The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One - A D&D podcast. It’s cast should be pretty familiar if you’re into other D&D podcasts - Brennan Lee Mulligan is the DM, Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii and Lou Wilson are players - but it doesn’t seem to have many listeners.
It strikes a nice balance between scripted narrative performances and actual play. It’s edited and scored with a light touch that stops it dragging like the raw sessions of something like Critical Role, but preserving the authentic character breaking reactions as the dice takes it somewhere interesting. The players don’t seem to be in on a “script”, anymore so than the normal sort of out of session discussions you might have in a narrative heavy game at home, but the DM does a very good job of keeping it focused. It’s also thankfully not another billion player table, three is much more comfortable.
The vibe is excellent. From cozy slices of life to drama that plays on your heartstrings as three childhood friends reconnect and go on an adventure. Its trailer conveys the tone pretty well honestly: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q9et3Othu4
For me, there were several dollar store trinkets that already broke, and one toy for my kids that was a huge sparkly styrofoam mess waiting to happen, so I threw it out rather than curse anyone else with it.
My neighbour gave me a TV. To be precise, he rushed it to me unannounced at the exact moment I was leaving to go to a party. I accepted as quickly as I could in an effort to still make my train.
It turns out it’s about 15 years old and I have no use for it. He’s a lovely man but I intend to post it as free to a good home then drop it at an e-recycling station if nobody is interested.
I reckon I’d have severely diminishing returns past 6 figures, and I would (and do) trade income for less hours with a better work environment well before that.
I remember when it was just Hulu for $5 and Netflix for $8. Saved $50 a month from cable. Now it seems we spend more. I have four. Max, Peacock, Paramount and Hulu. Prime doesn’t count because it sucks balls. (Only paying Netflix when next Stranger Things and Squid Game is released). Curious to see what the average...
None, and every time my coworkers talk about how many they have it seems insane. One has fucking 6 different services. It’s not even about the money. I just truly cannot be bothered working out the maze of what is where when an RSS feed will just deliver me the stuff I’m interested in when it comes out from anywhere.
I’ve never had a Facebook account or any other social media. I know they keep shadow profiles, but I’ve never given permission. I never had any interest and frankly still don’t....
LinkedIn isn’t a terrible idea if you just want to come up in search results. It’s quite useful for a lot of different professions for networking. You’d likely just make a profile and never look at it again.
Facebook can be almost mandatory depending on where you live. I currently live in a city where Facebook is the only meaningful source of networking, local news and information on events online. It’s not uncommon for businesses, even quite larger ones, to have their only media presence online be a Facebook page. The city is also kind of infamously hard to break into socially so you want any advantage you can get.
I don’t currently have any social media but it’s become a hindrance and I might need to reactivate. I end up using social media by proxy through family and friends anyway.
Going with the just de-age interpretation and not time travel, it has to be late enough I could still pass for an adult but I’d want it before any of my chronic health conditions emerge so I can mitigate them. I don’t want to look younger, I just want the health benefits.
I can’t go back to being a kid because where the hell would new identity documents come from? I still have to be able to live my current life more or less. I suppose 35 is the absolute minimum for me to take it, at 15 I wasn’t getting carded buying alcohol. I reckon at that age with the right presentation I could pass for 20 at least, and a 35 year old seeming that young isn’t completely unheard of.
I can’t go too much older because issues start compounding in my 20s. I’d love to have picked a post development age - aside from my health, I didn’t really get comfortable in my own skin until then - but it’d be too late. Maybe 40 so the worst of puberty is over, but that’s probably my limit.
Nah, you’ve fallen in to a classic trap for men. Even though the answer could be correct under different framing, it’s not always okay. The framing matters.
So if she said would you still love me if i was the size of a whale
In this example, the underlying insecurity is about you. She’s worried you’ll leave her if she’s not always at her best. Thus just saying yes provides helps solve the core issue. To be honest it’s not a perfect answer, but it’s fine.
gf saying “I’m fat”
In this one, the insecurity is not (just) about you. Most likely she’s worried about how other people perceive her, or how she perceives herself. Men often assume any concern someone puts into their appearance is for their partner or for finding one, but it’s not. Saying you’ll love her even if she is fat does not address the underlying insecurity. In fact, it implies she is fat and heightens what she is worried about.
I would advise a hug or something for immediate reassurance and then asking her some gentle questions to gauge what she’s really worried about if you’re not sure. Literally, “hey what brought this on?”. Maybe with a “you look great” leading into it first.
Although when she asks you would you still love her if she was a worm, the correct answer is yes.
