Also the opposite can be infuriating. When a company asks you to install their app, you usually find that the website has more features. Looks like usually the app is just a bare bones version of the actual website with several core features missing.

Well, bullets are pretty small, but that’s not going to help when they travel so fast. Same applies to flying rocks too.

Most meteors that reach all the way to the surface are really small. Bigger impacts are rare, buy not impossible.

You could also list some long term average power draw instead of the peak.

It gets even better when you read about annual or even daily energy production of a specific power plant.

For example, the annual production of Aswan dam in Egypt is about 10 042 GWh, which translates to an average power output of about 1.1 GW. Now that you have this number, you can compare that with the maximum theoretical power output which is 2.1 GW. Therefore, they should have plenty of capacity left, but you can’t tell that just by looking at the published numbers. They just have to use convoluted units, because that’s the tradition in a bunch of industries.

Sounds like a fun (and terrifying) idea for homebrew rules. I asked Mistral to write suitable rules, and here’s what what I ended up with.

–

When a character contracts COVID-19, they must make a Constitution saving throw (DC 15). On a failed save, the character develops Long COVID. The effects of Long COVID are varied and can include fatigue, shortness of breath, and other physical ailments. However, the most feared complication is brain injury.

Brain Injury

Brain injury from Long COVID reduces a character’s Intelligence score. To determine the extent of the damage, the character must make a roll based on their current Intelligence score:

Roll a d20: The result of this roll will determine the severity of the brain injury. Modify the Roll: Subtract the character’s Intelligence modifier from the roll. For example, if the character has an Intelligence score of 14 (modifier +2), subtract 2 from the d20 roll. Determine Intelligence Loss:

• 1-5: Minor brain injury. The character loses 1 point of Intelligence.
• 6-10: Moderate brain injury. The character loses 2 points of Intelligence.
• 11-15: Severe brain injury. The character loses 3 points of Intelligence.
• 16-20: Critical brain injury. The character loses 4 points of Intelligence.

New Hard Maximum

Once the Intelligence loss is determined, the character’s new Intelligence score becomes their hard maximum for the rest of the game. This means that even with magical healing, potions, or other means of restoring Intelligence, the character cannot exceed this new maximum.

Oh, wait. That means that if you do drop to zero, you’ll be in permanent coma for the rest of the game without any hope of recovery. I guess I should add some exception, that allows to you recover back to 1 point, but no higher than that.

Indeed! Too bad facts don’t work when talking to conspiracy theorists. Regardless, that’s an interesting observation to the rest of us.

I guess I should have been more specific. People who actively choose not to get vaccinated, and get terribly ill as a direct result of their delusional thinking, can blame themselves.

If you took all the sensible precautions, like getting vaccinated, but ended up with long covid regardless, that’s not your fault. You did what you could, but some times even that isn’t enough.

Even lower intelligence score? As far as D&D rules are concerned, you would get knocked unconscious if your intelligence drops to zero.

Oh, that makes sense.

Many instances allow much longer messages, but it depends on the admin and how they see it. Could even be thousands of characters in some cases.

Anyway, mastodon integration is nice, but there are some serious issues too.

Better not get vaccinated, because the vaccine kills you and covid is just another harmless flu anyway… oh wait.

Seriously though, antivaxxers already have some sort of psychological issues going on, so adding a literal brain injury to the list might not even make a big difference at that point.

I have so many questions. Like, was there supposed to be a link to an article? This picture alone doesn’t really answer any questions.

“And math’s just physics unconstrained by precepts of reality ”

Source: xkcd, every major’s terrible, square 2

"Why can’t you leave the church alone?”

Here’s an opportunity to strike a deal. If mormons leave people alone, people will leave them alone. That’s how it already works with most religious groups.

The more evidence you provide, the harder some delusional people will reject all of it. It’s not a fight you can win with facts.

It may look like a debate to most people, but some people just don’t play by those rules. The whole idea of it being a debate just falls apart when you realize that what wasn’t reasoned in, can’t be reasoned out.

Is that your first espresso machine, or was there also a journey from a cheaper machine to a fancier one?

You’re welcome.

I drew it using gimp, skipped a some details, and didn’t really focus on getting things right. Also, instead of saving it in a proper format, I just took a messy low-res screenshot.

Apparently, i’m not the only one who feels that way. I tried to use Mastodon, but couldn’t find anyone worth following. People always post random stuff I don’t care about.

I looked into this, and it seems that nowadays UK is getting lots of educated immigrants from India and a few other countries. Racists are obviously going to hate seeing so many foreign faces and hearing foreign languages, so in that regard Brexit has failed. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To make Britain white again?

Anyway, having educated people should still have a positive impact on the economy as a whole, although that might not be enough to mitigate the damage inflicted on other areas of society.

That gives me an idea for a sci-fi weapon. It squeezes a few grams of stuff into an unstable black hole, which then releases all of the energy in a massive explosion.

If there was a compression ray, it could cause a few pico grams of matter to form a black hole on the surface of the target. If you pulse it very quickly, you get the appearance of a continuous cutting beam. Obviously, those explosions would be very loud and they would emit lots of radiation, so maybe it could be a tank mounted weapon.