Pigeon @ Lowbird @beehaw.org

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10

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205

Joined

2 yr. ago

It's kinda wild that Paint apparently made it all the way to 2023 without supporting layers.

This feels very similar to me to businesses freaking out and trying to prevent their employees from wearing rainbow flag or pronoun pins. Or rainbow masks, for that matter.

I think employee uniform requirements should be just enough to make employees identifiable so they can do their jobs (e.g. answer customer questions about where the lettuce is or whatever). Just a mandatory hat or shirt is enough to do that. Beyond that, they're humans. Let them be fucking humans.

This rubs me the wrong way given that very many people need orthodontia for medical reasons, because their bite would otherwise be so wonky it leads to pain, or to extreme wear on the teeth that can lead to losing them. When orthodontists correct a medical bite issue like this, they straighten out the teeth, too - maybe more than is necessary, sure, but it's generally better to overshoot and be sure the pain or cause of damage is fixed rather than not doing enough.

Nobody should be ashamed of crooked teeth: this is true. But equally, nobody who has hollywood straight teeth because they needed a medical issue fixed should be shamed and told they look "creepy" for it.

Imo, there's no shame in getting orthodontia just because you prefer that aesthetic or really don't like the way your teeth currently are, either. None whatsoever.

The solution to the existence of an arbitrary beauty standard is not "well, everybody who does fit that standard actually looks creepy/[insert insult here]".

I think this is akin to saying something like: women should never have to wear make-up or suffer judgement for choosing not to wear it, therefore women who do like and wear make-up are bad and it's okay to insult and make fun of them and their choices about their own personal appearance. Or that because women shouldn't be required to wear pink or dresses, we should shame those who do wear pink and dresses. Or that because people should not be insulted for being fat, it's therefore okay to insult people for being skinny. It's a ridiculous way of thinking and doesn't solve the original problem at all.

And it just makes a situation where people can't win no matter what they do - crooked teeth, or no make-up? You get insulted. Straight teeth and make-up? You get insulted in a different way. And as always, everyone who isn't cis, white and male will have their appearances nitpicked this way the most.

It's like they looked at Wizards of the Coast's fuck-up with the D&D license and decided to copy it. What the hell?

Maybe the Costume Quest games? They're not scary at all, but Halloween themed.

If he's a precocious reader, Sunless Sea is a horror game with a similar sort of theme. The content is much weirder and more horrifying than Dredge, but it's 99.9% delivered via text, so the impact may feel more tolerable regardless.

But again it's very text-heavy, possibly too much so depending on the kid. Probably too difficult, too.

Great game though.

Your link doesn't seem to support your statement. Do you mean the part that advocates "turn on by default" tools to amplify factual information over disinformation? Because "turn on by default" implies an off switch.

It's not possible for search engines to make zero decisions about what to prioritize in results, anyway. How would you prefer they sort the absurd quantity of results? Especially now SEO listicles try to drown everything else out?

Years upon years of being told this cannot make me not taste metal from stainless steel cups/canteens and forks, even brand new and/or freshly scrubbed to hell and back. I can't use stainless steel tumblers because of this - even if I keep my tongue well away from it, and it's the cleanest dish in the world, it makes the drink taste metallic. No amount of youtubers just insisting I don't/can't taste a thing can actually compete with a lifetime of experiencing this problem. And I have, multiple times, tried all the things they say to do to fix the "real" problem - but no. Steel tastes like steel, always.

Hypothesis: this is one of those things some people can taste and others can't, like how there's a whole group of "cilantro tastes like soap" people and everyone else is like ????

You're close. Not the tilt of its axis, but its rotation around its axis (day) is slower than its rotation around the sun (year).

Earth's axis is tilted at about 23 degrees, which causes the seasons. Venus, by contrast, is tilted only about 2.6 degrees, and thus basically doesn't have seasons in a comparable way.

Earth's axis does very slowly wobble around (precession). Over long enough time scales, this affects the seasons, and it means the North Star has not always been aligned with Earth's North - once, North pointed at a patch of black sky and the North Star was just another star appearing to rotate around that arbitrary point.

I'd imagine Venus's axis might also wobble at least somewhat, but I haven't actually looked into this at all.

