I think as the game progresses, you get to see why Astarion is so eager to act in his own interests. However, his backstory really only justifies half of his refusal to help people. The other half of his whining feels antithetical to his own situation, but perhaps that’s just because he doesn’t fully acknowledge his newfound freedoms until Act 2.

A lot of birdwatching, maybe some music-making, and learning to cook very well.

Well of course God won’t answer a prayer that would negatively affect one of his true followers.

…I’m not God, so I have made peace with the fact I will never understand that.

Could you share what makes you so confident in the first quote, despite what you say in the second quote? How can you know God would not or has not answered any prayers that negatively affected a true follower, and how can one define whether God has negatively affected a true follower when one cannot intimately know God’s true intentions?

ALL of the ching chong jokes, lots of dog-eating comments, being told I wasn’t welcome in white gf’s family, etc. I feel that.

Been called a ch*nk multiple times by random people in public, been told as a child that I should be performing better in school because of the “type of person” that I am, been called a dog-eater by peers, asked “what’s your real name” (even though my government name is an English one), etc.

One time someone called me a ch*nk, I explained that despite them being shitty for thinking that’s okay, that I’m not even Chinese, so they must be extra braindead. I also said that it must be disappointing to know less of the English language than a non-white person, and that if a white person like them can’t learn proper English, then they’re failing their own expectations of what it means to be American. I suppose hearing me say that in perfect American English was enough for them to realize how dumb they were being. Everyone in the room glared at them and they shut the fuck up and left lmao.

I’m not that young, but sometimes I see people here refer to their childhoods, and then I feel like a baby.

Here ya go

I checked on my phone, green is 10, yellow is 20, orange is 30, burnt orange is 40. I know that’s not a great measure but currently walking so if someone could screenshot the legend that would be coolio.

A woman fell to her death right before the graduation ceremony… and then this guy did sing-a-longs, crypto powerpoints, and ayahuasca speeches?

The honing steel doesn’t actually sharpen (remove metal)

Doesn’t a honing steel also remove burrs?

Well, backyards are usually at the back of the house, so I figure that’s why it feels natural.

My personal must-play PSP titles:

• Monster Hunter Freedom Unite
• Patapon 2/3
• Lumines
• Wipeout Pure
• Gran Turismo
• MGS: Peace Walker
• Tekken 6

The problem is that all of this requires infrastructure spending.

Agreed. This is spending that our country isn’t willing to do, mostly because of what we already have (both in terms of infrastructure and in political influence). Personally, I hate this.

As for Cali’s duck curve issue, desalination is a great idea, but expansion of renewables and storage should really come first. Keep in mind that the current Cali grid generates much less dirty power during the day, where solar covers a majority of demand. Should we divert that solar power to desalination, we would need to ramp up dirty power generation during the day, and we would continue to generate dirty power at night.

Even if you only get 30% of the power back with green hydrogen it is power you had too much of in the first place.

While I agree with you, we also have to consider what this would do at scale. The 70% of excess power that you lose here translates to wear on the solar panel systems that is never realized into power. That is, the systems will wear at the same rate, but the amount of power you can utilize over the lifespan of the systems is decreased. It’s still a better solution than not implementing these at all, but I’d be wary as to how reluctant our society would be to the spending, especially if the ratio of cost to utilization(?) becomes skewed.

We’ve been perfectly fine wasting energy for over a century, I don’t see why we should pearl clutch now.

Well, that’s an issue in of itself. It’d be great if we could waste less power in conventional generation, but it’d be even better if we could match or even beat that with renewables. I hope we can reach a point where everyone can agree to implement renewables sooner than later, but I don’t see dirty power’s political influence allowing for changes until renewable is equal to or better than dirty power. Which sucks, but a lot about our political system sucks.

Let’s add in the cost of batteries as their own thing

I don’t know if this is a fair thing to do. Yes, we could charge it from any other source, but we aren’t (intentionally) overgenerating power from sources like coal, gas, etc. Thus, the need for implementing that storage largely depends on renewables.

I also feel like factoring out the costs of storage implementation leaves more gaps for combustion generation supporters to criticize renewables. I would rather be honest about the upfront costs and instead emphasize the long term benefits of renewables, both in cost and cleanliness.

The problem right now is that we need to find better ways to turn renewable energy into stable, reliable power. The power production problem is highly dependent on balancing power generation and demand, and any excess energy must be stored, used, or wasted.

The main benefit of gas/coal/etc. is that we can (almost) always control the output to a close margin based off of demand projections, which are typically updated every 15 minutes. That being said, the drawbacks of using this form of generation are obvious and need to be addressed.

For renewables like solar and wind, we can’t always predict the output, so in the larger scale of power balance, we need to supplement it with something that can make up for fluctuations in generation. In the current system, this is from conventional sources.

The goal is to implement a robust energy storage system, ideally one that can hold a huge amount of excess renewable power during the day (largely due to solar), and reliable output that power when it is needed (higher demand at night). I would love to see the day where our nation is fully powered by renewables, and I’m super happy to see that there have been pushes to build up renewables, but the target scenario relies on big advancements in storage.

I would suggest anyone who is interested in what I said to look up “california duck curve solar” for some reading on what challenges solar overgen presents in bright and sunny states.

All that being said… we can do it! I sincerely hope we reach a point where we can phase out dirty generation across the globe, but it will take a lot of time and effort.

source: taking several power systems courses as part of my EE degree

I read this too and scratched my head. I would argue that voice assistants are more useful on a mobile device than a stationary one 💀

“Pretty sure that’s a bot everybody, careful what links you click”

Not taking any sides here because I think it’s still unclear what actually happened, but:

This is a weird point. It’s not like government workers unilaterally know when the people at the top are lying. If your friends are of high enough position to know the truth of the matter, it would be the priority of national security to not share the truth to you, should the truth be something other than what the government claims.

I can imagine being in your shoes and trusting your friends; that’s always a nice spot to be in. I just don’t see how this claim bolsters your previous argument.

My nostalgic answer is Super Smash Bros Brawl (Subspace Emissary was wild to me), but my more modern answer is Elden Ring.

That game was like cocaine the first time I played through it.

My partner also lost their budgie a couple months ago, my condolences. As someone who grew up with dogs (and fostered a cat), I can’t understand why some people think birds are any less impactful. They are little bundles of chaos and joy, and they demand space in our hearts.

And, this may or may not help, but when I lose a pet, it soothes me to remember that I gave them the best life I could, and that the joy they gave me was born of their thanks.