FuglyDuck
@FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
- Comment on Shitty stores that penalise you for not having their store card 1 day ago:
Historically, the whole point to the loyalty card coupons was because then they could track your purchases and sell that data on you.
It used to be incredibly valuable, and it techncially still is. But your big box retail stores are going to insane lengths, including tracking you from the moment you pull into their parking lot (including knowing what kind of car you drive,) and how many times you circle, lets say, the lego aisle, or the cookies. They know how long you spend looking at stuff and are selling all of that. (as well as using for marketing to sell you more shit you don’t need.)
- Comment on Contadont deny it. 3 days ago:
kinda looks like my uncle. (Complete with the whiskers.)
- Comment on earth, fire, water, wind - it's not hard 4 days ago:
(Chuckles in evil DM)
Yes. I know it’s absurd. (The island of stability is only predicted to go out to what? 120 something? And then isn’t really stable in a practical sense.)
That’s like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin.
This gives me…. Ideas. I know the math breaks down before the big bang, but if anything could get that hot…I would imagine pre-expansion universe. Now how to stuff them in one?
- Comment on earth, fire, water, wind - it's not hard 4 days ago:
Because we like our unobtainium, okay?
Also part of it is, we don’t want to get too complicated here, the stuff only really exists to bypass things and maybe give some interesting abilities (for example, the energy output of the “corroded” stuff is unstable. It could be used to provide pulsed power for things like railguns, or as a sort of electrically-fired fuel for missiles.)
So we stick to things people are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a superconductive wire composed of nonbarionic matter or not- it’s still going to behave a certain way, and sometimes you can get lost in the weeds explaining it, when really it’s just a handwaive away.
I also don’t like introducing power supplies that my party can exploit for really big booms. They may have, for example, opened a portal inside a neutron star (the portals swap a spherical volume of space. So suddenly they created an unstable mass of neutronium roughly 30m in diameter in some douches fleet yards.)
(In their defense the douchenozzle lost control of a sentient grey goo and it was the only way to keep it from spreading.)(but they did blow up half a solar system. And rendered it unnavigable past its Oort Cloud.)
- Comment on Christmas Animals 5 days ago:
Puffins are cuter, usually less, ahem, fragrant, too.
- Comment on Industrial Strength Shitpost 5 days ago:
- people are stupid and this is all just hypothetical
- <you should read this one in Badge 502’s voice>NO!
with those disclaimers… I suspect they were trying to make a mold of their poopchute and didn’t think it all the way through. I’m not sure if that was then going to be directly used, or if it was going to be used as a negative for something else… but that’s my guess.
- Comment on Well? 5 days ago:
are we sure we didn’t confused for a giant piece of shit?
I guess it’s a matter of perspective.
- Comment on earth, fire, water, wind - it's not hard 5 days ago:
it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with “Solarians” who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter’s orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they’d pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)
meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.
the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.
meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)
Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.
My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual’s instructions were basically “tell the AI to update the blueprints.” which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)
- Comment on earth, fire, water, wind - it's not hard 5 days ago:
It’s kinda sad.
I DM for my TTRPG group. One of the things I’m most proud of was a years long, multi-arc universe chock full off world building. (We were using the star drifter ruleset, though everything else was homebrewed.)
One of the the limiting factors for interstellar civilization is “luminium”; a faintly glowing semi-metal that’s a superconductor at room temperature and technobables its way to some kind of exotic energy source (I think I went with quantum tunneling from another universe or something.)
The problem with the stuff is that if it starts corroding it becomes unstable and explodes if conditions are right. The other problem is that the only known way to synthesize the stuff is lost to the Terranogene sphere. The only FTL is through wormholes that jump an enclosed spheres
That same society that figured out luminium also built “port ships” that were large dormant autonomous ships that had the portal generators on board.
Any how. Luminium’s atomic number is 1869 to honor this guy.
It was one of my favorite Easter eggs And they’ve still not noticed even though they now short hand it as “1869” (they didn’t know what it was called and that’s how they started identifying the stuff.)
Though im kinda proud of that campaign. I may have gone a little stir crazy during covid.
- Comment on What is this colour? 5 days ago:
Mom would call it “baby poop” green.
I’d call it pea soup green.
Or puke green.
Depends on what the color was on and howl inoffensive I care to be.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Context matters.
“Men make me uncomfortable.” Could or could not be sexist. It would depend on why one feels uncomfortable and how they act on that feeling.
It’s a very fine line.
Given the additional context provided by OP… yeah she’s definitely ableist.
- Comment on How I imagine mathematicians... 1 week ago:
Naw. Mathmaticians are frequently dyslexic.
It’s grammarians doing it backward!
- Comment on How I imagine mathematicians... 1 week ago:
it’s funny, because I always imagined them giggling about typing 8008135 into calculators.
- Comment on If I was to watch the next jake paul fight on netflix, but only watch the first couple fights and turned it off before watching him fight.Would they know? 1 week ago:
They wouldn’t even care.
Unless you were also grifting the free week trial thingy and not actually paying the subscription. But usually they’ll only offer that once per email account/credit card.
- Comment on Nat 20 1 week ago:
That sounds like a fun team.
The div in our party plays like an idiot-savant. Total himbo, except occasionally useful.