Better to put it back reframed in more direct terms, showing you understand the underlying insecurity, but dodging having to be dishonest about the fact her being a worm obviously would change things. Then lighten the mood with a joke.
I have to be honest, I forgot about Rebels. By the end of Season 2 it started putting out some real bangers. Don’t blame anyone for not being into a kids adventure staring a brat with a laser slingshot, but I enjoyed it more than I did the Bad Batch.
Ahsoka was a meh for me. I didn’t hate it, but all the live action stuff of her has been really disappointing. Becoming a Jedi again just feels like wasted potential and cheapens the most interesting thing her character ever did.
I need to occupy my mind with something that isn’t related to real life. Not just avoiding topics that are stressful or otherwise emotionally loaded, just thinking about anything I’m going to do or things in my life will stop me sleeping. So I think of stories and fiction worlds until the day dreams become actual dreams.
Since I got into the habit my sleep has gotten far more regular and I have had more control over went it happens.
I’m not sure how old I am, maybe three or four. It’s the only memory I have from the first place my parents lived in. I’m outside the garage and I’ve got a hammer.
My mother is smashing computer components and I’m “helping”. I remember being so fascinated with what they were and how they worked. I was particularly enthralled by what I now recognize were the internals of a hard drive. The platter is just so shiny! This memory sparks a long term interest in computers.
Later I’d learn my father had been caught consuming particularly violent BDSM pornography.
Heat waves are basically the only serious thing here. There isn’t really much to surviving them for the average person. Stay where it’s cool, stay hydrated, don’t over exert yourself in the heat. All really easy things to do if you have a reasonable amount of security in your life. Most don’t bother except maybe making sure to contact elderly or otherwise vulnerable relatives.
Preparation is needed if you’re not financially secure. Maybe you’re homeless, maybe you’re too broke too cool your home, maybe a lot of things. I’ve been there before. To this day I’m still aware of places I can find shelter across the city and how to get to them, with and without public transport, in a hurry.
Mostly the answer is libraries but it depends where you are in the sprawl and how bad the heat wave is. They’re great during business hours but they can close before things cool down. I learned to get really good at loitering in shops and other private places while expending as little as possible without them moving me on.
Also where to get potable drinking water for free, you’ll be surprised how hard it can be to find in a pinch.
Edit: I forgot an underrated and personal favorite method from those days - trains.
Before everything went electronic it was really easy to travel free without the stereotypical methods of fair evading, so you could relax when inspectors were on. I’d find a train with functioning air conditioning on one of the ‘safe’ lines and just ride it for the whole round trip back to the central station then find a new one. Outside of peak hour it would be dead quiet and I could read or sleep in peace, and they go till late.
If you’re curious about the fair evasion method, the old tickets were just small bits of plastic-y cardboard with a magnetic strip on the back. Ticket machines would read the magnetic strip, write to it and mark down a trip in ink on the front of the ticket. If the magnetic strip ever failed they’d still honor the ticket and use the marks on the front to determine how many trips you were owed.
All you had to do was stop it being inked (or remove it). The tolerances on the machines were quite large so you could easily just put a bit of tape on the front and peel it off after to have an unmarked ticket. If you were desperate, you could sometimes rub it off anyway. Then all you needed to do was run a magnet over the magnetic strip or bend the ticket until it was damaged in the right way for a “fresh” but broken ticket. You’d then exchange it as a broken one and have a new ticket. If inspectors ever came around while you had a broken one they’d just tell you to take it in and leave you be.
This way you’d theoretically only ever need to buy one ticket, though it was still advisable to pay when you could or fair evade other ways to avoid become a regular at the service stand. My mother was an alcoholic and my father a deadbeat so this was how I made it to school for years.
I’m sure there is some trick with the new electronic cards but I’ve been fortunate enough to not need to work that out since they came in.
For women: I like women a bit older than me, I like plus sized women, I like slightly deeper voices, I like flat women, I like a chubby uhhh “mons pubis”, I like muscle women, I like pubic hair. There are so many, often contradictory, things I like that are broadly considered imperfections. Frankly, I just like women who aren’t the typical beauty standard.
For men: I like anything that softens them, makes them seem less aggressive. Some of these are pretty common (e.g., “twinks”) but I also like chubby men, short men, long hair and so on. It’s less broad than things I’m into with women and has a definite reason rather than being a seemingly random assortment of things.
That’s just physically as well. Wealth is a turn off, being really into fitness is a turn off, overly ambitious is a turn off (particularly for work). I like cozy introverts who just want to be content with life.
I’ve pretty consistently chosen less hours and better working conditions over pay since I started to have that choice. It’s made it a lot more tolerable. I’m currently on a four day week, with a minimal commute, good perks and a relatively stress free job that I took a pay cut for. My retirement savings look pretty slim, but due to my health the chance of a long one isn’t much higher anyway.
