Libra00

Aliens didn’t exactly break new ground in strong female characters (except perhaps with Ripley as lead), but it was an early very popular movie that had strong female characters who weren’t dependent upon men to save them so it was pretty good for representing women as something other than Hollywood’s standard of the time. Not great mind you because the only way either of them managed to achieve that is by making both of them (especially Vasquez, Ripley at least had some nuance) act like traditional male characters, but it was a big step.

You shut your mouth, the 90s were definitely like 10 years ago right?! :P

Ah, ok. I haven’t flown in probably 15-20 years, so I apparently had old information. My bad.

The restrictions on RF in aircraft are not based on band, last I heard. Low signal strength might let them slip by, but the question is will staff know that? Are you going to argue with them about it until they remove you from the plane? shrug I’m just saying, if radio signals are the problem, other sources of radio signals are also potentially a problem. Seems like it’d just be easier to use wired/attached/whatever controllers (I don’t own a Switch, I dunno how that works.)

If the wifi on the switch is a problem on airplanes, why are wireless controllers not also a problem? It’s still RF signals, just in a different band of the EM spectrum whether it’s bluetooth, or something else.

Nicole posts were banned and deleted en mass?

I only thought of it because I bought a little stand for my phone a couple years ago and it has one, but fair enough!

That looks really nice and elegantly simple. If I could make a suggestion though, you might want to raise the phone cradle up a bit and put a slot in the bottom so it can charge while on the stand.

Stove? Nah, just buy yourself a decent Weber kettle grill and do your cooking outside. It’s not like it rains much in England, right? ;)

I mean, with a little love that could be quite a nice little courtyard, but damn, not for ~US$1k/mo.

I have a project in which the draconids once had a great and terrible theocratic empire (largely fueled by their religiously-inspired ideas of supremacy) who conquered and oppressed pretty much everyone (except the giants, but they’re more the force-of-nature kind of giant rather than just large angry people) and then ultimately collapsed. The elves, who being the closest geographically suffered some of the worst excesses of the old empire, have taken the long view and accepted the peace and tried to normalize relations, but there’s a sub-group of the elves who were kind of an underclass even to regular elves in the old empire, and they are utterly devoted to eternal war against the draconids.

The absolute hottest of takes are from those who have declared their brethren collaborators with the ghost of the old empire and are actively hunting them. But the fact is, while the old empire is long gone here are several large and fairly powerful remnant-states of draconids nearby, including the elves’ immediate neighbors who still take rather seriously the idea of draconid supremacy. If the revolutionary elves succeeded in sabotaging the peace or even just significantly undermining the stability of the the elven nation, they would be immediately at war with that neighbor state which both is both extremely capable of, and has no hesitation against, utterly crushing them and returning them to the situation they were in in the old empire.

The first example that pops to mind is creation ex nihilo. Magic is commonly shown as being able to conjure (or summon) things from ‘thin air’, but that’s just not in the realm of telepathic abilities I’ve ever seen before. There are a few (like Jason Ironheart from Babylon 5) that I believe could probably do it, but that guy was basically a god in human form.

I can see arguments for both sides.

• Low-Development: Long lifespans lead to people taking a generally longer view on the present/future, and this leads to a lack of urgency in solving the problems of today when they will (hypothetically) be easier to solve with better tools tomorrow, only complacency means no one is making the better tools of tomorrow.
• High-Development: Long lifespans allow for greater accumulation and mastery of skill; Legendary creators with centuries, not decades, of experience create magnificent wonders almost beyond imagining, wise and aged theorists achieve greater intuitive leaps to new understanding than the short-lived could imagine, technology is urgently needed to automate away the mundane aspects of their craft so they can focus more on the visionary parts and contribute even more to society. imagine how much higher someone like NIkola Tesla or Frank Lloyd Wright could take their skill or art if they lived a thousand years instead of 75.

Mostly architect, but a little bit philosopher. I’m kind of a map-focused guy, so one of my favorite ways to start a worldbuilding project is to hit up Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator and just generate random worlds until something interesting pops up. Interesting in this case might be one large state near lots of small ones (what keeps them from eating the little guys?), two cultures or religions that overlap or cross state borders, zones that suggest interesting conflicts, etc.

Then I start telling myself stories about how those situations emerged, how they evolved over time to the present, and where they’re going. The kinds of stories I wind up with tend to be all over the map (pun intended):

• The goblins have created a true egalitarian religion of peace and it has spread rapidly, but there remains one point of contention: a militant sect whose sacred city is on the other side of a border and they will recover it at all costs, including sparking a 5-way international incident by just seizing it.
• The draconids once formed a great and terrible theocratic empire founded upon the oppression of all other races, but it has long since fallen apart. One of the legacies of that collapse has resulted in a sizeable minority population within one of the majority-draconid remnant-nations, and they have turned radical and revolutionary because while most draconids have settled down, this particular nation of draconids are still rather serious about their religiously-fueled ideas of superiority.
• Three tiny human kingdoms cluster at the delta of the world’s largest river, constantly vying with each other for more control of it while trying to assuage the large dwarven confederation nearby because through that delta flows the bulk of all trade in the world, including the heartland food production that is a vital lifeline to the large outlying islands in the ocean.
• The largest elven kingdom is divided between ‘high elves’ and ‘dark elves’ (never got around to giving them better names, they’re just different cultures, not different races) because of an old war with the aforementioned draconid empire - the high elves have accepted peace and have accepted overtures toward making amends from the remnants of that empire, but the dark elves remember still the piling of atrocity upon atrocity against them and have vowed eternal resistance to the idea of peace with them. For some, this includes not just sabotaging that fragile peace, but declaring their fellow elves collaborators for trying to maintain it.
• The center of the world is a vast, high-altitude plateau of black glass with a giant volcano in the middle of it that produces an extremely valuable resource. The region is largely inhospitable (no soil to grow food in, too cold for animals, etc), but is ‘inhabited’ by orcs who have adapted to these conditions (because they believe the volcano is the heart of the world from which their creator-god forged the rest) and live a nomadic, largely ascetic life moving between collecting this resource and trading it with the rest of the world. But this resource is vital to all nations, so any attempt in the past by the orcs to form some kind of nation themselves in the more-habitable verges of this plateau have been ruthlessly crushed so that they could continue to exploit the dependence of the orcs on trading their labor in extracting this resource for the food and supplies they need to continue living in their holy land.

Stuff like that.

Ahh, ok.

Aw, I was sure that was the building, the metal staircase iwth metal frame walls and such looks very similar.

I keep hearing that it’s possible to do this on lemme, but I’m new and haven’t figured out how yet.

Yes, this is a theater in London, I saw a Tom Scott video about it. That stairway leads up to where the lighting arrays are and to roof access.

It usually doesn’t get much colder than 40 or so. Once in a while it will actually freeze. But it’s snowed 3 times in the 10 years I’ve lived here, and it was always less than 1-2" and didn’t last the day. The coldest it’s gotten since I’ve been here was 18F, but that was during the big winter storm of 2021 when most of TX lost power for a week+. Fortunately I’m in the part of Texas that gets is power from Entergy in Louisiana which is not a clusterfuck unlike ERCOT’s deregulated hot garbage, so I was only out for a day and a half. Here’s a composite image I made on that day showing snow on the ground, and the coldest temperature I saw indoors while the power was out. Fortunately I had big thick blankets.

Not a lot, been sick off and on all week, but got in a little try of the Aviassembly demo, that was fun. Also some BG3 and Factorio with friends, and I’ve been loving the Icaria demo.