I was responding to the implication that a transition to electricity was trivial because households could purchase a heat pump for little to no cost. There are households for which the energy costs of resistive heating+heat pump are likely higher than their current heating costs, making this not the case. (Unless there are further rebates I don’t know about for people who have a heat pump, beyond covering initial costs?)

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

The VA for Laezel (Devora Wilde) has actually seen this meme and read it in-character. :P You can find it on YouTube.

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

In terms of extremely minor one-off characters, He Who Was was very cool. I was sad when he didn’t show up in act three. Just a random Shadar-Kai warlock of the Raven Queen chilling in the Shadow Cursed lands, delivering warped justice to the dead, and collecting their tormented memories and emotions to sustain his queen.

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

I could see that. She’s got some thematic ties to Karsus, shares a home plane with Shar, and has a portfolio revolving around lost knowledge (ie, a potentially attractive avenue for recoving an amnesiac’s memories) giving options for a subplot around her to resonate with a couple different origin characters. (And could potentially serve as a more “benign” (for certain definitions of the word) source of power to Wyll, if he wanted to retain his powers but escape his contract with Mizora.)

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

spoilerYou monster.

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

Yeah, as the other commenter mentioned, wander around north of the Shadowed Battlefield waypoint, make sure to explore all the nooks and crannies at the edges of the map, you’ll find his campsite eventually.

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

Clearly, I need to find a Dane to get in a fight with. I could use a drink. :P

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

Yup. Until our technology and biological knowledge reaches the point where we can stop using (metaphorical) chainsaws and start using scalpels, everything is a tradeoff that’s going to vary greatly by individual. Personally, the only side effect I’ve noticed from my meds (diagnosed as a child, didn’t take medications for it until more recently), is appetite supression, and aside from a couple blood sugar crashes before realizing working out on an empty stomach was a dumb idea, I’ve seen no ill effects. On the other hand, a good friend of mine on the same medication experienced heightened anxiety and tachycardia. /shurg

There’s perhaps an argument to be made that the current state of healthcare leaves clinicians unable to provide the needed followup care and medication adjustment, but then the issue isn’t the use of medication, so much as the burden on physicians. /shurg

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

This is also a valid question, the systemic pressure to “be productive” puts a lot of weight on the side of taking meds despite side effects. Anecdotally though, some ADHD patients do find meds useful for helping them maintain interpersonal relationships and the like, not just focus on work.

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

Yes. Thank you. There have been plural studies (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/, and many more, these are literally just the first google results), showing that perscription stimulants have a negligible, or even negative, effect on productivity in neurotypical populations. Their reputation as a “smart drug” has been greatly exaggerated.

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

Never mind the nudity toggle, we need a “hairless cats” toggle at the beginning of the game too I guess, if we want everyone to be happy. :P

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

Worth noting, if you’re dual-wielding, you can sneak attack with a bonus action. (Go into your reactions and make sure Sneak Attack is set to always.)

AT is mostly about adding control and utility abilities to the Rogue; options to take enemies out of the fight, and aid/supplement your sneaking. Sleep, Colour Spray, Hold Person, Invisibility, etc, are your mainstays. Your unrestricted spells (ie, ones that don’t have to be enchantment or Illusion) should probably be geared towards defence and mobility. (Shield, Misty Step, etc.)

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

Eh, common knowledge if (and only if) you are someone chronically online and in the habit of trying to understand current events. :P

That said, rage bait is a bit harsh; while I’m not sure there’s much to be done (the calls to deport geriatrics into an active warzone are… a little silly, even if we can prove these people to be war criminals), there are questions worth asking wrt to the circumstances and legitimacy of the rulings and descisions around both their post war status and entrance to Canada. Some acknowledgement and reckoning with some of the questionable actions taken as a nation in the aftermath of WWII is likely past due. /shurg

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

Well done Scotland, now it’s Britain’s turn. :P (To much to hope, I know. :P)

Oldmandan, 9 months ago

Generally, no. (Often there are explicit clauses in the EULA for various content creators.) But it’s a grey area, one where other companies have occassionally chosen to enforce copyright claims despite the convention, usually punitively when someone has done something egregious (or just that the company dislikes). (EG, the whole Pointcrow-Nintendo debacle where they threatened to take a youtuber’s channel down because he was promoting a mod he comissioned for Breath of the Wild.)

Oldmandan, 9 months ago

The dude’s damn near a centenarian. Even if someone in government goes through the effort to circumvent protocol and allow the extradition of someone who has not (and likely can not, at this point) been able to be convicted of anything, even odds he passes away before the standard bureaucracy is done.

Similar the Conservative effort to pin blame directly on the Prime Minister instead of the House Speaker, this feels less like a genuine response to this really shitty thing that happened, and more like an attempt to use the situation to score political points. /shurg

Oldmandan, 9 months ago

Yeah. This is a major gaffe. I’ve seen the odd post villanizing this dude in particular, which I’m not sure is called for. (I don’t know it’s not, but I’m hesitant to yell at a 90 year old over what uniform they wore when they were younger than I am now.) Regardless of who the dude is or was though, it’s a bad look, and they do deserve to be called out on the eminently stupid oversight to not to the bare minimum of research before choosing someone to bring in.

Oldmandan, 9 months ago

Nay, although there have been a couple times losing a stack of lockpicks consecutive lost coin flips where I almost regretted it. :P

Oldmandan, 9 months ago

Yeah, AFAIK, they have no plans to add a GM mode themselves, but they do plan to add extensive mod support with upcoming patches.

