"Oof. Right in the blocks"

"What a load of absolute blocks"

"It's the dog's blocks"

Camera zoom into extreme closeup. "oh... blocks".

Yep, that's the one.

Where did you go?

Even imagining this pronunciation hurts my ears.

I think you're a little off on the "we need to fix this world" guys.

Although zombie films / TV series lean heavily into the action side of things, that's just because it's more entertaining than watching people building things, developing tech, doing scientific research.

Remember with COVID 19? Huge numbers of people immediately set out to find a cure, inventing and deploying ways to prevent and monitor the spread, creating pop-in treatment centres, etc.

I used to take this to school with me to read during form periods!

I'd been a fan of them since they appeared as a proper army in White Dwarf, although I remember being a bit disappointed that the weird and colourful squigs had been functionally replaced with chubby little rippers.

And for anyone wondering, even for the time the old Zoanthrope looked stupid.

It's the money-men making the decisions now, instead of people who actually care about the product.

Mind you, this isn't sustainable - by shifting to the more "luxury" end of the hobby, and their refusal to embrace emerging technology, they're creating huge gaps in the market for exploitation.

They're on the verge of Nokia-ing themselves out of market dominance.

Just beautiful.

This is exactly the kind of picture that captured my imagination as a kid.

We have that too (UK), but here, when used without the "up" part, "bottling it" and "losing your bottle" means getting scared and deciding not to do something.

Essentially, bottle = courage.

Warhammerers?

The initial buy-in, especially at a Games Workshop/ Warhammer store is astronomical.

You'll need paintbrushes to start - here, try these, the most expensive paintbrushes you'll ever buy. And paints too, how about our mindboggling range of expensive paints?

When I took up mini painting again as an adult, with dirt-cheap acrylic paints and brushes, and achieved far better results than I ever did as a kid with the "proper" stuff, it was a real eye-opener.

Quick question - do Americans use the expression "bottled it" for being scared off?

I'm wondering because in an episode of The Boys, Butcher says the related phrase "I lost my bottle" when he meant "I lost my rag", and it made it to air, even though it made no sense in the context.

From an outsider's perspective, although the Republicans are clearly the most corrupt of the two parties, the Democrats are far from being the good guys.

There's plenty of evidence to suggest that the Democrat politicians don't actually care about truth and justice either, they're just less bad than the Republicans are.

Tldr: vote Democrat, but don't kid yourself. Vote because they are the least worst option.

D&D with the classic Heroquest DM screen? Colour me intrigued...

When juries deliberate, they discuss their reasons for thinking this or that. Basically, by telling the jury to disregard something, the judge is saying that this shouldn't be included in the decision-making process.

Of course people can't just take things out of their heads, and of course the legal representatives take advantage of that fact.

Overhangs were the biggest issue I found. So much so that I moved back to a 0.4 after a month of faff trying to find settings that would compensate.

I use my printer mainly for minis, and figures that would print supportless on the 0.4 nozzle needed huge amounts of supports at 0.2 in order to print without missing chins etc.

That said, the level of detail that I could achieve was better, particularly on the hair, but not enough to compensate for all of the extra faff and wasted plastic.

Is it possible to just tell them it's a medical appointment, but it's about something that you don't feel comfortable talking about?

It's the truth, it explains the secrecy about the appointment, but it keeps the secret.

The trouble with "creepy" is that it's emotive. Although it's absolutely a correct word to use, it can easily be dismissed as an insult.

"Weird" is less of an insult, and can be taken objectively. I've got OCD, I know I'm weird - I'd be lying if I pretended otherwise.

But the thing is, Trump and Co don't just want to be seen as "normal", they want to be seen as the best at "normal".

This is why "weird" works. It's possible to argue that Trump being creepy is just someone else's opinion, but it's very hard to deny that he doesn't do and say some weird things.

This is sticking because, even with the ludicrous amounts of good-faith his supporters have for him, it's undeniably true, and possibly taps into any underlying misgivings they may have.

Something to add to this.

The people protesting against racism are counter-protesters. They are showing up to protest against the far right who are in turn protesting against migrants.

In the past couple of days they have been out-numbering the far right protesters by at least an order of magnitude, and a lot of the expected riots have been averted.

We've seen empires burn to the ground so many times before.

At the very simplest, you can just overlap things in the slicer without Blender.

If you want to learn about Blender's Sculpt mode, you can just Google "Blender Sculpt mode tutorial". For convenience, try to use the most recent results, as the interface can be slightly different in older versions.

Sculpt mode effectively allows you to alter the models as if they were made of clay or plasticine.

A lot of the tutorials will be showing how to make things from scratch, but what's important is that you see how the tools work.

Once you have everything overlapping the way you want, you can join the using a Boolean operation. You'll want to use a "union" operation.

To avoid the gaps you can line them up with an overlap.

You can adjust the vertices of the model slightly to help facilitate this. The most natural-feeling way to do it in Blender is by using the Sculpt mode.

You can use a Boolean addition operation to then make the two models a single piece of geometry. Or not bother (if you are printing on FDM or at 100% infill in resin, it won't really hurt either way).

Does "World's Richest Man" count as a leader? Because I'm struggling to think of any negatives to him being suddenly substracted from the world.

Also, TIL that substracted is a valid, albeit obsolete, variant of subtract.