Thinking about this sent me down a rabbit hole because the day and year lengths are so extremely close to each other, and Venus rotates around its axis clockwise (unlike the other planets) while spinning around the sun clockwise, and its tilt is so slight... so as it spins around the sun, it rotates just enough to keep one side facing the sun almost all the time. I ended up googling whether it was tidally locked, like the moon is to Earth (such that we only ever see one side and it never changes) - and apparently it would be, but its atmosphere is so wild that it prevents tidal locking. But it almost is. It kinda has a dark side, and a light side, like the moon, but there's just enough mismatch between the yearly rotation the axial rotation that the side facing the sun changes slowly. This is the first article I found.

From that article, it seems like the daylight hours you'd experience standing on the surface of Venus would be 117 Earth days of light, before it got dark again. So the sun would rise, and then you'd have about half a Venus year (aka about half a Venus day, too) of daylight before you'd see night again. And then it'd be night for the rest of the year. But still scorching hot because atmosphere.

Anyway this is blowing my mind a bit. I feel like I should have known this - I used to be obsessed with astronomy when I was little. Maybe I knew it once and forgot. I don't know. But dayum. Planets are cool.

If it's otherwise Chrome or bust, I'd honestly suggest considering Edge. It's not like internet explorer used to be. It's also not anywhere near as good for privacy as vivaldi or firefox, but it might be better than chrome - I don't really know. But some people really like it now.

If you're some who's tried firefox in the past already, I'll note it's change quite a bit over the years. I used to dislike it but I like it now (on desktop).

You can multi-select items and mark them all as wares at once, just only for one character at a time. I agree all wares should be pooled between characters though, or we should have the option at least.

THANK YOU. I thought lemmy had just lost a shitload of users! I've been missing so many posts and I had no idea. >.<

For others who use apps: check your profile settings on the website, not only in your app of choice.

Trying to get into those as a newbie is miserable dor all those reasons and also because, unless maybe if you get in right when the game first comes out, your competitors will be far more comfortable with the mechanics and have memorized the maps and so on. It's especially bad if you're a newbie to multiplayer shooters a whole, even if you're good at single player shooters. It becomes and exercise in: spawn, die, respawn, die... Super frustrating to begin with. And then people insult you. Noooot something I find worth bothering with for a thing that's supposed to be enjoyable in my free time.

Primarily, library receipts!

I recommend Ken Liu's translated Chinese scifi short story anthologies, which include some stori3s by Liu Cixin. The books are called "Invisible Planets" and "Broken Stars".

Mother of Learning by Nobody103 - free webnovel, complete now I think. Wizard student gets stuck in a time loop and uses this opportunity to become OP and solve the mystery.

Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, if middle grade is okay.

I second Earthsea.

Spellwright seems like it might be good but I haven't got far in it yet.

The Black Magician trilogy by Trudi Canavan. It's been a long time since I read this, but Canavan is one of those authors who's popular and has a lot of books out but is weirdly never mentioned online.

Also try L.E. Modesitt Jr. If you haven't. Either the order mage series, or Imager maybe. Most anything by him will have a lot of studying. They're very good if you like his specific flavor of writing.

Edit: Vita Nostra being described as just "magic school" is very funny to me, although I do see where it comes from lol.

Edit 2: I remember the Charlie Bone books being good, but again those are middle grade and it's been ages since I read them. No idea if they hold up.

The Young Wizards series by Diane Duane if middle grade is okay.

Spellwright also seems promising but I haven't finished it myself.

If you are willing to venture into fanfiction, there are some tags on archiveofourown.org - like "humans are space orcs", " earth is a deathworld", "earth is space australia" - for fics that feature overpowered humans relative to the aliens. Most of these are so AU that you don't need any knowledge of the ostensible source material. The trope seems popular particularly with My Hero Academia and Minecraft youtuber fandoms, for whatever reason.

Generally, the scifi worldbuilding is usually really light, including names "made alien" by adding apostrophes and that kind of thing - but they scratch and itch that almost nothing else does. And they're free! So maybe worth a try at least. Just make sure to filter by kudos.

Fuzzy Nations is a retelling of Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. Having read both, I can report that I liked Fuzzy Nation 300% more. But if someone likes one they may as well try the other.

Little Fuzzy is kind of hilariously western, with everyone smoking and gun-toting :P it's also decidedly more sexist and less interesting in the way it handles the aliens and the legal fight around them. Very dated. But it can be fun anyways.

Exactly this. 50/100 looks like an F, because that's what it would be on a school paper. Often we'd even be given points out of a hundred just like that. So giving a 50 to a middling/okay game feels really harsh, vs 70 (aka a C) or 80 (B).