I have similar nightsweat problems, so I did something close to this once: https://www.wikihow.com/Clean-a-Bed-with-Baking-Soda

If you Google “clean mattress with baking soda” you’ll find a bunch of similar recipes. Lots suggest using essential oils, which I didn’t use.

The results were decent when I did it. Definitely de-funkified the mattress a bit, and removed some of the stains. It was hardly like new, but it was definitely better than before.

When six newbies struggle to figure it out, then it isn’t well-defined. Or at the very least isn’t well structured to find the definition quickly. I will die on this hill.

My friends and I started playing DnD during COVID. We’re all at least normal intelligence, college educated people (I even work in a job where I regularly research federal regulations, so I’m used to navigating complex rules). Our biggest complaint was how obtuse and difficult to pin down some of the rules in this game are.

Six of us spent a half hour trying to figure out how darkvision works, and the answers we found online didn’t seem to match up with what we were reading in the handbook. You would find something mentioning darkvision, but it wouldn’t explain how it worked. Then somewhere else would say something different about darkvision. It seemed like you needed to go to multiple different sections of the handbook to piece everything together. We encountered multiple instances of this.

Our one friend defended it all saying it’s deliberately obtuse to allow for DM flexibility, but most of us disagree with that approach. The rules should be explicitly stated, and then a caveat added that all rules are flexible if the DM wants them to be. There should not be a debatable way to play the game, as far as official rules are concerned. How you bend the rules is entirely up to you.

It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody good.

I think happiness is a misunderstood concept. It’s something that many people take for granted when they’re young, but as they get older it seems to wane and comes with a lot more caveats. Your baseline used to be happy, but now your baseline is more neutral. You spend 80% of your time being neither happy nor sad. The idea of being happy all the time is sort of a farce, and I tend to assume people who claim to be are either lying or stupid.

Happiness is more about taking a step back from your life and viewing it all in one big picture. If you like what you see, then you can consider yourself happy, even if that doesn’t mean you’re smiling about it right this moment.

I really should give it a try. I liked almost everything else about S1.

I really liked The OA, but I thought the end of season 1 was the absolute worst, most cringe-inducing nonsense I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m not even being hyperbolic. It almost completely ruined what I thought was a great show before that. Haven’t given season 2 a chance because of it.

I think this is terrible advice for most people. You only need to spend like an hour in the airport to avoid missing a flight. Most people don’t fly often enough to get much actual gain from pushing this boundary. The only person I knew who would push the envelope like this was someone who flew every week for work. That makes sense to me, because you’re saving two hours every week for years. If you’re only flying a few times a year just pack a book and ensure you make your flight on time.

That’s sort of exactly the point. People believe it to be true, and it’s sort of impossible to prove them wrong. Nature vs Nurture still isn’t proven either way, regardless of how strongly you feel one way or the other.

The simple fact that someone believes it’s possible to “make people gay”, almost necessarily leads to them believing there are people out there actively doing it.

I think the butterfly effect is much more interesting when you think about incredibly far reaching effects that are essentially impossible to predict. Someone running late and getting into an accident might actually be relatively easy to predict.

Instead: someone reading this post is running late. Because of this a different car following behind them gets caught at a red light they shouldn’t have gotten caught at. As they hit the brakes for that light, their passenger lurches forward and accidentally sends a nonsensical text to their friend. Their friend reads that nonsense text, and in their confusion spills their coffee on the floor. A person walking by slips on the coffee, hits their head, and dies.

The person running late just killed a person miles away, and they have zero idea that it even happened.

An American Werewolf in London. My parents were watching it when I was like 6. The opening sequence on the moors scared the hell out of me, and they decided I should go to bed. I think they had heard it was a comedy, so weren’t prepared for actual horror. That scene stuck with me for like 20 years before I ever rewatched it. It’s a good movie as an adult.

Amazon, sort of. It absolutely cannot be beat for convenience. Ordering something in 15 seconds, then having it shipped within 48 hours is unmatchable.

But if you plan ahead, and aren’t an impulse buyer, you can find alternatives with better products and similar prices. Most stuff on Amazon is absolute junk with clickfarm reviews.

Ironically Reddit was really good for finding niche websites for whichever product you were looking for. Hopefully Lemmy will reach that point eventually.

This is one of those problems that makes more sense with context. The teacher had the students working on “reasonableness”, which is essentially “does the question I’m asking make sense?”. The students were probably instructed to ignore actually trying to solve the problem when presented with one, but instead explain why the question either does or doesn’t make sense.

In this case the student potentially misunderstood the task. The failure on the teacher’s part is wording the question in such a way that it actually has a reasonable solution, and isn’t necessarily an unreasonable question.

Stalker by Tarkovsky. The description made it sound like a really cool sci-fi/fantasy, bleak adventure movie. Instead it was just a bunch of melodramatic philosophy. Pretty much nothing even remotely sci-fi happens.

Are you talking about the things that look like big spiders? We call those daddy long legs as well. Horseflies are literal flies that bite.

I’m gonna go against the grain here a little bit.

I’ve never been particularly bothered by WoW’s approach to microtransactions. It’s all cosmetics and transfer/name/race change services.

I understand the fear that even cosmetic transactions can drive game design decisions, but I just don’t think it’s that bad with WoW. It has certainly never been pay to win, and has never even really been pay for convenience.

If someone wants to spend $20 on a meaningless mount I’m not really sure I care.