Noice. I multiclassed as a Monk/Sword Sage (from the Tome of Battle expansion) and had fun being my party’s enforcer for a long, multi-year campaign. Most of the rest of the party were squishy sorcerers and such, so I was pretty combat-heavy to balance that out. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had.

Our DM was kind of a jerk but he was generally a good DM. After that long ass 3.5 campaign I barely ever played with him again, but kept playing with the friends I enjoyed playing with more. Constantly did one-shots on the weekends when I didn’t have too much homework.

Looks like a defense response. Didn’t sneak up behind it and scare it did you?

they make too much money off people buying replacements.

Didn’t they start offering free repairs at some point due to it being such a widespread issue? Or did they stop doing that at some point?

Between the damage to their reputation it would cause (knowingly releasing a very flawed product despite having already publicly apologized for it years ago) and the potential for more class-action lawsuits down the line, it seems like it’d be profoundly shortsighted for them to do this.

But maybe the profits from selling replacements outweighs all that in their eyes. I sure hope not. One would hope the profits from a considerably more expensive console and moderately more expensive games would be enough.

Kinda surprised to hear that, but it’s good to see it officially supported.

Still wish the game wasn’t gonna have kernel level anticheat from some relatively unknown developer.

I revisit his channel every year at Thanksgiving when I need to prepare a turkey. His super simple roasted turkey video has served me well the last 5 or 6 years.

He doesn’t really talk in his videos, but I really enjoy watching Philippe Faraut sculpt in clay. Guy has masterful technique.

I recommend Technology Connections to anyone who enjoys learning about how stuff works. I really appreciate the way this guy explains things for laypeople.

SummoningSalt is super interesting if you like learning about speedrunning. My only gripe is that the videos are all really chill, but tend to have clips of people breaking world records and flipping out, like “FUCK YEAAAAAAAHH WOOOOOOO FUCK YEAH LET’S FUCKING GOOOOO FUUUUUUCK” and it can be very jarring, lol. But I do enjoy seeing those clips in the videos.

Grand Illusions is a fun channel where an older British gentleman named Tim presents curiosities, puzzles, toys, and the like.

Honorable mention: while I don’t watch many of his videos these days, Smarter Every Day is fantastic STEM content

Electricity and sound are actual physical phenomena though

Those physical phenomena are the manifestation of the transfer of energy between systems. Electrons carry charge (a fundamental force, like gravity, which transfers energy through the system) through conduits and sound carries air pressure fluctuations (force per unit area, transferring energy through the system) through the air.

Does energy have some sort of “matter”?

Energy, in the mechanical sense, is “the ability to do work” (where work is defined as the ability to move a mass over a distance, i.e.: Force = Mass * Acceleration). The situations you described can be ultimately represented by fundamental physical principles like F=ma. Energy may be described as the medium through which matter interacts with other matter, but energy does not, itself, have matter. Though my academic background is more in the realm of mechanical physics; there may be some newfangled theoretical energy-mass superposition concept that I’m unaware of.

It only becomes sound when a listening device of some sort registers it (usually an ear, but could also be an insect leg, etc.).

Acoustic waves propagating through a medium (air) exist regardless of whether or not something can perceive it as audio. I would argue that the mechanical phenomenon we call “sound” (acoustic waves) exists regardless of whether or not someone hears it. Similar to how light (electromagnetic radiation) exists regardless of if someone is around to look at it.

I’m no expert, but I was an aerospace engineering student once upon a time. So here’s my take:

Energy is not “manmade” because it would still exist and be transferred between systems even if humans didn’t exist.

Stars would still burn. Gravity would still pull. Inertia would still inert. Accelerating mass would still require energy. There just wouldn’t be anyone around to punch in numbers into a calculator and name the concept “energy”.

Of course all math and physics are “manmade” insofar as they are theorized, discovered, and proven by humans. But these phenomena would still exist regardless of humanity. This feels analogous to asking if “electricity” is manmade. We discovered and named the physical concept; it doesn’t mean we invented it. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it still makes a sound.

I’m a big fan of this one:

“Somebody that I used to Know” by Linkin Park

I’m sad to see that the original got taken down, but someone reuploaded it here.

My friends and I started off playing D&D 3.5e in high school and college. We played it a lot over the years. Eventually we started playing 5e, and that’s mainly what we play today (on the rare occasions we actually sit down and play).

I had a friend who enjoyed experimenting with other systems like “GURPS” and “Swords & Wizardry”. We only ever played a few sessions with “Swords & Wizardry” but I enjoyed it a lot. It was an extremely lethal system where players were encouraged to be clever rather than solving problems through comat, since players weren’t particularly powerful compared to your typical monster or NPC.

Most recently, another friend introduced us to “Apocalypse World”, which we really enjoyed. We originally were just gonna play a one-shot, but wound up having a dozen or so sessions to keep the story going.

