For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some ‘organic element’ since I couldn’t accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
You’re close. Not the tilt of its axis, but its rotation around its axis (day) is slower than its rotation around the sun (year).
Earth’s axis is tilted at about 23 degrees, which causes the seasons. Venus, by contrast, is tilted only about 2.6 degrees, and thus basically doesn’t have seasons in a comparable way.
Earth’s axis does very slowly wobble around (precession). Over long enough time scales, this affects the seasons, and it means the North Star has not always been aligned with Earth’s North - once, North pointed at a patch of black sky and the North Star was just another star appearing to rotate around that arbitrary point.
I’d imagine Venus’s axis might also wobble at least somewhat, but I haven’t actually looked into this at all.
Thinking about this sent me down a rabbit hole because the day and year lengths are so extremely close to each other, and Venus rotates around its axis clockwise (unlike the other planets) while spinning around the sun clockwise, and its tilt is so slight… so as it spins around the sun, it rotates just enough to keep one side facing the sun almost all the time. I ended up googling whether it was tidally locked, like the moon is to Earth (such that we only ever see one side and it never changes) - and apparently it would be, but its atmosphere is so wild that it prevents tidal locking. But it almost is. It kinda has a dark side, and a light side, like the moon, but there’s just enough mismatch between the yearly rotation the axial rotation that the side facing the sun changes slowly. This is the first article I found.
From that article, it seems like the daylight hours you’d experience standing on the surface of Venus would be 117 Earth days of light, before it got dark again. So the sun would rise, and then you’d have about half a Venus year (aka about half a Venus day, too) of daylight before you’d see night again. And then it’d be night for the rest of the year. But still scorching hot because atmosphere.
Anyway this is blowing my mind a bit. I feel like I should have known this - I used to be obsessed with astronomy when I was little. Maybe I knew it once and forgot. I don’t know. But dayum. Planets are cool.
Years upon years of being told this cannot make me not taste metal from stainless steel cups/canteens and forks, even brand new and/or freshly scrubbed to hell and back. I can’t use stainless steel tumblers because of this - even if I keep my tongue well away from it, and it’s the cleanest dish in the world, it makes the drink taste metallic. No amount of youtubers just insisting I don’t/can’t taste a thing can actually compete with a lifetime of experiencing this problem. And I have, multiple times, tried all the things they say to do to fix the “real” problem - but no. Steel tastes like steel, always.
Hypothesis: this is one of those things some people can taste and others can’t, like how there’s a whole group of “cilantro tastes like soap” people and everyone else is like ???
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Trying to get into those as a newbie is miserable dor all those reasons and also because, unless maybe if you get in right when the game first comes out, your competitors will be far more comfortable with the mechanics and have memorized the maps and so on. It’s especially bad if you’re a newbie to multiplayer shooters a whole, even if you’re good at single player shooters. It becomes and exercise in: spawn, die, respawn, die… Super frustrating to begin with. And then people insult you. Noooot something I find worth bothering with for a thing that’s supposed to be enjoyable in my free time.
If you are willing to venture into fanfiction, there are some tags on archiveofourown.org - like “humans are space orcs”, " earth is a deathworld", “earth is space australia” - for fics that feature overpowered humans relative to the aliens. Most of these are so AU that you don’t need any knowledge of the ostensible source material. The trope seems popular particularly with My Hero Academia and Minecraft youtuber fandoms, for whatever reason.
Generally, the scifi worldbuilding is usually really light, including names “made alien” by adding apostrophes and that kind of thing - but they scratch and itch that almost nothing else does. And they’re free! So maybe worth a try at least. Just make sure to filter by kudos.
Fuzzy Nations is a retelling of Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. Having read both, I can report that I liked Fuzzy Nation 300% more. But if someone likes one they may as well try the other.
Little Fuzzy is kind of hilariously western, with everyone smoking and gun-toting :P it’s also decidedly more sexist and less interesting in the way it handles the aliens and the legal fight around them. Very dated. But it can be fun anyways.
More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
They could easily all be giving their honest opinion at IGN: if the reviewers who tend to like everything are the ones who don’t get fired, the output of mostly positive (or sometimes groupthink negative) reviews would be the same, even if individual reviewers never lied.
Exactly this. 50/100 looks like an F, because that’s what it would be on a school paper. Often we’d even be given points out of a hundred just like that. So giving a 50 to a middling/okay game feels really harsh, vs 70 (aka a C) or 80 (B).
