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!

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?

This is a big one, and I’d add in an aggressive tax for owning multiple properties. Make single land ownership ~70% of what it currently is, and each additional property increases all your property tax by 300%. Couple that with getting rid of idiotic exemptions (seriously…I have a friend with parents that owned more than a hundred different properties in a semi-rural area [one that was going to become suburban soon] and paid nearly no taxes because they plunked a few cows onto each one until the development companies paid the big moolah for them) and there would be plenty of homes for everyone. Last report I remember said we had more than enough empty homes sitting around to house every homeless person multiple times over.

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.