NASA, NATO, Radar, Sonar, Laser, Scuba, AIDS, PIN, SWAT, YOLO, CAD

The rule genuinely is “if it can be said as a word, it might be said as a word”.

They’re called acronyms.

BBC, TV, USSR etc. can’t easily be said as a word - these are just initialisations.

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

That’s fair - my experience with handling them basically stops at individual LEDs in electronics and domestic LED lightbulbs.

But the sun is hot. You can feel the heat radiating from it.

LEDs are not hot - that’s pretty much the main reason that they’re energy efficient, they don’t waste energy as heat.

It’s not suddenly gotten colder, so if they did switch to LEDs, then they’re also artificially compensating for the heat. Which would completely defeat the purpose of switching (presumably from an incandescent bulb) to LEDs.

Also, I’m super intrigued about who is supposedly behind this sun-bulb maintenance, and more interestingly, what could possibly be powering it

Me also.

I’m HatGPT, designed to simulate conversation with a milliner.

I’m more of a coin return man myself

It’s a ridiculous take that the political minutiae of the US is largely meaningless to people outside the US?

Look, it’s enough for me to know that the USA has made a thinly veiled threat about forcibly taking over Greenland. This is of immediate concern to me.

I don’t need to know the details of what the American version of Göring said in defence of the American version of the Gestapo this week.

We have our own domestic nonsense that I’m sure you don’t get inundated with - why would it be so ridiculous for us not to want to get bombarded with yours?

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.

Everybody’s circumstances are different, so I’m only providing this info on the off-chance there is something helpful here.

Several years ago I reached out to my GP because I genuinely believed that I was going to end up committing suicide, and I was worried.

I’d had the occasional suicidal thoughts since I was a teenager, and like most people, assumed it was just a normal part of being a person. As I got older, they became more frequent - essentially becoming any time I let my brain go dormant.

You might wonder what had become so terrible in my life that I was obsessed with ending it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I had a young family, a loving wife, a nice house, a good job. I was happy, and had lots to be happy about.

The best way I had of describing it at the time was like a dual boot system - it felt like there was the normal me, and a different version of me that ran on the hardware when the normal me wasn’t actively using it.

This other me, however, had come to the definite conclusion that everyone I cared about would be better off if I died. It’d used the time lying in bed, stood on the tram, etc - the down time - to work out in detail exactly why, and by how much. It had a plan to minimise the distress and inconvenience to everyone who might end up involved.

Fortunately, I did reach out, though, and got referred to a psychologist. I was diagnosed with OCD and prescribed SSRIs. For me, they worked.

It was a genuine revelation that most people don’t think about suicide daily, that brains can go quiet.

Since being better, I’ve stopped thinking of what was happening as a dual boot system, and more like a badly tuned television. You get everything that should be there, but sometimes these extra ghost images. But it’s not because there’s anything actually there, it’s because the machinery isn’t properly tuned. The SSRIs just set the brain chemistry to what it should be, and the brain started working like it should.

Sorry, this has ended up a bit longer than intended.

I really hope everything works out for you, your sister and your family.

Well, the Greenland thing is certainly barely legal…

From an outsider’s perspective, I think the USA and Russia should just have sex and get it over with.

We get it - you both love the military, you both hate minorities, you both want to restrict the rights and freedoms of your citizens.

Just get a room, get it out of your systems, and maybe the rest of the world can finally get some much-needed peace this year.

I think the biggest issue is that you’ve assumed everyone is the same and wants to be treated the same.

The world isn’t black and white. People are telling you their personal preferences and you’re telling them that they’re wrong.

You’re fighting other people’s battles for them even when they’re telling you that they’d prefer you not to - you’re literally acting like the guy in the last panel.

If there’s anything that we’ve learned over the last horrible year it’s that getting all of your information off social media is a recipe for disaster.

FWIW, saliva contains epidermal growth factor, which is actually good for the skin. It’s one of the reasons the insides of our mouths heal so quickly.

“before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it”

It’s a Christian tradition - four candles, one for each Sunday before Christmas. There’s often an extra one in the centre for Christmas day too.

Every week an extra candle is lit. Today, using the conventional method, three candles would be lit.

Wait, do the refs in American football really have hats with their uniforms?

The snek!

Ha, you caught me, I was indeed a Reddit refugee. A little less enthusiastic about the MOASS these days, but I liked my old name, so kept it 🙂

I feel lucky that I was born at a time when computers were knowable. I grew up in the 80s, and cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum. Very little was hidden - even loading software into memory was something you experienced, listening to the beeps and warbles and watching the flashing colours for ten minutes or more. Guide books showed labelled photos and diagrams of the actual hardware inside, giving real tangible meaning to the commands you typed in.

I think there’s a massive amount of disconnect now between the users and the actual hardware, and getting up to speed with how things work is so much more difficult.

Also, I’m lucky that I was born into a family that was just able to afford a microcomputer. My dad had a stable enough job that he was able to get a loan from the bank to buy one.

Not sure my life would have turned out the way it did without this starting point.

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