The only problem with reading the Manga is that after you finish it, the film seems so simplistic and flat in comparison. The Manga has so much greater nuance, tragedy, and depth to it.

This. I don’t understand why murdering your alt-self is “necessary”. Wouldn’t you actually want to preserve your alternate-self at all costs, to ensure you can continue to make return trips?

The real issue here is that - if your home reality works by the same rules - once you leave it, you can never return home ever, because no alternate version of yourself exists in the one you originated from after you leave it.

Before you say “hey, that sounds awesome, this place sucks!”, consider that finding a better reality is not guaranteed.

Finally, another “No magic zombies” person!

What are your thoughts on a “28 X Later” style scenario? Where the they’re still subject to injuries/starvation/etc, and the risk is more due to the sheer speed of the infected, ability to ignore pain in the short term, and asymptomatic carriers of the disease?

CAD options also flow over to the whole GPU debate as well. Yes, Nvidia’s company practices are awful. Yes, I’d love to have more options. But this doesn’t change that most of the heavyweight CAD options out there don’t play well with non-Nvidia GPUs.

I’d love it if there were FOSS / GPU-agnostic CAD options. But until then, focusing on what works is important, y’know?

You know those people who restore old machinery and equipment? Locomotives, historic warships, industrial sites and so on? I’d absolutely be dedicating my day to that. There’s something so satisfying about seeing that old stuff work, but they’re always chronically understaffed and struggling to keep up with everything.

Oh, and write a novel.

Yeah, I struggle with Organic modeling. I think it’s because I was trained in parametric for engineering, but I just mind-blank when approaching “how do I make this complex shape?” in Blender. CAD’s approach feels very straightforward and intuitive; I know where each feature is defined and can tweak it fairly easily. Blender… doesn’t. And I know it’s definitely not me, because I’ve seen people do very powerful things with it.

Like, I’ve run through a lot of the tutorials, and every time they get to “Okay, time for you to make this simple shape on your own!”, I immediately slip back into CAD modeling mindset, which isn’t really compatible with Blender.

From your comments it sounds like this is Europe? In the US, 3-phase residential is rare - usually limited to large apartment buildings.

Usually what we have is a “split phase” system, where it comes in at 240v and a local ground is used to divide it into two 120v legs.

BTW if you ever move into a house where someone has put outdoors on the same rcd as the rest of the house, then do yourself a favor and get a separate combo rcd/fuse for outdoors.

It varies by state, but some states have requiring outdoor outlets to be on a separate breaker or GFCI (RCD) outlet already, for just this reason.

I’m in a similar boat right now - I use the Student Edition ($60-100 a year, depending on sales, locally installed vs. using the cloud-based 3Dexperience).

It’s not a bad deal by any means, but I do wish I didn’t have to deal with annual reinstalls and perpetually worrying Dassault is going to decide to take it away.

3D CAD software. There are a few options out there (FreeCAD, LibreCAD, etc) and Blender is a thing that exists for more artistic 3D modeling. But they simply don’t hold a candle to the features and capabilities of the paid packages, which typically have costs in the 4-to-5-digit range. And I’m not talking the crazy high-end simulation options - those I understand, they’re hard - but basic modeling features.

Hell, I’d even settle for a CAD package that had some solid basic features and had a reasonable purchase cost. Unfortunately the few providers have the industry by the throat, and so your options are “free but terrible” and “you need a mortgage to use this”.

Okay -

• 1, that’s awesome;
• 2, for what purpose?
• 3, is it normal for buildings to have 3-phase in split into different single-phase sections? That feels like you could get some iffy stuff from wildly different loads on the different phases.

It’s not as dumb as you make it out. The issue isn’t that GPS is really, really good at what it does; it’s that it’s also incredibly vulnerable to disruption and spoofing. And due to the particulars of how GPS works, we can’t entirely fix that. We can do some things to ameliorate it, but a lot of those aren’t suitable for smaller things that use GPS today.

The other thing is that GPS largely replaced a tremendous number of other navigation aides and techniques, including other radio-navigation systems like LORAN-C.

Bows are actually incredibly hard to use. When you see a “draw weight” of the bow, this is the force you need to exert to pull it back to its full draw. 40-50lbs is considered normal, I believe, while the English Longbow - famous for its use in the Hundred Years’ War - had a draw weigh of at least 80 pounds, with some scholars suggesting even 50% greater numbers than that. Imagine lifting a weight that heavy each time you wanted to loose an arrow!

