I’ve made a habit of saying “Look, [city] was a powderkeg ready to go off before we even got there.” It’s come up in multiple campaigns.

It’s bending the rules, since it’s a camping meal, but I have made it at home, too, since it makes a great depression meal. I got it from backpackers, who I’m pretty sure got it from prison inmates:

The Ramen Bomb.

Cook a crushed up packet of instant ramen noodles, maybe with a little more water than usual. Add like half a packet of instant mashed potatoes. You can also add a protein, like… chopped up Spam. Maybe some hot sauce or other fixings if you’re feeling fancy.

I hated how much I enjoyed it. Granted, that was when I was really tired and hungry, but that hit the spot.

Also, I’ve heard meals like the ones in this thread affectionately referred to as “glop,” by a fellow glop-enjoyer.

Minus the egg, that’s also a popular backpacking meal.

Personally, I also like genericizing D&D.

It’s a shorthand for folks outside or new to the hobby, it skips a hurdle to talk to people about other RPGs with those people, and it weakens the brand identity. Considering how much D&D has coasted on brand identity as the game suffered, I’m all for that.

I’m less likely to do it places like here, because it causes more confusion, but still. It’s fun to say, “Pathfinder is a great way to play D&D.” :P

Oh, another one: anti-vaccination was pushed by health insurance companies to dampen public perception of government-run healthcare.

Vaccine development and implementation fucking worked. If people were happy with the results, they might end up swayed towards publicly-funded healthcare. So… put a lid on that by whipping up a bunch of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Some folks will no longer see the vaccination programs as successful efforts to protect public health, but as a conspiracy to… do something. And instead of pointing to it as an example of a public healthcare program, you’ve first got to spend time defending evidence-based medicine, which takes up so much fucking time and energy, and ultimately won’t convince people who bored too deeply into that alternate-reality tunnel.

It turned a public health initiative into a fucking tar pit, and now the once-free vaccinations cost over a hundred bucks if you don’t have insurance.

Paper straws were pushed by big corporate polluters to build a negative association with environmentalism.

Plastic straws are single-use plastics, but seem unexceptional by those standards. It’s almost a meme that they’re being singled out like they’re the single greatest source of plastic waste, or uniquely damaging to ocean life.

On top of that, there are way better ways of reducing straw usage. I’ve used bioplastics that seemed way better. You could redesign the lids. You can do the plastic bag thing and charge people a nickel for a straw or whatever. Hell, you could just not give straws with every drink, and plenty of people will just drink from their cups and glasses. Instead, we get paper straws, something that is so obviously a bad idea it sounds like a joke, or a metaphor for a useless invention. Often served with cups and lids made entirely out of plastic.

So you get a bunch of people who have their drinks kind of ruined by a frustrating straw. It’s a small thing, but it’s just a little nudge away from environmentalism. You build an association with disappointment and inconvenience. Maybe it doesn’t cause a big sway, but it makes people maybe a little more anti-environmentalist than they already were, or just less passionate about environmentalism.

/u/DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca is right on the money. Mana paces the game, so anything that can break that is super good. In an otherwise even matchup, if one player has a Lotus while the other doesn’t, that can easily make the game. It’s not going to win the game in and of itself, but it’s a huge enabler to play the thing that will win you the game, before your opponent can reasonably do anything about it.

On top of that, it’s literally good in all decks. It’s been banned in every format besides Vintage, where it’s restricted to one (and not including casual/fan formats). It had to be banned partly for power reasons, but also because it makes deck-building less diverse. There’s no deck that wouldn’t want a Lotus if it could have one, much less four.

It’s also part of the Reserved List. After WotC overprinted cards, they essentially promised not to reprint certain ones. I think it’s a dumb decision, but they’ve annoyingly stuck to it (and players are worse off for it). Black Lotus is on that list. And it was alreadly limited in printings, because it was a rare card, and a bit of a design mistake.

It’s also simply an iconic card. Despite being a design mistake, it’s a major part of Magic history, and gets referenced all the time. To some extent, it’s famous for being famous. That makes it the biggest prize for collectors.

So, all this together, it has an incredibly high demand, a very limited supply, and no indication of a reprint anytime soon.

So I printed off a proxy at a professional card printer for 30¢. :)

Happy to help! It’s worked great for me, and a buddy of mine also liked it, so I’m fairly sure it’s not a fluke. :P

Also, my ratios were by weight. That’s only relevant because that’s what makes me push up against the maximum solubility. If you go volumetric, you have more wiggle room. The second point will be less relevant, but it’s still faster and easier than heating it in a pot, IMO.

Oh, and as a bonus: you don’t need to wait for the syrup to cool down.

If you’re going to make simple syrup, use a stick blender.

Firstly, it’s easier and faster than heating the sugar and water in a pot, which is the most popular method.

