I’m pretty sure that entire message was provided by degenerative “AI”. It just reeks of the format and language of an LLM chat bot.

Could people who have actual technical skills check something for me? Does this code even work?

“Duration” isn’t one of the “familiar first four dimensions”. That’s the point.

it starts with the familiar first four dimensions (length, width, depth, duration)

Duration?

It starts with that?

Then it starts with a complete and absolute failure to comprehend even the basics of relativity.

When (if) science discovers it, then I’ll think of multiple timelines. Until then it’s an entertaining fiction at best.

I think in terms of reality as can be seen, measured, observed, and inferred from that.

“Timelines” and “parallel dimensions” are not a part of any of that, so no, I don’t think of reality as different timelines. Those are (often very entertaining, I’ll admit) fictions.

Nice work!

There are several pre-modern cities with populations as little as 10,000 in history. When I consider that I used to live in this town:

Well, that’s a town of about 3500 people. A third of a “city”. I could bike from end to end of it in minutes, and over the three years I lived there I probably got to know well over half the population by face.

So if “Underdark City” is a pre-modern city with a population in this range, I could easily see this map as being a (smallish) neighbourhood of the city.

Another trick I saw used was players were always masculine-tagged and the GM was always feminine-tagged (or vice versa).

I love this one!

Toss-up between autumn and spring.

Spring because that’s when the really good teas start showing up, when most of the flowers start showing (there’s nothing quite as beautiful as a plum tree filled with blossoms and icicles) and the days’ length starts to increase visibly in the race to the equinox.

Autumn because that’s when all the really good crops start hitting the markets, because the horribly humid heat of summer starts to fall, when the moon cakes start showing up (along with the nice delicate rice wines hitting the scene) and the colours start their final run toward their winter forms.

There are some places in the Chinese diaspora where leaving your chopsticks like that will get you soundly rebuked (or smacked if your parents catch you). That’s a superstition that’s taken very seriously in traditional Chinese circles.

Where’s the emoji of Chief pinching the bridge of his nose after 86 speaks when you need it?

Did you not read?

I think that way about the '80s.

The absolute first non-food thing I ever bought in China was a jade “bi” pendant. This is what they look like:

(To be clear, this is not mine for reasons which will become obvious in a moment.)

I was told by the seller that you should never take it off as she strung it on red silk for me, because it’s to “protect your health”.

Since 2001 I’ve taken this off only five times, all but one of which was because the string frayed through and it had to be restrung. I don’t believe in the slightest that it has any impact on my health, but as a minor, neurotic superstition it stays on. (Which is why I couldn’t share a photograph of mine: I’d have to take it off.)

What proportion of Texan’s incarcerated population is forced to labour for next to no salary again? There’s at least one US state—Virginia (312)—whose official title for prisoners is “Slave of the State”. Do you think the other southern states are much more progressive in their attitudes?

Hint: no. Alabama (390), Arkansas (574), Florida (377), Georgia (435), Mississippi (661), South Carolina (302), and Texas (452) also have de facto slavery of their prisoners: defined as mandatory labour for negligible to no wage, with strict penalties for non-participation.

So what are those numbers I’ve put after all the state names? Those are the incarceration rates per 100,000. Compare and contrast these with the US national average (which, remember, includes the high-rate states): 355. Isn’t it mysterious that of the eight states with de facto incarcerated slavery six are over the national average, and three (Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas) have the highest incarceration rates in the country?

Slavery is alive and well in the USA, and Texas is one of its largest users thereof now. So yes, I think the average modern Texan secessionist would be pro-slavery … because they already are.

Don’t take “no” for an answer!

This voice sounds very familiar to me. Very shini.

I find some of the best introduction to the whole jazz ethos is to go old-school with Big Band and '20s jazz in general. You can get people started down the path to radical improvisation by the tighter, more constrained forms of that era and then guide them toward the more … ah … challenging stuff.

I’m in the “little bit of both” camp here.

1. By definition if you’re a malicious manipulator you’re being a bad person. (Disagree? Look up what “malicious” means…) And bad people really should be punished. (But that’s not the end-all, be-all of things: good people should also be rewarded!)

2. On the other hand, you live in a world where bad actors exist. At some level you have to watch out for yourself instead of dumping that burden on literally everybody around you who in some form or another cares about you.

Where things get complicated for me is when the people who are victims of malicious manipulators have been manipulated through their own desire to be, well, malicious. The victims of 419 scams, for example, are sucked in by malicious manipulators through a desire to benefit through what amounts to malicious manipulation. They wanted to be scammers themselves; it just turns out that they were incompetent at it and got scammed instead. Here my feelings are mixed.