Dusting and cleaning does not defeat the purpose. You’re making the mistake of thinking that cleanliness is boolean… true or false. It’s not that it’ll just get dusty again, it’s that it will get more dusty, and then even more dusty, and then dustier still, and there is actually no real practical limit to how filthy a place can get. Cleaning resets the progress to a point where you can live again.

Now, there is a related cleaning story that could be called defeating the purpose that stuck in my mind. It’s a bit Luddite in nature, but does have a point. It’s a micro-story from inside the book “Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh”:

The story was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop.

But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town—so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.

The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in the town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running.

In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever.

Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long, the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones every bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.

That’s an example of defeating the purpose, where the thing you do actually makes it worse. A similar “defeating the purpose” is when a bunch of companies lowers wages to save money, making it so that people can no longer afford their products, meaning that they earn less money after all.

I will say that the blow dry option doesn’t really help sufficiently after using the bidet to avoid me wanting to use TP to dry off, but it might be sufficient for lady parts after peeing. Don’t have a vagina personally, so can’t say for sure.

A paramour is an “other lover”. Para = beside, amour = love. It’s not a casual fuck buddy, it’s your cheating partner. I’m surprised to hear you say it’s unknown as a word these days? Seems like just a normal word to me, albeit one I’m happy to go without using as cheaters suck.

My advice is to know that, unlike dogs, a cat’s personality is not built into their breed, with maybe very minor behavior exceptions. Quite frankly, dogs were bred specifically for their behaviors, artificial selection created breed personalities— cat breeding was never for personality, but usually appearance instead, leaving personality to go whatever which way.

And secondly, you must know that a cat will not fully develop their personality until they’ve grown up a bit— you can’t learn a cat’s personality when they’re still a kitten. If you are adopting, adopting a kitting will mean rolling the dice on what you get. But adopting an adult cat will mean you can pick out a personality while at the shelter.

Seriously. You can learn a cat’s personality from 10-30 minutes hanging out with them in a room at the shelter… but only if they aren’t a kitten. And some personalities will fit with you and your family, and some will not.

Do you want a cuddler? An active playful cat? Or one that avoids you mostly and does their own thing? Or are you just looking for something pretty that matches your furniture? (I don’t really recommend you get a cat in this case, but historically, you’d be in good company)

Check out Quill18’s preview using the same footage but talking about what it means at every point, having actually played it: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs3acGYgI1-tzagcKgi6fNTFoBRZfOWVE&si=pCH-r1x7w6ho0tPu

A few other YouTubers have done similarly.

Many channels I watch have already been mentioned, but one comes to mind that hasn’t been: if you like Stuff Made Here and NileRed, you’ll love The Thought Emporium. Dude is a mad scientist, for real. His current long term project is trying to make a neural net that can play DOOM… except he means real neurons. Biological neurons grown in his self built lab, sourced from rats.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a rare modern fairytale, in the old sense of the word, not the Disney sense.

Generally, they don’t include intentional ones, or rather, haven’t done so since Super Metroid (and there, only with the wall jumps). When they release new versions of older games they often do so with patches to try to remove sequence breaks. And in new games they try to make sure not to include known older ways of sequence breaking, and sometimes include pretty drastic measures to prevent it.

Speedrunners sequence break anyway, because that’s how they are. But Nintendo gives every indication that they hate this for some weird reason.

Ah, here’s a YouTube link that goes into more detail about it: https://youtu.be/QLWKsugJPy4?si=gsT78aNb3wsQwCax

Will they be obsessive about trying to remove sequence breaks again? For a genre that is has a rabid following expressly because of the existence of sequence breaking, it’s so strange to me how much Nintendo hates the very idea.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if they didn’t burn everything at the end. I mean, I get that sanitation in that situation was pretty darn important, but it was the author’s choice to choose something that required that outcome. That ending made me sad for a long time. Definitely didn’t know how to handle it. Not sure I can even now.

From the title, I suspected it was Zach actually, because I know fewer people know that name and would be more likely to need the “dwarf fortress co-creator” label. Tarn definitely should have been named.

