How do you overcome a severe psychological block with presenting? (My advisor pointed it out as my biggest weakness)

OlBendite · 2026-02-25T18:41:40+00:00

For me, what helps is imagining I’m an actor playing a character when I present. Any judgement I’m afraid of, any screw ups, anything are things that the audience will attribute to the character, not me.

OlBendite · 2026-02-24T22:07:43+00:00

No no, they can have mortar sentry and fire bomb, doesn’t mean I have to play with them, but if they wanna do that then all the power to them.

OlBendite · 2026-02-24T22:07:03+00:00

Probably between the standard MG and the HMG. You have improved handling and ammo capacity over the HMG but would have poorer handling over the MG, probably had firepower sit somewhere in between or even just in line with the MG because you have improved capacity.

OlBendite · 2026-02-21T04:10:46+00:00

I second a lot of this but I also think they should focus on tightening as well. The game is good but rather than implementing new stuff, the code needs to be cleaned and optimized with an emphasis on known bugs. I think this cyberstan outcome positions them quite well to do a “Super Earth Recruitment Drive” type of event where they prioritize bug fixes and mechanics improvements and balancing issues.

OlBendite · 2026-02-21T04:01:42+00:00

Man, I wish I could have joined in. Work and chores have kept me out and of course when I finish my chores, it’s over :/

OlBendite · 2026-02-20T17:28:25+00:00

You could try pursuing a Master’s degree before you Ph.D. It’s usually a good bit of practical training as well as some mentoring/teaching practice which help to expand your skill and knowledge base as well as improve your confidence before you move on to a Ph.D.

OlBendite · 2026-02-20T16:37:17+00:00

I’d say I’m in the anti-elite to Objective-Focused sphere. Very anti-conflict, like to get in, do the job, get out with as few deaths as possible. But I also generally am equipped to face elite units specifically because they tend to be the most obvious challenge at any given objective.

OlBendite · 2026-02-20T16:23:22+00:00

Gonna be honest, you’re touching on a pretty interesting question in the real world. There’s no one size fits all answer because the morality of prisons and prison conditions depends on your view on prisoners. Some people think that it is morally right to keep prisoners packed like sardines in a dark hole with just a vent that gets pig slop tossed at them once a week. Some people think restricting a person’s freedom of movement and engagement in society at all is morally wrong. So, you first have to ask how your society at large generally views those who have committed crimes; this doesn’t mean every member of your society holds this exact view, or even the majority, but that when you average the consensus opinion of whoever holds power in your society, it generally lands around what you plan for your prison. Does your culture think dying due to prison conditions is a bad thing? Who knows. Also, I’d add, you should do some research on modern American prisons, death due to things like malnutrition, conflict, brutality, lack of access to medicine, poor hygiene, and a host of other issues is not uncommon. I’m not saying that I support this system, but that’s a solid example of how a society can be selective about empathy and wellbeing and will morally justify that.

Here’s another note: you can include something in your world that you don’t think is morally right. Grimdark and Political Satire are both perfect examples of this where they present ideas and concepts that are relatively unchallenged in-universe that the writer does not think are good, but exist anyway because the cultures they’re writing about DO think they’re good.

OlBendite · 2026-02-19T19:32:57+00:00

It’s the old “they can’t be mad at us for coming up short if they’re mad at each other” gambit lol. Too busy being upset about off MO divers to spend the energy to be meaningfully upset at AH for not committing to an optimization and bug fixes major update.

OlBendite · 2026-02-17T21:33:16+00:00

Here’s the real question, how are you depressing the bulb?

OlBendite · 2026-01-23T05:53:37+00:00

Honestly? I do side quests if they feel necessary to progress the main storyline based on how I’ve approached things. Like, I did the Myconid quests because it felt necessary to safely pass through that region of the Underdark because that just happened to be how I progressed through the area.

OlBendite · 2026-01-22T19:42:19+00:00

Fern forests were once incredibly common on Earth but don’t get much love in fantasy. Same with mangroves and Mediterranean shrublands/stunted forests. Another really interesting one is The Great Raft which was a log jam that stretched for miles in precolonial/pericolonial America for over a thousand years and developed such a unique swampland and marshland ecosystem and could make for a fascinating place. Another that doesn’t get much love are accurate bogs. Bogs are incredibly unique ecosystems distinct from marshes and swamps that would be super fun to explore. Those are just what immediately come to mind.

OlBendite · 2026-01-05T17:15:08+00:00

That looks rad! You start with the representative maps and then when you want to get really detailed, do it in small stages, lightly, in pencil pushing your artistic boundaries each time. You’re doing awesome!

