I once got to do a tour of a historic fort, and when we visited the magazine the guide told us that garrisoned soldiers were issued wooden button fly trousers. They couldn’t use a zipper because a spark might set off the gunpowder, and also they hadn’t been invented yet.

I’m sure it probably varies geographically, but when the plastic ban came first came into effect for us you’d see a lot of reusable shopping bags that were made from plastic.

I remember reading a study that suggested the typical reusable plastic bag used as much plastic as two-thousand disposable bags. So if you had one of those bags, you’d have to use it once a week for forty years to offset your plastic karma burden.

But anyway, as they say, you should bring your own bag because otherwise they’ll make more disposable bags. It has to be legislated, otherwise corpos are going to corpo and we’ll continue drowning in plastic.

These shopping bag bans don’t go far enough imo. The amount of plastic in packaging, shipping, medicine, fishing, whatever industry you choose - it’s just mind boggling.

Here’s a funny plastic quibble I have: a store near me sells bread which comes in a plastic bag, but the little clip/tag to tie off the bag they recently switched to cardboard. A token gesture, but hey, it’s still nice to see. Now if you want to buy in bulk, you can buy a bag of bread with two bags of bread in it. The outer bag is tied off with a plastic tag.

Pluto is and will always be Hot Shit.

Actually, it’s very cold on Pluto. Which makes Pluto cooler than Fonzie

What doesn’t kill you might succeed on a second attempt.

My mouth hurts so that my heart doesn’t

I can’t find anything concrete online, but my assumption is that it has to do with the adventure / module design.

Consider a scenario where the party is going to go kill a lich, but first must delve into the lich’s lair before they may fight.

“Prophet” being that the party is forearmed with the knowledge of what the final encounter will be - and perhaps some intelligence on the dungeon.

“Squeeze” where the party has encounters that drain their resources. Those grenades / fireballs are going to be handy for fighting the lich, but they’re also useful for dealing with the lich’s zombie army.

“Monster” where the party finally encounters the prophesied monster and fights the lich.

I’ve never heard this trope named this way, but it’s how so many dungeons and adventures are designed. The party knows they have a particular fight coming up, and must carefully manage their resources because they won’t be having that fight at full strength.

Y’know, I’m someone who gets unreasonably annoyed when encountering an unfamiliar acronym, but even I think banning someone for using one is going too far.

That said, none of these acronyms are without enough context to figure out what they are. Everyone knows what LOL means. USAID is an acronym where the acronym describes what the organization does. CJR is present in a thread about Columbia Journalism Review.

As a general rule, if you define your Three Letter Acronyms (TLA), then they’re no longer a barrier to understanding. And then you can use whatever TLA you like. See how easy that is?

Where they banned LOL and a reaction gif, if I had to guess the rule being violated would be about low-effort discussion. And again, I kind of sympathise with the desire to have meaningful discussion and I see where getting a message that just says “lol” could take the wind out of your sails. Banning is still overkill and alienating to your users though.

There’s a certain amount of irony if you consider a rule against low-effort discussion in a community that was made with such low-effort that they didn’t define and publish their rules

I don’t like it very much, but the price is right.

I used to play Overwatch, and abandoned it shortly after the Overwatch 2 debacle. A bunch of my friends kept up with OW2, and when Rivals came out they made the switch so I figured I’d give it a go.

Season 0 was rough. It’s on Season 1 now and things are a bit better.

Hitboxes are bad. Maps seem confusing, although that might be that my game sense hasn’t figured them out yet. Lag is an issue a lot of the time, and the game crashes more than I feel it ought to - but I’m on Linux which I feel isn’t officially supported.

I saw an article the other day criticizing that you can’t type “Free Taiwan” into the chat. I guess I haven’t actually tested it to confirm, but gosh that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I don’t go in for the battlepass, but my friends usually do when they play a game and they say it’s fair. They do have a model that allows you to purchase the battlepass and then continue to fill it out even after it’s no longer the current season. So if it takes you a long time to finish content, you’re not forced into playing more games for fear of missing out.

When it’s fun, it’s a lot of fun. When it’s bad, my goodness, it’s bad. I guess it depends on how willing you are to gamble with your feelings. But hey, I guess you’re coming from League, so you might be ;)

That’s the plan, yup

I highly recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is the best medicine I can afford, because all you need is pen and paper.

