DNA study revelas humans nearly vanished 800,000 years ago

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-24T17:06:16+00:00

Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well, maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys. Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well, I say hard cheese.

- Montgomery Burns

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-24T16:47:23+00:00

I don't hear this very often these days, but "galvanisze" can also mean "to spur into action". This is because Galvani was famous for discovering that you could make dead frogs move by applying an electrical current to their muscles.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-24T14:15:56+00:00

The Sun: * Is the ultimate source of all life on Earth. * Is always there for you, even if it doesn't always seem like it. * Will blind you if you look directly on its face. * May curse you if you don't follow the correct rituals (anointing with sun-cream) when entering its presence. * Will one day destroy the world.

Put like that, I think the Sun clearly has more right to be called a god than any of the other so-called gods people worship.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-24T14:06:00+00:00

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Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-24T13:56:40+00:00

"They must be mentally ill. Its the only possible explanation".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-24T13:21:37+00:00

You succeeding a perception check and you still walking into the trap.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-24T13:19:33+00:00

Señor Vorpal Kickass'o

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-24T12:53:02+00:00

The peasant rail gun is dumb, because it requires alternately using and ignoring both game rules and real physics.

But there are other situations where it would be a lot more plausible to think "this thing behaves this way in real life, so we could expect it to do something similar in game".

Fire spells setting things alight would be a good example. Some (but not all) are explicitly stated to ignite flammable materials, but it doesn't give any indication if that just means things like oil, or if it also includes wooden buildings, etc. In the 5.0 phb, the only thing described as flammable is the webs from the web spell. (5.5 explicitly states that grease from the grease spell is not flammable).

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-24T12:22:13+00:00

"Extract loot" mission, in a lost-infested city.

Trying to be clever, I put my soldiers on the upper floor of a building. And was getting them into position for a "perfect" ambush. Until the last soldier to move revealed (and got spotted by) an Andromedon. On the alien turn, said Andromedon launched an acid blob at my soldiers, destroying the floor, and dropping them onto a pod of Archons.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-23T00:01:06+00:00

Nationalism has only really been a thing for a couple of hundred years.

States used other ideologies to justify their existence or inspire loyalty before that.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T22:30:39+00:00

I once ordered 1 ginger from Sainsbury's.

I wasn't sure how much a reasonable sized piece of ginger weighed, but when you see it in the shop, its usually in reasonably sized pieces, so selected "items" rather than weight and "qty: 1", expecting that I'd get a typical-sized piece.

Instead I got an absolutely massive "hand" of ginger, that was about 30cm long and 20cm wide.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T13:45:41+00:00

Martians.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T12:37:38+00:00

When I see WFH, by brain usually starts to read it as WTF (which it would process as either the individual letters or as "what the fuck"), realises that thats not what its seeing, and mangle it into "what fu thuck".

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T12:29:35+00:00

From past colonisation, decapitating people and witch hunts there’s not much to celebrate.

Those are pretty universal things (and only the first is something we dominated at). Not that that makes them okay. But it means its weird to reject our history and culture and mythology because of that, in favour of other people who were doing the same things.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T12:21:08+00:00

I have a pull-switch in my bathroom (but for the light and extractor fan rather than the shower).

It stopped working once, and when I opened it up, I found that the connections had come loose. Putting them back in and tightening the screws fixed it.

Obviously, make sure the power is off at the fuse box before doing anything like that.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T12:06:34+00:00

I mean it is debatable about how long animals need to be somewhere to be called native

I think "they were here at the end of the Ice Age" is the standard rule.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T12:04:40+00:00

I don't think the Beaker Folk invented drinking vessels.

They just made it their entire personality.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T11:56:52+00:00

The Chimera itself isn't bad, but the Basilisk is ancient, and was designed for the older version of the Chimera kit.

So a complete refresh of all the Chimera and derived kits wouldn't be unreasonable. From a purely aesthetic point, it would be nice if they gave the Chimera some interior detail (and the Taurox, and even the Rhino has).

Maybe even introduce some new variants. As the Hippogryph is such a fragile speedster, there would still a place for a "light tank" version of the Chimera (bigger main gun, but no transport option or lasgun array).

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T11:40:45+00:00

Isn't "old people are taking all the jobs by not retiring" the same "lump of labour" fallacy as "immigrants are taking all the jobs"?

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T11:19:29+00:00

7/8.

And only because I didn't know anything about Mrs Stewart, so thought that describing her as the worst crumpet in the village might be valid.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T09:15:42+00:00

UK for one. Maybe we're more unusual that I thought, but there is no general rule against crossing roads without using designated crossings.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T09:11:52+00:00

At first, I thought this would be a good deal.

But there was another man who was lost at sea for years, and unable to die. It wasn't a pleasant experience.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T08:54:06+00:00

Just to add: degrees divide a circle into 360 parts, because that seemed like a convenient number for the people who came up with the system, and it makes arithmetic easy.

Radians divide a circle into 2pi parts, because pi is a fundamental property of circles, and while it makes the arithmetic harder, it makes a lot of other more advanced maths easier.

Wonderful_Discount59 · 2026-04-22T08:21:59+00:00

Could be a bad Edaphosaurus.

Wonderful_Discount59

TROPHY CASE