…isn’t that essentially critical role?..

…there’s a comic i read somewhere illustrating how sombre, dramatic campaign settings ultimately devolve into slapstick hijinks and silly, slapstick campaign settings ultimately evolve into dramatic epics…

…do three strikes laws apply to simultaneous convictions?..

…that’s pretty much my improvisational style, everything eyeballed, nothing measured: sometimes things turn out amazing but of course the cost of those happy surprises is that i’ll never make it the same way again; couldn’t if i tried…

…i dated a girl who dogmatically followed published recipes, considered any deviations anathema to the authors’ labor developing them, and she was horrified to watch me cook…

…let me introduce you to single cask-strength malts: one drop, drawn delicately through your lips, let diffuse across your palate by capillary action, that’s how i learned to appreciate alcohol for the first time after four decades of not getting it…

…the great thing about cask-strength sipping whiskies is that one bottle can last years if kept properly sealed between pours…

…in my experience, polyester teabags never really took off stateside: it’s only imported british mass-market teas which did the fused-pyramidal-bag thing as a product differentiator…stateside,i occasionally see boutique teas with fused polyester bags + strings, but i expect they’ll change in short order based upon this controversy…

…if your tea uses folded-paper bags stapled or tied-off with cotton string, you’re safe…

…i suspect they realised that the bare roasting pan wasn’t going to work, transferred it to a foil sheet, everything fell apart, and then hastily re-assembled the broken bits into what was cooked for the final result…

…their first-generation cards were poorly received, but intel kept at it and recently achieved parity with low-end offerings from ATI and nvidia as a respectable selection for a budget machine…

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/12/review-intel-arc-b580-is-a-compelling-if-incredibly-tardy-250-midrange-gpu/

…if they stay committed to the effort, i think intel might stand toe-to-toe on midrange cards within a generation or two…

“Freedom is a scary thing. Not many people really want it.”

…body count!..now that’s a name i’ve not heard in a long, long time: a long time…

…two-faced rarebit…

…trump’s trivially manipulated: the next four years are china’s best shot and they know it…

(ha - getaway car)

…maybe they like charge up at some lush port with a cheap grid surplus, sail across the atlantic to like, i don’t know, maybe texas during a polar vortex, supplement that grid for a couple of days, return + repeat for a tidy profit?..

…seems tricky to get the timing right; offshore data centers might be a better deal…

…NCSA mosaic won the web, absolutely; in truth i think it gave a lot of us an excuse to upgrade from terminals and shell accounts…

…i remember going to our computer lab in the early nineties and seeing a flyer about this new protocol called the world wide web, thinking to myself in what way is that better than gopher?..

…last week i learned that the cafeteria food i grew up with was scratch-made; the reason it tasted the same everywhere wasn’t because they all bought prepared foods from the same distributors, but because they all used the same USDA-provided recipes…

…and i’m glad i haven’t yet…

…the village building inspector is a recurring NPC in our ongoing campaign of the last four years…

…my experience before ‘high-efficiency incandescent’ halogens was the same: i have thirty-year-old proper halogen lamps either still going strong or which have been replaced only once over that period…these little A19 halogens, though, have an such absurdly-short duty cycle that they’re viable only by virtue of stocking up dozens of cases for pennies on the dollar when they were phased out a couple of years ago…

…i do hope that we have respectable consumer bulbs available in perhaps five years after those few hundred halogen bulbs are gone, but i’m not optimistic as poor spectra appear inherent to LED technology and the market seems to have settled on ‘good-enough’…proper incandescent bulbs are of course still available for specialty applications, but they’re not easy to get…