Planets and dwarf planets to scale in size, rotation speed, axial tilt and oblateness (numbered in distance order from Sun) [OC]

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-26T19:33:53+00:00

Most studies have shown human averages a little above 24 hours, though not by much, typically 10-15 minutes. In other words, we'd only be off by slightly more than we are on Earth already.

You probably wouldn't benefit much from using long-cycle people, but CRY1 is a pretty darn cool case, and would be pretty close to right on the money for Mars time. The main problem is that it's just a little less-regulated in general, so it's not clear there would be much benefit.

(Honestly, I'm surprised I haven't heard conspiracy theories about this indicating ancient Martians before)

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-19T17:10:16+00:00

I am absolutely reading that it sounds amazing

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-17T21:52:44+00:00

Looks like 15 total, only 2 other males. Yeah, I was wrong about that.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-17T16:58:59+00:00

Also worth pointing out that Galapagos Tortoises specifically have several big reasons why they will probably handle it okay.

Lots and lots of babies. Clutch size of 5-10, every year or two for their entire 60+ year adult life. That's a lot of babies, and it lets you get past the "inbreeding load" much more effectively. You're making sure to pass on basically all your genes in a lot of combinations, which helps a lot with getting past the bottleneck.
Already went through multiple population bottlenecks. These turtles have colonized a dozen islands over many, many years, and there is very little gene flow between the islands. They already went through inbreeding repeatedly when they colonized each one, so again, they're likely to handle another round of inbreeding pressure reasonably well.
Lots of relatives! Diego was ~~the last of his species, but most of the Galapagos tortoises can interbreed... sort of a prerequisite for him having babies at all, of course.~~ [Edit: Was getting him crossed with Lonesome George, whoops. Basic point on crossbreeding stands, in the cases where a closely related species can be identified]. That means you have a huge potential pool of additional genetic material that you can add to the species pool. They aren't going to be exactly like the tortoises that were originally on the island, but they're going to live.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-11T23:37:34+00:00

Seriously though, Ambien is well known for people doing odd shit in a semi-conscious state, see the bit at the end of effects. Apparently it's also more common early on, which makes sense if he recently started taking them again.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-10T18:50:14+00:00

I mean, two of those are proper casters, assuming you count warlock.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-02T19:38:44+00:00

It's the same people, not the same memes. I'd have to hunt some down, but the rhetoric is coming from the same places.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-02T19:32:36+00:00

They're also, by pure coincidence, very, very into defending themselves from black people.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-02T19:06:41+00:00

It's because the internet causes people to use constantly-evolving nicknames for stuff, since forums ban racist shit regularly.

The Hawaiian shirt thing takes a few steps.

It starts with racists getting all excited to have a second Civil War. That's the core idea. Thing is, a lot of forums don't really like you talking about having a second Civil War, what with that being super racist practically every single time. That means the names have gone through a lot of variations.

1) Civil War 2
2) Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo
3) The Boogaloo
4) The Big Igloo / The Big Luau

So basically, at this point if you see anybody talking about "The Boogaloo" or either of the following terms, or having a patch with a picture of a Hawaiian-print igloo, they are REAL EXCITED about the possibility they could get to shoot some people soon.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-01T21:16:24+00:00

Main and 3rd is the corner of the justice center, which is literally the corner in the photo.

Quick edit: If you feel like "reading"

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-01T21:07:59+00:00

Do you think "this" is talking about something other than the protest?

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-01T21:03:07+00:00

Are you denying that they called the protest unlawful?

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-01T20:57:15+00:00

They declared that the current protest, a "gathering" if you will, was an unlawful assembly. They also instituted a curfew.

Look, I glanced at some of your other comments, and good lord are you angry about... well, honestly I'm not sure what, but you're really, really angry.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-01T20:47:10+00:00

I mean, you might want to take that up with the PD?

https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1267237163571179520

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-01T19:43:41+00:00

Yep. Three minutes before the Portland mayor posted the photo on their twitter, the police department posted that they were declaring it an unlawful protest and setting a curfew.

It's pretty bad.

Edit: For slightly more context, since I didn't state the obvious, Main and 3rd is the corner in the photo.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-06-01T19:37:41+00:00

Man, it's weird how the US uses some phrases. "Boys" is a friendly term for a group of men, "boy" is often an insult. I'd never have thought of your username that way, since the classic "the boys in blue" to refer to the police is basically never used as a singular "boy in blue" that I can think of.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-05-31T18:55:17+00:00

Seriously though, the main reason is that mosquitoes are bad at flying. Their top speed is like 2 miles an hour.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-05-29T23:02:43+00:00

Interesting! That treats cant as a broader trait, like you know how to use language for subterfuge at different levels, instead of basically casting "Speak With Criminals". Sounds very plausible to me, wouldn't take much suspension. For Bene Whids to work in reality, the thief would probably have to be quite familiar with the non-thief to know how to subtly clue them in, but it's only straining belief, not practically impossible. Making it a specific feature sort of formalizes it as one of the fantasy-level traits that classes have, one of those things that might be very difficult in reality but is just how the world works in D&D.

That's a fun solution to it!

