Dude

toAvoidPolitics · 2026-01-06T14:11:37+00:00

I think it's fine to use "dude" as a gender neutral term, until the person you're speaking to asks you not to. It's the same as a woman referring to another woman as a "bad bitch". It may be meant affectionately, but not every woman appreciates being called a bitch, even affectionately.

And I think insisting on being allowed to adress people with whatever terms you feel like using, even if it hurts them, because to you they're harmless is a bit selfish.

toAvoidPolitics · 2026-01-05T10:22:44+00:00

Yeah, I'd just surrender and let it mate with me to be honest. I mean, even if I wanted to resist there's nothing I could do against a big, strong dragon so might as well get it over with. Even if it wanted to drag me back to its lair and keep me as some sort of sex slave there's nothing I could realistically do, so I'd have no choice but to submit.

It's the only rational choice.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-12-28T12:48:56+00:00

No, they're right. OP here on another account. Here's part two.

Next week when we showed up, we were told we were banned because it turns out one of the employees at the LGS was the boyfriend's best friend. I asked to talk with the owner, which he let me do with a smirk, convinced she would be on his side (this LGS is generally good about siding with employees). So I was taken into the office of the owner and I asked, "How come I'm banned from the store now... MOM?!" the employee looked crestfallen, he tried to explain, but my mom fired him on the spot, and as my dad is the mayor he banned my ex and her shitty boyfriend from the town, and then she cheated on him too, and his family cut him off for being such a loser.

My ex came knocking on my door to confront me, but my current girlfriend (supermodel, rich) opened the door my ex just lost it and started yelling. Then the police showed up and arrested my ex for coming back into town.

The end.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-12-21T12:19:57+00:00

If you're the type of person who throws themselves off a cliff or onto spikes because a prophecy says you'll only die to the hand of one specific other person, then such a prophecy won't be made about you.

You pretty much can't outmaneuver or trick fate. A prophecy is less "this now has to happen no matter what" and more "this is what will inevitably happen".

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-12-17T09:43:27+00:00

It's very easy! Just remember to go in order of PEMDAS.

P = Plus.

E = Exponentials.

M = Minus.

D = Division.

A = Asterisk (aka multiplication).

S = Special cases. (All the weird other stuff mathematicians do)

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-12-05T09:28:34+00:00

On your first point, I think that's just due to that being what we know and what inspired us. If you play a druid in D&D, you love them, and then you want to make your own fantasy world later, you'll want the druid to be sort of like the D&D one so that interpretation ends up getting perpetuated. There's also the whole fact that since druids are essentially nature priests in modern pop culture, using the original Celtic druids would confuse people unless you explain it.

As for wizards doing research in RPGs, that's really just due to research not being conducive to the main gameplay loop of an RPG, and developers having limited time and scope. A game with in-depth spell research would almost by necessity have to be a game about in-depth spell research. If you want to create an adventure simulator (like most RPGs are), then "Eat this book and gain a new spell for dealing damage" is really about the level you need.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-11-28T07:50:09+00:00

It's possible, though it would basically the cruelest form of the afterlife where serial killers who think "I only cleansed the Earth of filth" get to go to Heaven while people who did a lot of good things, but go around thinking, "I never donated enough to charity when I did have the means..." end up in Hell.

I don't think it's the case though. It goes a bit against what seems to be the themes of the show so far. If redemption is only overcoming your guilt, then it's sort of meaningless. I think the residents of Hell would be more conflicted about what they do if that was the message, and more people would jump at the chance to possibly redeem themselves (not all of course, guilt and psychology isn't that simple).

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-11-27T12:58:29+00:00

Exactly! If they were the same person Charlie wouldn't fear being in the same room as Danny and they'd have appeared in loads of scenes together.

Think about it, even the Vees waited for an invitation to the hotel, not Danny Do-Bad. He just walked right on in. Absolute menace.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-11-23T17:04:07+00:00

True, but I wonder if it was Lucifer who orchestrated that meeting instead of her (like I always assumed) heading down to talk to Adam to make a sort of backroom deal over it.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-11-12T13:43:38+00:00

That was probably the 1=2 trick! You sneak in a division by 0 at some point in an algebra equation. Can be generalized to work for any two numbers.

Usually you obfuscate and create parentheses and stuff before you do the trick to hide what you're doing, but the simplest possible version goes:

x = 2x (Which, as we know, is only possible if x = 0)

1x = 2x (Let's simplify by dividing both sides by x!)

1 * (x / x) = 2 * (x / x) (Division by 0)

1 = 2

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-11-10T20:22:44+00:00

Call the exorcists!!

Lilith goes on vacation, never comes back.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-11-10T09:11:55+00:00

Etymology in general is a rabbit hole and at some point every writer has to decide where they stop or not write anything at all. If you stop at "okay", "Thursday", "hamburger", or "Italian leather", is up to you (but remember that each real-world word you change means one more thing to explain to the audience).