You can multi-select items and mark them all as wares at once, just only for one character at a time. I agree all wares should be pooled between characters though, or we should have the option at least.
Your link doesn’t seem to support your statement. Do you mean the part that advocates “turn on by default” tools to amplify factual information over disinformation? Because “turn on by default” implies an off switch.
It’s not possible for search engines to make zero decisions about what to prioritize in results, anyway. How would you prefer they sort the absurd quantity of results? Especially now SEO listicles try to drown everything else out?
Last month marked the official end of the Reddit protests. Any subreddit that had changed its rules or gone dark — or forced its users to post exclusively about John Oliver — has now gone back to normal. On the surface, it seems like a complete victory for Reddit, but things aren’t so simple when a major element of that...
I wonder how many people, like me, ended up drastically reducing their social media use altogether, at long last. I still pop in here now and again, but I’m not spending anything like the amount of time I spent on reddit.
Voice actors are among “those who actually make the games.” Voice acting in particular also is strenuous work that can and does cause physical injury when workers are compelled to work long hours doing rough voices and so on. People end up having to have surgery on their vocal cords.
We don’t need to devalue voice actors to value other game industry workers. The only difference is the voice actors organized first, probably because of the injury risk, and when you form a union you have to define a group that you can reach and coordinate. It shouldn’t be an us vs them among works.
Do you have an alternative that isn’t google? Because google’s DNS privacy policy is much worse.
I don’t like cloudflare, but their DNS terms are relatively good, and they have my info anyway because as you say, they’re everywhere. I don’t think my not using their DNS will make any appreciable mark on their business, either.
My son loves the adrenaline rush of getting scared, particularly with jump scares, however, I have a lot of difficulty finding a game or show which is appropriate for him. He is prone to nightmares, and more adult-oriented “kid horror” is too much (Poppy’s Playtime, Cartoon Cat?) And others like Siren Head. His peers...
If he’s a precocious reader, Sunless Sea is a horror game with a similar sort of theme. The content is much weirder and more horrifying than Dredge, but it’s 99.9% delivered via text, so the impact may feel more tolerable regardless.
But again it’s very text-heavy, possibly too much so depending on the kid. Probably too difficult, too.
I think difficulty setting, how often you get into combat, and how far you are into the game might affect it. In my playthrough it was fine for a long time but now every now and then it hangs a bit when it’s calculating enemy turns, even with my good CPU.
If it’s otherwise Chrome or bust, I’d honestly suggest considering Edge. It’s not like internet explorer used to be. It’s also not anywhere near as good for privacy as vivaldi or firefox, but it might be better than chrome - I don’t really know. But some people really like it now.
If you’re some who’s tried firefox in the past already, I’ll note it’s change quite a bit over the years. I used to dislike it but I like it now (on desktop).
Hi all! I just finished “The Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin and enjoyed it a lot. It’s got me curious about sci-fi written elsewhere in the world and what cultural differences may appear in sci-fi written from a non-US perspective....
I recommend Ken Liu’s translated Chinese scifi short story anthologies, which include some stori3s by Liu Cixin. The books are called “Invisible Planets” and “Broken Stars”.
The organization that represents Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s works has petitioned the U.S. government to restrict the right to repair a religious artifact called an E-Meter. This device is core to Scientology practices but the group argues exemptions allowing device hacking should not apply to equipment restricted to...
You make a good point in general, but this particular case is about preventing non-scientologists from treating the ‘religious object’ devices how they will, not about the scientologists being at all restricted in their own handling of the objects (as would be comparable to illegal drugs or animal sacrifice used in religious rituals).
This case in particular is comparable to requesting that the government outlaw the modification or destruction of the Bible or Qoran, even by people who own their own copy of a religious text. It would require non-adherants to a religion to treat that religion’s objects as sacred and to do so in the specific manner prescribed by that religion. This is contrary to precedent and law established by cases against people who’ve burnt their own personal copies of the bible, or created derivative works making fun of the bible, and so on.
Mother of Learning by Nobody103 - free webnovel, complete now I think. Wizard student gets stuck in a time loop and uses this opportunity to become OP and solve the mystery.
Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, if middle grade is okay.
I second Earthsea.
Spellwright seems like it might be good but I haven’t got far in it yet.
The Black Magician trilogy by Trudi Canavan. It’s been a long time since I read this, but Canavan is one of those authors who’s popular and has a lot of books out but is weirdly never mentioned online.
Also try L.E. Modesitt Jr. If you haven’t. Either the order mage series, or Imager maybe. Most anything by him will have a lot of studying. They’re very good if you like his specific flavor of writing.
