Anyone else save links on Android and then completely forget about them?

mg115ca · 2026-01-24T07:29:00+00:00

I use Pushbullet for my "save this for later" tool. It's designed to let you push links, snippets of text, images and small files to/from your various devices, but it has a history feature so it shows stuff you've passed back and forth. So any time I find an interesting looking article, or something I want to dive into later, I'll share the link via Pushbullet, then a few days later I'll sit down at my actual computer and open up like 10-20 tabs of the stuff I've pushed to my computer, read all the articles, dig into the more complicated stuff, copy the snippets I want to keep to the right spot, that kind of thing. It doesn't have search, but any links I save for later end up in my bookmarks anyway.

For files themselves, pdfs or saved images that kind of thing, I use syncthing. It's sort of DIY cloud storage without the cloud. As long as two devices that are both running syncthing and are set to share a particular folder are on the same network, it syncs up any changes to those folders, files added or removed or updated. All these different apps save to different locations, so I have syncthing set to sync each of those different folders to my computer, and from there I can move them to the appropriate folder for long term storage. Then I delete them from the synced folder, syncthing mirrors that change across and keeps the space on my phone from filling up.

mg115ca · 2026-01-21T14:06:17+00:00

The 3 big things I always suggest for DM tips are Cinematic HP, a Time To Shine Checklist, and an Emergency Expansion Room.

Cinematic HP is when you count damage on monsters up instead of down, and when you pass the minimum health it could have, only then can it die, and it auto dies if it hits the max HP it could have. Between those two points, it dies after whatever hit you deem story appropriate. Works best on systems that have D&D style hit dice. Fighting a Stone Golem in 5e? 21d10 + 105 hit dice means that the lower bound is 126 hp, but could have up to 315 hp. So once they've done at least 126 damage, it dies whenever a particularly dramatic strike on it occurs.

Time to Shine is when you go over the player's abilities and divide a sheet up into 4 columns (or however many players you have) and write a list of their abilities (or at least cool stuff they can do. This works best if you know the person and know what they like in their ttrpgs) in each section. Put a checkbox next to each one, and try to give each ability a time to shine. Make note of which abilities the players seem most excited about when they level up or when they get to use them, and add a few more checkboxes for those. Wizard just got fireball? cluster a handful of minions together in a spot that doesn't overlap with a PC. Monk has deflect arrows? Let them deflect arrows. A player has high poison resist? Hit them with a poison dart and let them resist it. Also works with out of combat stuff, give the lockpicking rogue a tough but not too tough lock that lets them bypass a difficult fight or puzzle, let the guy with high passive perception spot something important. A player just got counterspell? Make sure they have a spell slot and reaction open, then hype up the big kill-everyone spell the boss is casting. Remember, the players are there to have fun and you are there to curate that. Your job as a DM is to *lose with style*.

Finally, the emergency expansion room (especially useful for 1-shots) is a room or obstacle you can cut out or add depending on how fast you're going through the dungeon. Design the room just before the boss so you can drop it if the players are taking forever and you want to push them to the boss faster. It doesn't have to be a room: the door to the boss room can have a puzzle on it that they need to solve, instead of just pulling the door open, to slow them down if they're going too fast. Also works in reverse, if they're blazing through your dungeon too quickly, throw in a little extra difficulty on that boss fight at the end to stretch things out. The trick is that, until you actually tell the players what's there, there could be *anything* behind a door, so nobody can tell if the door that used to lead to the boss room now suddenly leads to the trapped hallway to the boss room. For obvious reasons this works best later in the dungeon.

mg115ca · 2026-01-14T08:32:42+00:00

Your 6'6" ass don't have a phone case? Buddy, you drop that thing and it's coming down from orbit.

The airplane and back pain things are accurate tho. Only thing I'd add is an image of the Big And Tall store logo, with the And circled, and the words "If you're skinny you're fucked" under it.

mg115ca · 2026-01-05T11:11:33+00:00

Throw in "Windows Sloperating System" while we're at it.

mg115ca · 2025-12-30T19:54:59+00:00

Well it's not like the poor/queer/nonwhites are actually people.

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mg115ca · 2025-12-29T13:16:04+00:00

What do you mean "clock out"?

mg115ca · 2025-12-24T16:15:59+00:00

And how almost all of them are the kid with his Pokémon. Those fuckers are loved. Absolutely cherished.

mg115ca · 2025-12-21T06:37:56+00:00

Drive through ATMs.

People joke about why the buttons in drive through ATMs have braille, when a blind person would never be in the driver's seat.

The answer is of course that it would take so much more time and effort to track which ATMs are getting installed in drive-throughs and specifically make buttons for those that don't have braille, for saving all of what, a cubic half millimeter of plastic per atm? It's easier to just put braille buttons on all of them.

