Watching people repair old electronics on Youtube has opened my eyes to the realities of real-world electrical engineering. In short: it’s all about tolerances.

A power supply may have a nominal voltage of 5V, but anything from 4.8 to 5.2 is a-okay. Why? Because your TTL components downstream of that can tolerate that. Components that do 5V logic can define logic zero as anything between 0 and 0.8 volts, and logic one as low as 2 volts. That’s important since the whole voltage rail can fluctuate a lot when devices use more power, or draw power simultaneously. While you can slap capacitors all over the place to smooth that out, there’s still peaks and dips over time.

Meanwhile, some assembly lines have figured out how to aggressively cost-reduce goods by removing whole components from some circuits. Just watch some Big Clive videos. Here, the tendency is to lean heavily into those tolerances and just run parts hot, under/over powered, or just completely outside the published spec because the real-deal can take it (for a while). After all, everything is a resistor if you give it enough voltage, an inductor if the wire’s long enough, a capacitor if the board layout is a mess, and a heatsink if it’s touching the case.

IMO (not a scientist), moon dust is basically pulverized glass, only without the benefits of weathering and erosion. So think of lots of microscopic sharp, abrasive, shards of finely pulverized volcanic rock and obsidian. Get that stuff anywhere near a mucous membrane - eyes, nose, mouth, throat - and it’s going to irritate you. At the same time, it’s pretty much intert; well, at least the parts that don’t instantly react to oxygen or humidity that is. My guess is that Schmidt is just a little more sensitive to the physical sensation of it, or perhaps he rubbed his eyes with a glove by accident, giving him an extra big dose.

And for the uninitiated, it’s well documented that everyone in the lander was physically exposed to moon dust. There was no airlock on the lander, so every excursion resulted in bringing whatever was on the suits right into the cabin. They reported that it “smelled” like burned gunpowder, so they were at least all inhaling the stuff.

Venice? Wow, that’s actually kind of on-the-nose for a show of excessive wealth.

https://historywalksvenice.com/article/early-venice/why-did-venice-get-rich/

TL;DR: Venice exists in its current form (canal city on an ever sinking atoll) not because of climate change, and not because of some fishing village put their backs into it for hundreds of years, but because of money. LOTS, and lots of money from a shipping/trade boom a very long time ago.

The fact that Bezos built his obscene wealth on shipping and international commerce, just makes this even more appropriate in a gross kind of way. Like he’s deliberately connecting himself to Venice’s history, and everything that implies.

Easy there, boss. That depends heavily on what state you’re in. And the ones that have “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” are usually the ones where local police are openly coordinating with ICE.

As a totally cheap-ass DM, my recommendation is to find some printable DnD tokens that you like and glue them to things like bottle-caps, or small round bits of wood (like chunks off of a dowel from the hardware store). There are a bunch around. If you want to splurge, take the bits you want somewhere you can pay for a quality color printout.

Personally, I’m a fan of these generic tokens by “Acquitt”. They’re useful for every encounter: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FV7egJC87nsVUTybGs5E3DwvRihmz6KduUfniSJk6Fec.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D57f11a74865814f31c7236adb1555a43529ca355

I glued these to some sculpey discs of the same color. I also used transparent binder sleeves for HP tracker sheets, so I could use dry-erase marker. Lastly, my battle map was a large (but cheap) poster frame with 1" grid paper inside¹. This let me use those dry-erase markers to draw terrain.

1. For more thrift, some wrapping paper brands print a barely visible 1" grid on the backside. Some quality time with a ruler and pen can turn that into something useful.

A cantrip that’s as effective as “power word kill” on mundane folk? Use 55 times to kill a dragon? How did I miss this?

As a DM, I’d have to implement a house rule that every such insult must be unique, as it is magically bound to the target at that distinct moment in time. And that goes for failures as well as successes: each use burns that phrase forever. At the very least this goes if used repeatedly against the same target. Besides, a good bard should be able to cook up fresh material.

Snake, this is a sneaking mission. You are not here to assassinate anyone’s work.

Did they conduct this test in Japan? I ask since we could be losing something in translation. AFAIK, the Japanese people have a habit of being overly polite and not conveying strong emotion publicly, which might explain Kojima’s reaction. If he wanted to provoke a strong reaction in people, they’d say very different things.

Honestly, this is more OG than most people realize. You’re doing it right.

Coins, and even dice work in a pinch too.

I know everyone points out the problems with Nest, Ring, and various talking/listening/spying agents. For me, one of the worst offenders was a garage door motor that came with WiFi capability. Damn thing has the ability to just open up a door on my house on command. There’s no way am I putting that online.

Workers risk a few things, depending on the job:

• Health
• Time
• Opportunity (could be working someplace else that’s better)

These have a lot of dimension to them, including how one quantifies what “pay” actually is/for, what legal restrictions there are around taking the job (e.g. non-compete, non-arbitration), work/life balance, and so on.

Risk comes into play where the employee takes a bet that the job won’t destroy their health, work only as much as is absolutely necessary, and have taken a position at the optimal balance of responsibility, personal growth, retirement prospects, and income. It’s a risk since there are substantial barriers to changing to a new job, so you can wind up “stuck” in a bad position, but can’t know until after you start.

Yes, exactly!

The moment my therapist laid out the path forward to mindfulness, it felt like I was handed a “debug mode” for my own brain. Life has been transformative ever since.

You can do this - many of us do. However when you get to writing a solid backstory, or attempt to act as that character, it’s all going to be “you” flavored on some level. Kind of like interpreting a Rorschach print.

Photographer is hiding in plain sight. Really. I have no idea how they did this.

You’re basically watching a whole country (re)learn how to do this. Most of us have had it good for a long time, up until very recently. You’re seeing a lot of first-timers in every one of these protests, as the movement grows. Give it time.

The collective man-hours this would have saved people, if we had it back in 1999, would be staggering.

people love over engineering the fuck out of technology

Exhibit A: 2.85 Million packages, as of mid-2023

Finally, we have “thanks, I hate it” as an emoji.

Had me in the first half.

It was uncanny and disturbing back then. It’s uncanny, disturbing, and hilarious now.