This recently happened in my campaign.

We were fighting a dragon, and it kept flying around its lair, making it very hard for my Barbarian to hit it. We ultimately won, but 3 of the party of 5 died.

Later, while dividing loot, I saw that I had been carrying a Potion of Flying the whole time, and the fight probably would have gone better if I had used it.

I was thinking Flagpole Sitta, but that works too

Or a 90s indie song.

If I can’t find a Canadian version of a product, I look for Mexico next.

Help your neighbours, everyone.

I can think of a bunch of other things that Google should be embarrassed about, but Gemini is uniquely humiliating because of how proud they are of it and how hard they are pushing it.

Copilot is one of two LLMs I’ve briefly tried. It was noticeably better than Gemini was at the time, but still seemed entirely pointless. Nothing it (or Gemini) offered to do were things I wanted help with. I enjoy research and writing, so why would I outsource those things and burn down an acre of rainforest in the process?

The zeal of the convert.

According to his Wiki page:

“In August 2019, Vance was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church in a ceremony at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

I met my partner through a dating site. In the two years prior to that, I had used the site to meet over two dozen other women, which led to no long-term relationships but did result in a few short flings.

I can say that what helped me was expectation management. This was actually my second time using a dating site, and the first time around I was super picky, looking for “green flags.” Correspondingly, I messaged very few women, and met even fewer (four in two years). The second time, I realized that someone having a sparse profile didn’t mean they were a boring or lazy person. Sometimes it does, but other times it just means they aren’t very good at writing about themselves.

I’ll also say there’s only so much the metrics of dating sites can tell you about someone and your compatibility with them. There’s a level of response bias to the questionnaires on these sites, i.e. people answer the questions based on what they think a potential partner might like, not their genuine beliefs and preferences. You’ll never discover your actual compatibility with someone unless you talk to them, so I took the approach of, “unless there are explicit deal breakers in your profile, I’ll ask you on a date and we’ll see how things go.”

There’s also the expectation management for the frequency of matches, responses to messages, dates, and beyond. Dating apps aren’t magic machines that will get you hooked up in hours. They take work, and you’ll see a lot of rejection (most of it just utter silence). There can be long dry spells. Sometimes you’ll need to take a break because you’ve literally messaged everyone on the site and you need to wait for more members. And sometimes, they just won’t work for some people. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. Success for many of these sites and apps is highly dependent on one’s physical attractiveness, and some people simply did not win the genetic lottery.

I watched some of that original CGDQ stream live, and it’s amazing how far they’ve come.

The story seems generic at first, but it goes places later.

One feature I really liked about this game was that you can adjust the encounter rate, even down to 0%. No in-game consumables or equipment needed, just an option in the menu. If you want to gain a few levels, you can crank it up. If you just want to revisit an old location because you missed an item, you can turn it off.

There is no reason to believe that Noah’s family were the only innocents in the Flood story. I do not know how one can pin the supposed hedonism of the world on all those young children who would have drowned.

There is also no way to excuse killing the children of thousands of people because of the actions of one man. Blaming that one man for “forcing” supposedly omnipotent being to act in that way is also unjustifiable.

And there is no way to shift blame for genocide by simply saying, “the underlings took it too far.” This excuse rings especially hollow when Jehovah asks for a cut of the spoils afterward (Numbers 31:25-31).

Well, there’s the Flood and the Ten Plagues (particularly that tenth one) for starters.

Then there’s the various war crimes committed by the Israelites at Jehovah’s explicit instructions (e.g. the genocide of the Midianites in Numbers 31).

My first attempt to cancel my SiriusXM subscription saw the agent tell me that it was “impossible” because I had “just renewed.” It was true that I had recently renewed, but only because I had forgotten to cancel it in time. Since that was my mistake I was willing to just let it go and just use the service about year. But in order to stop that from happening again, I wanted to cancel early, which they didn’t let me do.

My second attempt three months later saw the agent protest again, saying that I should call back when it was closer to renewal. This time I put my foot down and got them to cancel my renewal.

Or so I thought.

I finally had to call them again eight months later after I started getting emails hyping up my impending renewal. It seems that instead of outright canceling, they had instead put a note on my file to cancel at a later date - a note I’m presuming they were going to ignore.

Maybe their system really did make it impossible for front-line agents to cancel to far out from the renewal date. That would explain the agents’ behaviour, and if true it makes SiriusXM look even worse

Definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had trying to cancel a subscription.

Having learned French as a second language, I can say that the gendered noun thing wasn’t the most difficult aspect, but it was the most consistently annoying. There are signifiers that makes the gender of some nouns very obvious, but then there are just as many others where it feels arbitrary or even contradictory to the established trends.

I mean, it should have died years ago the last time they unceremoniously dumped talent over apparently ideological reasons, but they survived.

Granted, this time is different because now they are losing their primary breadwinner. They plodded along before because ZP still brought in people. This wound may actually be fatal.

When I was growing up, my two sisters and I decided what to watch on TV pretty much by pure, brutal democracy. They formed a bloc against me and I always got outvoted, so it was Little House on the Prairie (and The Waltons) every day after school.

I met my wife on a dating site, though I had an assist from a mutual friend.

My biggest takeaways were:

1. Don’t expect instant and constant results. You can go weeks in between meaningful matches, and at some point you will actually tap out the “market” and there will be no one new for you to see in the app.

2. Be selective, but not demanding. Someone having a less-than-stellar profile may just mean they are bad at writing about themselves, not that they are a boring or unpleasant person.

I feel this in my soul. My university house had mould on the bathroom ceiling, and one of my roommates was allergic - they went into violent sneezing fits every time they showered.

Our landlords tried everything to avoid addressing it, up to claiming that, “people couldn’t be allergic to mould like that.”

They only “fixed” it after one of my other roommates threatened to talk to his father who was a lawyer. Their “fix” was to paste over the ceiling with vinyl plates.

It looks like there’s a lot of Ogre Battle in there as well.