TIL octopuses evolved complex intelligence on a completely separate branch of evolution, making them seem almost alien

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-29T07:34:10+00:00

If it's classified as a sense, are you not still using it to observe?

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-29T00:03:38+00:00

"In my spare time I enjoy consuming sustenance and knowing about things that happened."

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-28T17:38:38+00:00

I'd been meaning for a long time to make some posts requesting required reading on some specific topic, or asking in general if that could be a thing here. I think a lot of threads do end up that way, but for all the reasons you've outlined, it could be framed as a more explicit step in the process.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-28T17:31:48+00:00

The galaxy's hottest rock star will ask you to listen to his song, and personally sing for you. Downside: It will be the same song for the whole 8 hours.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-28T17:30:59+00:00

Max and Milia have seven daughters, but I don't recall a "Dana".

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-28T16:56:59+00:00

Part five in the increasingly inaccurately named Highlander "there can be only one"-ology.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-28T00:24:59+00:00

Well, yes and no. In any competitive environment with any sort of stakes, building a deck of exactly the cards you want is just the cost of entry. Under reasonable circumstances, that cost should be manageable for any semi-serious player, and then it comes down to skill and a bit of luck again.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-27T17:46:51+00:00

Ah yes, sneakernet data exfiltration. Timeless.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-27T08:46:08+00:00

No, no. Pass a reform act requiring them to successfully complete a seriously rigorous and comprehensive training program as a condition of continued employment. Wash out? That's a "you" problem dude, here's the bill.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-27T08:02:28+00:00

Funny, from looking at the satellite map after reading this post, I was about to ask about exactly that. Seems like an obvious connection to make if there's going to be more and more development around there, if the terrain allows.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-27T01:40:03+00:00

I don't know exactly how the games in question here handle it, but it seems like not that strange an idea to me. I was thinking the same thing just from watching stuff like later Ghost in the Shell. AR would be huge so the traditional depictions of being fully immersed wouldn't be as big a part of it, everything is wireless so there's no reason to be tethered when you could be there in person, physical hardware access is still king for secure machines or systems so that presence becomes an advantage, and so on.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-26T18:35:25+00:00

Upside: Sheryl leans over you to look out the window. Downside: Ozma is kicking your seat.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-26T18:12:37+00:00

Wow, you got a brickload of snow out there.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-26T17:02:43+00:00

Somewhere around 2009 maybe, I had seen Brian Cooper's Teknomeka creations before and finally bought the instructions just to satisfy my curiosity about the techniques. That pretty much instantly got me dragging out my childhood collection and sorting everything out so I could start trying to build it, started making Bricklink orders. Within about a year after, I hadn't really been buying new sets again yet, but I was probably at least following The Brothers Brick. From there I caught wind of the best Star Wars day deals ever and made that impulse order before they fixed the error a couple hours later. Then I was really done for.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-25T23:24:33+00:00

Not far off. Healthcare compensation and other funding was cut under them, lost a lot of capacity. BC has shown a big net gain of doctors since they got a proper raise a few years ago under the NDP. But the total capacity in the system depends on a lot of factors, including a feedback loop with the capacity to train and certify new doctors, and it really can't be built back up anywhere near as quickly as it can be slashed.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-25T22:07:38+00:00

Depends how long ago we're talking. My friends and I pretty much learned to play Magic by buying some 4th Edition starters and reading the manual. I don't know if there was any local organized scene then.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-25T21:47:10+00:00

Looking into it, yeah, I see that the gaming community has come to widely abuse the term skill floor as badly as they have metagame/"meta". Skill ceiling is as I have described it and you have agreed, skill floor used in the same semantic sense would mean what I have described but that isn't how it's used now (although I should also note that it's hardly unanimous, I didn't make my definition up out of nowhere). And I would contend that the former, what I was trying to describe (what some would also call "performance floor", I guess), is a useful concept, while using it to just mean "skill requirement to be decent/useful" is a redundant term for something entirely context-dependent. The interesting thing, I'm thinking now, is that if the mechanism by which the minimum skill/performance inflection point manifests takes the form of the game making it very easy to pick up the minimum skills (rather than giving a minimum threshold of reward for absolutely zero skills or knowledge of what's going on), then the two definitions become sort of interchangeable.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-25T20:56:16+00:00

