It’s sometimes used here, I think it depends how English you are. I just use “lol” but my fiancée does use “mdr” with other French speakers.

I think generally it’s hard to “fake” being behind because your board state is your board state. Unless you have something giving all your stuff flash or something, in most cases it doesn’t really matter if you have an Ulamog in hand and castable if on board you only have a vanilla 2/2 and the green player has an army of 12/12 tramplers. If you have lands in hand, for instance, you’re generally better off playing them than holding back to hope that “oh, I’m so mana screwed” gets you further later.

On the other hand, there’s also playing smart. If you know there’s a boardwipe coming you probably want to hold on to your creatures. I try not to play turn 1 sol ring, even if I draw it, because that makes all eyes turn to you and any big thing that you might drop as a result of that will be coming out when everyone else is most likely to have some kind of removal, and often when there’s nothing better to spend mana on. If a player is sitting on two untapped blue mana what are the odds that he’s sitting on a counterspell? Can you bait out the counterspell with a threat now so you’re able to do what you really want later? Or hold off casting in the hopes that it gets dropped elsewhere?

Depends on how the fight resolved. Sometimes you get snippy for a bit but ultimately either come to an agreement or the fight resolves and that’s it. You rankle for a bit after, get over it, and move on.

Sometimes the fight isn’t about what you’re fighting about. They’ve had a bad day and it manifests as some bitchy comments about how the dishes were done. You stop fighting about the dishes but you’re still upset because they’re taking their bad day out on you, or they’re still upset because they feel you don’t care about them. These can last much longer because the fight revealed bad blood, but didn’t do anything to address it.

A French one is common enough that it’s used in English- “Répondez, s’il vous plaît” (Respond, if you please) is where we get RSVP. “SVP” is also sometimes used as a shorthand for “please”, at least in Quebecois.

I remember Dolly Parton singing about her.

I’m terrified to respond. Every time I find an artist I like it seems like they turn out to be a completely garbage person. Therese Nielsen, Seb McKinnon, Noah Bradley…

Jeremy Wilson, Magali Villeneuve, and Johannes Voss are probably my highest ranking active artists right now, but now I’m looking forward to finding out one is an actual cannibal or something.

Maybe we also should talk about not needing to work so many hours that it’s necessary to ration the sun then, too.

I truly do not care even one little bit about whether it stays on daylight time or standard time, I just want to never have to perform this absurd little ritual ever again.

For clarity you’re asking for some 2d image to use with an ink or laserjet printer and not for 3d printing, right?

Could be exercise-induced asthma? I get this as well and only found out it wasn’t a common affliction a few weeks ago, when it was pointed out that this might be a cause. For me at least, after a while the pain gets so bad that every time I swallow it feels like my throat doesn’t want to reopen.

Nuclear power, genetics, steam power, modern explosives…

Vancouver has a steam heating system around Gastown, which is what powers the famous steam-powered clock there (at least since they repaired it).

The big question then becomes: “is that behaviour inherent to all systems like this, or just this one?” Like, if you go to the store, buy a basic sprinkler, and then test it and it behaves exactly opposite to how you might expect it to. Or it does something completely unexpected, like phases into another dimension and starts pumping strawberry jam. Your next step shouldn’t be to say “Oh, weird, I guess that’s that.” You’d start knocking down variables. Is it the same with every sprinkler or just this one? Does the amount of suction applied affect it? If I replace the water with something else does the outcome change?"

If you’re doing research like this, you’re kind of expected to do the same sort of elaboration even if the result of a basic experiment conforms precisely to your hypothesis, because the question isn’t if any given sprinkler setup behaves in this way, it’s about whether this is a universal phenomenon across all similar setups. Because there’s an xkcd for everything, it’s this.

Larian isn’t especially big though, even with the success of BG3, a purchase like this is likely would be well outside what they could hope to afford.

By far the best way I’ve found to use the false Hydra so far is a week or two ahead of a session, to send out a link about the false Hydra to your group and be like “look at this neat monster I found!” Then present them with a story about people disappearing from a village and watch them invent their own false Hydra.

I’ve been playing Star Ocean the Second Story R since my fiancee bought it for me at Christmas.

I can’t help but feel like if we didn’t live in a capitalist hellscape, the increasing democratization of art would be unambiguously a good thing. I’d be more than happy to see “art as decoration” (as opposed to “art as a human means of expression”) opened to being something shunted off to machines, if it weren’t for the fact that this is a method that people currently use to make sure they have enough money to not starve to death in the cold. Advertising art of polar bears drinking Coke is nicer to look at than big block text saying “consume”, but it’s hardly a soulful expression of the human condition. Or maybe it is, which is even more depressing, but the ultimate apotheosis of this is pushing that sort of messaging to robots to make anyway.

Meanwhile, giving people who aren’t necessarily “artistic” a vehicle to create art as a means of expressing themselves is also really neat, and in the hands of people who are artistic, it gives them a low-impact tool for pre-visualization, inspiration, and a new medium to experiment with. It also reduces barriers for people with disabilities to make art. I’d love to see artists training LLM systems on their own work as a way of sharing their “style” with the world — something which is difficult to justify in a world where your style is something that needs to be jealously protected against copyright infringement, which again comes down to needing to monetize your expression as a matter of survival.

I feel like in the best case it would have been a catastrophe that somehow manages to fall together in a way that actually works, and in the worst case it would have just been bad to the point of being offensively bad, appealing to neither regular filmgoers whole also pissing off established fans.

… But it also feels like giving a chainsaw to a bear: You know whatever’s gonna happen you’re not gonna like, but also you kinda want to do it just to see what it is.

I really enjoyed Starfleet Academy for the SNES. It wasn’t particularly difficult or long, but there was enough interaction with your “crew” outside of space combat that it felt pretty well-rounded, especially for a SNES game.

Yeah, I spent a ton of time with that. It had a terrible memory leak, though, which made it unplayable slow after an hour or so. I was really hoping that Star Trek: Infinite would fill that void, but it’s basically just Stellaris.