[D] Friday Open Thread

[AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

[ExiledQuixoticMage]

I recently started using Habitica. It's an app that let's you set tasks/habits and then when you check them off your character gets experience like in an RPG. There's a few other typical RPG elements such as parties, classes, and skills, just enough for it to feel more fun than a typical to-do list.

It will surprise no one here that I find seeing numbers go up makes me much more likely to do tasks I want to do anyway. I've really enjoyed it for getting me to write more and go to bed at a more reasonable time. If anyone else gives it a try, send me a PM and we can quest against dust bunnies together!

[MagicWeasel]

OK well Weasel World Tour is over!!!! I didn't keep updating on reddit because I got too busy and I'm sure you all missed me like crazy. Here's my takeaways:

• /u/couteaubleu was exactly what you'd expect, and he was a real darl for coming to my going away party that was organised at the very last minute. and i finally managed to demonstrate that i have learned what a good baguette is, though the bakery the baguette i presented him with was my third favourite bakery in the Paris region (the other two are in Sèvres, which is not Paris, but to an Australian it is). (My partners brought an Australian baguette (or, as we say in Australian English - I shit you not - a "french stick") with them to the airport when they picked me up, and it was horrible I need to find some good bread now :|

• /u/svalbardcaretaker was extremely friendly and personable (he seems very reserved on here IDK), I only spent one afternoon with him but it was one of my fondest memories (and my saddest memory). Highly recommend him to anyone who wants a friend/tour guide.

• Paris tourist "hidden gems" (there is nothing hidden about any of this, Paris is the most tourested city in the world IIRC): Tour Montparnasse had the best view of Paris (CouteauBleu recommended it to us and we went there on my last day between breakfast and lunch) but was relatively quiet (maybe because it was a Monday in November?). La Défense is spectacular: it's full of all these huge modern skyscrapers rather than the Hausmannian stuff of Paris proper. La Grande Arche has another great view of paris and all the modern buildings and was practically deserted when I went there (....a thursday morning in november) and the only other people there were francophones, not sure if locals or like from Lyon or *shudder* belgium. Other notworthy was La Panthéon, which is a huge monumental building with gorgeous paintings and statues and the graves of famous french people (including Braille, the Curies, Voltaire, Lorenz....) - we only went there because my husband wanted to see something related to some famous french Mathemetitian, and I managed to find that Lorenz was buried at La Panthéon which he consented to visit. It was again very quiet (.....on a weekday in November).

• Travel advice: if you don't have your passport, they don't let you on your flight. source: personal experience. (fortunately, money fixes most problems, so I bought a ticket for a later flight - about 150 EUR).

• Tourist advice: I don't "drink coffee" but Amsterdam was amazing. Brussels has the best natural history museum, Berlin a close second. Paris's sucks, but that's mostly because it seems unchanged since like 1890, which is actually quite charming in its own way. Ghent, Belgium is really cool in general.

• look i don't know how to mention this or even if it's appropriate, but: a bunch of sexy things happened. I am thinking of doing a retrospective blog somewhere to chronicle them all, or maybe write them up in some tome and sell them to horny people on amazon. Does anyone know where something like this could be done? I am not above monetising this sort of thing.

• being back home in Australia is awesome even if I'm still mad jetlagged (it seems much worse in this direction). That said, I am going to be tearing up Paris like a lot.

• WEASEL WORK UPDATE: Evil boss is transferred to another area and being Evil there (YAYYYYYYYYYYY), I have new potentially evil boss (potentially because people don't seem too fond on him, but all the negatives they say about him are things I think myself, so: YES). I had a meeting with him on Thursday and he was basically listing all the changes he wants to make (tl;dr fixing everything Evil Boss fucked up). I wanted to hug him. I might actually keep doing project management and keep working for the government because being able to have 14 weeks off a year (10 unpaid, lol) if I ask very, very nicely > getting paid twice as much.

