It may be, I’ve not checked.

But it’s still not something I’d risk without full verification, and I wouldn’t really want to use it in my writing tbh. It’s already been chewed gum.

There’s not really any truly new ideas at this point, but directly lifting someone else’s creation defeats the purpose of writing for me.

Ain’t that the truth!

If you got him talking about his art, you could end up in these long, deep conversations with him, and he was always just so damn nice.

I wish like hell the account I talked to him on the most didn’t get nuked during the protests. I can’t go back and revisit those conversations now.

The guy was just well rounded, smart, and as you said very down to earth.

It wouldn’t be accurate to call him a friend, but I liked him a lot. Like, if he had figured out where I live and had knocked on my door, I would have invited him in; there’s family members I don’t let in my door, and I’m paranoid as hell about strangers showing up uninvited.

Yes, though only one has been used in my fiction, since it’s the only one that made sense outside of a ttrpg setting.

Heartstone. It’s a magically altered form of quartz. However, the alteration only occurs naturally" in that the quartz crystals have to grow in the presence of an adequate magical field. You can’t just cast spells and make it. So far, there’s never been a point to having someone figure out how to make it happen in a controlled way, but it would be possible.

Heartstone has properties useful for magicians and psychics, such as the ability to amplify or store energies of that type. It can function as a backup pool of energy you can use to cast spells and such, or make those actions more potent.

However, the biggest property it has, and the only aspect that’s shown up in fiction rather than gaming, is that it can resonate with people, allowing them to channel energy into it at scale (when the crystals are big enough) in a way that forms a field. This field has different physics inside it, and one of the properties is that the speed of light is no longer a barrier.

So, FTL ships running an Imagical drive can achieve very rapid travel within a galaxy, and speeds high enough that other galaxies are reachable in theory. The limitation is that the crystals have to be big enough as individuals, or have to be shaped enough that multiple crystals can be in perfect attunement as they vibrate. Since there’s limits to how much you can shape them at all, and the biggest crystals aren’t big enough to actually go fast enough to reach another galaxy in one human lifetime, there’s still a practical speed limit.

But you can travel between the farthest inhabited planets in a month or two, depending on the drive’s capability. Between closer planets, it’s days or weeks.

That’s the most significant one. It’s basically magical trilithium in a way, but it does differ enough in the details that it’s not the same thing, and it does a lot more.

In ttrpg only, there’s a magically crafted alloy of Heartstone and vibranium that is a much more powerful amplifier of magic energy, and can generate intense sonic effects when shaped the right way.

Obviously, that one will never be used in anything published, because I ain’t fucking with Marvel lol. Which, I’ve used vibranium, adamantium, Nth metal, and other comic based materials in ttrpg settings, and have cooked up other alloys with them as well.

I’m gonna argue with the title.

Obsolete means no longer of use, in a general sense.

Just because people don’t know that the tool is there, or don’t know how to apply it, doesn’t mean it’s obsolete. Hyphenation still has its original utility, it helps communicate in writing what is evident in speech.

I get what they mean, but the title is not accurate to the rest of the article, imo.

Well, fuck.

Had several conversations with him on reddit. No idea what he was like other than that, but he was always really great to talk to there

I don’t, because it would require a trip to the hospital. Ain’t allergies fun?

But they’re not exactly easy to digest anyway, and how they’re cooked matters to the people I know that do eat them

Jokes are the original funny meme

Why didn’t the toilet paper cross the road?

!because it was stuck in the crack!<

I picked that joke up on reddit years ago. I’ve told it to every single person I know because it’s a perfect joke. Now, many of those people tell it. Some of those people tell it too.

That’s a meme.

Infintevalence pretty much nailed it

We’re country as fuck up here. Not a small town any more, but still more rural than suburban.

While we’re in driving distance of a good hospital, it’s a drive, not something in town. There’s just not enough people to keep a hospital in use often enough to make it reasonable in a capitalist system at all, but even in an ideal, post scarcity system, the resources to build and run hospitals are going to be best located where the most people can benefit from it.

And pretty much everything scales the same. Why locate a big university in a town with maybe 10k people if you include outlying areas? To support that kind of endeavor, you’d need more people to do the work, so the town would get bigger because of the large undertaking.

It’s a balance. If you want to have bigger centralized services, you need more people to make it work. And, if you don’t already have the population, attracting bigger things is harder, so the chances of things like public transit, resource intensive facilities, exotic supplies/foods coming there are lower.

It results in people that value the benefits of a smaller population center over the usual benefits of a bigger center being the only ones that’ll move out

No worries :)

You need to check the posting guidelines. This post is empty of anything that users can do anything with

Mind you, if you’re driving far enough to go on a tangent, you should pack a bag. For that matter, you should always keep a small bag of basic supplies in your own car anyway. A change of clothes at least.

And, if you’re smart, you’ll have a go-bag for an unexpected overnight trip ready to grab in case it happens.

Of course, that comes back to the EDC mindset of preparedness.

That mindset is often compared to the old scout motto, and that’s one of the good things that scouting did.

It’s a shame scouting died off because of the bad parts of the organization itself.

You know, my uncle was the den leader for our area, and it’s something he’s fondly remembered for.

Speaking of, anyone remember back when scouting was less about badges and more about useful skills and camaraderie?

