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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)S
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2 yr. ago

  • Paranoia, the game where every character is technically engaged in a crime punishable by death at basically all times, and you're given a number of clones because you are expected to die...a lot. Also the R&D gadgets, like the personal disintegrator which does exactly what it says on the tin - disintegrates your person.

  • Like forcing the players into an encounter where all their toolkits are nerfed. Close quarters for casters, magical monsters that can’t be harmed by melee, or NPCs that are way OP for the group and they stick to the Monster Manual to the letter.

    When I GM, it depends on just how narrow and just how powerful your particular toolkit is. I'm not going to ensure that you can do whatever your thing is at absolutely every opportunity, and if your schtick becomes well known, enemies capable of planning will plan around it when feasible. The more narrow your schtick is, the more scenarios you might encounter where it does not apply simply by chance (for example, if you're a flying archer every room in a dungeon won't gain a minimum 30' high ceiling to maximize your use of that). The more disproportionately powerful your schtick is compared to other party members, the more likely I am to specifically come up with occasional scenarios meant to make it not apply so someone else gets to shine.

    Sometimes I will signpost something is a very bad idea, and if you do it anyways (or do something else absurdly dangerously foolish) I'm not going to pop up a guard rail to save you at the last moment - retrieving your body from somewhere adrift on the astral and your soul from the gemstone the archdevil you pissed off is keeping in his treasury to try to save you is the next adventure hook.

    You encounter a huge, elaborate tome, on a concealed lectern, in a library connected by a hidden door directly off the bedroom of a powerful wizard, you detect magic and get extremely powerful auras of conjuration, transmutation and evocation maybe "I flip it open to a random page and start reading aloud, I'll sound out any words I don't recognize" is not, in fact, a wise decision. The copy of "Words You Mispronounce And Die: A Primer For Apprentice Wizards" you saw on one of the shelves on the way there, the references to a cursed grimoire of terrible power, the book being bound in the skin of an angel covered in burns and scars, etc, etc should have maybe hinted at that.

  • It's weird that both France and Germany are as low down the list as they are, since English is a Germanic language with an absolute fuckton of words rooted from French.

  • Ah, FATE - it's F.U.D.G.E. with extra icing!

  • Doesn't need to be a sole cause to be a cause. See cancer, where smoking causes lung cancer, but not all lung cancer is caused by smoking. But again, needs more study.

  • Eh, it's not totally baseless. Hell, there's even a non-zero chance it's true. It's way too early to claim it as true though, since studies on the topic are few, have mixed conclusions and correlation is not causation. I refuse to give it any more credence than "not totally baseless" though.

  • This is not at all accurate. If a girl wants to play a sport for which there is a boys team but not girls team, she must be allowed to try out and participate on the same basis as the boys (a boys team is really an "everyone" team - this actually applies beyond schools and Title IX as no professional sports league in the US actually bars women from competing). Only girls/women's teams get to set restrictions with respect to sex/gender. For Title IX, this is a wildly discriminatory interpretation of a low that bans discrimination, but it's the one that has been in use for years.

    And Title IX doesn't require equal funding, but something much more nebulous about impact and opportunity that makes the whole thing kind of intentionally wishy washy so anyone they need to be can not be in compliance. To make it even more impossible to actually comply, questions of funding and opportunity are not limited to what the school itself supplies, so for example anything donated by parents or volunteers (such as the work of a booster club) also counts. So for example, if you cut funding to a boys team and parents more than make up the shortfall in donations and fundraising, it's entirely possible based on that you might have to cut it further. Related, this kind of thing is why less popular boys sports are prone to being cut at the drop of a hat - football and sometimes boys basketball make money, most other sports teams lose money so the school is incentivized not to make cuts from King Football or Prince Basketball, but they have to target equal opportunity and impact between boys and girls athletic spending which means they spend what they're willing to have as a cost on girls teams and cut whatever boys teams they need to cut to avoid cutting into the football budget, because the football budget has an ROI.

    Per NFHS website (https://nfhs.org/stories/title-ix-compliance-part-iv-frequently-asked-questions):

    FAQ: Does Title IX require that 50 percent of our athletic budget be spent on girls programs and 50 percent be spent on our boys programs? Answer: No. The key to allocating financial resources under Title IX is the overall impact of expenditures – does your school’s allocation of financial resources provide equivalence of athletics opportunities and benefits to boys and girls. Although this will result, in most cases, in an approximate 50-50 budgetary allocation, Title IX does not require a strictly proportional division of dollars.

    FAQ: Our school offers soccer for boys, but not for girls. Does Title IX require that we allow girls to play on the boys team? Answer: Title IX requires that in sports where a girls team is not offered, girls must be allowed to try out for the boys team and participate on the same basis as boys. This does not mean that a girl automatically gets to be on the team. She has to try out and make the team on the same basis as any boy would have to try out and make the team. She can also be cut from the team, but only on the same basis as a boy could be cut from the team – for an objectively verifiable lack of ability or a lack of size, strength, skill and experience making participation unsafe.

