mic_check_one_two @ mic_check_one_two @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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4 mo. ago

Yeah, parvo specifically attacks multiplying cells. It’s not super bad for fully grown dogs, which only multiply cells to maintain a baseline. But for puppies that are actively growing, it basically causes them to fall apart at the seams. Their bone marrow and intestinal lining basically turns to mush, since they’re almost entirely made of multiplying cells.

Probably. American homes are typically made with lumber and foam insulation. Older homes (pre-WW2) will use lath and plaster for the interior walls, while newer (post WW2) will use drywall (gypsum board) sheets. There are two big reasons for the differences between American and European construction.

First, Europe had the luxury of time and existing infrastructure. When people were building homes hundreds of years ago, they already had trade routes in place for things like stone. When America was being settled and people were moving west, the only things settlers had was whatever they could fit on their wagons. They weren’t carting massive quantities of quarried stone across the wilderness. And that’s assuming they even had quarried stone in the first place; There aren’t very many quarries in America, even today, because America simply doesn’t have good stone. Rome basically sits on a massive slab of marble, which is why they used so much of it in their construction. But America (with a few exceptions, like the mountains) sits on sandy clay. So if stone is incorporated into American construction, it’s usually in the form of brick (made from the aforementioned sandy clay) instead of quarried stone. But again, nobody was going to waste a ton of wagon space (and an entire team of horses to pull said wagon) to cart fucking bricks across the country. They were more focused on things like survival, and stone+mortar didn’t make the cut.

Instead, the settlers carried tools, and then used those tools to build houses out of whatever resources were local to the area they settled in. This usually meant lumber construction, because carrying a saw and axe is much easier than carrying an entire tree. And as they moved into the more sparsely wooded areas, they changed their construction methods to match; The Great Plains used wire fences instead of solid lumber fences, because there wasn’t enough wood for solid fences. Wire was easy to carry in bulk spools, and you can make the posts out of small pieces of found lumber. When they realized cattle would push the wire fences over, they started adding barbs (literally just twists of more wire) to the wires. And that’s how barbed wire fences were invented, and became prolific throughout the area. Not because they were the best at fencing, but because they were good enough and were extremely resource-efficient for what the settlers had laying around.

The second reason is climate. It can be difficult to get Europeans to understand the sheer destructive force of American weather patterns. My buddy from the UK came to visit, and we had a thunder+hail storm while he was here. He was hunkered down below the table, worried that the windows were all about to shatter. Meanwhile, we were just watching TV like it was no big deal. The tornado sirens hadn’t gone off yet, and the hail was only the size of pennies, so we hadn’t even started to worry about it. To us, it was just a regular storm, but my buddy said it was the worst storm he had ever encountered… We had three more storms just like it during his two week stay. Lumber construction is surprisingly good at resisting high winds, shifting foundations (from the aforementioned clay soil), earthquakes, etc… Stone will tend to crumble, while lumber will bend and flex. The lumber house sounds like it’s falling apart, but that’s just the creaking and groaning from the joints. And that’s just in regular winds; If an actual tornado comes through, anything less than solid concrete will quickly fall apart. And even the concrete isn’t a for sure thing, as the tornado may just decide to pick the entire foundation slab up.

He actually had a hand in tweaking Decima too! When he signed on with Guerrilla, they basically hadn’t planned on offering the engine for external use. It was something they had simply developed for themselves. Guerrilla gave Kojima the framework, and went “well you helped develop FOX, so help us develop Decima (the new name for the previously unnamed engine) too.”

The engine name is even a reference to Dejima Island, which was a Dutch trading port in Japan; For much of Japan’s history, the Dutch were the only ones allowed to trade with Japan. So the name has some strong symbolic meanings, with Guerrilla being a Dutch company and Kojima being Japanese.

Also, EGL is basically just a glorified web browser that only points to Epic’s website.

I’d argue that they’re being realistic. The only reason you’d want a name is to harass them.