- Comment on Nat 20 1 week ago:
Don’t tell the our divination wizard that… they already broke out their “special” d20.
- Comment on Nat 20 1 week ago:
the hollow bronze things with the studs?
probably not some for of die- divination or otherwise. They just wouldn’t roll well. There’s a few uses for those things that seem likely. Rangefinding (mount it on a staff and peep through the holes, , some sort of symbolic use, or simply just being some sort of decorative weirdness.
(I mean, really. Think about all the jangly things people have on, like backpacks or purses or keychains. People have always been people.)
- Comment on Nat 20 1 week ago:
I dunno. But i find it funny that even back then the divination wizards needed their special hard-to-read dice.
Like, bro. I have a chart with all your symbols on it.
- Comment on Nat 20 1 week ago:
- Comment on Festive Cookies! 1 week ago:
also… the Mossie used less critical resources which meant they could build more of them. and the plywood construction may have been harder to spot on radar.
- Comment on Caption this. 2 weeks ago:
“Yoink!”
- Comment on Gravity! 2 weeks ago:
yeah. its ridiculous. Rather than accept that there’s some inaccuracies and that parts of the bible contain mistakes and say something like “but most of it is true” … they double down, triple and quadruple down. They have to get increasingly improbable theories to explain how all this evidence isn’t really real. Fossils are planted by satan, to lead people astray; there’s a massive World Order whose sole job is to keep this secret for some strange reason.
like. they could just build a rocket and launch it into space and see for themselves. Or some really simple experiments involving sticks and shadows. that allowed them to determine the distance of the sun from the earth, it’s circumference, and can be replicated with some lumber and fifty bucks in the gastank.
- Comment on Gravity! 2 weeks ago:
Also, they believe the earth is flat because the Bible says so; and the earth is young because the Bible says so, and that science is the devil’s work because it contradicts a book written by Bronze Age goat herders retconned by a guy in the Iron Age that got killed for telling the Roman’s he was king of the Jews.
- Comment on Could there be additional forces at super low energies? Could a new fundamental force be discovered anytime soon? + other questions relating to forces 2 weeks ago:
Short answer? probably not. particularly when considering the second paragraph.
“the force” is not a fundamental force as described in physics. Speaking as a fan of Star Wars, don’t get me wrong, but The Force™ is bullshit handwavium to explain why the BathrobeRaverSquad can do the things they do. you’re not going to find some special force literally or proverbially fictitious that will let someone do the things they do.
If there was, we’d see that in the world today.
All of that said, our understanding of the universe and it’s nature is imperfect. It’s something we improved incrimentally getting better and more accurate models as we progress. it’s certainly possible that there is something new to be found, but it’s highly unlikely.
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 3 weeks ago:
I mean, you can use a magneto hydrodynamic generator to replace the bits normally spin up by steam.
But, eh, it’s less efficient than a rankine cycle.
- Comment on mmm... tastes like chimkin 3 weeks ago:
Need to snack on the crunchy chicks to get the evil modifier up. There’s a door with loot, after all.
It’s okay, because you can get even more loot by donating to a temple; and everyone forgets it.
- Comment on Why do I always have "dreams" that give me anxiety (aka: nightmares)? Why do I never just get to re-live my happy memories in my dreams? Wtf brain?!? This is outrageous! It's unfair! 3 weeks ago:
IIRC, what you’re describing is called Lucid Dreaming. most people who lucid dream are aware, though some can actively control their dreams. The degree of control varies, though.
- Comment on Why do I always have "dreams" that give me anxiety (aka: nightmares)? Why do I never just get to re-live my happy memories in my dreams? Wtf brain?!? This is outrageous! It's unfair! 3 weeks ago:
move to Jericho.
(iykyk.)
- Comment on Why do I always have "dreams" that give me anxiety (aka: nightmares)? Why do I never just get to re-live my happy memories in my dreams? Wtf brain?!? This is outrageous! It's unfair! 3 weeks ago:
the idea that cheese affects your dreams is kinda… folklore. Most likely, it’s simply the act of eating right before bed is the problem. (your body doing digestion stuff affects your sleep cycle, making it hard for you to sleep well.)
- Comment on Why do I always have "dreams" that give me anxiety (aka: nightmares)? Why do I never just get to re-live my happy memories in my dreams? Wtf brain?!? This is outrageous! It's unfair! 3 weeks ago:
As far as I know- and I’m far from an expert here- dreams are really just your brain trying to make sense of your brain doing whatever the fuck it is your brain is doing why you sleep. (maybe a de-fragmentation cycle to keep everything nice and functional? bad analogy, probably.)
in any case, your brain is trying to make sense of signals and synapses firing off, in what is basically a random pattern. so it cobbles together a reality as best it can and fit things to that.
Its also trying to maintain a certain amount of continuity with where you are. So, if you’re anxious while you fall a sleep, your brain is going to incorporate that anxiety.
Also, as Bigfish mentioned, the freaky/weird/anxious ones are more likely to wake you up so that you actually remember them.
In any case, I would suggest maybe changing your bedtime routine up and finding something positive/calming to focus on. crotchet works well for me. but it could be just about anything. a feel-good novel, or whatever. (I also suggest turning the screens off.)
might not change that the only things you remember are the unpleasant ones, but it might make them less frequent.