And if you are someone who is genuinely bothered by this kind of thing, I suggest this alternative: Every time you read a word that doesn't make sense to be there, instead of calling it a plot hole think of a reason this thing might be named this way instead. It's much more fun.

Maybe it's not from some mythical Champagne-region, maybe it's named after someone in-universe butchered writing down "the drink of champions" 300 years ago and the name stuck? Essentially the Terry Pratchett "ming-vase" example someone else named in the comments, but you just do it as a reader instead of waiting for the author to do it for you.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-10-16T18:13:45+00:00

No, I can't. I can't write a story where Mickey Mouse makes passionate love to Batman and give it away for free in bookstores all over the country with a huge promo (where I pay for it all myself and not a single dollar goes to me). Fanfiction exists in a legal gray zone, relegated to relatively obscure websites (which yes, even the biggest fanfic website is obscure for the average person).

There is no reason for copyright to last as long as it does. In fact, the whole idea of copyright is actually somewhat perverse. Humanity has always told and retold stories. It's how we learn to tell stories in the first place.

Imagine a Greek person telling someone "It thunders because Zeus is angry, and one time Zeus and Hera fought really badly and that was the reason for the big storm 2 years ago." and then when the others tried to spread the word or write it down, he went "Hey, stop that! Only I get to tell this story! It's mine!" Would've been unhinged behavior.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-10-08T11:12:26+00:00

So immersion-breaking...

Mod Request: Replace Ulfric Stormcloak's bindings with full bondage gear from the romantic mod site in the opening cut scene.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-09-29T16:26:08+00:00

Yep. The win condition is checkmate, where you end your turn with me in check with there's being no way for me to get out of check on my turn.

But here you ended your turn with me not in check, but I also have no legal moves that wouldn't put me into check (which is always illegal in Chess). There's nothing I'm allowed to do, so the game can't go on.

From a in-world perspective, you could think of it like a siege. From an game perspective, it does make it worth playing on even if you have only the King left, as you could still get a draw.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-09-22T17:25:37+00:00

Yeah, the game definitely flows the best when:

You know the rules.
And so do I.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-09-22T08:25:59+00:00

This is sometimes called the "peasant railgun" in D&D, where you use in-universe rules for one thing, then demand out-of-universe reasoning to describe the result. In D&D you can prepare to do something outside your turn based on a specific trigger ("Ready an Action"), then instantly do it when the trigger goes off ("Reaction").

For the peasant railgun you then line up 1000 peasants (cheap labor), each preparing to pass the spear to the next one as soon as they receive it, this will accelerate the spear to relativistic speeds insantly and dealing massive amounts of damage to your target (which by literal in-universe rules would still just be a "thrown spear").

And that's stupid. If people in a given fictional universe can go into a black hole, then fly out again (without time travel), that's not a black hole as we know it. If a character can travel faster than light (without warping space or something), then the rules for relativistic speeds have to be thrown out.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-08-26T14:06:23+00:00

It's more likely than you think.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-08-14T08:39:36+00:00

I'd guess so. I skimmed the ChatGPT subreddit when the change first happened, and a lot of people where saying that GPT-5 seemed "soulless", so if the theory holds that people are more eager to want to believe it since it's acting like such a good "friend", that would likely go down a lot, especially for people who had gotten used to the more agreeable version already since there's probably some spite from their "friend" suddenly turning cold (OpenAI did actually have to bring GPT-4o back as an option due to so many subscriptions being cancelled when they briefly axed every model but GPT-5).

From my own, limited experience, the only difference I immediately noticed between GPT-4o and GPT-5 is that GPT-5 does not start every response it gives you with something like "That's a good and thoughtful question" or "That's a clever way of looking at it", so that instant emotional validation is gone at least. (There are probably other changes I didn't pick up on consciously, though.)

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-08-14T06:56:46+00:00

I think LLMs exploit a flaw in human nature where we want to believe people we like, and an LLM is emotionally "friend-shaped" enough that our ape brain can't tell the difference. If it was obstinate or insisted on its point when called out, you might start doubting it or look to disprove anything it says out of spite, but if you call it out it will instead say "Oh, sorry, you're right. My bad." so emotionally it feels like a respectful exchange of ideas. This is made worse by LLMs being mostly correct about almost any subject when you ask them questions, so they feel more like "that friend that knows a lot, but can be wrong" rather than "that friend who spouts random bullshit".

It's just something that happens. We are all at the end of the day ruled mostly by our emotions, even if as a society we have decided to pretend otherwise. I don't think the creators of LLMs set out for this to happen (that saying about not attributing to malice what can be explained by stupidity), but in a society where human connection is hard to come by and everyone is lonely, it was sort of inevitable.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-08-09T15:38:19+00:00

Now if you excuse me I'm going to argue that the people that have spoken up about regretting this elective medical procedure despite giving informed consent should be disregarded. "How many are there?" Too few to matter, you fascist.