My point wasn’t that fantasy needs elves, but rather that when a fantasy setting does include elves, you likely have a rough expectation of what kind of stereotype they’ll fit. That stereotype is the influence I’m talking about.

The “elves are old, somber, magical, close with nature, tall and thin, magically graceful, pale, have pointy ears, have delicate swooping architecture and designs, etc” stereotype is what you’d likely expect from elves if they get brought up in fantasy… And that stereotype is largely influenced by LOTR. A setting can still be fantasy without elves, but including elves in your story will have the reader automatically setting certain expectations about how those elves will fit into your world. You as the writer can choose to conform to (or rebel against) those expectations, but there’s no denying that the expectation exists, and is heavily influenced by LOTR.

If he was taking medicine for it, it likely wasn’t BPD; BPD doesn’t have any chemical treatments. Treatment is usually Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to try and regulate the person’s emotions and establish a more normalized baseline emotional state. But that requires a lot of personal effort, and many people with BPD refuse to follow through with it. And CBT only really helps with the emotional outbursts; It doesn’t do a lot for the abandonment issues, desires to self-harm, dissociation, etc…

Maybe he was bipolar? Bipolar is in the same category as schizophrenia, because the mania produces delusions and hallucinations. And it is treated with meds similar to schizophrenia.

Yeah, Pluto’s ad breaks are awful in regards to reliability. It seems like every time an ad cut happens, the stream needs to be restarted. Which then triggers another ad, which has a high likelihood of breaking the stream again.

I don’t use Pluto streams when I can avoid it.

Literally no difference between the two. None whatsoever. She’d be doing all the same stuff, for sure. That’s what The Duopoly™️ posters have told me, so it must be true.

Yeah, I do a vinegar bath when brining berries home from the grocery store. Just fill a mixing bowl with water, then add like two cups of white distilled vinegar. Let the berries soak while you put away the rest of the groceries.

I started doing it after I had some strawberries get visibly moldy only one day after I bought them. I was pissed. Since I started soaking them in diluted vinegar, they don’t get moldy anymore. They literally dry out and shrivel before they go bad. I just dunk the entire container into the mixing bowl, and let the entire thing float while I put my groceries away. Then give them a quick rinse with the sink sprayer before they go in the fridge.

When I notice them starting to dry out, I just move them to the freezer instead; They still taste fine, so after they start to dry, I use them in smoothies instead.

I can commiserate… One time I fucked up my back by picking up a loaf of bread. I had just worked an extremely heavy shift at work. Slinging +200 pound pieces of gear overhead, lots of bending and crawling around, etc… I was gross after work. Climbed into my car, toweled off with some baby wipes, and headed to the grocery store on my way home. I just needed milk and bread.

So I make a beeline to the dairy section and grab the milk first, then swing by the bread aisle on my way to the registers. I bend over to grab the bread from the bottom shelf… And I feel a twinge in my lower back. Just a small little tug. I stand back up, and start heading to the registers. As I continue, the twinge gets worse and worse. I didn’t even make it to the registers. I quickly found myself wishing I had grabbed a cart, because I needed a walker to stay upright. I had to abandon the milk and bread in the middle of the store, and slowly hobble back out to my car.

That was on a Friday evening, and naturally my doctor didn’t have any appointments available until Monday. So I suffered all weekend. Monday finally rolls around, and the doc basically goes “oh lol yeah that just happens sometimes. Have you tried taking any ibuprofen?” Uhh excuse me. What the fuck do you mean that just happens? Can we make it not happen?

He says it is extremely common for industrial athletes to injure themselves after work. During work, they’re careful enough to not injure themselves. They’re warmed up, they do team lifts, they’re careful to use proper lifting form, etc… Then they get into their car, drive home, cool down during the drive, and then get injured by something stupid and small (like picking up a loaf of bread, or bending over the sink) because their cold joints basically go “nah I already worked enough today. I’m just gonna rip instead of stretching.”

