Thank you for writing the comment for me so I didn’t have to. Every history nerd I know in my life is a woman except one. The women know all sorts of interesting contextual things ,the origins of traditions, crafts, foods, the local area, and social development. The guy I know knows all about wars and battles amongst other classic History things. Both are valid and count!

Here’s a fun one from a story told at a panel from a con:

Siddig (Dr Bashir) was asked when he believed his character was replaced by the changelings, and did he make any acting choices related to that. His response was utter confusion and surprise, because he never knew that Dr Bashir had ever been replaced in the storyline. During the time of filming, he hadn’t been reading the full scripts, only memorizing his lines, because he was playing too much Ultima Online.

This was exactly my play too, mind locusts were crazy OP, especially with movement bonuses over Xenofungus. I usually played Zahkarov over Deirdre but the result was always the same, lol. A planet covered in Xenofungus and a massive mind worm/locust army. That game is so good, I was immensely disappointed in Beyond Earth. It couldn’t live up to the original unfortunately

Try Debian based Linux Mint with the KDE plasma desktop environment. Linux has its issues but they’re honest issues. Linux has hiccups because a bunch of volunteers are trying to build an airplane while flying it, while Windows has a bunch of C suite goons purposely creating a hostile user environment to monetize you for every red cent.

I think when people talk about “falling behind” they’re actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.

Same, when I read through the Bobiverse series it was quite evident the author believes in biological determinism, great man theory, is at least somewhat sexist and feels squeamish around queer people. He doesn’t outright say those things but it comes out in which characters are focused on, their actions, and the consequences of them. It’s an entertaining series but for me it was hard to ignore the red flags.

If Narnia is real, the most important thing for all people is owning a wardrobe and keeping the hinges on it.

We live pretty frugally in comparison to our peers. Less than $30 a month in subscriptions, our utility bills are low, we eat out maybe once a month and every other meal is made at home. We thrift and get just about everything we can second hand from yard sales or friends. It used to be that we were putting aside money, now there’s less extra. We’re getting ready for worse, and planting fruit trees, learning gardening and canning, and reaching out to our neighbors.

Baguette from the grocery store, brie cheese and some berries. Sounds fancy but it’s easy, and aside from buying the things requires no effort. Tear off chunks of bread with your hands, slap a slice of room temp brie on it, eat. Then eat berries. Cherry tomatoes work too, just eat them whole. Great with a glass of wine if you’re having a Day, but cold water is nice too.

Been daydreaming about a city builder sim that realistically characterizes cars. No “magic parking”, no perfect drivers, with pollution mapping, traffic deaths, an average commute time per citizen as a statistic, that kind of thing.

I imagine it starting out exactly like Cities: Skylines, where you start building out your town with commercial and industrial and residential zones. As you lay out roads and utilities, the citizens keep demanding more parking and bigger roads. If you build them, your town becomes mostly parking lots and huge, dangerous roads. People complain about living near pollution, loud car noises, traffic deaths and commute times. Your town would have negative income from all of the building and maintenance costs and constantly be needing to be bailed out due to how expensive it all is.

The trick, then, would be not to listen to the complaints from car drivers. The only way to build your town where the budget is balanced properly is to increase density, utilize mixed use areas, and to build as few large roads and utility corridors as possible. The game wouldn’t tell you this outright, it would simply give you realistic price tags and maintenance costs compared to people moved and let the player problem solve and optimize.

There would be a robust palette of micromobility options, public transit, greenways and parks and pedestrian areas. Car access would be optional for building placement and based more on emergency vehicles or services. You could design your own streets with your desired configuration of bike paths, street cars, pedestrian walkways and green spaces and save templates to use elsewhere.

There would be lots of beautiful middle density building models, parks, and plazas, and a mode where you could rehabilitate an already developed car centric city.

If someone made this game I would be so happy and play it all the time, making a perfect transit utopia

My point is that if you want to win in a first-past-the-post voting system, if you can’t get everyone to vote for your candidate the next best thing is to stop your opposition from showing up. Common tactics are limiting who has access to polling places, purging people from voting rolls, adding barriers to registration, and sabotaging mail-in ballots, but you can also encourage apathy, purity testing or erode faith in the electoral system, all of which work to allow a party with a minority of supporters to win an election.

Friendly reminder that a common propaganda tactic is to discourage your opposition from voting

Yeah! Pizza dough is pretty easy, it’s basically flour, water, yeast, olive oil and time. A pizza pan is <$20. I’ve played with a lot of weird flavors and toppings and a white pizza is fantastic with apple slices, some ham and a drizzle of honey.

Here’s a recipe I found that seems similar to the one I like to make, but I’d skip the arugula

Apples are so good on a white pizza!

Cilantro, with the soapy gene. It tastes like soap, but eh, I kind of like it.

I know you said insulation is less of a concern but I gotta put in a good word for Baffin boots. Waterproof, with replaceable and removable insulated inner liners. The difference wearing those makes in snow is immediately perceptible, and they all have good traction too. I have bought used pairs and all but one set (my kid’s) still look pristine after multiple seasons.

Bogs also seems to be good quality, though I haven’t worn them myself. Their insulated rain boots have withstood an impressive amount of abuse from my kiddo.

If you have any quartz you can put it by your citrine and amethyst and they will all go nicely together by all being forms of quartz! You could also put some calcite by the amethyst, because amethyst likes to grow next to calcite (something Minecraft got right)

Some HOA’s are literally just to pay for the maintenance of a shared private drive, which IMO is reasonable. So, we explicitly refused to make any offers or consider any homes in HOA’s which didn’t let us see their charter. Interestingly enough, that was all of them… makes you think.

My Swiss friend got me converted to Kaegie chocolates, same concept as KitKat but so much more decadent!