Oldmandan, 8 months ago

IIRC, elves can sleep properly, if they want to, they just generally choose not to. And depending on the age of the elf, they do “dream” in their trance, IIRC. Said dreams are memories of their past lives. (Since elf souls are special and don’t work like regular souls.) Realistically though, none of our companions are in the right age range (dreams being super rare for elves older than ~100 and younger than ~600). Astarion might dream normally though, if he ever sleeps*, severed from their reincarnation cycle as he is by his nature as a vampire spawn?

When in doubt though, blame tadpoles. :P

Oldmandan, 9 months ago

Short answer; no.

Long answer: If you’re really struggling and still quite early, swapping to Samurai isn’t a terrible idea, it has a good stat spread and good starting gear. Elden Ring though, like all Soulsborne games, doesn’t really put much empthasis on your class. All it is is your starting stats and gear. A couple bosses in, your starting stats won’t matter near as much as how you’ve been leveling, and you can find the gear Samurai starts with in the starting area, if you really want to use a katana. So feel free to do whatever you want/is fun for you, but I wouldn’t bother, personally.

Oldmandan, 10 months ago

They’re all over Youtube. Especially the shorts. I’ve given up on trying to report them, at this point, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Started noticing them a month or two ago.

Oldmandan, 10 months ago

Possibly one of my favourite series, period. The first book is objectively hard to get into. (The writing is a little rougher than the later novels, and the in media res start + Erikson’s… anthropological(?) approach to world building (where history and culture are complicated, everyone disagrees about everything, anyone who can tell you something about the world with certainty either refuses, or is lying) leaves you needing to work hard to understand what’s going on while not being sure if the effort is worth it.)

And then book two shares almost no characters and takes place on an entirely different continent, only tangentially connecting to the main plot. :P But if you can get over the shock of that (and get through the first book to get here to begin with) Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice (books two and three) are genuine works of art, and the rest of the series is of similar quality.

Oldmandan, 10 months ago

Realistically, this is a complicated issue. I can understand wanting to modernize older works (wanting to share something you enjoyed, but struggling because said thing has not aged well), but part of the value of those works is in the view they give of the past.

The important part if this is going to become commonplace, I think, is making sure the process is transparent and the originals preserved; EG, if a book is going to be edited, it needs to be explicit (in the new version) that it was editied, what was edited, and why it was changed. It’s one thing to tweak something so that it can still be enjoyed, it’s another to try to forget it was problematic in the first place.

That all said, I find I agree with Pullman, here; I doubt the publisher is motivated to do this by anything other than sales. Let new authors find their place, instead of whitewashing the works of dead men to turn a quick buck. /shurg

Oldmandan, 10 months ago

/shurg Can’t say I’ve found it this way, but I’m pretty used both to DnD mechanics generally, and Larian’s approach to encounter design in specific. (I’ve so far had exactly one combat game over, because I was dumb and let Ragzlin get into the rafters and chuck javelins at me for like 20 damage a pop.)

Positioning matters, your environment is something to be used to your advantage, abilities that boost your accuracy are very powerful, and different enemies have different strengths and weaknesses. /shurg Hard to give much specific advice, because different encounters and party compositions demand different tactics and threat assessment.

Oldmandan, 10 months ago

Some specific quests have time limits (long rest based ones) but those that do are pretty explicit about it and make a point of warning you before you can unintentionally progress them.

Oldmandan, 10 months ago

Was that the

spoilerNere/save the gnomes quest in Grymforge?

I got a warning before I rested (right when I went to camp) that I was going to fail that one (psychic call for help, that they were about to die), I did rest specifically in that area of the underdark though, the scene might not trigger elsewhere? IDK.

Oldmandan, 10 months ago

Always a little annoyed at articles like this; “strength” doesn’t tell me anything. If this is 5x more resistant than steel to deformation, but then shatters catastrophically, that limits its use cases substantially. Likewise, compressive, tensile and shear strength are all different properties, only one of which is referenced at all. Still very cool, and I look forward to seeing how it develops and learning more details about its capabilities (when I have more time I’ll read the paper), but vague terminology like this has a bad habit of making stuff sound way more revolutionary than it actually is. /shurg

Oldmandan, 10 months ago

I told myself I wouldn’t read unrelated papers at work, but here we are. :P Yeah, as expected, the actual paper is way more informative about the structural properties, and about the limitations. (Difficulty fabricating larger samples without voids, said voids resulting in much lower strengths and much less plasticity, uncertain tensile strength, etc.) Fascinatingly though, (at least to me, not having known the details about DNA based metamaterials :P) the details of the properties should be tunable by way of changing the DNA lattice structure. Which makes it a two-part engineering problem, figuring out how to manufacture it at scale, and determining optimal lattice structures for different applications. Definitely exciting, and will be big once we figure these things out.

But that’s not really what I was talking about. While I get that this is an article geared to laymen/the general public, I do think we should be holding science communication to a higher standard. What was discovered is exciting, but we don’t know how it can be used yet, or if it will ever be practical to do so. Overview is fine, I’d just like some more qualifiers and less speculation. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like some more care would do a lot to improve overall scientific literacy and trust in the scientific community. /shurg

Oldmandan, 11 months ago

IIRC, there is a bit more complexity than that to the Pirahã understanding of numeracy. Relative quantity is something they’re just fine at understanding, (with words for single/less, plural/more and same) it’s abstraction of quantities to tokenized values where they struggle. Which, I suppose, also interestingly lines up with the study results; the initial training period resulted in nodes associated with quantity, but those nodes were separate/unrelated to numeracy systems that developed with additional training.

Oldmandan, 11 months ago

It got more questionable the further I scrolled. /shurg Perhaps it’s just marketing (thumbnails decrying feminism/diversity/etc) but bare minimum he gives off vibes like he’s trying to cater to a far-right crowd.