Man, I miss camping, too. Not just scouting camps, but all of it. My family would go several times a year. When I grew up, I would even go out alone and do primitive camping.

I ran into a bunch of feral dogs and coyotes back when I was doing it. Damn near got killed by them once, and ran into trouble another time.

Luckily, I always parked my car in a location that was easier to get back to that it was to get away from, if that was an option. You always want the hard hike to be towards your camp site when you’re alone because, if something happens you want a better chance of getting out in a weak or injured condition.

A long hike is bad enough if it’s downhill. But you still have a long drive back to a town or city.

Which gives you plenty of time to go off on tangential thoughts.

Being real, this is the kind of shower thought I prefer.

This particular one is inaccurate, but it’s still a proper shower thought; something that you might think of idly while your body is busy and your brain is on autopilot.

Yeah, it’s an issue for sure.

Southeast.

Well, that screen shot does change things to a degree.

However, we have no way of seeing any reports you sent, or any messages with the mods.

Since both of those are cited as reasons for the ban alongside the comments, there’s a couple of ifs involved.

If those two reasons are accurate enough, then it would switch it entirely to YDI for the ban alone. You go around fucking with reports, you get banned, and you should be. But, again, nobody here can see that, so that’s a giant IF.

If the only factor was a claim of misinformation, I’d call PTB because the mod log does not back up a claim of repeated misinformation. Nor does your user history. The links you’ve posted, the comments you’ve made in the last month or so don’t have a pattern of misinformation at all, though you do have a habit of hyperbole that might read as pushing an agenda. IMO, that’s only a problem if you’re going crazy with it, or you’re beating the drum in inappropriate communities, and I’m not seeing that happening.

But, because the ban cites behaviors we can’t see, it doesn’t serve to change my opinion on the original matter of the removal. The removal itself, not power tripping. The ban might be, but it could also be totally justified.

I will say that it is entirely possible that the mod in question could be exaggerating those other reasons, because that kind of thing does happen. But that makes the ban as evidence of power tripping useless.

Look, that’s the entire reason I disliked her as VP and as a candidate.

But the words you used, the way you used them do not accurately represent the facts of the matter.

So, yeah, it’s misinformation. When someone bends facts, that’s exactly what it is.

Hyperbole being presented as fact is just another form of misinformation.

Since the only action taken was removal of the comment, I can’t see any power tripping, just a difference of opinion about the precise definition of what makes up misinformation.

I can’t fully say YDI in this case, because you clearly weren’t acting in bad faith to break a rule.

But it also isn’t a clueless mod either.

It’s somewhere in between those two. The comment being removed was a justifiable action. If they’d done anything at all beyond that, it would have been over the line, but they didn’t.

Sin tar is the usual way, though it’ll sometimes come out more sin tawr, where the au is a bit more drawn out.

Sin tore is a fairly common one.

However, sin tar is more common, at least with what I’ve heard in meat space. That’s a fairly limited thing though, since most of the people I have talked to over my fifty years have been fellow southerners. We do tend to use softer vowels in most cases, and tar is softer than tore in the way we tend to do vowels.

However, with the latin and Greek origins of the word, I’d argue that the tar or tawr would lean closer to that than tore, just because of similar words. When an au is present in medical terminology (which is where almost all of my latin and Greek comes from) it usually gets pronounced aw or ah, not oh.

But, I never hear anyone pronounce the initial C as a K, and that’s the way it would have been in both of those languages originally. The Greek version is spelled with a K, when written with the usual alphabet rather than Greek. Kentauros.

Which is an aside.

Wikipedia lists the two I did as the usual pronunciations, fwiw. And all the dictionaries with audio options are either those two, or slight variations of them, where the au sound is rounder or flatter than the norm.

Thing is, it’s a word in a living language. Whatever the original English pronunciation may have been, that can change, so supporting a pronunciation is kind of meaningless. What matters is consensus over time, and by location.

So, a regional accent that sounds more like cent-ur is just as valid in that region, it just isn’t standard. So would any other variant be, if there’s enough people using it to be called a consensus.

Yeah, you block and report. That’s all you can do

Man, it’s crazy what folks will get up to when they’re spring cleaning their HQ.

Kinda bold of them to admit up front that ice is the same as the klan. Never would have thought a group of republicans would just put it out there like that.

Nah, the roman system developed from even older systems.

They’re tally marks, with a twist.

You take a stick and cut a notch, that’s one. This works up to a point, and that point is 4 or 5, when it becomes unwieldy, and our brains have trouble using the groups of notches.

So you need a new mark to denote a grouping. The v notch is basically adding a / to the already present \ or | tally mark, denoting that the new symbol represents a group of the previous ones.

Different methods have 3 base marks, with the fourth being the new one, others do it at five.

Roman numerals stop at 3 individual marks, and there’s no record of why. But avoiding 4 repeating symbols is consistent with the higher numerals as well.

Basically, once you hit |||, the next number with be the | subtracted from the next higher digit. It works with IX, as well as XL, XC, etc.

But, the idea you suggest is sometimes presented as a possible origin for the earlier systems. Thing is, other tally systems that originated separately follow the same basic concepts, without using the same V symbol, but using other cross marks. Not that it matters because nobody knows. Nobody back then passed the information along.

It does kinda make sense, but the idea that it’s the simplest way to make marks on sticks and stones does too