I once had a session that became infamous amongst my group at the time. There was a magic forest that only the elves knew the way through, but no elves had come through for a while. One of the players was an elf, and I had given him a note explaining that there was a path featuring a sequence of specific species of trees, oak then spruce then elder, that sort of thing. He was supposed to go in the direction moss grew on said trees until seeing the new species, then look for the moss again, and so on and so forth. I expressly noted on the note that if he didn’t see the exact sequence of trees I gave in the note, “something had gone seriously wrong”.

Of course, the idea was that something had gone wrong and the path through the magical maze forest was screwed up, hence no elves arriving recently. My reason for setting it up this way was so that the elf would lead the party into the woods, he’d try to find the path, realize the path was broken, tell the party, and then they’d get down to the business of figuring out what was wrong and fixing it. You know… start the adventure.

Instead, what ensued was an entire multi hour long session of nothing happening. The elf would lead them. I’d tell him the trees they were seeing, out of order. He’d just keep following the moss, the “path” as he always did. I started emphasizing the wrongness of the trees he was seeing. He kept leading the party. I nudged him harder and harder. He just fucking kept going. The party was confused of course, as the whole path thing was supposed to be an elven secret that they didn’t share. And the elf player just kept ramming the entire party’s heads against the stupid wall for real world hours and I couldn’t stop it until I eventually dropped the 4th wall and flat out said this isn’t working, I’ve told you it isn’t working, please do something else! And then we had to end the session and start again next time.

It was incredibly frustrating in the moment, but it actually worked out well for the game as a whole. Became a running gag, a source of a lot of laughs, and it somehow ended up hammering in the point that something was wrong with the world and forest far more effectively than it might have if it had ended quicker. So good times in the end after all…

But MAN was it frustrating in the moment.

Yet again, censors are afraid of gambling motifs more than actual gambling… loot boxes get a pass as long as the loot box isn’t decorated in a shape similar to a standard playing card (sports trading cards are apparently fine), or of a slot machine.

How to get supervisors, superintendents, school boards, and even politicians to let teachers teach. It’s understood that overtesting reduces learning. It’s understood that rigid curriculums don’t work, and you really should be tailoring lessons to the capabilities of the class. All kinds of educational philosophy is understood well and in depth… but being permitted to apply any of it?

More like… take the orange, with the peel still on it, into the shower. Dig your fingers straight through the peel deep into the center of the orange, and then rip it open. Smash your whole face into the middle of the orange, shoving the sweet insides into your mouth and not caring that much of it is smearing on your face. Then shower normally… no sticky residue because you’re already in the shower and it washes right off.

A 1-800 number is immune to long distance charges, free to call by anyone in the US— the owner of the 800 number pays any fees associated with the call. Traditionally, 800 numbers are owned by companies in order to sell stuff. (The 1- portion of a 1-800 number means that it’s a long distance call… which was a thing when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, but basically isn’t a thing anymore in the age of cellphones)

The opposite of an 800 number is a 900 number. The person calling a 900 number has to pay, usually by minute, and most of that money goes to the owner of the 900 number. Famously used for phone sex lines.

Nah, it’s fully polymorphed, it just cast the spell after it sat down.

I legitimately had my players pull that one on me once. Door into a secret lab disguised as a closet was beyond their skill, warded by powerful magic, etc etc. They looked at the floor plan and saw that the closet protruded from the main wall a bit. “Why not go in through the side?” I hadn’t thought about it. I figured the villain hadn’t thought about it either. A simple pickax later and they were in.

Correct. To be more specific, in Tolkien lore, Bilbo (and later Frodo adding to it, organizing it, and editing it) wrote the “Red Book of Westmarch” which was later translated by the narrator of the books into the Hobbit and Lordnof the Rings. Many (most?) Tolkien fans prefer to frame things this way when discussing the stories, and for good reason— that’s how Tolkien himself viewed the stories. As a translation of something in another language. He was a linguist, after all.

Wikipedia has a good article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch

Hey guys, is it okay if I don’t hate Jewish people, I just hate people who do Jewish things or otherwise associate themselves with Jewish culture or identity? I mean, if they just stop being Jewish then I won’t hate them anymore!

No. No that’s not okay either.