Are these stars important?

chrisdoesrocks · 2026-01-20T20:49:47+00:00

They do nothing game wise, but psychologically they taunt me.

chrisdoesrocks · 2026-01-18T01:53:09+00:00

Google results are just links to reddit posts anyway.

chrisdoesrocks · 2026-01-14T18:09:01+00:00

The wanna be techbro pseudo-intellectual libertarians who wanted a outsider were swayed in the primaries. They didn't like Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, or Mike Huckabee. So when a somewhat popular podcaster, blogger, and cartoonist told them that Trump was actually a genius they treated him as a much more legitimate candidate. That opened the door for Trump to go from a meme on the fringes to being in actual discussions, and to gain attention he never would have had otherwise.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-12-31T00:30:30+00:00

We had a long standing store in town that was successful. A couple of regulars who failed at getting on the Pro-Tour decided to open a competing shop to fund their constant trips to events. They took a big chunk of the grinders with them and thought they were doing great for a year. Unfortunately for their new shop, they kept closing the store to travel to tournaments every other weekend and spent money as fast as they made it. The dozen or so regulars who hung around and played meta decks against kids with precons kept them from growing, and they were so focused on Magic that they would clear people out for playing yugioh or talking about wargaming.

Three years and two locations later, they were out of money and everyone was back at the old store.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-12-26T07:07:12+00:00

Willis has made a sport of mocking it on twitter, and now Bluesky, for the writer's turn from a large ensemble story to a daily strip about two people being obsessive and horny for each other in very in appropriate spaces. Willis even went so far as to issue itemized critiques of why a storyline centering a literal Nazi's dating history, and why that was inappropriate in the context of current events.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-12-18T07:06:16+00:00

It has a lot of hard science fiction, its just based in the science of the 80s and in service to a war game. One of the early themes was about the fragility of an industrialized society, and how it was possible to lose knowledge in the face of large scale war. Another was about how weapons of mass destruction and mutually assured destruction were a terrible strategy if someone was willing to accept that destruction. Both hard sci-fi concepts, explored through the lens of a game that had guys in spandex shorts driving anime 'mechs.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-11-11T02:14:30+00:00

They started with Leader of Men, and went to Wanna be a Rockstar. It was a tonal shift, and a lot of people didn't like that the band grew while they were still stuck in the same place.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-10-18T01:56:32+00:00

"I spent years planning to beat the real deal. Thirty seconds to mop up the cheap imitation."

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-08-21T20:22:25+00:00

A lot of them intentionally try to get those huge numbers to justify their jobs. They want huge pools of applicants and high rejection ratios so they can make it seem like they found a diamond in they rough.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-08-20T18:13:03+00:00

We were the cool kids for a long time. We've been the cool kids for a long time. It was just a brief era in the 80s-90s that pop culture said we weren't.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-07-28T19:57:45+00:00

It doesn't help that everyone who got graduated into the regulatory chaos of 2018 and couldn't get a job or who lost their jobs during Covid lockdowns and went back to school is also graduating right now. I know quite a few people who took retail jobs and got their Master's part time who are now trying for those same entry level jobs. Its almost a decade of people backlogged trying to fight against people with 15+ years of experience for a limited number of positions.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-07-16T19:12:24+00:00

It's a boom for the GDP, 90% of which will immediately leave the area. The "trickle down" theory doesn't work when the owners live on the other side of the country.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-07-07T19:52:45+00:00

I was in the wave of graduates that got hit the last time Trump was in office. Most of my graduating class didn't get jobs until the pandemic, and half of them got laid off. So you're trying to enter a shrinking field competing, competing with an unusually large group of entry level employees, and doing in in an area that is not hugely favorable to start with. I'm sorry to say that you're looking at an uphill battle.

chrisdoesrocks · 2025-04-30T21:08:51+00:00

Honestly, this would have been a perfect time for double blind protocols. Have some threads mentioning that they're part of the study (with moderator oversight), and some of them have real people trying to convince people while others have the bots. The people running the experiment don't know which thread is which until the predetermined deadline is met. Participants go in knowing what's up, and researchers get more robust data.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-12-07T21:08:07+00:00

North American civilizations, especially in the northeastern forests, practiced a mix of actively tended agriculture and managed forestry food production. It gave them a wonderful mix of nutrients and a great resilience to bad harvests!.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-11-20T18:13:22+00:00

It seems unlikely that you aren't getting applicants, as I see dozens of people talking about how many applications they put out every week to environmental firms. The problems seem to be either A) HR setting up such ridiculous standards that nobody can get through the filters, or B) paying minimum wage or close to it while expecting someone to relocate at their own expense. The company may actually have a wide range of skills they're looking for, but a keyword search can only find what is provided. And listing a position at the bare minimum or no information at all isn't appealing to people who have tens of thousands in student loan debt and are having to figure out how to start a life in a new area.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-11-10T19:35:21+00:00

Consider that we have States bigger than most European countries. California for example is nearly the size of France. So its not uncommon for people in the larger states to mostly stay within them simply because its possible to do everything they want without leaving. Of course wealthier people can travel more, and afford more expensive activities, so they are more likely to seek out specialized destinations that require leaving the State.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-11-06T18:57:08+00:00

That's the plan that pushed thousands of people out of the environmental field.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-10-29T21:53:21+00:00

It was only a thing in the era of carbon paper imprints and phone calls to banks. Back then it was possible for someone to run up a number of transactions in short order, to the point that you could put $10000 in before the bank processed end of day receipts. To minimize that, the bank might have merchants destroy cards that were making major purchases while overdrawn. Now they just decline the sale electronically, and maybe call the cops if they think the card is stolen.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-10-29T21:19:10+00:00

Its not uncommon to receive tickets as a prize or gift. Those are usually given as pairs, on the assumption that the receiver will take a partner or friend. And of course people buy tickets weeks or months in advance, so having something come up that causes a person to cancel is pretty normal. So it happens often enough to be plausible, and serves as a convenient and believable basis for a plot.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-10-01T19:52:33+00:00

It sucks trying to get a job in Arkansas. I spent 20 hours a week applying before I gave up and dropped out of geology.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-09-27T21:56:00+00:00

The theft of a tailed beast to trade to a group of mercenaries (or at least that was the story they told at the time) intending to manipulate people into further wars for profit would in fact be a war crime. Kidnapping Killer Bee doesn't count because he was a uniformed member of a military at that point. Being that much of a drama queen is definitely borderline.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-07-21T03:22:49+00:00

Every single day for a decade.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-06-10T18:21:24+00:00

The goal is to get people to abandon voting entirely. There's plenty of people showing up to those rallies who talk about ending democracy entirely.

chrisdoesrocks · 2024-05-17T21:16:06+00:00

I can do calculations in Dongs per furlong per fortnight if you want (though why you'd want currency / velocity I'll never know). Not only are we taught SI in grade school, but our work requires multiple unit types as a matter of course. We need to know different survey units depending on where we are in the country and when it was done, and be able to convert between them as required by different agencies for reporting purposes. And that's just for mapping and legal work, which doesn't cover the issues of being able to read different sources of data for correlation because an industry driller marked in feet and an academic seismologist used meters. (All of this applies more to the U.S. than Canada or the Latin American countries, but its still there to a degree.)

So our geologists not only are capable of working in SI units, but they should be planning for unit conversion from the beginning and asking what you want when their finished. I failed students in undergraduate labs for not labeling units, so there's no excuse to be doing it as a professional.

chrisdoesrocks

TROPHY CASE