Bows, then, require extended training to use properly. Not just strength training, although professional archers were jacked, but in how to properly employ the weapon. The dominance of early firearms had much to do with not just their absolute performance - at times, they were actually outperformed by bows in absolute terms - but by that their effective use could be broken down into simple actions which could be easily drilled into new recruits.

If we’re talking about modern guns, this effect is much exaggerated. Guns can take some getting use to, sure, and modern bows have added features for ease of use. But guns are, honestly, shockingly easy to use for what they can accomplish.

On the G502, the first button directly beneath the scroll wheel should lock and unlock its free-spinning mode.

Be fair and equitable. There are times when strictness benefits a community, and there are times where laissez fair, laid-back moderation benefits a community. But nothing hollows out a community like moderators being unreliable or unfair.

If you’ve got a “don’t be a dick” rule and someone is making a point you agree with but being a dick about it, you still have to step in. If you’re having a bad evening, don’t let yourself be extra hard on people because you’re angry or rushed. Etc.

Not Republican myself, but work with a lot of them. I’m seeing a few different camps right now. I can’t really speak for exactly how many fall into each, but can only give estimates based on my subjective experiences:

• The “Leopard-Facers”: The ones who’ve suddenly woken up to the fact they elected a moron and a bully. These tend to be foreign policy hawks, and may have only voted for Trump reluctantly. Probably the smallest group.

• The pure Trumpists: A mix of people who thought the US should be isolationist anyhow, just don’t like Zelensky in particular, or just are too invested in the vision of messiah-Trump. Obviously they’re thrilled. Very vocal, but I think also somewhat fewer. Maybe I just hope they’re fewer.

• The cognitive dissonancers: Probably the greatest number. There’s a lot of different views under this umbrella. Some of them were buying into the idea “he’s just blustering for a better deal”; some thought the message was on-point but the display was inappropriate; some actually support Ukraine but can’t bring themselves express any actual opposition to this shitshow. Broadly speaking, they’re all squirming - struggling to reconcile the appeal they feel for his persona or other actions he’s taken, with their opposition to his foreign policy and this in particular. Yet not able to accept reality like the Leopard-Facers.

This. I think people are way, way underestimating the integration costs for all of this. It’s not as simple as “buy the pieces, plug them into each other, instant sensor system!”

Especially for riding around in a rough environment, a Pixel is sensors, communication, storage, power, all wrapped up in a reasonably robust case and featuring premade software to run the whole mess when you purchase it.

Sounds like a perfectly good reason to check out whether your local library has it. And/or take up a career in sailing.

With every month that passes, I feel ever more infuriated that so many of the programs I use are essentially hard-locked to Nvidia, with frankly miserable performance on other GPUs. Not the cards’ fault, the software devs’ fault for - when they even bother at all - doing a piss-poor job of integration with other GPUs.

“Every time” is certainly an exaggeration. Just off the top of my head in a minute:

• The Dragon Prince - nobody gave a damn.
• Star Wars [pick any of several releases] - we’ve had various people of color, both human and alien, as protagonists. I don’t remember much of a fuss over that in particular.
• Various MCU things - Brave New World just came out, again featuring Mackie as Wilson - taking the place of the stereotypically WASP Steve Rogers, no less.
• Hazbin Hotel: Vaggie is heavily coded as latina.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch From Mercury - okay, not a non-white lead, but the first Gundam series with a female lead, and a lesbian romance front and center. Once again, no attack.

If I looked around further, I’m sure I could find more. All of these have variously been critiqued for writing, characterization, or pacing, but failed to draw attacks based on the ethnicity (or orientation) of their protagonists.

Is this kind of attack a thing that happens? Absolutely. Is it “every time”? No. I’d suggest it’s more often when a series goes out of its way to bludgeon the audience with a message related to it, or tries to sell a newcomer as a superior replacement for a legacy character, that people can get riled up.

We were getting called in to HR one by one for unclear reasons. Turns out we were getting our annual raises, but my boss and his boss were both handing them out that day. I and a coworker go in first; on the way out, they ask us to send a third coworker in first.

We look at each other and instantly know.

We both walk up to her desk, stony-faced, and tell her “You need to go down to HR. [boss] and [big boss] need to see you.” She is nervous, but we insist she just needs to go, now.

Ten minutes later she comes back and chews us out, but is laughing all the way.