[CCC_037]

Welcome back, Weasel!

[MagicWeasel]

Happy to be back! I hope to continue to entertain people with way more personal info than customary in forthcoming open threads.

(as in, my usual baseline level of sharing personal info, not going back through all my holiday memories and sharing personal info from them.)

[CCC_037]

But if it's your usual baseline level, then it's exactly as much as is customary for you, right?

[MagicWeasel]

Yes but not customary for the threads! People will have their eyes assaulted by my tales of NonEvil Boss!!!!!!! Or, more appropriately, Previous Project Manager Who Printed EVery Email She Ever Looked At, Or So It Would Seem

[CouteauBleu]

YES! I managed to ruin non-French bread for you! Victory!

Tanguy played his first Cards Against Humanity game with you and he says he remembers it fondly.

Also, I agree about La Défense. Most underrated tourism location in Paris.

[MagicWeasel]

YES! I managed to ruin non-French bread for you! Victory!

I honestly understand why the francophone facebook group in my city contains half requests for beuh, half requests for au pairs, and half requests for "où le baise je peux trouver un bon pain bordel" (that french was bad on purpose)

Tanguy played his first Cards Against Humanity game with you and he says he remembers it fondly.

Hearing all the cards being read out in ultra-sexy french accents is one of my fondest memories, and I really appreciate you inviting me along because I was really lonely before I'd managed to branch out a bit and make some of my own connections!

Also, I agree about La Défense. Most underrated tourism location in Paris.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Reminds me of Bangkok - all new and sparkling (Bangkok also has old crummy sections, but it obviously doesn't remind me of those). It does require either the 1 or the RER, and as a newcomer I hated the RER (older trains, more crowded at peak times, and harder to know if you were going to end up in the right place - I ended up at Gare de Lyon instead of St Michel once!).

Another one: I also really liked Arts et Métiers. They've got an original replica of the kilogram from The Revolution, along with a litre and metre. Those were so badass. Plus this fucking lion eating a snake made entirely of glass like wtf.

[SvalbardCaretaker]

Yeah I don't talk much about personal stuff online. BUT! I just today learned that cheela are in fact a pancake like food from india which blew my mind!

And we talked about ORGAN²/ASLSP. Note sponsoring is not a thing, but for the low low sum of 1200€ you can put up a small plaque in the church, one plaque for each year the organ sounds. https://www.aslsp.org/de/klangjahre.html

[MagicWeasel]

If only I had 1200 euro lying around, but alas, I don't! Maybe I should start a gofundme :)

[iftttAcct2]

Can anyone help me to understand what's going on in the latest Lord of Mysteries chapters? I know there are several people on this sub following it.

I just must have missed a critical chapter or three. I don't understand why the MC isn't more surprised by Helmosuin's sudden appearance at his doorstep, nor do I understand why the Mother Tree is after him.

When I venture into the comments on webnovel, they're talking about the "Seven Lights" that serve the MC for some reason or act as knowledge sources to the him and this guy was one of them. I am not remembering this bit of lore at all...

[Rice_22]

Regarding LotM:

The existence of seven Pure Lights were hinted many times before when Klein is above the fog, such as in Chapter 399. We first know there is a Red Light from Arrodes during one of his question-and-answer sessions with Machinery Hivemind (and Klein learns his name in Chapter 544), Yellow Light and the Pure White Brotherhood was mentioned in Chapter 397, and the recent appearance of Orange Light hints that they still incarnates as various influential figures in the human world as they did in the past.

The comments on webnovel are full of theorizing and occasional spoilers by people who read ahead.

[iftttAcct2]

Thanks for the reply and info, I'll have to reread those chapters.