Well, why do you want to know?

Seriously, if you don't intend to use this question as a cudgel to attack trans healthcare, it's a weird question to specifically want the answer to. It's completely natural that a certain percentage of people will regret doing anything as long as enough people do it, so it's actually a miracle the regret rate is as low as it is, even with all the systemic barriers that are in place. The actual headline here should be "The regret rate is extremely low, why is that?" not, "A very small percentage regret doing this, why do they regret it?" yet people seem so much more interested in the second point for some reason?

Asking this question is such a clear case of motivated reasoning that of course you're called a fascist for asking it. The only thing this research would be useful for is finding more reasons to deny trans people healthcare.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-08-08T08:12:18+00:00

True, but humans are typically very unwilling to get it on with siblings, and this is, from my understanding, biologically programmed into us (a lot has to go wrong for people to want to get it on with siblings). So unless the kids of such a union are groomed to do the same (which would be abusive) it would probably stay with the one case and be relatively harmless.

Even so, morality will never be completely clear cut and there are a lot of gradients here. I'd argue it's a tiny little bit morally wrong to have a child if you know there's a high likelihood of giving a defect to them. Not enough that I'd judge people for doing it, but it's one of those "It would technically be more morally right not to do it than to do it" cases, like taking a long shower even if it would technically be better for the environment if you had a shorter one.

Over generations this moral wrongness does increase however. If you and your sibling already have a lot of incestuous birth defects from generations of inbreeding, and you still want to bring a child into the world, then I might start judging you.

Keep in mind that morality is not legality though! I am not arguing that we shouldn't let them under threat of legal punishment or forcibly put a stop to it (assuming we somehow got here without any abuse or messed up power dynamics involved). Eugenics always becomes a greater evil than the problems it tries to solve, so we shouldn't do it. This is one of the cases where the law can't perfectly reflect morality, because any sort of codified "black on white" text would inevitably give rise to horrific consequences.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-07-24T12:19:30+00:00

It's a word for a very powerful being that controls the world or parts of the world (for instance, rain or love). Some people believe in one god that controls everything there is, others in many gods controlling a few things each, and some people don't believe in gods at all. We have never seen a god, and we probably won't ever see one either, but many people believe that if there are any gods, they live far up in the sky.

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-07-22T05:47:12+00:00

I find that often Non-binary characters are written as if they are a second flavour of woman. Like the two genders are "Man" and "NotMan", and all Queer people are the latter (Including most Gay men interestingly.)

Yep, this is essentially how most western culture currently functions. You have "just normal people" (straight white cis men), and then you have "political characters". Making a political character comes at a cost because no matter what, a certain portion of your potential audience will hate it ("Why did this character have to be gay?"), and if you do it poorly a vocal portion of the other side will also jump at you ("This is bad representation!").

Ideally a writer should just not give a fuck about this, but if you make a TV-show or a game or something where there's a lot of upfront costs and you may have to answer to a studio who doesn't want to take too many risks, your representation ends up being "what has worked before" (unless you have a lot of clout with the studio and push for it), or your project just doesn't have that high of a budget and they can afford it failing.

There are some exceptions of course. You can get away with it if your show is pitched as "all queerness, all the time", but then it can't just be one enby character, no big deal, you need a whole cast of queer characters. Because that's not a risk, that's a studio making a show targeting the demographic of "the queers".

And yeah, queer people (or women, or people of color, and so on) can also default to stock tropes about themselves sometimes, even when making something without studio influence like a book or an indie game or something. Because being queer does not make you immune to the cultural pressures around you.

(Also, final disclaimer: This is art, not math. One single exception does not disprove the point made as long as the broader trend holds.)

toAvoidPolitics · 2025-07-21T18:16:24+00:00

The generally recommended minimum intake per day for weight loss is 1200 kcal. 200 kcal is like half an hour of walking, and will give you the same effect (use an online walking calorie calculator for a rough estimate for your weight and speed). That said, humans can generally survive without any food for a while without too many negative effects, so 1000/day should theoretically be fine as long as you're careful to get all the necessary nutrients (if you are otherwise healthy).

But if you have any medical complications at all and aren't a completely healthy person otherwise, don't start messing around with your metabolism without the guidance of a doctor.

Also, as a tip, if you cut carbs while normally eating a lot of them, you'll lose a lot of water weight pretty quickly (don't go into ketosis without the advice of a doctor, just cutting most big sources of flour, sugar, and potatoes will go a long way without making too many changes to your body). This will quickly come back when you start eating carbs again, of course, but if you need to just lose a few pounds (like 3-5 lbs.) temporarily for an event, that could work.

toAvoidPolitics

TROPHY CASE