    FAQ: Our school offers volleyball for girls, but not for boys. Does Title IX require that we allow boys to play on the girls team? Answer: No. Although there have been a few, isolated lawsuits where boys have obtained injunctions to allow them to participate on a girls team for which their schools offered no same-sport equivalent for boys, the courts generally rule that the purpose of Title IX is to remedy past inequities of athletics opportunity for the historically under-represented gender – females – and that if boys are allowed to participate on girls teams, they will because of height, weight and strength advantages come to dominate the membership of those teams, and thereby decrease the competitive opportunities for women. Therefore, in the vast majority of cases, the courts have not permitted boys to play on girls teams, even if there is not a same-sport boys team.

  • The law in question only prohibits biological males from participating in female sports. It does not prohibit females from joining boys teams.

    There's a simple reason for that - the second sentence is required under current interpretations of Title IX, while the first is not. The argument for that is about girl's sports being a sort of protected space for girls, so it's OK to bar non-girls (however your jurisdiction chooses to define that) from girls sports, but "boys" sports are actually for everyone who can compete.

  • i think sport, exspecially in schools, should always be mixed.

    Girls' teams exist entirely to guarantee girls a number of slots, on the presumption that on average in most sports once you hit puberty generally the boys will start to dramatically outperform the girls due to things like size, upper body strength and other traits that are broadly connected to testosterone levels. Then you have things like chess, where you still have a women's league, but that basically exists because "not enough" women play chess and the notion is that a smaller talent pool broadly means easier competition that will in turn be more approachable.

    Mixed teams in school sports as a general practice won't happen unless specific minimums are mandated, because it would impact competitiveness.

    At the same time, under Title IX, if there is no girl's team and a girl wants to play a sport she must be allowed to try out and must be allowed to play if she can pass try outs. The reverse is not required under current interpretations, leading to a weirdly discriminatory interpretation of a law banning discrimination.

  • "Where are my testicles, Summer?"

  • Is it? I went to a state college to take advantage of in state tuition, commuted because gas for my Geo Metro 2-seater was cheaper than a dorm room, etc to cut my costs down to where I wouldn't need to put myself in debt and got a small scholarship/grant (that in turn came with an in-state work commitment that shaped my choices after graduation). Other people my age made other choices related to college that landed them in massive amounts of debt that I avoided.

    If I had known that I could borrow as much as I wanted and expect someone else to pay it off instead of being stuck holding responsibility for my debts, I likely would have made different substantially less frugal and less restrictive choices.

    Tell, you what, nix an equivalent amount of my debts, and we'll call it a deal. You don't mind paying off my mortgage, right? Just because you didn't take out a mortgage doesn't mean you shouldn't be responsible for mine, right?

  • What's the best way to do that, presuming I already have access to a Usenet server but that's really all I know?

    I mean I've used Usenet before, but that was back in the late 90s using Netscape Communicator and I was mostly (but not exclusively) reading text groups. Most of my piracy back then involved trolling IRC channels to either find DCC bots or get access to FTPs. And even then was limited because, well, dialup.

  • She is quite important in contribution to the society, but when we talk just about working people, we overlook her.

    ...even then, since her contribution is to her own household should that marriage collapse society decides that not only is she owed a share of their produced assets to date but also a share of his future production for her part in enhancing it to date (alimony), including the requirement that he must continue to produce at that level at a minimum (aka alimony is based on what a judge believes you can earn, not what you actually are earning). Sometimes this also includes a share of any future retirement income as well.

    Everyone should be able to live without poverty.

    Ultimately, what you would consider living without poverty requires the labor of some number of people to maintain, and eventually the question of why they do that labor for people who don't do that labor will be asked, by them if not by you. Usually the answer is that those people are doing other labor which benefits the first group, usually abstracted out to some generalized representation of debt (aka money).

  • If i invite someone out to dinner I pay. If someone invites me out to dinner I expect them to pay.

    expect the man to pay

    ...they're the same picture. Seriously, given the general dynamics of how straight dating actually ends up working most of the time IRL, these are basically equivalent statements, because the man is also generally expected to be the one to do the asking.

  • This corny meme implies that philosophy majors become flat-earthers, etc.

    No, most philosophy majors still believe in gravity. While flat-earthers cease to believe in gravity once they realize that a flat earth is incompatible with gravity. They replace it with this notion that the earth disc (and the rest of the system) is accelerating upwards through the void at 9.8 m/s^2.

    Though I've come across some interdisciplinary studies types who would probably argue that gravity is a social construct because we describe it with language.

  • The set of all primes is the same size infinity as the set of all positive integers because you could create a way to map one to the other aka you can count to the nth prime. Reals are different in that there are an infinite number of real between any two reals which means there's no possible way to map them.

  • ghouls with more remaining brain cells.

    Heritage.

    ...they're the same picture.

  • Like, most kids in the US had Tylenol. Most kids don’t develop autism.

    Except the claim being studied is that Tylenol might cause autism when administered to the mother while pregnant. There are a lot of drugs that will cause a problem to a fetus when administered to a pregnant woman, but do not cause that problem when administered to someone outside the womb. Building a human from scratch is a fiddly process.

  • Or they WANT them to feel pain.

    In their myths, a woman explicitly incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong strayed from absolute mindless obedience to sky daddy, so all women have to suffer forever, and anything that reduces that suffering is inherently evil for opposing the will of sky daddy.