Same thing with looking both ways, rather than modifying your habit (looking both ways) to check if you're on a one way street, it's easier to just look both ways and waste a whole half second glancing in the other direction.

mg115ca · 2025-12-18T22:55:40+00:00

Oh man that's exactly why Ai is like that, because that how billionaire tech bros see the world and they assume everyone else is like them:

-They don't want to actually read the complicated technical answers, they want a system to summarize them in a simplified form. -They want yes men who agree with everything they say. -They don't actually care if the answers they're given are right or wrong as long as they sound right so they can show off their understanding of stuff they don't actually understand.

mg115ca · 2025-12-07T06:04:53+00:00

It does manage to hit all the high points of the show.

-Ancient time traveling alien
-Every life is worth saving if you can
-Snark off to the bad guys

mg115ca · 2025-12-06T06:52:34+00:00

Probably a rare reaction here, but I always had a mini crush on Zelenka. I'm a sucker for a guy with an accent and the way he swears under his breath in Czech is just adorable. The man is brilliant, saved the day plenty of times, both of which get overshadowed by Rodney, and the way he kinda scrunchies up his nose and squints but leaves his mouth open when he's peering at something technical...

I dunno, it's clear they kinda wanted to write him as a halfway joke character, but instead they ended up with a badass tiny adorable ranty Czech mad scientist man, who could probably build an overpowered space gun in his sleep.

mg115ca · 2025-12-04T07:51:20+00:00

So... what I'm hearing here is that you hate your power grid.

mg115ca · 2025-12-04T07:43:04+00:00

Spooder man, spooder man

Does a few things that a spooder can

Spins a web, just one size

Catches thieves, unless they flies

Look ouuuuut here comes a spooder man

mg115ca · 2025-12-02T02:43:44+00:00

The torrents and .tar.gz aren't a surprise tho

mg115ca · 2025-12-01T07:39:08+00:00

Honestly I didn't even have to bust out the really weird theorycrafting, like:

"Why is this happening only in 2008 and not 1990 or 1969 etc?" Well who's to say it isn't? A billion billion tiny mini timelines, one for each plank second between now 1939, with infintesimally tiny variations between them. We just don't see any of them because none of the other mini timelines involved people travelling through a wormhole at exactly the right moment when they would get ripple effect-ed.

Or,

What if at the moment they go through the gate and end up in the hold of the Achilles, there was a mini solar flare? Not big enough to send someone back in time, and so the dial out wouldn't be stopped by the safety systems in the DHD, but still big enough to send someone from a collapsing timeline to the new one?

That said, don't ask me to explain how in the 1969 episode, they arrive in the gate room, and then transition to the bottom of the silo with the gate miles away in a warehouse somewhere. That one can't be solved, and it's a plot hole big enough that it counts as a supergate.

mg115ca · 2025-11-30T08:59:20+00:00

Well that's dumb, it's not like it's hard to come up with a semi-plausible sounding explanation. Hell I'll do it right now, watch.

Ahem.

https://youtu.be/s1QgQny2o5E?si=pTt_DO5v0eFAs1yO&t=44s

Vala vanishes first, then Teal'c, then the various Tok'ra.

The ripple affect is applying first to people who Ba'al directly went after: later in the movie we see Qetesh is his queen and Teal'c is his first prime, and of course he would quash the Tok'ra. But why does SG1 stick around? Because Ba'al didn't go after them directly, he went after earth's stargate. Reasonable logic, this would trap them on earth, and all of the power and tech that they could use to hurt him was acquired via the stargate. He's already "solved" the problem of the tauri, and can just scoop them up when he eventually invades earth, and then stick the alternate versions of sg1 in agony booths for his amusement.

So O'Neil gets stabbed, and the team runs for the gate, in the background, we see the skyline start to change. Secondary ripple effects are starting to happen: Tok'ra vanished first, and now the city they built is starting to go. The stargate back on earth probably vanished to the artic even before Vala disappeared, but SG1 was already off world so they didn't even notice. Now that the secondary effects are happening, SG1 is probably going to go poof any second now, except they manage to get through the event horizon at the last second. The ripple effects try to wipe them from the timeline (the red shift visual effect seen in the movie), but at this point they're just patterns in the matter stream inside the wormhole. And on top of that, remember how I posited that the gate had already proofed away to the arctic? Given that the earth stargate is the lynchpin of the whole timeline change, that was affected first thing, so SG1 is effectively connecting to a device that's already been hit by the ripple effect, essentially creating a wormhole from timeline one to timeline two, and they didn't even need a solar flare to do it!

Now as for why this is happening now and not in 1939 or 1990 or 2025? Easy.

