Armies?! Be serious. They were in the Gayroller 2000. Ref: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally

The really fun bit: in order to smell anything, you necessarily have to snort in molecules of that substance. It’s a happy little thought whenever passing a sewage treatment plant.

I don’t understand the joke. Would you be willing to add more context? TIA.

Oh, I skip FB and IG ads completely. It’s crazy: I didn’t even have to install anything, and the ads just disappeared one day.

But seriously, the “your attention is being monetized” model makes for such an awful experience for me. I’m envious of people who can enjoy the world and the Internet when ads are everywhere.

The “consequences” for those involved in the Mỹ Lai Massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre) paints a different picture.

That said, I have some close friends in the military, including one who is a Military Defense Counsel. Enforcement, when it happens, is quite strict.

Am cis-male. And I guarantee you my genitals absolutely make me way dumber than other genital types. 😆 I could fill a novel with data points of my genitally-enabled stupidity.

That seems kind of harsh. I’d totally accept falling on his own sword, maybe seppuku.

It came from a speaker a few years ago at the Davos World Economic Forum. Davos is where the ultra rich gather each year to plot out how to be even more evil.

You have it backwards here. Apple needs to support developers. They make it expensive and inconvenient to develop on their ecosystem. But until Apple releases their stranglehold, I would be just fine if I never have to use their shitty OS, development software, and tools ever again.

my M1 Max MacBook Pro could run Baldur’s Gate 3 at max graphics with no performance issues. On battery. Over extended periods

I’m a bit skeptical on this claim, or maybe we have different ideas of what “extended periods” mean. My M1 Max MBP would have just under two hours of run time with VS Code doing .NET Core dev. It was even worse when doing Ruby on Rails work. And that was when MBP was new. My whole team were issued these, and our experiences were the same. Zoom calls were even worse, with about 90 minutes of run time.

The ARM architecture has amazing battery life when idling, quite unlike x86. But when it gets spooled up, it eats angry pixies just the same as x86. All of my x86 laptops can do .NET Core work… for two hours.

But …why does the boat have a sprit and no stay? 😆

But seriously, thank you for sharing. What are the dots on the paper? Is this one of the digitizing sketchbooks?

This is exactly the case. Also, I worked for a credit union at the time, and employees got a 1% discount on interest rates for loans over a 24 months.

Liquidity. Buying a car on credit is mostly stupid, but there are cases when it makes some sense. My last car loan was 3.54%. My combined accounts were earning ~8%. Paying cash in that case would be throwing away money. Well, throwing away money on top of wasting it on a car.

You raise a good point on REI. I would trust any of those to not burn down my neighbor’s house. I would also trust REI to be able to work on any bike they sell, AND make sure it’s actually set up correctly before it goes out the door. At the LBS where my partner works, just about every day, people bring in bikes that would put the fear in you. The “new in box” mail order ebikes can fill a novel just by themselves.

I love what Priority is doing with bikes. It’s like they thought “What do bike commuters really need?” And then they built those bikes without letting the MBAs and bean counters getting in their way.

You can get a pretty damn good one in the 1k range, which seems reasonable given the price of batteries.

Avid cyclist here, former community bicycle mechanic, and my partner works in the biggest bike shop in town. There are no good electric bicycles under $2000. This is how houses burn down. Furthermore, shitty mail order bikes are an e-waste scourge.

They are difficult to work on, very frequently use proprietary parts that might be specific to that model year, often have mechanical disc brakes and no-name parts, and have crappy electronics and batteries.

You may love your cheap electric bike. I wish you the best of luck and many happy miles.

We truly are nothing but a bunch of barely evolved monkeys. We’re even smart enough to know better, but too stupid to do anything about it. “Hey, that’s a brick wall dead ahead.” Humanity at large: <stomps the gas pedal>

I’m okay with the price and range. I am actively averse to the parts and service lock-in, app requirements, subscription-based everything, data privacy issues, and all of the other “modern” bullshit that comes with modern vehicles. I think most people at least implicitly understand that the early gold rush is going to be a bloodbath and that new entrants to the game are going to sputter and trip on things that other companies have been doing for decades.

I’d buy an electric motorcycle today if it didn’t have an app requirement to get full power and level 3 charging, didn’t have any subscription bullshit, was entirely designed to be worked on by anyone with basic tools and knowledge, had user-swappable batteries, and had a strong data privacy policy.

So yeah, lots of niche players are going to die, and most of them absolutely deserve it.

LOL. “I am disinterested in doing [a thing] that I don’t have to do.”

“Hurr hurr, ur pathetic.”

Good fucking christ, this person isn’t into building computers. The opinion expressed is utterly harmless and their personal preference. You are free to build all the computers you want.

Its literally easier than most lego sets these days.

Oh, yeah, anything can be super easy for people are interested in and experienced with doing that thing.

Building a computer properly is way more than “plugging parts into marked slots,” and your comment is disingenuous at best. RAM timings, socket types, cooling selection, power supply selection, wire routing and dressing, version/generation conflicts, Red vs Blue, will the GPU even fit in this computer case, counterfeit parts… And this is all before the thing is plugged in.

Gout. Gout is the biggest hammer in my toolbox. And I found this thumb-detector the hard way.

I love to drink, and I drink like the sailor I am. I steadily cut back the frequency and volume of my drinking as I aged, primarily because I don’t drink swill, and that gets expensive quickly. Also, what I like to drink can be tricky to find and/or seasonal, so that was always a natural limiter on my drinking. And finally, it was getting harder to stay fit, so that further limited my drinking.

Last week though, I woke up in the middle of the night in excruciating pain. My entire foot was on fire. I have a high pain tolerance, but this is up there with stuff like tearing my plantar fascia and sepsis. I couldn’t even move my foot if I wanted; the joints refused to respond to commands. Digging into the medical literature, this is one of the more painful things that can happen to the body, however still not in appendicitis and kidney stone territory. My neighbor has gout, and she said her “mild” case far exceeds the pain of childbirth. 0_0

I couldn’t walk (still can’t). Laying down caused my foot to throb. The pain at night is so bad that I couldn’t sleep, even with prescription-only anti-inflammatories and opiates. And I eliminate anything that messes with my sleep.

If you don’t have gout, count yourself lucky. Alcohol is hugely inflammatory, but I thought I was in good stead. With this first gout flare, I completely stopped drinking instantly. I can deal with pain, but when my joints refuse to work, that’s the kind of thing that gets in the way of living and sailing. And I live on my boat.

In the US, medical care is a joke even with health insurance. But for the love of your body and sanity, get your blood markers checked in an annual physical! You really don’t want to experience gout, and you really, really don’t want to find out the hard way you have it.

Be graceful to yourselves fellow non-drinkers. And thank you for being here today.

I know nothing about miniatures or even painting at that level of detail. But I really admire the detail and shading. For example, the writing on the inside of the headgear above, to me, is such an amazing touch. Out of the miniatures you posted, what is a figure (or a specific detail on a figure) of which you are especially proud?