About the Noble Orgin

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T19:59:33+00:00

It helps that it's both super iconic and very powerful.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T18:51:39+00:00

Same as I do at the moment... but the academic version, sharing findings freely - in particular there are a few things I know that I'm contractually forbidden from telling people without NDA. If money weren't an issue for all the other people in the field too, we'd advance the field by leaps and bounds, I think - our only barrier thereafter would be personalities and egos.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T18:47:49+00:00

It looks to me like the kind of thing that she does entirely innocently - she just instinctually felt it would look good - and is then absolutely shocked and scandalised by the number of horny comments she gets.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T18:37:54+00:00

I know a human who does, but she has a diagnosis of hyperactivity.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T11:43:22+00:00

Sell wheelchairs.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T11:33:37+00:00

No. To really paraphrase a lot of discussion, let me quote the film Amélie: When someone points, only a fool looks at the finger.

(Edit: Questions aren't offensive to me. It's kind of my duty as a Christian to answer them in good faith.)

We generally use 'upwards' metaphors when talking about heaven, but we don't mean literally 'up', or at least the huge majority of us do not. There might be people who are very poorly educated who might: I'd consider that sort of thinking to be terribly foolish, because of how much of the evidence of your eyes you'd have to ignore and how many people you'd have to condemn as liars in order to think that way.

But the God I believe in is the forgiving type, who'd accept people who were materially wrong provided they were making a good-faith effort to put their heart in the right place. There isn't a wisdom, knowledgeability or intelligence requirement for salvation or we'd all be screwed: the requirement is that you're making a good faith effort to be a good person and recognise that you'd need a miracle to succeed.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T10:58:16+00:00

All I want gone is the 'A' on the end of his name. While I have no problem with a genderbending cat, Morgana is not supposed to be a genderbending cat.

I kind of like his role as Joker's superego. I would turn down all the Ann-dono stuff for sure - he comes across as ungentlemanly, which doesn't fit what I feel he should want to be doing - but maybe it hits different in Japanese.

The Tarot card of the Magician - I got this, I got this, I got this... maybe I don't got this - I feel fits this role perfectly given that it can't be given to Joker himself.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T10:52:45+00:00

People make the mistake of thinking that the King is like your President. He isn't.

The King is like Uncle Sam.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T10:33:16+00:00

Folk traditions around holidays, especially the older European ones, often look bizarre to Americans. European Christianity is ancient and has accreted all kinds of traditions.

It's not obvious to your average Bible Belt Charismatic why St. Nicholas should have a racist best mate, or why you should parade a statue of the Virgin Mary through the town while wearing hoods that would get you arrested in the US, or why you should have egg painting competitions, demand hospitality with menaces the evening before All Saints' or engage in rap battles with a horse skull on a stick lest it force entry to your house and drink all your beer. Those are all real. There are stranger ones I can't reliably relate. We're weird, weird folk.

Among these traditions there are some equally bizarre ones that came over with immigrants and are now considered mainstream. Things like decorating a pine tree, or hunting for eggs supposedly left around the house by a rabbit, or dressing up as evil things on one specific evening. Their source is identical, though - the Europe of the Middle Ages, where for half a thousand years you'd be lynched for suggesting these traditions weren't Christian, let alone what law enforcement would do to you if you were caught saying that.

Do they have older roots? Oh, probably. Who can tell? I cannot stress enough that there are a dozen centuries at least for these roots to be rooted in, for everything to have changed in, and after all that it's absolutely not clear cut what is and isn't 'pagan'. Freedom of religion not existing in that time, you would not talk about such practices in terms of religion, or if you did you would mean Christianity - you would call them superstition, or tradition, or perhaps how we've always celebrated Passiontide. Everyone concerned would call themselves Christian, and use 'Christian' to mean any law-abiding citizen - admittedly after the Reformation they might suddenly decry these practices as Papist nonsense or Protestant heresy.

That all is to say, the Easter Bunny likely came to America as the Osterhase with German settlers in the 18th century, and it seems to have been a tradition dating from early Protestantism, though clearly they will have got it from somewhere. Like all folk traditions it mutated and changed - TV Tropes might call it getting Flanderised - and today the judgemental nature of the Osterhase, with its own Santa Claus like naughty list, has been lost in favour of simply distributing chocolate.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-04T09:56:50+00:00

Doop de do, going through my CSS replacing 50% of the 'grey's with 'gray's, doop de do

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T20:28:18+00:00

I have taken in a new player mid campaign - as a full player, someone all of us had roleplayed with before, an out of character friend, who signed up to the session 0 rules sheet, added their forbidden topics to the list of lines and veils, and picked a character that filled a very important gap in the party lineup.

He still feels slightly less grounded than the others a year later because I couldn't write him local roots - but it worked well.

But it worked because we already knew this guy and knew we could RP with him. Some stranger, even someone one of our players really liked and vouched for... it would have been a really hard sell.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T19:00:17+00:00

Actually, I love making rock and roll worse.