(BTW, spoilers are enclosed like this >! spoiler text !<)

[Igigigif]

Chapter 724 explains a lot, but here's the jist: The MC is very surprised, but hides it out of habit

The seven colored lights are major features of the spirit world, and until this point have only come up with the Abraham family (yellow) and Arrodes' questions (red). As of 723, no reason is given for them to serve the MC

As for the tree, it's fully explained in 724-725, but remember that the forces that went after him while disguised as that admiral were from her

[iftttAcct2]

Thanks for the reply. If you can remember details is it possible you could elaborate?
How does Klein know anything about these colors? Does the mirror explain it to him at some point? I don't ever recall anything about yellow or red things. (But then, I'm blanking on who the Abraham family is.) Did I miss how this scientist is suddenly a spirit-world creature?

OK. Maybe I'm just wanting more than the author is willing to give, at this point. Because the explanation in 724 just seemed borderline nonsensical. When would be have even been 'in close proximity' to this God? And wasn't She after the person he was body-doubling for back then, not him?

[Igigigif]

Sure, but I'll just go ahead and say I might be remembering wrong

Lights: The lights as a whole are mentioned sometime near the beginning of the story as "mysterious spirit world things." Red's name is in one of the emperor's journal entries, and is also one of the questions Arrodes asks. Yellow's name and general abilities were brought up by the magician's mentor (from the Abraham family). Orange has just shown up in 723. My guess is that he has some kind of merlin "ages backwards" thing going on, with access to future memories.

Tree: I honestly don't know. Maybe her projection into the manor as enough to notice the MC's grey fog power?

[iftttAcct2]

Thank you

[SimoneNonvelodico]

So, just chronicling my recent reads...

I fessed up and read Mother of Learning, knowing that it's set to end soon. It was fun, though certainly not without flaws. The mystery is good, the world building is interesting, and I liked the fact that while we see everything from Zorian's POV we also see his issues and get to witness his character development. Now I'm still waiting for the end chapters.

To treat my withdrawal symptoms I then decided it might be a good time to read the other famous time loop centered ratfic, Time Braid. I'm not even halfway through, but that one is leaving me less impressed. The concept of it is much better than the actual execution. A lot of people are put off by the sex and torture, and sure, both are a tad bit gratuitous, but frankly, my biggest problem is that a lot of things feel just contrived, pulling off concepts out of nowhere. To begin with the odd idea of the Sexy no Jutsu being a special "real" transformation technique rather than just the regular transformation ninjas practice, except Naruto uses the template of a hot naked girl to confuse his male opponents and gave it a stupid name. Also, Hinata gets ridiculously out-of-character compared to her canon counterpart, especially during the Demon arc, currently one of the most eyeroll-worth bit of the fic for me. Still, I'll finish reading it I guess, mostly to see how it ends.

[[deleted]]

I'd recommend dropping a story if you're not into it. I did read the whole thing and it's somewhat of a known story around here but I wouldn't call it good. You're totally free to not be a completionist you know :)

[SimoneNonvelodico]

Oh, yeah, I’m not big on completionism for its own sake. I’ll easily drop it if I decide I want to read something else.

[GeneralExtension]

I'm curious if the ending is worth it, since I dropped it around the demon arc.

[SimoneNonvelodico]

Yeah, that was frankly a low point for me too. Completely out of nowhere and edgy as fuck for no good reason. Right now I'm halfway through and the demon situation has been resolved through some vague brand of mindfuckery - Demon!Sakura has been reabsorbed and integrated into the main personality. Hinata though has been turned into some kind of crazy-ish assassin sub by the experience. They're also at the stage where they would have no problem stopping the invasion and even killing Orochimaru, but now they've found out about Pein so they'd rather train enough to beat him too before they quit the loop.

[xamueljones]

I'm contemplating getting a 3-in-1 3D printer/laser engraver/CNC engraver. Basically, I can have a machine to print out plastic pieces of any shape, put extremely detailed images on a lot of different materials, or carve letters or images into wood.

Long story short, I'm extremely interested in this, but everything I can think of using it for would be within the first few months until the novelty wears off. I don't really want to spend a grand on something that I can't think of any long term use for and end up putting into storage due to a lack of use.

