Um… There may not always be male and female plants, but pollen is definitely the ‘male’ form of a haploid gamete, and nearly perfectly analogous to sperm. The link should be able to take you to every part you’d not want to know about plants. Allergies are normal. People who don’t have allergies are the freaks, because their bodies don’t care that the tree is trying to have sex with their nose.

Hell, the part of the fruit that you eat is often the plant sperm that didn’t fertilize the plant egg. Pollen contains a second plant sperm that fertilizes a different part of the female plant and creates all the juicy goodness you ingest. You can read about it here.

Now, the dandelion is formed seeds, sure. So baby cannon it is. /shrug

Comfortably? Nah. They should live in barracks just like the military. Public Service requires public servants.

Milhouse is not a meme!

Interesting how the ‘vintage’ ‘black border’ meme has a remarkably modern website watermark. Go back to sucking on your pacifier, you wanka.

I’ll forever be grateful to those thronal thespians of the page, who told me exactly whence the phrase, “Close, but no cigar,” came from.

This is a big one, and I’d add in an aggressive tax for owning multiple properties. Make single land ownership ~70% of what it currently is, and each additional property increases all your property tax by 300%. Couple that with getting rid of idiotic exemptions (seriously…I have a friend with parents that owned more than a hundred different properties in a semi-rural area [one that was going to become suburban soon] and paid nearly no taxes because they plunked a few cows onto each one until the development companies paid the big moolah for them) and there would be plenty of homes for everyone. Last report I remember said we had more than enough empty homes sitting around to house every homeless person multiple times over.

It was, when it was just people looking to get a tiny bit of income from renting a room in their house. Then people tried to make it their sole income, and then companies got into the game. Part of it is that the service became popular, so any cheaper rooms are snatched up instantly, and the user now gets to choose between a hotel-looking hotel, or a house-looking hotel, with nasty fees to get more money from you.

Okay, I think this is the one I read way long ago, but it says it was updated in 2021. I remember when I read it must have been early 2010s, and this dude even admits his grandmother was an impasta so… /shrug Amazing how memory gets skewed. I must have remembered the grandmother not being Italian line and somehow mangled it into him being Italian.

#Your favorite game’s “awesome story” robs the player of a basic sense of agency

It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss’s boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player’s consent.

Right, so…please tell me a narrative medium that allows this. Somehow movies, books, comics, manga, and literal storytelling all get a pass on this?

I can sort of nod along with everything else, agreeing that there is some truth in the spewing. This statement is so pants-on-head foolish that every other assertion you make gets dragged beneath the water and drowns with chains made of the last page of shitty choose-your-own-adventure book. And for that level of strength in the chains to work, those assertions have to be pretty crappy.

Sorry, but no medium of media allows for agency. I don’t care if you have some of the best writing in a game (whether that means Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate II, Disco Elysium, whatever), or if you want to go with the old choose-your-own-adventure books, but there is ultimately little to no player agency. If you want player agency in a game, you have one choice, and it isn’t a video game: TTRPGs. Even ChatGPT can’t match what a good GM can do, because they can allow you to break the mechanics of the game or add mechanics on the fly to fit what a player wants to do. A GM can literally respond to something a game creator never imagined within seconds. I want to see Planescape or Disco Elysium react to a player doing something they thought of that the game creator didn’t imagine. Buuuulllllshit. Player agency my ass.

Also, as the OP obviously fails to mention any games that he thinks is worthy of being an ‘awesome story’, I’m calling this as a troll/bait post.

This is why pasta instructions will tell you to add the pasta only when the water is at a vigorous boil. Either you stir, or you have the pasta boiling like it’s a volcano about to pop.

There was a neat cooking blog where an italian fella went into all the ‘old myths’ that his grandmother used to tell him: Vigorous boiling; Large Pot; when to add sauce; etc. It all boiled down to knowing what you’re cooking. Pasta is starchy, so if it sits in hot water instead of being tumbled about, all the starch that’s been liberated into the water settles back on the pasta (and not in a good way).

That’s a humorous take, because I’ve known so many people who went to see crappy movies because of the movie previews for something they liked. This was way before the internet took over as a way to see videos, but still, interesting to note the opposite.

I’ve lived and worked in areas like the article describes. I’ve been the one giving CPR for 20 minutes while waiting for an ambulance. This is just part of living in a rural area. I think we were around 1,000 square miles with one ambulance. It’s not just EMS, it’s everything. Groceries, police, fire (this was actually the least spread, because everyone likes to be volunteer fire), doctors, lawyers, telecom companies, etc. etc. etc. All of them are spread thin when the populace is thin.

While yes, it sucks, it isn’t going to be fixed by throwing money at it from the state. It’s just like suburbs of a city taking more money per person in budget areas like infrastructure. If you take money from urban areas to give to these rural areas so they have rapid EMS response, you’re spending the money much less efficiently, and it isn’t sustainable. Accept that your area’s funding is tied to the amount of people, and move to where there are more people or learn to live as you wanted to: away from other people, and the problems and help that they bring.

It’s funny, I really liked the outfit for Berseria. Something about a not well-groomed-in-the-middle-of-fights look stood out from the crowd.

The equator and its rain forests are much more pleasant. Plenty of shade and the temps don’t reach quite as high. It’s the tropics that get nasty. There was a stretch of the border between the US and Mexico that reached 115 this week. The summer I spent in Texas years ago broke a record for never getting below 90 for something like 45 days, and the apartment I had didn’t use AC. That was a nasty summer.

That’s what an article emphasized that I skimmed through. The sub had automatic pinging, and systems to automatically raise it to the surface if an untoward event happened. For communication and pinging to be lost, as well as the lack of floating submersible… It’s likely whatever happened buggered the whole setup. The banging also was supposedly heard in 30 minute intervals, but no one is saying how many of those intervals happened. The banging could be from anything. The deeps get strange, and the water distorts much of what we know. Multiple people with knowledge from other searches, like the 2014 MH flight, said banging was often heard during their searches but it was always from other sources.

An article on APNews said there were multiple backups onboard… Which sort of engenders the thought of why they needed multiple backups. I’d be sure to have A backup, sure, but multiple?

The mobile app is definitely what turned me back onto OSRS. I wish I had more time, because the gameplay is like comfort food to me.

Ya know, if the dude had just left the original caps on my doorstep, I wouldn’t even be upset. I’d drive around for a while loving it.

The amusing part is that we can’t even guess (accurately) what the actual tell will be. Somehow I don’t think the time gap between blinks is going to be it. I’m betting it’s going to be slang-based. There’s a reason kids use slang readily, and it’s often to separate the worlds of adult regulators and the ‘more free’ children/teenagers. Imagine AI trying to keep up with the slang, but just like adults, it will be unable to use it in the same way with all the pseudo-information packed into it.

They did that with a 30-40 foot stick a few years ago, and the initial attempts by the driver were hilarious. They didn’t show improvement because I’m sure it wouldn’t be as funny, but I think we all forget how difficult it first was to match up how far to push the stick left or right for a particular turn. Now imagine an actual wheel.