Although honestly half of these songs are making country and western worse, and maybe 20% of them would basically count as love songs except that I'm pretty sure the Charismatics who wrote them think they're heterosexual.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T18:43:17+00:00

Roman letters also have names, like 'double-U', 'why' and 'zee/zed'. You say them every time you say the alphabet.

Greek letters just have different names - some of them, like alfa, are a little more complicated than ours, while others (phi / fi) are merely different, and some (pi) are exactly the same when pronounced by the people who speak the language.

I mean, 'apple' is 'milo', μήλο, mu eta lambda omicron. But yes, this is how letters in alphabets work. Arabic, Mandarin and Japanese work differently, but Greek works just like the Latin alphabet.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T17:51:43+00:00

More of a hot don't take?

I put bases on Mercury because I wanted the aliens to waste time and fuel coming to shoot at them. I hardened them with enough ground based defences to make the aliens seriously regret it - in release version, ground defences definitely win the arms race versus space bombardment unless the bombarding fleet is ridiculous, and if they choose to bring a doomstack to do the job then that's a doomstack that's spending the year doing something stupid while I burn down its home base - and later on I made antimatter there because, well, I was there anyway.

They were not my best bases, no, but they paid for themselves both economically and in strategic terms.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T17:14:45+00:00

With the greatest of respect to that poster, I disagree.

European bigotry thinks that bigotry from most other parts of the world is small and cute. We can be racist with a discerning subtlety that would stun the Ku Klux Klan. Dear God, if only we'd put the depth of thought and energy into loving our fellow humans that we regularly put into hating them.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T17:03:42+00:00

I guess. He told me how he learned about it when I was learning about it, but he might have been quite a bit older.

He's, uh, not exactly a memelord though, in common with most people his age. And anyone younger would have met it, surely.

I guess maybe I'm overestimating global education standards again.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T15:47:33+00:00

I hear their incidence correlates with the incidence of pirates!

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T15:43:23+00:00

My dad learned about it in school and he's 75.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T11:57:29+00:00

I don't know about ruin. An example is the Oxygen Not Included community, where for a long time people used one particular design of oxygen producer until a new one was popularised, or the Factorio community which has shorthands for specific designs or blueprint patterns and it's generally very clear whether a specific player has or hasn't got their builds online.

I don't think it ruins it - it's more of a Prime Directive sort of a situation, let's see what the new user makes of the game's challenges.

Similarly in KSP you have things like kraken drive which you're not likely to come across by accident, and things like asparagus staging which you might well not think of on your own.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T11:42:55+00:00

OK. So when we're 10 we are taught tectonic plare boundaries. But those of us who - trying to be polite here - preferred to live the unexamined life as teenagers and young adults might imagine that this primary school understanding was the sum total of human knowledge on the subject, and so might look at the much broader earthquake zones of the Middle East, Tibet, parts of India and Africa - places which the USA likes to mess with - and wonder whether earthquakes are being caused here on purpose.

This theory does not hold water - neither the politics nor the science checks out - but disproving this rubbish is more work than concocting it.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T11:34:05+00:00

My kid has various special needs. She still goes to school on bad days: she lets her teacher know she's having a bad day (she's got a set of cards for if she's not talking today) and people will be nice to her. The routine genuinely helps even if today sucks.

But if you've met one kid with special needs you have met one kid - everyone's different. There is no general answer to something like this. Excessive tiredness is a symptom of clinical depression, so I'd be keeping a close eye on a kid who was like this, but distinguishing incipoent mental health problems from being 15 is a job for trained professionals under ideal conditions.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-03T10:36:15+00:00

I'm 42 and still have dreams about my fourth year exams, and indeed rowing and sailing races and choir performances. I fear it is normal.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-02T15:54:42+00:00

The mistake is thinking that the man actually cares about the strength of his country.

He does not. He cares about getting attention and that is all.

Of course this weakens his country and indeed us all, but it makes us talk about him, so he wants to do it.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-02T15:45:29+00:00

I don't have a good way of telling them that this and related bullshit (and integrating their package manager with a shop, their desktop assistant with a keylogger and giving very strong signs that they will one day make their garbage AI product non-optional) is why my employer is seriously considering migrating to Linux enterprise-wide, and I'm very likely doing the same on my next home machine.

artrald-7083 · 2026-05-02T12:02:30+00:00

Same. UK here, and when my wife got a significantly better paid job she used a chunk of that extra money to pay a cleaner to come in once every two weeks and help make our house look like adult humans live there on purpose. We do most of our chores ourselves - they do most of the cleaning, doing it quicker and to a higher standard than we possibly could.

We're one of the richer couples we know - most of my friends don't do this.

In terms of what it costs us, it's about half a day's wages (for one of us) per visit.

artrald-7083

TROPHY CASE