It depends? Video can get across an explicit concept easier for me. If I’m learning something that I’ll struggle with, I find that video is usually a better bet for me.

For fiction, I prefer books because it can get a lot more across. It’s not even just that they cut corners or parts of a book, sometimes a book will have the protagonist basically run an internal monologue, or just notice something in a particular way that conveys a lot of information in a way that a movie or show can’t really do as seamlessly, if at all.

Video is better for showing details and small things, but I can fill in the blanks myself- I find it really frustrating when authors don’t let me fill in the blanks. I don’t need the entire feast described in depth to me, I don’t give a shit how the pig is coated in honey and the desserts look delicious unless the reveal is that the pig is poisoned and the desserts went bad last week.

Hello, I’m an American and I’m probably as shy and sociall awkward as you lol.

It’s a landing flap, not an aileron. All losing it is going to do is make it somewhat more difficult to land the plane.

Swapping entirely to renewable energy is cool and all but not as easy as “just use a bunch of solar panels???” The issue is that most renewables are some mix of a: unreliable, and b: geographical.

Wind isn’t going to be blowing 24/7 in most places, so wind is unreliable. The sun isn’t always shining in most places, so solar power is unreliable. Hydro is amazing if you have it, but it isn’t the kind of thing you can just build anywhere. Geothermal is also great if you have it, but again isn’t the kind of thing you can just build.

Meanwhile, the power grid requires reliability. It’s incredibly important. The obvious kneejerk response is “but batteries?” which would work and all but you’re basically suggesting we produce enough power during the day to cover usage overnight, which is a tall order. There’s also the fact that the kind of battery banks we’re talking about would be ruinously expensive, and probably some amount of dangerous.

Also, like other people have said: coal/gas are cheap and ubiquitous. Both of those words might as well be synonyms for ‘more money’. Realistically, that’s the primary reason.

Reinstalling windows is hardly a laborious task unless you have a lot of data you need to keep, but even then my main point was that buying a 32GB SSD is pointless when you can get much larger ones for extremely cheap. Even if you don’t use it as a boot drive, more fast storage is never going to be a downside.

You could add an SSD specifically to serve as a pagefile location and nothing else, in which case you could just get a small cheap one (a 32GB SSD would be more than enough for 16GB of RAM)

Honestly, assuming OP isn’t somewhere that the market for PC parts is extremely wonky compared to the US, if you’re going to get an SSD you might as well go ahead and get one big enough to serve as a boot drive. A 256gb SATA SSD is ~$20, and should be fine for that purpose. It probably won’t have DRAM at that price point, but realistically it’s not really necessary and still going to be a night and day upgrade over an HDD.

Okay, so: is it because you reasonably expect that from your friend? Have they given you reason to expect these things? Or is it more just an anxiety thing? Like, you know it’s not a reasonable fear, but your brain still won’t let go?

If A: no, that’s not normal and he’s hella toxic. Especially the online anonymity thing- what the fuck?

If B: no, that’s not exactly normal but anxiety is a bitch sometimes.

I’ve never seen ‘drag race’ used in this context, and I was wondering how you were about to compare drag racing (like with cars) with wrestling.

Nah, at least this once it’s definitely not a US defaultism thing.

As an American, this is the first time I’ve thought about pro wrestling in a very very long time.

Why not? What definition of ‘athlete’ are you even using? Did you just decide this?

You don’t need to be wired in order to self host things? It’s better, ofc, but far from required. You can just do it via wifi.

My experience with self hosting begins and ends with video game servers and jellyfin, though, so maybe I’m wrong here.

yes. It’s a thing. https://mcsus.com/products/68-water-balls-tube-of-10 No clue if they’re good or not, but they exist.

There’s also paintballs with clear paint, or reballs which are basically just rubber balls meant to be fired out of a paintball gun.

I assumed. I know it’s similar where I live, but for all I know Montana has some strangely restrictive finders keepers law where if you drop your wallet and someone else finds it you can only legally reclaim it via a duel to the death.

Bad news dominate headlines, do you think journalists will write about people behaving normally?

This is a funny mental image.

“Breaking news: Man gets normal sized plate at buffet. More at 11.”

Front of a newspaper in giant bold font:

“MAN TAKES NORMAL ROUTE HOME FROM WORK”

Where do you live? That matters, unless you’re just asking from an ethics perspective. I’m not asking you to dox yourself, country/state is plenty.

Assuming you’re Canadian(based off your instance being lemmy.ca) technically speaking you should report in to the police, and they’ll hold it for 6 months. After that if someone hasn’t claimed it you’re free to claim it yourself. At least in Vancouver. Maybe the laws are different in other parts of Canada. Your local police probably have a non-emergency number for pretty much exactly this purpose if you wanna double check.

Realistically, it’s not even $200. Probably keep it for a week or two and then tell the kid the cops couldn’t find the original owner.

Because surprise is important, and if the enemy has precise intelligence on what’s going to happen they can act to make it not happen. Which means that any assumptions your plans make might be outdated or even actively countered.

To quote Sun Tzu, “All warfare is based on deception.” The lengths militaries have historically gone to in order to keep operational security or obfuscate the details of an attack is utterly absurd.

A real world example: In WW2, ahead of the allied invasion of Sicily the British launched Operation Mincemeat. They took the body of a homeless person that had recently died, gave him an entirely fictitious service record/life, and some fake letters heavily implying that the allied invasion of Sicily was a feint and the true invasion was going to be in Greece and Sardinia. Then they took the corpse onto a submarine and let it go where the tide would take it to Spain. The Spanish shared the letters with the Germans, and the Germans then reinforced… all the wrong places. Which made the Allied Invasion of Sicily easier than it potentially could have been.

Is Valhalla anything like Odyssey where it’s just outrageously long? I put like 50hrs into Odyssey, realized I’d barely scratched the game and stopped playing lol

Which, I liked Odyssey quite a bit. There’s just too much game there for me.

I think he’s talking about actual mythologies, not fictional pantheons. I’m not sure tho.

Always been like that in my experience.

I remember being frustrated asf as a teenager by people not understanding words or knowing how to spell things. My brother in christ, you have a phone and an internet connection in your pocket with access to basically the entirety of human knowledge. Fucking Google it.

I’ll list a few other pantheons on his behalf if it makes you feel better:

Voodoo, Yoruba, Celtic, Japanese, Polynesian, Aztec.