Some are more worst than others

Yes. They might follow you, but that’s mostly out of curiosity and the fact that you’re tall enough to be their leader. Sometimes they might even run at you, but that’s mostly just to catch up and/or get closer - They’re not charging at you. Stop, turn around, and T-pose, and they’ll stop as well, waiting to see what you’re up to.

Cows alone are pretty chill and playful. Think of them like huge dogs, but without the instinct for hunting. If there are young ones with them you wanna give them some extra space for obvious reasons.

Source: Grew up on a cattle farm.

There are, but they’re quite some distance away, and the story doesn’t focus on the region as a whole.

Was*

Typical dwarvish. Very hierarchical. An industrious proud people, full of skilled craftsmen who pull their weight for the greater good of society. Due to seasonal attacks from a goblin horde nearby, they’ve built fortification that protect them, and during attacks the wall guards are helped by alchemists fire. Unfortunately that last step failed during the most recent attack, which was also unusual in its strength and strategy (the horde got outside help), causing the fortress to fall. While looting, the invaders opened the floodgates that had redirected the river, thus drowning any survivors except one.

As an ordained dudeist priest, I think dudeism should be placed somewhere. I don’t care hard enough where, because that’s just like, your opinion, man.

I’d finish one of the stories I’d already started:

• Sci-Fi, life on board a converted old interplanetary transport vessel, refitted for interstellar transport, on its way to join a small group of pioneers and colonize a distant planet.
• Fantasy, centered around a crafty dwarf who has built a decent self sufficient for himself independent of the fortress, unaware that his childhood friend caught a curse and caused the fortress to succumb to the goblin invasion.
• A more down to earth story about a struggling early twentysomething, and what sheer desperation does to a person.

…but the common denominator for all three is that I haven’t quite figured out the plot yet.

Yes. LEDs on that scale generate a lot of heat. Far less than a normal bulb on the same scale, but the problem is that an LED array is more compact and sensitive, so it retains heat much better, and is more sensitive to it.

Source: I’ve retrofitted a lot of old ships with more modern LED “bulbs” for their search light.

No idea. I’ll look into creating one.

Remind me in two months, and I’ll tell you what’s happening.

Yes, but which is which? Nothing in the name tells me whether it has oxygen in its chemical composition.

I just had a chat with my oldest (almost 13 years y.o.) asking him some theoretical questions in the hope to spark some curiosity: “When you connect to a Roblox game, what do you think you’re connecting to?”. It took him a few leaps of imagination to realize that he’s connecting to a physical machine somewhere, and now he’s curious as to how such a machine looks. So that server stack I’ll be setting up, he’s interested in tagging along.

He already knows full well that there are more to PCs than just the windows UI, as I’m a linux guy, but I don’t think they’re aware of just how much can be done with a computer once you go outside of the usual GUI app that connects to some cloud service.

So, provided that his teacher agrees (after all, I have to take him out of school for what effectively will be “alternative education” for a few days so we can fly down to the head office), he’ll end up with bragging rights of having dealt network hardware that costs more than the average computer, and computers that cost more than the average house.

And here’s me, mixing up hydrocarbons and carbohydrates.

I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don’t have any awareness of what’s going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).

I’m thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.

Sure, they’re mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.

I’m building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I’d like for them to help build and connect it.

How did UKIP do in elections and polls way back when?

Baldurs Gate 3.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game, and I’m sure I will finish it at some point. I just played it too much for a while, and found myself rushing for the main quest and ignoring side quests right after arriving at Baldurs Gate. I took that as a sign that I was in “just get it over with”-mode, so I decided to take a break for quite some time so that I can one day return to the game, take a step back, and continue with the pace that I had to begin with.

Wtf, the prawns have actual dialog?

I was so focused on trying to understand the South African accent, that not a single brain cell was available for additional processing.

For the sake of his children, I think that might be for the best.

It was amazing.

Relevant backstory: I was an introverted kid who grew up on the countryside with not a whole lot in common with my peers. I played football because that’s what my “friends” did. I was OK at it, but I never really felt any enthusiasm for it. I only did it because I didn’t know of any alternatives. I got along with most people, but I always got the impression that it was only because I was good at playing the part of someone who fit in.

I got my first PC in 1996. It was an outdated 386, but it allowed me to really get into the low level stuff an learn about it beyond the usual gaming aspect, and for that I am grateful. While my peers were more interested in whether their favorite football team would beat their least favorite team in some important and upcoming match, I was more interested in turning our sat TV dish to see what other satellites I could find. Yes, I know there were systems that did this automatically. We didn’t have that, but what we did have was a programmable card for decoding D2MAC, thus allowing me to view any TV channel that we received. I don’t remember which satellite we normally used, but after some trial and error, as well as looking up something on the internet at a friend’s place, I learned that my newly acquired signal was the Astra satellites. This is how I stumbled across Futurama a few years later.

In 1998 I got an up to date PC, and internet access. It was like a whole new world opened before me. Whatever information I wanted was freely available, and finding like-minded ones were easy. I was 15 at a time, and I still wasn’t allowed to stay online into the small hours. So I went to bed and pretended to sleep until my parents went to bed, so that I could get up and dial up undisturbed. I live in UTC+1, so this worked well, as most of the people I knew online was in the US. When everyone around me went to bed, my world was just beginning after a full day of pretending to fit in. Between midnight and 6 in the morning, dialup was free, so that’s when I could just stay online without having to worry about cost, or whether someone in the house would disconnect me (accidentally or otherwise) by picking up the phone. I dipped my toes into Ultima Online at this time too, but that was only a small part of my online life. In general, by bandwidth was too slow to really do what I do, but there was a whole lot of info, guides, and technical explanations available in .txt format. I also started playing with FreeBSD and slackware linux around this time.

Come 2001 and things were more or less the same, except that I had moved to a rather big city for studies. I got ADSL for the first time, and no longer had to pay for each online minute via dialup. The whooping 2mbit I had all to myself allowed me to start experimenting with running servers and services, in addition to poking and prodding the internet to see what was out there and available (you have no idea how insecure everything was back then).

It didn’t take me long to have access to various servers all over, legal or otherwise, so I could pretty much do as I pleased online, as it couldn’t be linked to me personally. I never used this access for anything disruptive or destructive. The only time I know that I caused something major was actually purely by accident, lol. I was more like the tapeworm you never knew was there, plus i was more interested in corporate servers. I mostly did it to learn more about how everything fit together.

I had a presence in almost all noteworthy internet communities, and while I wasn’t “famous” on the internet, i knew A LOT of people, as most of my life was online. Sure, I met like-minded people in the city, but nowhere close to as many people I knew online. There’s a non-zero chance that others in here knew me once upon a time. Hell, it happened on reddit last year where I told an anecdote and someone responded with “Hey, I remember this. Did you go by REDACTED back in the day?”

Due to various reasons, I decided in 2006ish to leave my old internet identity behind for both practical and legal reasons. Partially because that’s around the time when the lines between internet identity and real world identity began to blur. But I still miss the days before corporate interest ruined the sense of community one had in these small niche corners of the internet.

Nah, this isn’t reddit.

If you are able to open the cap to begin with, you’re capable of twisting it and tearing it off. It’s not that hard. I never understood the “controversy” when these were introduced, and I’m convinced that the ones too inept to take it off completely are the same ones who caused the caps to end up in the wrong place to begin with.