NielsBohron @ NielsBohron @lemmy.world

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705

Joined

2 yr. ago

Windhand. Sort of a psychedelic doom metal with groovy elements and a haunting, ethereal female vocalist

We use Roll20 as a VTT, but we all run a zoom meeting at the same time because we live in different states and continents and it's good to see their faces (and their kids and partners). Shrug It's a pretty wide range of technology skills and preferences, so we went with the stuff people know best.

The Paradox of Tolerance writ large in real time

Mörk Borg? Other Fria Liga? Other Borg-likes? Other Kickstarter games? Is that just me?

Don't get me wrong, I love PF2 and I mostly actually play 5E with my friends on zoom (that bunch of Philistines), but I can't be the only one obsessively finding niche games online like Into the Odd and Forbidden Lands and Frontier Scum and Inevitable and porting them into system-agnostic hex-flowers that could support Dark-Tower-esque realm crawling and West March-ish living worlds that I can never find anyone that wants to play and...

Do I have a problem? Am I out of touch? No, it's the D&D players that are wrong

I'm not much of a gambler either, but I live in a casino town, and I've gotten lots of drinks comped by sitting with $20 in a video poker machine while I drink and shoot the shit with my friends.

Just remember to tip well, and go in with the mindset that any money you're betting is the cost of entertainment for the evening. It's a fun way to spend an evening, and plenty of times I wind up going home with money that I would have just spent at a bar.

Edit: also if you're into sports, the sports book is the way to go. If you wager $10 in what's called a parlay on 3 different games, you can win $160, so even games you otherwise didn't care about suddenly become interesting. Betting in three baseball games can be a great way to kill a day hanging out in the summer

Even the cheap places as long as you are wagering a certain amount

I thought Prey would be great for pre-teens, but my wife hasn't seen it and was super skeptical (and she didn't want to watch it, which was probably more of the issue), so... shrug. Next time she's having a night out, we'll probably do it.

Tangentially related (since this is our go to when the wife is out of town), all 3 of my kids have loved kaiju movies since the oldest was in diapers, so if you haven't watched Pacific Rim and the modern "kaiju-verse" (or whatever it's called), I highly recommend it, ideally from a pillow fort on the couch so you can play act being kaiju and knocking over your own city if it gets slow.

Really? I always heard/read that it was as a response to Alien getting an R rating.

And actually, Alien is not a bad answer to this question. It was my 9yo and 7yo's first R rated movie and they absolutely loved it. Plus, it sets them up for more good sci-fi down the road. My kids just watched Interstellar at 11 and 9 and really enjoyed themselves

I don't even ever get the physical withdrawals or any noticeable effects, regardless of how often I do or don't drink it. So, since my partner really does need the coffee first thing in the morning and I'm making it anyway, I usually have a cup because I like the taste and ritual. But when she's out of town or getting coffee elsewhere, I hardly ever have any caffeine.

The exception is when I was taking Adderall every day, I really did feel some effects from the caffeine, mostly potentiating the amphetamine. I do miss that aspect of being medicated

Made well I enjoy the taste, but it's ever been good at keeping me awake or making me productive.

Same. I eventually figured out that this is likely a symptom of my adult ADHD, and I either need unhealthy amounts of coffee or something a little stronger

Is that a Stanisław Lem reference in the wild? Will wonders never cease...

The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as intended.

Truly a brand new sentence

Looked like it had just come back from the ethereal plane, its eyes were so wide

Well, yeah. If I got chased down and caught by a predator 4 times my size, I'd be a little wide-eyed, too.

I don't know; my wrestling coach used to say "you're never useless; you can always bad a bad example." So, personally I think putting his charred corpse on display could serve as an effective deterrent on oligarchs that are considering meddling in politics, especially if Musk was loaded into the doomed capsule against his will by a coalition of the proletariat.

Note: I am not advocating for violence. I'm just saying that hypothetically, if Musk was executed by low earth reentry, others might think twice about trying to buy government influence.

His handlers are just using it as a distraction from the class war. Trump is too dumb and fried to think with that level of intention.

You can tell that this wasn't written by a parent. Parents know that the small child is already covered in jam, despite there being no jam at the BBQ

ISIS the American post-metal band, not ISIS "the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria"

100%. The only redeeming quality of boredom is that it encourages you to go out and gain other interests and skills in the absence of other entertainment, but that's more in the "I'm done with my homework and have nothing to do for the next 2 hours until dinner" sense. And even before smartphones, TV, booze, and weed easily filled that niche if you weren't careful.

It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.

I teach chemistry at a college and I don't think it's any different than the past; it's just more obvious. When I was in middle school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn't have a smartphone, so I brought shitty fantasy novels to read under the desk. In high-school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn't have a smartphone, so I would just leave or draw band logos. In undergrad, I would tune out all the time, but I didn't have a smartphone, so I doodled or wrote song lyrics in the margins of my notebook. Even in grad school, i would frequently just straight disassociate my way through lectures when I ran out of attention span (so every 5 minutes or so).

There's tons of pedagogy and andragogy research that shows that humans in general only focus for 10-15 minutes at a time (and it's even shorter for teens and males in their early 20's), and that's remarkably consistent across generations. I don't think people actually have shorter attention spans; they just have an easy way to mindlessly fill that void that is harder to come back from without an interruption. Frankly, my students from Gen X all the way to Gen Alpha students do pretty good at paying attention, but even my best students still zone out every few minutes, and that's fine. It's just human nature and the limitations of the way our brains are structured.