Not without it’s issues. Pay is pretty significantly below the median. Fortunately I’m not interested in having kids and I’m content living cheaply, even if it sounds boring. But I’m in a weird dead zone for government support; for instance - if I earned more, there are programs for “middle income” housing and the like that I earn too little to qualify for. Low income housing programs are a joke - with wait times being as much as a decade -but even if it wasn’t I’m not high priority anyway. Also no way on earth I’m ever getting a home loan, even though mortgage repayments would be less than rent and I could conceivably make the deposit.
It’s kind of been a shallow year for both books and movies in terms of impact on me. That’s not to say it’s been a bad year for them, but it’s mostly been just ‘enjoyable’.
That said, it was probably Radicalized by Cory Doctorow. It’s a collection of four novellas that follow different characters pushed into different kinds of extremist action. The one where people start murdering health insurers was particularly heavy.
I’ll start: I tried to move a bookshelf while drunk about 6 years ago and tore a tendon in my shoulder pretty damn good. It still bothers me sometimes if I move it wrong or sleep on it wrong.
It’s a little petty, but I constantly feel stupidest about my hearing. Cranked my music too loud and didn’t wear ear protection ever when I was younger. The tinnitus gets so bad sometimes it makes me suicidal.
It’s an extremely similar movie to the Swedish version, which only came out two years prior, down to using some of the same locations to shoot. I preferred the Swedish cast and found Craig a particularly poor fit in the American version. No question that Fincher’s is more impressive stylistically, but it also made it feel a lot more artificial in a way that I don’t think was a benefit to the plot.
Bear in mind I saw both when they came out so my memory is fuzzy. Also the screen was fuzzy, because I was watching the Swedish version on a laptop with one of the janky, standard definition rips we used to trade in school due to the fact all of our internet connections were slow and heavily metered.
We’re still talking about how Kelly Rowland tried to text Nelly in Microsoft Excel for their ‘Dilemma’ music video. I
This is hilarious, I’ve absolutely used a shared spreadsheet for texting. Plausible deniability built right into it. Yes boss, I’m totally doing work and not slacking off.
What is an obscure piece of media or videogame that you think nobody else here has heard of? (kbin.social)
It could even be a youtube video or movie that you don't think anyone reading this has heard of besides you.
What gifts that you received for Christmas this year are already in the trash?
For me, there were several dollar store trinkets that already broke, and one toy for my kids that was a huge sparkly styrofoam mess waiting to happen, so I threw it out rather than curse anyone else with it.
What salary do you think would make you happy?
How Many Streaming Services Do You Have?
I remember when it was just Hulu for $5 and Netflix for $8. Saved $50 a month from cable. Now it seems we spend more. I have four. Max, Peacock, Paramount and Hulu. Prime doesn’t count because it sucks balls. (Only paying Netflix when next Stranger Things and Squid Game is released). Curious to see what the average...
After a lifetime against, I'm considering joining social media. Any advice?
I’ve never had a Facebook account or any other social media. I know they keep shadow profiles, but I’ve never given permission. I never had any interest and frankly still don’t....
You have a magic pill, which de-ages you by 20 years. You can take it once in your life only, so long as you are at least 20. What age — past, current or future — do you reckon is best to take it?
How to respond to gf saying "I'm fat"
She gained some weight but she is not fat at all!
What’s your go to driving song?
Just saw this picture with "good Disney Star Wars", do you agree? (preview.redd.it)
What are your best Sleep tips and hacks?
Nature’s Ambien...
What is your earliest memory?
What Kind of Natural Disasters Occur Where You Live? And How Have You Prepared for Them?
Bonus points for man-made disaster preparedness tips.
Thoughts on reddit reposter bots?
I’m new to lemmy but would like your opinion about instances like lemmy.online
Tron 3 (or TR3N) started production today. (www.instagram.com)
What physical features do you find attractive on a person that would be considered unattractive by your culture's beauty standards?
How do you deal with the thought of having to work for 40+ years and then when/if you retire, you're too old to do much?
There has to be a better system than this.
What movie or book had the biggest impact on you this year?
What stupid injury left a long lasting impact on you?
I’ll start: I tried to move a bookshelf while drunk about 6 years ago and tore a tendon in my shoulder pretty damn good. It still bothers me sometimes if I move it wrong or sleep on it wrong.
It hurts my soul how underappreciated Fincher's Girl With A Dragon Tattoo is. (lemmy.ml)
Text messages for TV and film. What works and what doesn't. (blog.frame.io)