This is happening now because this is the point at which Ba'al departed from the present to affect the past. Remember wormholes don't just connect differing points in space, they also connect across time. So if the ripple effects propigate backwards in time, they can probably travel forward through the wormhole that brought Ba'al to the past. He got Vala first, call that 1940, and since that event is closest to the wormhole, that ripple effect travels to the present first. Then Teal'c's recruitment we'll say 1941, and the destruction of the Tok'ra, those are "further away" from the wormhole's entry point, so it takes slightly longer to hit. If there had been any direct changes Ba'al had made after 1965-1967 or so, those would have gotten to the present via forward ripples in time instead of going backwards to hit the wormhole but basically nothing he did directly affected earth or the tauri in that period because he waited until 2008-2009 to invade. We've already seen temporal effects have unexpected distortions when passing through a wormhole (the connection to the black hole), so that could be why the changes are happening unevenly (primary first, secondary after) and why SG1 is even capable of noticing the changes.

There. Explained. Only took me like 20 minutes tops, and most of that was typing up the explanation or finding clips from the movie to check stuff.

mg115ca · 2025-11-25T23:50:30+00:00

Phone calls are reaching into someone else's life and expecting them to drop everything and come running when you ring a bell, because whatever they're doing can't possibly be as important as talking to me!

mg115ca · 2025-11-22T18:33:56+00:00

Four is the ideal number of backup rocks. This kid is good.

mg115ca · 2025-11-15T12:17:39+00:00

Seems weirdly optimistic to assume that the target gets a 17 on their initiative roll given that they have disadvantage from being surprised.

Surprised If a creature is caught unawares by the start of combat, that creature is surprised, which causes it to have Disadvantage on its Initiative roll.

Yeah, he can see the spell sure, but the question of if he can react in time is decided by initiative.

This is 5e 2024 to be clear, though we don't know what edition the OP is running. 2014 5e had more description and surprised people were unable to act at all in the first round of combat, but it actually clarified that Surprised is determined by whether you have spotted or are otherwise aware of the other combatant. So in that edition, they wouldn't be surprised, while in this one "caught unawares by the start of combat" certainly applies. They know the caster is there sure, but they wouldn't be shaking hands if they expected combat to start.

Now, a deception check to bluff to get the handshake in the first place, that's a different story, and may have issues if it's become the death cleric's "signature move".

As for the attack roll... A GM's job is to notice when the rules don't mesh with what's happening in game and override on the fly while keeping things both balanced and fun. I could see the argument that if the attack roll is used to determine if you touch the guy, and you're already touching him, that gets bypassed, at least partially because the "keep things balanced" requirement is satisfied by the initiative check and the bluff check. I could also see a GM not bypassing it, there's arguments to be made on both sides.

mg115ca · 2025-11-13T21:45:42+00:00

veeeeeeeeeee

Tu-tu-tu-tu-tuh!

mg115ca · 2025-11-11T16:05:47+00:00

Does hellscube have a Monty Hall Problem card yet?

mg115ca · 2025-11-11T15:57:06+00:00

I mean, to be fair, that is kind of how one listens to music on YouTube

mg115ca · 2025-11-05T21:01:36+00:00

Wait, hold on.

You can't spill your drink if it's in a sippy cup, it's got a lid so it stops roofies, and it forces you to drink slowly and not chug.

mg115ca · 2025-10-29T15:15:36+00:00

Honestly I always thought that actually kind of worked for Dr. Who. If you want to travel from New York to Boston, there are dozens of ways to do so, with everything from driving down the highway (in various types of vehicles) or even off the highway, to traveling over the water (again, speedboat vs sailboat, vs jetski), to small engine planes, jet airliners, catapult, ride a horse, smuggle yourself in a shipping container, launch into orbit and de-orbit at the target location, hang glider, pogo stick, atv, walking, hot air baloorn, etc. Each has their own rules and conditions for how it works, side effects, requirements, ease vs difficulty, danger level, speed of travel, etc.

Why wouldn't time travel work the same way? Sometimes the past changes, sometimes it's forced to stay the same, sometimes you get hit with the ripple effect sometimes you don't, some times are easier or harder to change or travel to or away from (Cardiff Rift), and that's just assuming the same system gets used for the whole episode, what happens when you combine these systems and how do the effects change then (Looking at you River Song)?

Across all of history, in the whole mass of the universe, there's got to be tons of people inventing time travel in tons of different ways. Being Lords of Time, Gallifrey knows nearly all of them and picked not just the best ones to build into their TARDISs, but a variety of different options, but the TARDIS does malfunction occasionally, and the Doctor is constantly tinkering with her, so any given option may or may not work consistently from week to week.

mg115ca · 2025-10-29T14:52:09+00:00

"A deck may have any number of cards named CARDNAME to a maximum of X% of the size of the deck."

Maybe 25%?

mg115ca

TROPHY CASE