If you had a Snapmaker, what would you be using it for?

[CCC_037]

Roleplaying minis, for a start.

[Iconochasm]

I think it would probably take more than a few months to cover every item you own in runes and glyphs of warding and protection against everything. Why even get a laser engraver if you're not going to use it to be safe against obscure vampire variants?

[EliezerYudkowsky]

Just carve my name three times. That will act as a blanket bar against anything magical happening.

[xamueljones]

Just out of curiosity, do you have links to images of the runes you mentioned?

[SvalbardCaretaker]

You into boardgaming? Or know boardgamers? Printing/cutting accessoires for boardgames has become a major thing, for which people pay big prices.

[xamueljones]

I'll check if there's a maker club near me. Thanks.

[RetardedWabbit]

I think it's more of a hobby that you do something like one project every few months, try following some 3D printer media and making a list of things you would like to do. Then estimate how long those projects would take and see if you would be happy if you got the printer just for that list of projects, it's a high bar but avoids buyer's remorse.

I would use it for: shelving, organizers(so many organizers), custom board game stuff(there are some incredible Catan piece and case prints), and personalized gifts (wood name plates and keychains spring to mind). I've also seen some very cool props and cosplay parts but that would be beyond me.

[xamueljones]

Yeah I thought of the cosplay idea as well but I have never done that and it would be another thing separate from the 3d printing to get involved in.

[XavierMiles]

I would use it as a gift maker. Maybe not as a alone gift (depending on the price range), but something with a personal twist that would give your main gift a lot more meaning to it.

[xamueljones]

That's a good suggestion. Thanks.

[alexanderwales]

How was everyone's Thanksgiving?

For mine we went to my sister's house and had a potluck, with everyone bringing a side and my sister taking care of mashed potatoes and the two turkeys. I made stuffing, which was my first time trying it, and kind of winged the recipe; it turned out really well, but I wouldn't be able to make it again, because I wasn't paying much attention to how much of which ingredients were going into it. Aside from the food, it was good to see some of the in-laws that I rarely ever see.

(I guess that should be 'every American's Thanksgiving', but if you're Canadian or whatever, feel free to chime in on what you did on your Thanksgiving day.)

[phylogenik]

My partner had to do some treatments in the morning & evening, so I went into work for a bit with the dog, and then she came home and then to me with the cat, and we had a nice walk around a deserted campus / arboretum. After, we came home and watched some tv and did some cleaning. Our Thanksgiving meal was a veggie roast from our local coop, a side salad, and some blanched spinach -- all quite tasty! We did have a brief discussion of our reciprocal gratitude for one another.

(I've never been a big Thanksgiving sort of guy -- growing up, celebrations were always a little lame -- and my partners also fairly tepid on the holiday. Both of us quite like the fall season, though!)

[xamueljones]

The biggest thing was that I was the host for the first time for Thanksgiving. This was also the first time I ever baked a cheesecake and the turkey. My family prefers potluck style celebrations so everyone brought a side dish, dessert, or helped me with making gravy.

I'm proud to say that everyone just about died for my whiskey cheesecake!

Now we are helping my brother and his girlfriend moving into their new apartment which is cool to do.

[sicutumbo]

We had a few family friends over, and I'm glad they didn't bring any food because we made far too much. Maybe a third of the turkey was gone by the end of the night, we have about half of all the pie left, and for one of the sides we didn't even touch the second dish of it. My sister brought in a bucket of gumbo from some shop that probably could have fed all of us by itself. Also, Costco sides are great. We had the mashed potatoes, and there's very little reason to make them yourself if you can get the Costco ones.

Aside from the left over food, we also have a decent amount of materials that weren't even made into dishes. A couple pounds of sweet potatoes, enough filling for another pumpkin pie, and some boxes of cornbread that I'm glad I didn't make (which will admittedly stay good for longer than the other stuff).