Secondly, you don’t lose any significant amount of water to evaporation. That’s not a big deal if you make 1:1 simple syrup, but if you’re going 2:1 (which I prefer), you’re already very close to the maximum solubility of sugar in water at room temperature. Losing a few grams of water can make it supersaturated, which leads to sugar crystals falling out of solution over time. Not a big deal, but a little annoying.

If you give it a try, bear in mind that you’re going to get a cloudy syrup at first. That’s totally normal, and it’s not undissolved sugar, it’s just air bubbles. They’ll float out over time.

“If you’d rather play D&D, are you willing to DM while I recharge?”

In my group, yes. :| We actually have plenty of players willing to run games.

That said, they’re also willing to try out new games, so it all works out just fine. :)

This is especially true with generic medicines.

The cheapest I can get Claritin in my nearest supermarket is 50¢—$1.12/pill.

The store brand can be as low as 7¢—37¢/pill.)

The CostCo version is 2 or 3¢/pill.

All of them are the same. 10mg of loratadine, highly regulated by the FDA.

They can differ with inactive ingredients, so maybe you’d like a syrup or something from a name brand. But it legally has to be the same active ingredients, in the same amounts, in the same forms.

Yet again.

That user is basing their position on a Daily Mail article citing LePoint, a french right-wing magazine, that quotes one of her trainers, who said (with context) “There was a problem with her hormones and chromosomes, but she’s a woman. That’s all that mattered to us.”

Nowhere does that even suggest she has XY chromosomes, and, to state the obvious, he’s not a doctor. He’s responding to an unsubstantiated allegation, and probably giving it too much credit. He even says that she underwent a testosterone test that came back within female norms.

It really is simple. The burden of proof is on people making these claims, and we’re not taking the word of a blatantly corrupt organization, that had a vested interest in disqualifying Khelif, who would not say what test was administered or what the results were. If they had more specific information, they wouldn’t shut up about it, because won’t even shut up now with less to go on.

It’s about PROTECTING WOMEN! And if I have to hurt a bunch of women to protect them from hypothetical scenarios I made up to demonize trans people, so be it!

I think part of it is that meme discussions are just a great place to actually talk shop about D&D.

Back on reddit, the vast majority of D&D subs were flooded with fan art and very little discussion. There were DM subs, but those obviously left out players. I loved /r/rpg, but that place was also a refuge for people who don’t want to talk about D&D and only D&D all the dang time. (And even if I’m mostly over D&D, I still like D&D in theory, if not always in practice). So… that kind of left /r/dndmemes as, unexpectedly, one of the few places to get in-depth discussion about all kinds of RPGs and experiences from around the table.

Oof. I wouldn’t like that at all. I’m already bothered with how many player powers just shut off certain parts of the game. Also putting it on the monster side seems like it will make the game an arms race of things not mattering.

The fascinating thing about this is that, in context… it’s still fucking weird, but for different reasons.

He’s technically joking about how it makes you transition, saying it’s a claim he heard from “scientists.” So he wants to call men women as a misogynistic insult, but also to poke fun at the concept of scientific study. It’s wrong to distinguish between gender and sex as part of evidence-based medicine and basic conscientiousness. It’s cool and good if you’re doing it to be a dick, though. He’s got to police gender roles, but also insist that they are completely immutable based on your sex.

What a creepy weirdo.

It’s definitely something that’s a part of newer D&D, though it’s debatable when it started. It was inarguably a part of 4th edition, I think it was here by 3rd edition, and there’s even a case to be made that 2e was headed in that direction with some of the supplements.

Anyway, your dad was right. :P During 2e, that was still a big part of the game. It’s part of the differentiation between “old school” and “new school” D&D. Whatever I think of any particular edition, I think both approaches are rad for different reasons. :)

It’s just the mismatch of expectations that would be a problem. It sucks to die because you were expecting another epic set piece battle, and it also sucks to try to come up with a clever solution to avoid an encounter just to end up not doing much or getting railroaded.

My favorite part was that Vance, supposedly, wrote about it in Hillbilly Elegy. Reading the book would easily solve the issue once and for all, but no one wanted to.

It’s also why the AP article was retracted. They could obviously prove that it’s not in the book, but like you said, it would be impossible to prove that he never, at any point in his life, when no one was around, fucked a couch.

…but also, the AP article didn’t even involve reading the book. They just used Ctrl+F on key terms because, again, no one wants to actually read that book.

Yeah, we had a near-TPK with our group recently. The rogue picked a lock and opened a door, which triggered a comical amount of explosives. We dealt with the consequences, but it was frustrating because it just kind of came out of nowhere. It didn’t seem to be that kind of campaign, y’know? Nothing remotely like it happened in months of play up to that point.

…so I was kind of reading my own experiences into this. :P