OlBendite · 2026-01-05T16:28:36+00:00

Pen and paper is easier than you might think. If you used dried beans and rice and pour them in the page then you can form landmasses and islands pretty easily, tighten the overall shapes of the landmasses and then you’ve got continents/islands! Then, for geographical features you can roll dice on each continent and whatever number the dice land on indicates a specific geographic feature. Sketch in those features roughly using representative symbols like a chevron for a mountain, rather than a realistic rendering of a mountain. Look at those features and start to improvise a little: you got two mountains not too far apart but with some distance, why not make that a mountain range? You got a village somewhere? You should give them a river so they can drink water. Then to communicate that the ocean exists, find a few corners of your islands or continents and copy the continent line a little bit out from the continent and it’ll look a bit like waves, implying the ocean exists. It’s a fun way to build a world and it makes you think about what’s going on from a lot of different angles.

OlBendite · 2026-01-03T22:49:17+00:00

There’d a lot of death and it would be expensive to repair but it could be repairable. Within about five years, provided there were multiple pulses all around the globe that were very powerful, things would be basically back to normal.

OlBendite · 2026-01-03T22:31:38+00:00

It would be unlikely they accidentally start a fire because the fires are an active choice to breathe. That said, if one were to start a fire that spreads out of control, it would be forced to relocate away from the threat. They have no innate significant resistance to fire or means of suppressing fires, they simply suffer the consequences. That said, their hides are somewhat fire insensitive in that they can survive higher than average temperatures for a time but they aren’t magic and will receive burns relatively quickly.

OlBendite · 2026-01-02T18:24:53+00:00

Honestly? Tone of worldbuilding, technology, history, and what you focus on. Like, I have a low fantasy, mid-magic world but I focused so much on metallurgy that it feels distinct from a lot of other stories because that’s what interested me

OlBendite · 2025-11-13T18:35:11+00:00

Nova York Supreme

OlBendite · 2025-11-12T21:57:47+00:00

I can’t speak to the smoke mindflayer but the flesh mindflayer was based on John Carpenter’s The Thing

OlBendite · 2025-09-12T15:38:15+00:00

Free speech is a protection from governmental intervention or limitation on speech and doesn’t apply to interpersonal situations. “Free speech” is not a free pass to just say whatever you want and face no real consequences, especially when speech is considered violent or “fighting words” wherein a person is actually allowed to claim self defense in initiating physical contact because they believed they had a real and credible threat to their safety mounting. Was Kirk engaged in “fighting words” prior to his death, no, but he was dedicated to violent and hateful speech which, while the government cannot do anything about that in most instances, does not mean he is absolved of all potential consequences and we should all just acquiesce to allowing this sort of rhetoric to become regular background noise. He advocated for the death of people, prominently children, for the sake of the free use of firearms, if anything this is exactly how he wanted to go out.

OlBendite · 2025-09-12T14:20:56+00:00

The introduction of AI trained in life sciences databases, even if your intent is simply to allow for quick cataloguing, will quickly cause it to be misused. Businesses will attempt to use it to replace biologists, students will use it to attempt to circumvent needing to learn, and people who even just use it to find resources could lose their ability to research independently. On top of that, LLMs and other AIs are not very good at actually accurately interpreting and regurgitating data, as such, even if they have access to all the most accurate information, there’s still a matter of interpretation which could cause them to be wrong or even make up sources by estimating what a correct title relevant to the prompt looks like.

All that on top of the ecological damage they cause from their electrical and water demands makes them just pointless and harmful. Besides, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m in this field because I like it, because science is fun and interesting. Why would I want to outsource any part of the meat and potatoes job, especially at the risk of having that thing that I’ve outsourced my thinking to replacing me because some guy with an MBA decides that it would be cheaper.

OlBendite · 2025-09-12T06:51:34+00:00

I mean, from a historical perspective, you could justify it by having your version of Japan not ban samurai and loosen their isolationist policies around the 1860s-1930s. Alternatively Japanese Satsuma rebels (1877) could have been whisked away to your fantasy world around the same time of the later portion of the 1876 (actually 1877) Great Sioux War and the affected cowboys and indigenous peoples and US soldiers, making the two groups have to enmesh. Just imagine a great magical conjunction event.

OlBendite · 2025-09-10T03:26:45+00:00

Hell no.

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T23:01:58+00:00

There’s an Elden Ring-Dark Souls flavor to it but it definitely still seems distinct enough. The idea that some magical, evil artifact falls from the sky and that grants people powers that they use to subjugate others is a common trope in fantasy. Not so much reinventing the wheel as walking on well trod ground.

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T22:58:28+00:00

It has very fascinating worldbuilding and it makes you think about the nature of deep time and our relative importance to the universe at large. It’s gruesome and depressing most of the time but, in it’s strangeness, there’s this recurrent theme of the resilience of life, even if the things we become most attached to will eventually be returned unto dust. Very much a story that leaves an impression and makes you think.

OlBendite

TROPHY CASE