But why not get the drop pods to fly the ring to Mordor?

I’m definitely writing useless git commit messages

For work, I at least include the Jira ticket id

For personal stuff, it’s sweeping features stuffed into one commit that barely describes what was changed

I keep seeing this guy pop up in memes.

I’ve never seen Star Trek, but like… he makes me want to give it a go

My wife has ADHD and some wicked rejection dysphoria. I feel bad interrupting because sometimes it makes her feel really badly, but I swear she could talk for an hour without pausing for breath.

I definitely do the same thing when I’m talking about something I’m passionate about though, so like… live and let live.

I work in software, so I guess we use a whiteboard instead of a blackboard. There are tons of options for virtual whiteboards that have features which sound like they’d meet all your needs and more. One big plus is that you can virtually collaborate, which is a big argument for working remotely.

However, given the choice, I’ll always pick a physical board to write on. This might sound like a personal preference, but there’s some solid reasoning behind it.

You see, when you want to write or draw something, your brain has to do some kind of neuromancy in order to transform that thought into an idea that can be shared with and understood by other humans. When you write physically, the process is very kinetic. The idea starts in the brain, then is sent to the hand to write it out, and is verified by your eyes for correctness.

When you want to write that same thing digitally, there’s more steps involved in subtle ways. You have to decide which tool is best, move things around with your mouse, know which keyboard commands will translate to the thing you want to do, etc. Many of these steps are far more abstract than picking up a marker, and for this reason there’s a higher cognitive load in transcribing digitally.

Depending on what you’re doing, that higher cognitive load can come back to bite you. A lot of my whiteboard time is ultimately spent on reasoning out a complicated system, brainstorming, or trying something new. In these cases, you want your cognitive load to be as low as possible because you want to be able to use it for the task at hand.

However, that’s not to say that there isn’t a benefit to the digital tools. Collaborating with remote colleagues is difficult without a virtual tool. You also typically benefit from having an infinite canvas, which means your board is always going to be as big as you need it to be. If you already have technical drawings or specifications or whatever you can also easily copy/paste them in.

So all this to say, I guess the way I look at it is that physical and digital boards are separate tools. You want to use the right tool for the job, and in my evaluation the physical boards are still very useful tools.

Story time:

I had some trouble scheduling the group together, so I ran some one-on-one adventures with each member so they’d still get a chance to roll dice.

So the cleric is cruising around town one night when this man runs out of his house yelling for help. Some horrible goober (later identified as a bodak) snatched his son out of bed and absconded into the spooky cellar. The man can’t go far to summon the watch because his invalid father is upstairs and can’t be left alone, so isn’t it fortuitous that a locally well known adventurer happens to be strolling by?

So the cleric goes down into the basement to get the baddy. The bodak has the boy hostage and has a deadly gaze attack.

My expectation was that the cleric was going to Turn Undead and scare off the monster. The cleric’s expectation was that they were going to cast Pillar of Fire and cook that sumbitch.

Pillar of Fire is a cylinder with something like a 20 foot radius and 40 foot height. I ask if he’s sure, and he is, so the monster, child, cellar, first, and second floors burst into flames.

Realizing he’s toast if he stays here, the cleric leaves the cellar and bumps into the frantic man on the street. He asks if he got the monster and the cleric shrugs.

The man then agonizes over whether he should save his father or his son, and then plunges into the cellar. Moments later, the burning house collapses on itself.

And that’s how our cleric wiped three generations of a bloodline off the map with a single spell.

That might make it difficult to visit the remains of a loved one, but I suppose you can just chuck your flowers in the pit and eventually they’ll work their way down.

You guys should maybe tell him that, huh?

I try to win as the DM.

“Winning” in this case being that everyone had a good time.

The name of the community comes from the idiom, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” The idea is that as long as the person asking the question genuinely wants to learn, then there is no question they can ask that would make them stupid because they’re trying to educate themselves - one of the least stupid things you can do.

Some people feel shame at not knowing something, so they’ll often talk down to themselves and call it a stupid question. This is particularly true if the asker feels it’s something that they should already know or everyone around them seems to already know.

This community offers a place where you can ask a question, no matter how small or basic, without fear of being made fun of. In a sense, you might say that the community welcomes stupid questions while at the same time reassuring the questioner that the question is not actually stupid.

I’m a peaceful person, I try to live by the ethos of causing as little suffering around me as possible. So to me a violent uprising in the name of making a better society is a lot like fighting war in the name of peace: it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

When you see a leftist advocating for violence, I think it’s usually one of three things: someone who is disenfranchised with their perception of what they can do as a an individual to better society, someone who actively wishes to be violent and will attach themselves to whatever cause justifies that violence, or someone on the internet stirring up trouble.

I’m not aware of a violent leftist uprising which didn’t devolve to authoritarianism. Even the French revolution which is often upheld as being a turning point for democracies around the world devolved into a reign of terror and gave us Napoleon.

Do I also have to partake of the foot fungus?

The bullet machines will be for the campus law enforcement, the tots won’t get to use them.

But they will get to try out the tech in cafeterias, so that they’ll be more conveniently denied a free lunch.

Apple’s walled garden is anti-consumer, anti-developer, and pretty much anti-everyone-but-apple.

It just doesn’t make sense to me to use or develop for Apple under those conditions.

I did this one campaign which was a hexcrawl where the party was shipwrecked on an island purported to hide the lost city of gold.

The site of the shipwreck was home base, but the party obviously wanted to explore. There were some NPC crewmate survivors, so they would assign them to work on projects while they were exploring. I would always tell them that “some guy” was working on their stuff.

Cut to a few months later when they have a sort of mutiny on their hands. It seems that one crew member in particular was fed up with how much work they had to do while the party went adventuring that they turned the crew against the party.

The mutinous ringleader’s name? Sum Gai

I have the D&D 3.5 core rulebooks on my shelf in the nerd nook. I know that I’m never going to play 3.5 again, but it’s the system I first got into the hobby with. It would feel wrong to get rid of my personal history of nerdship.

I suppose if you’re going to die of the beetus it might as well be in your sleep

Vincenzo, beati sumus?

Say, I’m not really a horse guy, but my dad says my mustang needs more blinker fluid. Well the guy at the stable sold me some, but now where do I put it?