Much appreciated! I’ll give it a read.

When those memories come up, choose a different response. Laugh at yourself. Forgive yourself. Love yourself.

Any recommended reading on this topic? Choosing a different response when these memories come up is really difficult for me, personally. Even when I acknowledge that I’ve grown as a person since then, the memories themselves still just feel jarringly awful.

Adding on to this, I’ll say the term is likely used less now because, for the reasons you mentioned, the common person actually aspires to get famous for the specific purpose of selling out and making a big payday to escape the hellscape of everyday wage-slavery.

But then there are also “sell outs” that are totally situational. For example, a content creator (who I won’t name because that’s not the point) who’s an OG that’s been around for over 20 years now, constantly putting out content, never had sponsors until a few years ago. Initially I was annoyed at suddenly seeing “Sponsored by NordVPN!” and “Sponsored by RAID Shadow Legends!” in every video, but then I learned he’d had a child with his wife. And his child had a bad birth defect that required a lot of expensive surgeries.

After that, I was like, “Get that paycheck, my guy.” It’s hard out there.

I read the post title and immediately thought it might be a Technology Connections video. Great channel

I don’t wanna be a buzzkill, but if you’ve only been practicing for a month so far, I’m not sure there’s gonna be any particular resource that’s going to make you improve faster, short of taking formal lessons. It sounds like you’re already making good progress, so just keep doing what you’re doing! Read that book you downloaded, add new finger exercises to your daily routine, and drill the chords and scales and such into your muscle memory so you can do them in your sleep. But this all takes time.

The biggest factor, at least for me, was consistently practicing for years. I’ve been playing for about 17 years now and, by the end of the first year, I had spent hundreds of hours with the guitar in my hand (it was my primary hobby). I’m no rock star, but I got pretty decent by just practicing the stuff I wanted to play and learning the basic fundamental concepts like scales, arpeggios, chord structure, etc.

One good piece of advice my old man gave me: even when you’re not actively practicing, just having the guitar in your lap when you’re working on other stuff winds up making it extremely comfortable to handle. I’d sit with the guitar in my lap while doing homework, or using the computer, and would end up fiddling with it here and there, gradually getting better at navigating the neck, getting more familiar with the distances between the strings, etc.

And use. the. pinky. A lot of guitarists shy away from fretting with the pinky finger if they can avoid it, but they’re doing themselves a disservice. Put in the effort to train your pinky to fret and it will pay dividends when you start tackling more advanced stuff. Even if you can easily hit a note with your ring finger, hit it with the pinky to give the pinky more practice so it becomes second nature.

Find some finger exercises that help teach finger independence. I learned a great one from a Chet Atkins VHS tape back in the day, but I can’t find it anywhere online at the moment; I’m sure there’s a million similar exercises on YouTube though.

If you’re learning a song through a video on YouTube and it doesn’t tell you the strumming pattern or the tuning or whatever, you can probably find that info on Ultimate Guitar. I’m not affiliated with them, just been using their site for basically the entire time I’ve been playing. Has an absolute mountain of chord charts, tabs, yada yada. Very useful.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. 🎸

You might enjoy this read: https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

It talks about decoding the signals sent back by Voyager 1

I think using Apple products involves paying money to a company who actively hurts you and limits your rights

Vendor lock-in and walled gardens aren’t an Apple-specific problem, though. I’m not saying Apple doesn’t have problems that they are particularly bad for, just that “paying money to a company who actively hurts you and limits your rights” isn’t unique enough to Apple for me to consider someone not “walking the walk” for buying their products. Most mainstream phone brands have locked bootloaders that limit your rights to affect the hardware you purchased, but I’m not going to suggest someone isn’t “walking the walk” with regard to their consumer rights for owning one.

I’m not much of an absolutist. One can only do so much. But Apple is putting unreasonable constraints on consumers, and it should not be tolerated.

I agree they’re putting unreasonable constraints on consumers. I do not agree with labelling those who do tolerate it as not caring about their rights or not “walking the walk” when everyone has different, if arbitrary, desires, goals, and limitations that are unique to them.

This is the first I’ve heard of it, but it sounds pretty interesting. The new Avatar being born as one of a set of twins is a very neat idea that I wouldn’t have considered. That can create some really compelling stories on its own.

But if you care enough not to be ignorant and you still tolerate it, you might have a problem walking the walk rather than just talking the talk.

I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that people are only “walking the walk” if they take every single avenue possible to protect every single right they believe they have. I run Linux on every device I own, but the CPUs on those systems are still largely vulnerable to privacy violations from things like Intel Management Engine and other vectors caused by closed-source blobs in the firmware. Am I only “walking the walk” if I also go the extra mile to flash Coreboot or Libreboot to my devices?

If you believe in your right to privacy, you shouldn’t own a cell phone at all, should you? Even a dumb flip phone allows governments and other private entities with enough power or resources to monitor your location at all times.