Um… There may not always be male and female plants, but pollen is definitely the ‘male’ form of a haploid gamete, and nearly perfectly analogous to sperm. The link should be able to take you to every part you’d not want to know about plants. Allergies are normal. People who don’t have allergies are the freaks, because their bodies don’t care that the tree is trying to have sex with their nose.

Hell, the part of the fruit that you eat is often the plant sperm that didn’t fertilize the plant egg. Pollen contains a second plant sperm that fertilizes a different part of the female plant and creates all the juicy goodness you ingest. You can read about it here.

Now, the dandelion is formed seeds, sure. So baby cannon it is. /shrug

I use both as well. Ublock would let a lot of things through that NoScript does not. Ublock also gets stuff that NoScript does not. Facebook and google stuff? Zapped by noscript. Youtube ads? NoScript lets them through because you have to okay the youtube player, while Ublock blocks them.

Only complaint I have with NoScript is that it doesn’t seem like I can allow scripts without it automatically reloading the page anymore. It was nice to be able to click the ‘expand image’ here, see that NS blocked the script, allow the script, and just click the ‘expand image’ twice more to close/open it. Now I have to click ‘expand image,’ unblock the script, the page reloads, I have to go find the post again, and then see it. If you figure that out, let me know.

Comfortably? Nah. They should live in barracks just like the military. Public Service requires public servants.

Milhouse is not a meme!

Granted, you can pluck out Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on your guitar now. Everyone else in the world no longer has any interest in music. No instruments are played, and you are considered an anomaly to be shunned.

Interesting how the ‘vintage’ ‘black border’ meme has a remarkably modern website watermark. Go back to sucking on your pacifier, you wanka.

I’ll forever be grateful to those thronal thespians of the page, who told me exactly whence the phrase, “Close, but no cigar,” came from.

Nice to know what happened. Quick action with no communication is probably better when security is on the line. I was internally debating whether it was a hosting issue or ya’ll had been targeted by some government agency. Speaking of, have you thought about putting up a warrant canary?

It was, when it was just people looking to get a tiny bit of income from renting a room in their house. Then people tried to make it their sole income, and then companies got into the game. Part of it is that the service became popular, so any cheaper rooms are snatched up instantly, and the user now gets to choose between a hotel-looking hotel, or a house-looking hotel, with nasty fees to get more money from you.

I have an honest question for you. Have you ever seen a bulletproof vest?

Also, the person you’re replying to gave a very frightening scenario: being hunted down at your own home. If you’re not shooting back, what do you think the enemy is going to do? Give up and go away? Molotov cocktails are an easy, low-tech solution to a barricaded enemy you don’t care about taking alive.

Now, if we assume you’re in public, there are still issues with a bulletproof vest. They’re not really all that great at being concealed. If you truly have a bulletproof vest that can fit underneath clothing, it’s not going to stop many bullets. You can look through the wikipedia page on different levels of body armor, and do a quick search to see how bulky the different types are. Police armor is rated for most handguns, and is super bulky already. Military armor can hopefully stand up to a rifle bullet, but they’re often ceramic plates, which don’t last against multiple rounds, and are very obvious and stand out. Your slim-fit vest may be able to handle a very small subset of rounds. If you go the route of more protection, you’re going to find yourself targeted by the gunman due to your visibility and because your potential as a threat is large compared to others. Even a very high quality, military vest/suit is not going to cover you well enough to make a difference if a single person is shooting at you and A) you don’t have buddies to give you cover fire and make them put their head down and B) space because you knew the shooter was an enemy before he pulled out a gun and started shooting at you.

#Your favorite game’s “awesome story” robs the player of a basic sense of agency

It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss’s boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player’s consent.

Right, so…please tell me a narrative medium that allows this. Somehow movies, books, comics, manga, and literal storytelling all get a pass on this?

I can sort of nod along with everything else, agreeing that there is some truth in the spewing. This statement is so pants-on-head foolish that every other assertion you make gets dragged beneath the water and drowns with chains made of the last page of shitty choose-your-own-adventure book. And for that level of strength in the chains to work, those assertions have to be pretty crappy.

Sorry, but no medium of media allows for agency. I don’t care if you have some of the best writing in a game (whether that means Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate II, Disco Elysium, whatever), or if you want to go with the old choose-your-own-adventure books, but there is ultimately little to no player agency. If you want player agency in a game, you have one choice, and it isn’t a video game: TTRPGs. Even ChatGPT can’t match what a good GM can do, because they can allow you to break the mechanics of the game or add mechanics on the fly to fit what a player wants to do. A GM can literally respond to something a game creator never imagined within seconds. I want to see Planescape or Disco Elysium react to a player doing something they thought of that the game creator didn’t imagine. Buuuulllllshit. Player agency my ass.

Also, as the OP obviously fails to mention any games that he thinks is worthy of being an ‘awesome story’, I’m calling this as a troll/bait post.

It’s funny, I really liked the outfit for Berseria. Something about a not well-groomed-in-the-middle-of-fights look stood out from the crowd.

That’s what an article emphasized that I skimmed through. The sub had automatic pinging, and systems to automatically raise it to the surface if an untoward event happened. For communication and pinging to be lost, as well as the lack of floating submersible… It’s likely whatever happened buggered the whole setup. The banging also was supposedly heard in 30 minute intervals, but no one is saying how many of those intervals happened. The banging could be from anything. The deeps get strange, and the water distorts much of what we know. Multiple people with knowledge from other searches, like the 2014 MH flight, said banging was often heard during their searches but it was always from other sources.

An article on APNews said there were multiple backups onboard… Which sort of engenders the thought of why they needed multiple backups. I’d be sure to have A backup, sure, but multiple?

The mobile app is definitely what turned me back onto OSRS. I wish I had more time, because the gameplay is like comfort food to me.

They did that with a 30-40 foot stick a few years ago, and the initial attempts by the driver were hilarious. They didn’t show improvement because I’m sure it wouldn’t be as funny, but I think we all forget how difficult it first was to match up how far to push the stick left or right for a particular turn. Now imagine an actual wheel.

Okay, I like it, but… How do you load the payload?

Just about every area of interest already needs one. Every topic I’ve wondered about in the past several years and looked for with a search engine has horrible articles that have been SEOed to death, and it is going to get worse with AI being able to generate the bulk of the article now.

They just want to capture the person coming in off of a search platform looking for something in a game. It’s all about the clicks.

I was curious about some stuff in Elden Ring, and every search I did had shitty, obviously SE optimized bullshit for at least the first 10-15 results. Well fuck that, I’ll just read the also bullshit SE optimized wiki because I can at least keep the adblockers on and the scripts off and wade through the crap.