I noticed a lot of the players doing that neck grabbing thing in the World Cup this year.

I get a visceral reaction every time I see it. It’d be a massive red flag if someone tried to do it to me.

Is it a new Andrew Tate/alpha male kind of thing? It’s weird and I don’t like it.

I see four white rectangles there. If that’s not proof of snow, then I don’t know what to tell you.

deleted by creator

AM = morning, PM = afternoon/evening/night

Like 7AM or 7PM

AM people are most awake and productive during the morning hours, and get more tired as the day goes on.

PM people are tired in the morning and more alert later in the day/night.

It depends on your chronotype. It messes with PM people much more than AM people.

If you’re tired in the evenings and wide awake in the morning, then going to bed slightly earlier and getting up earlier is easy.

If you’re alert in the evenings and tired in the mornings, going to bed early is counter-productive, you just lie there awake getting less tired. Similarly getting up earlier is even harder than normal.

If you’re an AM person, then you’ve drawn the lucky straw - the world is built for people like you. But there’s lots of PM people who struggle daily, fighting against their body clocks just to show up to school/work on time.

Hey, if we find something bigger than Pluto, then by all means let’s call it a planet.

By any reasonable person’s definition of a planet, Pluto is a planet. It’s a rocky spherical mass that orbits the sun, with a varied terrain of mountains, plains and glaciers. It has days and seasons. It has its own system of moons.

An additional grievance I have is that, by the IAU’s stupid definition of a Dwarf Planet, Charon should really be called a dwarf planet too. It isn’t a satellite of Pluto in a meaningful sense - both Pluto and Charon orbit a point between them. The other moons also orbit this space between Charon and Pluto.

So, want to know why it isn’t a Dwarf Planet? Because the IAU class it as a planetary satellite. What’s the formal definition of a planetary satellite then? There isn’t one. It was discussed, but a formal definition was not decided upon. Charon is literally a moon now because it was called a moon before the definition of a planet was changed and dwarf planets were invented.

I’m all for formal definitions, but the IAUs current rules are just really sloppy. It’s maddening.

I’d be happy with:

Pluto = planet

Anything smaller than Pluto ≠ planet

Nine planets. Now with clear non-stupid rules.

I’d tell a reduction reaction joke, but I want to stay positive.

You can call me et al

She has to defend her Masters thesis? Over here in the UK, you only have to formally defend Doctorate level theses.

Kenya’s system must be a bit more rigorous than ours.

I wonder if I’ve got the same kind of thing. I love onions but absolutely hate leeks. They taste like the smell of stale urine.

I’ve never understood it - I know they don’t taste like this to other people. I like the other edible alliums, but leeks taste uniquely awful.

I keep trying them every few years hoping that my tastes have changed, but they haven’t until this point.

In the linked article, MyMiniFactory say that they’ll ultimately be removing AI content from Thingiverse.

I’m in a tricky position here.

I use MyMiniFactory, have backed several frontiers things and am a member of a few tribes.

I also use Thingiverse a lot.

And while I certainly don’t want to pay for AI content, I don’t mind that much if it’s free. There have been times that I’ve looked for something for DnD and the only option was AI generated. And honestly, I’d much rather have that than no model at all.

Taxonomically speaking, birds are dinosaurs.

There isn’t a place to put a line between them - all the things that make birds “birds” also apply to dinosaurs.

A super fun fact is that of the two main types of dinosaur, Saurischia (“lizard-hipped”) and Ornithischia (“bird-hipped”), birds actually evolved from the lizard-hipped group.

I can’t see the video without an account, but the house in the thumbnail looks really good.

For DnD, my orcs all lived in a Tabletop Scenics Orc Barracks, but now I’m very tempted to try something like this for next time.

Psssh.

It’s clearly a mogwai and nest of wild otamatones

He was. He just didn’t get the mechanism behind it right.

A crude way of explaining Lamarckian evolution would be to look at giraffes. Lamarckism suggests that because an animal that spends much of its life stretching its neck to reach food, it ends up with a slightly longer neck. This trait is then passed down to children, who might spend much of their lives stretching their necks, making them slightly longer. And so on.

He correctly identified that speciation occurs over many many generations, as a result of tiny incremental changes.

What Darwin did was to recognise the actual mechanism behind speciation - Natural Selection. Darwin was aware of and built on Lamarck’s work.

Weirdly, within the last thirty years, we’ve realised that the truth is not so clear cut. Epigenetic changes do occur as a result of the environment and are hereditary. While genes are still the main drivers of evolution, these epigenetic changes affect gene expression.

Ellen - before she was a talk-show host, Ellen DeGeneres played the main character in an Emmy award-winning sitcom. The show had LGBT characters, with Ellen herself (both the character and actress) coming out later in the show’s run.

I’m surprised I’ve not seen Will & Grace mentioned (I’m sure it must be here, but I didn’t notice it). That show famously featured many LGBT characters, including a lesbian couple who were Will and Grace’s main rivals.

Less specifically for lesbian characters, but featuring a gay couple as main characters, you’ve also got The New Normal, a fantastic show about a gay couple that was cancelled after one season, and, of course Modern Family.

I wouldn’t say that this programme was good, but Brookside famously featured the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss on British TV (the watershed is the point, 9pm, where it’s assumed that children will no longer be watching TV). This was in 1994, when we still had backwards Conservative Party laws about it being illegal to “promote public discussion” of homosexuality. For context, it’s worth noting that even two years later, when Carol and Susan got married in Friends they didn’t kiss.

The shocking truth is that the US is just one of many, many, many democracies. There’s nothing uniquely American about democracy.

The American system was based on the French implementation, which in turn was based on the British implementation.

What is unique about American democracy is the scale. The biggest issue that America has is that the current incarnation is not fit for purpose - it’s a system that when used like it is, creates massive vote inequality, gives some “elected officials” what amounts to jobs for life and spreads blame so thin that (heaven forbid!) should someone try to create a dictatorship, it would be very hard to stop it.

I use ESUN PLA+ for printing minis and would recommend it to anyone.

For reference, the only filament I’ve used that came out nicer was SUNLU high-speed PLA, but would NOT recommend for minis (it can’t cope with the constant retractions).

Oh, and also prime your models before painting them. I just use ordinary spray primer that you can get for dirt cheap - Tetrosyl Trade Spray / Hycote / Motip are all good brands. Just make sure you don’t get gloss finish and you’ll be fine!