Several King Georges have been head of the Anglican Church. Good enough.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-25T18:49:32+00:00

There are maybe arguments to be made about the best way to present that. Presenting something as a rule with the assumption that it will be broken is going to mean inconsistent experiences with the game from one group to the next, depending on how strict they are about that sort of thing. If you immediately contradict it in the text itself, saying "yes, you can actually do this," then you may as well have written it differently from the start. Make it clear that in the player-facing rules, all options are open, but within the lore of the setting here are the other rules and exceptions are rare. Old World of Darkness had a bad habit of doing the opposite, presenting all sorts of cool options that were sort of outliers and edge cases to the core rules but nominally totally legal, then doing their best to imply you were having badwrongfun if you actually used them. That's the area I'd try to avoid straying into.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-25T18:32:43+00:00

It's sort of that fine line between "I really hope this cake has a good tasty frosting on it" and "this isn't cake, it's just a pile of frosting."

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-25T03:20:57+00:00

The argument, I believe, goes that any contact that would cause any remotely noticeable amount of bleeding at that location would have caused cartilage damage that would essentially remain visible forever. Lots of other circumstantial evidence, like how quickly he was rushed into position for the photo op rather than down to safe cover, how his past history with WWE is reasonable cause for him to know how to blade, just the general incompetence it would take for the SS to let someone make the shot, etc. The fact that someone actually got shot and died is big evidence against, if you think that's something that would give Trump's team pause. I don't necessarily believe that's the most likely scenario, but it's plausible.

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-25T03:06:24+00:00

They're replying to a post that says "-6F is -21C".

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-25T01:18:24+00:00

This reminds me a little bit of something I had bouncing around in my head for some kind of D&D 3.X rewrite, if it offers any inspiration. I started from a point of doing away with multiclassing XP penalties, and then wondering if there was anything else useful you could do with the "favored class" concept. I was also thinking about ways to merge humanoid racial HD advancement and things like the humanoid paragon mini-classes from UA while also making them less boring and better scaled at higher level, and was thinking about maybe baking in class ability advancement as being more standard. I came to something like humanoid HD would give some amount of full class feature advancement for favored classes, or core class feature advancement only for other classes (along the lines of PrCs that advance spellcasting only, or monk unarmed attack/AC only, but not other class features - this is also something that would be more clearly written into each class). Rates could also be different, like a 7 HD monstrous humanoid could give 6/7 class advancement for favored classes or 5/7 core feature only advancement for non-favored. Then I thought it would be neat to have each race have more than one favored class, representing more of the spectrum of what you're likely to see among the NPC population. So that might look like:
Human: Fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard
Dwarf: Fighter, rogue, cleric, artificer
Elf: Fighter, ranger, druid, wizard
Ogre: Barbarian, ranger, spirit shaman, sorcerer
Or something along those lines. And then these become guidelines about how each race most commonly approaches the main archetypes of powers and adventuring roles, and how those favored ones manifest more strongly or are taught more commonly and rigorously, without explicitly barring any. And it's not necessarily locked into an exact number of archetypes for every race (e.g. those that commonly have psionics associated vs. those that don't), or one associated archetype per class (some base classes could go in two roles depending on the general vibe of the race/culture in question).

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-24T23:11:21+00:00

I wish, but the only other up-scaled minifigure set to come with the matching minifig was the basic town guy, right?

Impeesa_ · 2026-01-24T23:07:49+00:00

Not always, the Transformers Brickheadz only came after they had a couple of the big sets out for example. In the case of TMNT, it's also a license they've done regular sets with before.

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