If you don’t think you can change your circumstance, then you can try to change how you react to it. The core model of the therapy is to analyze your thoughts and look for patterns in which your brain tries to fuck with you. Identifying distortions and fallacies helps to replace your automatic thoughts with more positive ones.

Example:

Thought: I hate my job, everything about it sucks

Distortions: Overgeneralization, All-or-Nothing Thinking, Feelings as Facts

New Thought: I hate certain parts of my job, but I like X part of it

The whole thing only works if you believe in it, and the important thing is that you’re not just putting a sunny face on things that make you feel terrible. You’re working to restructure your thought based on objective truth.

I’ve struggled for a long time with the Sunday Scaries. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get easier, and I’m going through it right now, but I know if I take the time to untangle my feelings then things end up easier in the long run.

Good luck out there, partner

A saw a graphic the other day that was comparing the number of frames generated between the 4x and 5x, and people in the comments were saying that the 5x uses AI frame generation to speed things up

People in the know would know that AI is largely hype, and the generated frames probably don’t look as good as if they had been properly rendered

I’d like minimum wage to be able to support my family, so that a job flipping burgers could actually feed us

Failing that, to live as a bunny in a cottagecore tree stump, spending my days slicing up strawberries like they’re roasts, and baking pies with my neighbours

I paid a dollar for this two weeks ago

Worth it

I’m not in healthcare, so I’m not sure how valuable my opinion is

If I had to guess, I’d say that there’s a cost associated with a patient refusing care, particularly if the condition is going to be aggravated.

This cost might be financial. It might also mean that the patient returns to the healthcare system and requires more intense care. It probably also means that the patient will suffer more while outside the system.

I don’t know what your healthcare system looks like, but mine is stretched to the breaking point. If someone discharged themselves against the advice of doctors and then later worsened and returned to the hospital, they might die waiting for triage. It’s an extremely bad look for the hospital and erodes the public’s opinion of healthcare. And while the hospital is being raked over the coals for allowing someone to die in the waiting room, the media will conveniently ignore that the patient previously discharged themselves against the advice of their doctor.

Another scenario to think about: just because a patient is cognizant doesn’t mean they’re behaving rationally. While the patient is in care they could be heavily medicated and not realize how bad their situation would be without care: until the meds wear off and their suffering returns. If they got a particularly bad prognosis, then the panicky ape brain could take over and they just want to get out of their, damn the consequences.

Does all that add up to being more important than the patient’s autonomy? Opinions will probably be divided. I don’t personally think so, if I was restrained against my will I’d be pretty angry about it. But I understand the rationale behind the people who want to keep their patient in the system.

Does that mean YOU have to care? Probably not. People should be free to make their own decisions, and you can’t and shouldn’t take responsibility for the decisions that they make.

As other people have said, there are definitely bots on the fediverse

In fact, the coolest thing about lemmy for me is that there’s a checkbox in settings to disable viewing any bot users

Although as I understand, users have to self-identify as a bot, so the actually harmful bots probably don’t do that. But I can dream

Personally, I like to supplement my knowledge with the occasional book. Like shit, that’s sort of the whole point of books.

I don’t think a book has ever got me started on something new while programming. Like if I want to pick up a new language or framework, I have better luck going directly to the documentation. If I have a specific problem, then I can search online or find a tutorial or something.

Another risk of using a book as the entry point is when those books go out of date and no longer become relevant. Always make sure they’re using the right version of whatever tool you’re using, lest you pick up a book vaguely titled “Learn Python” and discover it’s for 2.7 when you’ve installed 3.11

But as you’ve kind of surmised here, books are great for filling in the gaps in knowledge. They’re also generally speaking written by authors with tons of experience (and perhaps biases) which might tell you why things are done a certain way.

Of particular interest - and caution - are opinion-based books. For example, Clean Code is full of examples that sound good on paper, and then when taken to their extreme are shown to be brittle and cumbersome. I still think the book has some good points, but at the end of the day it’s opinion, and opposing opinions exist for a reason.

So I guess what I’m saying there is books are great, but you shouldn’t follow them dogmatically

You don’t see too many Payday memes these days, but I’m here for them

$1200 in damages - facing five years in prison. Hoo boy

Eight nations of the world represent 85.2% of the arms trade, and the US makes half of that.

The other 200 or so have 14.8% of the market.

I guess I’m not really surprised, this is classic pareto / 1%er representation

Well, that’s once again changed the way I look at things

Easy come, easy go