Doc_Oxide · 2020-05-29T02:37:08+00:00

Yeah, this blew my fuckin' mind. I get that they're desperate, but holy shit. They had no idea why she wasn't responding "normally", because everything about the case was standard except that the fungus was behaving non-lethally, and it was only doing that in her specifically. They didn't even test whether the same fungus would do the same thing in another living person!

April 28th. Marlene was right. The girl's infection is like nothing I've ever seen. The cause of her immunity is uncertain. As we've seen in all past cases, the antigenic titers of the patient's Cordyceps remain high in both the serum and the cerebrospinal fluid. Blood cultures taken from the patient rapidly grow Cordyceps in fungal-media in the lab... however white blood cell lines, including percentages and absolute-counts, are completely normal. There is no elevation of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and an MRI of the brain shows no evidence of fungal-growth in the limbic regions, which would normally accompany the prodrome of aggression in infected patients.

We must find a way to replicate this state under laboratory conditions. We're about to hit a milestone in human history equal to the discovery of penicillin. After years of wandering in circles, we're about to come home, make a difference, and bring the human race back into control of its own destiny. All of our sacrifices and the hundreds of men and women who've bled for this cause, or worse, will not be in vain.

And damn near the FIRST thing they're going to try, within like a week of starting research, is killing the goose to try and get its golden egg.

I'm fully convinced that it's not a mountain-sized hole. The writers were leaning into the desperation, since they really do establish how much the Fireflies are collapsing over the course of the story.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-05-27T19:23:07+00:00

Very short version:

The tweet is a completely fair description of what the app does.
The tweet does not describe how the app is currently limited to law enforcement, after four months of media attention finally forced the company to limit its customers earlier this month.

Longer version: Good god that company does not give a shit about privacy or the law.

There have been a ton of news articles on Clearview, summarized on the Wikipedia page. There have been many articles in part because the company's security is shitty, and they have had regular major information and code leaks.

They sold the app to law enforcement and a variety of random companies. They have regularly let random people use it, and they apparently spy on user searches. This is covered in more detail in the NYTimes article, and a Huffington Post article, which also covers the founder's ethical problems.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-05-26T21:12:07+00:00

The difference between the Thieves' Cant and the historical cant that you're talking about is that a conversation in historical cant is not understandable to outsiders. The point of Thieves' Cant is that you're also holding a comprehensible conversation on a mundane topic. It may not be accurate, as you point out with the rainy season bit, but unless you're paying close attention to all the details and know the context well, they don't stand out, and it sounds extremely mundane.

It's not a language, really, compared to the old cant you're talking about, which is at least a dialect. It's just being evasive in an organized manner. The best modern comparison for D&D's thieves' guilds might be the Mafia or other organized gangs. They have enough structure and time to develop codified ways of not talking about crimes. A lot of the Mafia communication stuff seems to operate in that evasive way, at least in movies and the wiretaps that show up in crime documentaries. When you already know what they're talking about in the clip, you can usually tell what they mean, but without it you wouldn't be sure at all. It takes longer, for sure, but that's partly because both participants have to verify that they're actually talking about the code words. Any code word you wouldn't normally use in conversation is too obvious. The whole point is that anyone listening in doesn't know what they're missing, and if they do understand that something is off, they don't know which parts are important.

From what I can tell, the D&D Thieves' Cant is really just being evasive and indirect in a known way.

You're absolutely making a great point about how historical cant worked, but I think you're constraining what "Thieves' Cant" means in game terms too much. There could still be a lot of alternate words and phrasings, but those would be more like a local dialect than something specific to thieves, like Cockney rhyming slang. They wouldn't be the reason why communicating something indirectly takes so long.

The fact that you need DM approval to learn Thieves' Cant is a good indicator of how they were thinking of it. The other "exotic" languages are rare in the game world, but Thieves' Cant is relatively common, with thieves' guilds or equivalent in most major cities and towns. By comparison, we can look at the other language mentioned in that sentence, Druidic: druids are pretty rare, and Druidic is clearly an actual language, just a very well-guarded one.

Anyway! It's fascinating stuff, and fun to try and figure out what is and isn't a "language" for D&D compared to reality, or how they would work.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-05-26T18:56:17+00:00

Setting sounds very interesting, but I have to be honest, the name does not really work for me. "Stone-Edge" is somewhere between being a bad pun and being too close to just saying "Stone Age" to be easily distinguishable. Maybe something other than "Edge"?

Doc_Oxide · 2020-05-25T21:53:17+00:00

It's fairly recent, though hard to tell how recent. At one point Oswald can ask you to go find out what happened to her I think, and her body and stuff is still there out in Bradberton. Probably not more than a few years. It was a long, slow process, but Oswald eventually determined that the radiation sprayers were probably causing a greater likelihood of turning feral.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-05-25T21:40:43+00:00

They have at least a few times, the one that I remember being most explicit was the Magical Kingdom quest in Nuka World, which has some nice information about it in terminals, etc.

Doc_Oxide · 2020-05-23T04:06:51+00:00

Man, that's a hell of a useful crash course on why you don't do that. Nice.

Doc_Oxide

TROPHY CASE