My wife found an Emerald ring she really liked from more of a boutique style jewelry store owned by a young woman. It had the vibe of a brick-and-mortar Etsy store. We went to a few old school jewelers and hated the experience. It felt like we were being scammed by some slimy diamond dealer.

You’re being obtuse about the definition of “go to war”. If they invade your country and you fight back you’re still going to war.

This is slightly extreme. Go tell Europeans in the late 30s and early 40s that there’s no justification for going to war against Germany. There are always exceptions.

Sports subs are the #1 reason I still occasionally check in on Reddit. I’ve removed every non-sports sub. Sports subs can also be sorta “reddity”, but it’s still my favorite place for news and discussion.

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.

My wife and I gave up after two episodes. Neither of us have read the books or played the games. We just think the show sucks.

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.

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.

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.

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.