Wandering Adventure Party

@pluralisticOne thing that really stuck out to me when I was in school: a lot of people seem to not get the *point* of sentence structure, spelling, or punctuation. They think that such things exist purely as hoops to jump through to stave off the wrath of a teacher, rather than as legibility aids. When they don't perfectly map to the spoken word, they're seen as even more arbitrary.Writing good dialogue involves learning how to make legible text that still sounds like real speech.

@Taskerland To quote my bio, "I started playing RPGs in the 1980s, when the only form of social media was White Dwarf magazine."In the early days (first ~100 issues), it was a magazine written by gamers, for gamers. Articles, reviews, a scenario or two, fan-contributed content. There is nothing like that any more.

@mariamannone @blogdiva Not a bad suggestion, for those in a position to take it - which is by no means everyone. Presumably via \usepackage{babel} and whatever other tweaks one may add for fonts and such. Here's the frightening manual which no one will want to see:https://mirrors.mit.edu/CTAN/macros/latex/required/babel/base/babel.pdfBut it does indicate that a certain amount of thought has gone into it.

I am a RecipeTinEats advocate. The recipes that I have tried have never turned out wrong - even my kitchen-anxious partner can follow her recipes just fine. Her books go for $20 at Target/KMart/Big W. I also have a book called Africola, after a restaurant in Adelaide, South Australia. I also like The Mediterranean Dish. I don’t think it’s AI, but I could be wrong. I hope not.

@gwynnion The system doesn't work by taking marching orders from the parties, it is our job to provide them marching orders. Most significant progress in the US has come when people have been so pissed off that they've voted to replace their reps wholesale for being shit.

@BillySmith @ASegar I think devaluing a Texas A&M degree would be difficult.

@johnzajac @cybervegan @EricLawton @bonaventuresoft Engineering is not politics. The principle applies to a certain degree insofar as sometimes tearing it down and starting over is the only option to repair/reform. But, in poliotics, new laws are a reformation. Unless, of course, you're using reform as to make again and not as improve.

@ljwrites Sadly, they are quite rare.However, I do have hopes for writing a book about love stories from German folklore. Romance is a popular book genre, right?

@mcnees The creator also posted to reddit r/music about the site. He writes it took him only 48h to get it up and running thanks to AI. And there's this really prominently placed link begging for money.

@markwoll@universeodon.com @pluralistic@mamot.fr @cwicseolfor@zeroes.ca Yeah. When we moved into our house (fall of 2002), there was a very good, independent vet less than 1mi from our house. I had a pair of Bengals when we first moved in, so, that's where I started taking them (and the dogs that we adopted in the years following). It was a great practice …until they got acquired by VCA in 2016 (or maybe 2015). The other than adding the VCA logo to their signage, the changes weren't immediately noticeable. Then we lost a dog to kidney failure in early 2017. When I reviewed her bloodwork from the previous two years' physicals, I saw that there were abnormal numbers for her kidney labs. The vets overseeing her care had apparently not noticed them, at the time, presumably because, since the VCA acquisition, they didn't have enough time to pay attention to the details.During that 2015-2017 period, they'd also had a high turnover among their treating personnel and their prices spiked. But, due the location, and the fact that being our "regular" vet, we got discounted access to their emergency-hours services. So, we'd just sucked it up. However, we didn't change practices until 2019 when they discontinued the 24hr emergency-service part of the practice. At that point, we had no compelling reason to pay the premium plus the bloodwork-gaff that preceded the 2017 loss of our one dog made me say, "yeah, fuck these guys" and change practices.Was only recently that I found out that the new practice is also PE-owned. My criteria for selection of a new vet had merely been "not VCA-owned" (and not BanField, et. al.). The new practice wasn't slathered with "chain" logos and appeared to only be a local practice-group (at the time of our switch, they only had two locations). The only reason I found out that our "new" veterinary practice is PE owned is I was speaking with their practice-manager about recent changes to their prescription policies. It was in explaining to her why we'd changed practices that she revealed "for the sake of transparency" that they, too, were PE-owned (thankfully nont VCA). So, yeah, they're on a very short leash, now.

@Taskerland *looks suss at photoshop back to 97*

@jzb One thing you can do to help right now is just to spread the word about how bonkers and awful all of this is. I feel like a lot of national and international news is soft pedaling it.

I do think part of the current wave of anti-intellectualism is that academic knowledge was supposed to be gatekept. It was supposed to be used as a tool for people with power.When white men filled every philosophy department, many of them spewing out rationalizations for colonial violence & oppression, they could tolerate philosophy, even saw its uses.

Yes from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2010: Odyssey Two

Hell yeah, dude!

@CactuarJoe that new stencil doing work

@gwynnion why don't Presidents fight the war?why do they always send the poor?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUzd9KyIDrM

@artemisI dunno, honoring suckers tricked or manipulated into doing evil things seems inappropriate.

@Annacats dogs sit there by what they broke, looking very embarassed.cats *totally* have that "i meant to do that" expression.

@eljas And yet it still looks better than some 🥲