I was out of commission for a solid two weeks, all because of that loaf of bread. That was about a decade ago, and my back still gives me issues occasionally.

The only realistic answer is “it depends”. Torrents require at least one side to have an open port. If your port isn’t open, you’ll only be able to connect to people who have opened theirs. If everyone had open ports, you wouldn’t need to worry about it. But the reality is that many people don’t bother with opening a port, so your connections will be limited.

The issue will be much more apparent on smaller/less popular torrents. With popular torrents and hundreds of seeders, chances are good that some people will have an open port. But your speeds may be limited, because you can only connect to a select few. Even worse, torrents may stall entirely if there are only a few seeders, (and none of them have open ports). It’s super frustrating looking at a torrent with 3 or 4 seeders, but seeing that it has stalled.

There are workarounds like pinholing, but those are bodges that require specific circumstances to work.

Even if you dislike the story, its impact on the fantasy genre is hard to argue against. I personally dislike the series too, but I refuse to call it overrated because it influences basically every aspect of modern fantasy writing.

There’s also the fact that a lot of that fantasy is going to essentially be elf/vampire/etc smut. The fantasy-romance genre is surprisingly huge, but many of the books are just labeled as straight fantasy (and just happen to have really graphic sex scenes). Further confounding the issue, male writers will use female/androgynous pen names when writing smut, because female author names have been proven to boost smut sales; Women prefer reading smut if they believe it was written by a woman.

So yeah, if you’ve been sucked into the fantasy-romance algorithm, I could 100% believe that the vast majority of fantasy books being shown are written by women, (or at least have traditionally female names on the covers.)

My local library uses CloudLibrary, which doesn’t actually support ebook readers. It forces you to install an app and read from your phone. I literally have a card in a neighboring town, just to have Libby access on my Kobo e-reader.

Every time I go in to my local library, I make a point of mentioning that CloudLibrary doesn’t work on e-readers, in the hopes that they’ll consider switching to Libby instead.

Hideo Kojima had the FOX engine developed for Metal Gear Solid V, because he was tired of game devs thinking they knew better than him. He’d ask for something specific, and the game devs would do it differently because they thought they knew better. So he created his own engine, to be able to go “fucking fine, I’ll do it myself.” Essentially, he was tired of having his ideas filtered through the game devs, so he created his own engine to be able to understand how the engine worked and have a more direct hand in the development.

And MGSV is one of the most well polished games in history. The story is a hot mess because there was some politicking tomfoolery between Kojima and the publisher... But the actual gameplay is top notch, and the game runs smooth as butter on even low-end systems, while looking amazing.

The irony is that Konami almost immediately abandoned the FOX engine, due to the aforementioned politicking. Kojima left the company, and the engine was quickly relegated to only being used for bad soccer games that Konami cranked out every year. Then once the PS5 came around, Konami didn’t want to update the engine, so they abandoned it entirely.

Yup. Iran got to strike back so their leadership doesn’t look weak. No damage on the military base, so the US doesn’t need to claim it was escalation. It’s a win-win if Trump actually allows it to be one.

Yeah, anyone who answers with anything besides “invest in the tech companies you know will get huge, then get into bitcoin early and ride it all the way to $100k each” is going to fail to thrive.

like they like to do with fan games/projects/etc.

Cries while staring at the defunct AM2R project

Not really; The emulator doesn’t use any copyrighted code, but the ROM is copyrighted. That’s just basic IP law.

What is fucked up logic is Nintendo encrypting their ROMs, then providing decryption keys on the console. So the emulator itself is legal, but actually booting a ROM requires decrypting it, which requires keys from a legitimate console. Nintendo has argued that those keys are illegal to use in an emulator, even if the user rips them directly from the console that they own. So you have the keys. You own the console they’re stored on. But it’s illegal to use those keys anywhere except on the console they came on, because Nintendo said so.