• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle




  • Yes–although the ticket prices for her school have always been reasonable, so it’s not as big a perk as it would be in some places. The free meals, however, have reliably been incredible and well worth the headache of chaperoning.

    We’ve been very fortunate to have never had any “incidents”–most of the kids appeae willing to save their drinking and debauchery for after prom–but it’s always a real worry that the next morning we’ll read about one of her kids drunk driving his car into a tree.


  • Mine when I was in school was entirely forgettable. But! I married a teacher, and until the pandemic we chaperoned prom almost every year. And that was reliably awesome. We may get back to it eventually. The kids are always proud of their outfits, and it’s a small, rural school, so even though there are cliques, it’s still mostly an everybody-in-it-together atmosphere. We’ve never really been party types, but getting to dance with my wife at prom every year is something I miss.




  • I’m incredibly fascinated by the ghost comparison. Is the probability that ghosts are a real physical phenomenon higher or lower than the probability that aliens exist or have visited us? That’s an extremely interesting question, and I’m sure someone could do a statistical meta-analysis comparing the incidence of, say, UFO sightings with the incidence of paranormal experiences (if such an analysis doesn’t already exist). Both questions seem like the things that should be generally empirically falsifiable (and indeed, specific instances certainly are), but humanity’s curiosity about both has proven remarkably durable despite centuries of curiosity and myriad efforts to settle (negatively) both questions once and for all.




  • Biden’s an awesome leader. I’m going to show up and vote for him even though my state will almost certainly go red in November, because I’m a patriot and Joe Biden has actually tried to improve my life, which is more than I can say for Trump, Obama, Bush, or most other presidents in my lifetime, and it’s certainly more than I can say for every third party candidate with the sole exception of Ralph Nader (thanks for making my car safer, Ralph).

    Joe Biden tried to forgive my student debt, he tried (and partially succeeded) to improve the company’s crumbling infrastructure, he revived antitrust and labor, and he’s been fighting to keep Russia from taking over Eastern Europe. Donald Trump told me to drink bleach. You don’t have to like either of them, but pretending they’re equally bad is either trolling, being willfully uninformed, or doing the propaganda work of a foreign adversary (knowingly or not).

    You vote your conscience; it might not matter much, depending on where you live, or it might matter a whole lot. But reality should show you, like it does the rest of us, that the only possible outcomes of this presidential election are a second Biden presidency or a second Trump presidency. Anything you do will make one of those things more likely to happen, and you don’t get to opt out by staying home or setting your ballot on fire in protest.





  • Really? I’d be very interested in seeing a peer reviewed article in Nature in which someone reputable claims to have disproven the existence of the soul (especially without making a bunch of other ontological assumptions first). Can you point me to one?

    As far as I can tell, the existence of a soul, like the existence of God, is inherently a non-scientific proposition–i.e., it is not falsifiable. But correct me if I’m wrong.



  • Good of you to ask. It’s entirely possible to play D&D without buying any official materials (and you should play it without buying anything Hasbro currently sells, but that’s just my opinion).

    In fact, you can find a more or less complete set of rules for most versions of D&D just by searching combinations of the version you want and terms like “SRD” or “wiki”. Some of these will lead you to officially hosted sources, and some not, but the great thing about D&D is that Hasbro can’t ever sell it away from players.

    I’m not going to provide any links to anything because someone will accuse me of breaking the rules, but D&D isn’t Hasbro, and it wasn’t even really TSR. It’s just collections of rules, and game rules are not patentable. Hasbro owns a copyright in the 5e PHB’s written content, for example (and some trademarks on trade dress and some terms), but crucially it does not own the way people play D&D. Ergo, in a matter of speaking, Dungeons and Dragons is already open source. If you’ve got a pen, some paper, and a fistful of dice, you can play. Less is more.

    Having said that, many folks believe that the best versions of D&D aren’t in print anymore anyway, but even if 5e is your version of choice (and to its credit, it has a few marks in its favor), I’d recommend checking a used book store before getting worried about whether this rumor ever amounts to anything. Hasbro can sell D&D, or not, and millions of people will happily keep right on playing D&D every week without ever giving them a dime.



  • Is that realistic? Not a rhetorical question: I’m genuinely curious. I ask because the last time I tried to update a single (desktop) part, it was more cost-effective to replace the whole Pc and migrate the salvageable parts since the only thing I could have held onto would have been the ram, SSD, and PSU.

    I suppose with a laptop you have the monitor to also consider, and admittedly I know nothing about laptop boards, but it just seems like 6 years is replacement time anyway, at least for a daily use computer.