Edit: Vita Nostra being described as just “magic school” is very funny to me, although I do see where it comes from lol.
Edit 2: I remember the Charlie Bone books being good, but again those are middle grade and it’s been ages since I read them. No idea if they hold up.
There isn’t an unbiased metric in existance, not when intelligence is itself so ill-defined and nebulous.
You can’t reduce it down to a number or set of numbers without making judgements about what intelligence is and isn’t, or what the numbers represent specifically, or without making judgements about how to take the measurements. These judgements cannot be made but through the lens of the culture and individual life experience of judge(s). And when it comes to research on topics like this there is simply no way to truly isolate any measurable quantity out as being inherently caused by biology vs external factors. Humans are messy and hard to sort neatly.
If anything, the comic more-so reflects what happens to kids who grow up getting told they’re gifted and praised for being inherently smart rather than for working hard or other such things that they can actually exert any control over, thus producing kids who are terrified of not being as smart as they’re told they are or as “successful” as they’ve been expected to be, who grow up to fret about their failures or perceived failures. Or to kids who have or believe themselves a great deal of potential but cannot realize it for other reasons, be they economic, geopolitical, familial or whatever.
Eternity says that there are 569 posts in this community. When I access it through my sh.itjust.works account I see so much more posts (only old ones though). I don’t even see the admin’s post! I also see much less comments on those 19 posts than how many Eternity is saying there are. Just in general, I feel like I see so...
What are some commonly known facts that are too bizarre for you to believe to be true?
For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some ‘organic element’ since I couldn’t accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe)
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Any sci-fi with aliens where humans are not the less advanced race?
What the title says, I’m tired of the trope where humans are the least advanced in the universe....
Starfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay (www.gamesindustry.biz)
More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 Revive Age-Old RPG Debate About Encumbrance (www.ign.com)
Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 both weigh the player down with encumbrance. Love it or hate it, it seems like it's here to stay.
Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome (arstechnica.com)
Reddit Activity Plummeted After The Protests - by Adam Bumas (www.garbageday.email)
Last month marked the official end of the Reddit protests. Any subreddit that had changed its rules or gone dark — or forced its users to post exclusively about John Oliver — has now gone back to normal. On the surface, it seems like a complete victory for Reddit, but things aren’t so simple when a major element of that...
SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry (www.eurogamer.net)
Does Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS Block Archive.is? (jarv.is)
tl;dr: No. Quite the opposite, actually — Archive.is’s owner is intentionally blocking 1.1.1.1 users....
Does anyone know of any kid-friendly "horror" games out there for children ~7 years old?
My son loves the adrenaline rush of getting scared, particularly with jump scares, however, I have a lot of difficulty finding a game or show which is appropriate for him. He is prone to nightmares, and more adult-oriented “kid horror” is too much (Poppy’s Playtime, Cartoon Cat?) And others like Siren Head. His peers...
Valve's compatibility rating for Steam Deck doesn't even try to be accurate anymore... Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't run well on the Steam Deck, it's okay... you can't support every devices but be honest!
If a game hypes a lot of people up, it will be verified. That’s like, the most important factor… not even the performance, the controls, etc…...
What do you use as bookmark
Question to the physical book readers here, what do you use as bookmark?...
Google’s new Topics API makes users vulnerable to fingerprinting attacks (www.theregister.com)
Google has stated it plans to address developers’ concerns by “making web publishers promise not to abuse the API”....
Non-US sci-fi recommendations?
Hi all! I just finished “The Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin and enjoyed it a lot. It’s got me curious about sci-fi written elsewhere in the world and what cultural differences may appear in sci-fi written from a non-US perspective....
Scientologists Ask Federal Government to Restrict Right to Repair (www.404media.co)
The organization that represents Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s works has petitioned the U.S. government to restrict the right to repair a religious artifact called an E-Meter. This device is core to Scientology practices but the group argues exemptions allowing device hacking should not apply to equipment restricted to...
Can Anyone Recommend me Magic/Superhero School or Guild Stories?
Can Anyone Recommend me Magic/Superhero School or Guild Stories?...
Being gifted makes you wish you were below average (i.imgur.com)
Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off (www.theverge.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/4975490...
Why do I only see 19 posts in this community?
Eternity says that there are 569 posts in this community. When I access it through my sh.itjust.works account I see so much more posts (only old ones though). I don’t even see the admin’s post! I also see much less comments on those 19 posts than how many Eternity is saying there are. Just in general, I feel like I see so...