I mostly print stuff for DnD and wargaming, so I just run off a few 25mm bases - I can always use them!

That's not wrong at all, but there is a much more recent Adam and Eve - an actual anatomically modern human woman and man that all of us are descended from (although, again, they probably lived about 100,000 years apart - I.e. they weren't a couple)

It should also be stressed that I'm not saying that at one point there was only one woman alive or one man alive.

Mitochondrial DNA isn't like the usual inherited mix of DNA - instead it's passed down directly from mothers to their children. If they have girls, then it'll be passed down to their children too. If they only have boys, though, then that mitochondrial DNA has come to a dead end. Basically it's matrilineal - it passes down the female line.

The same with the Y Chromosome. Fathers pass the Y chromosome to their sons. If they only have daughters, well it's come to a dead end. It's patrilineal - it passes down the male line.

DNA analysis shows that all of our mitochondrial DNA is shockingly similar - especially compared to many other animals. Rolling back the clock (by accounting for the tiny random mutations that occur over time) shows that everyone converges to a single person around 155,000 years ago. Before modern humans, as a species, had expanded out of Africa and spread across the world.

Interestingly, especially so if looking for biblical comparisons, the Y-chromosomal Adam can be traced to around 100,000 years earlier than Mitochondrial Eve - so he did appear first.

So, the next question might be, "if anatomically modern humans existed for at least 100,000 years before the Mitochondrial Eve, what happened to all the other mitochondria variants - why did we end up with only one?"

That is simply a numbers game. Compared to many other animals, humans only have relatively few children in their lifetime. This keeps small populations from exploding suddenly, but it also increases the likelihood of only having boys (and stopping that line of Mitochondrial DNA).

You can map it out on a piece of paper:

Get five different coloured pens and a black pen.

Across the top of the page, draw dot in each coloured pen, with a black one beside it. The coloured dots are female, the black ones male). These are the parents.

Now for the kids. Toss a coin twice - heads for a boy (draw a dot in black pen beneath the parents), tails for a girl (draw a dot the same colour as the mum). Do this for all.

Now pair up the offspring and carry on.

You'll find very quickly, one colour will start to dominate the paper. This represents the Mitochondrial DNA.

Mankind isn't descended from two people.

Kinda.

The Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam are a thing. Admittedly, they probably lived about 100,000 years apart, but all mankind is descended from these two people.

I'm British, and AC/DC are Australian so... I guess you're right?

Edit (although I do kind of like AC/DC, so IDK)

This.

Alternatively, it might be that it's just an additional identical role, but company policy means they need to go through a new round of interviews.

NHS = National Health Service

It's what we have in the UK, and essentially means that all your health care is free.

Vasectomy = free. Having a baby in hospital = free. CAT scan = free. Insulin = free.

Admittedly, it's paid for in taxes, but at a small fraction of the cost of the American way of doing things.

If you're interested in smaller scale sculpting, it'd be remiss of me not to direct you to The Crafsman Steady Craftin'

https://youtube.com/@thecrafsman?si=IrZ7Ze0j5WnfyXXk

Had mine done through the NHS. Basically two questions, "do you have children already" and "how long since your last child was born?".

If you haven't had kids yet, you just need to explain why you want a vasectomy, usually with a specialist. If your last child was born less than two months ago, they want you to wait (apparently a lot of men's first reaction to the realities of having a baby is to try to ensure it won't happen again).

a fun treat like being financially solvent is to generations after Boomers.

FTFY

Lemmy was released as an open-source fediverse alternative to Reddit.

Just over a year after launch, r/ChapoTrapHouse, moved across after being banned from Reddit. This is likely what you're referring to. It had well over 100,000 active users on Reddit, so represented a sudden sizable influx of users.

I'd wager the biggest influx of people by far, though, occurred when Spez upset a majority of mods and many users by banning third party apps.

People looked for an alternative, and Lemmy was it.

But why are so many people who lean left politically? Because the Venn Diagram for "people who like the idea of a decentralised platform that supports everybody and is free from the machinations of millionaires", and "people who would like society that supports everybody and is free from the machinations of millionaires" is nearly a circle.

You might be underestimating the timescales involved.

For example, grass - super simple organism, right? Should have appeared early on? No, dinosaurs appeared before grass did. But when the first grasses did evolve, wow, they were successful on a scale that is hard to overstate.

The beauty of sexual reproduction, from an evolutionary point of view, is that by its very nature, it allows many experiments to take place at once. The success criteria of each experiment is how many babies can the subject make.

Little wings evolve on seed pods for the same reason they evolved on anything else. For whatever reason, each step along the way made them a tiny bit more successful at having babies than those without.

Maybe a little spike makes them slightly less likely to be eaten, a bigger spike less likely still. A flatter spike helped them catch the wind and scatter further afield, and broader ones further still.

There's no feedback needed for individuals in this system - it's literally a numbers game based on who/what can make the most babies. They're the ones who, millions of years down the line, end up winning.

It's not the boiling that's the important factor - it's the temperature.

You could make a cup of tea with it, but it wouldn't be much different than just plopping a teabag in room-temperature water for the same amount of time.

I think you might have misread my comment. I don't think George Lucas was trying to make a comment on any of the above.

I'm not sure - just think...

Within less than thirty years there has been:

A sudden massive increase in the number of people who believe the MMR vaccine causes autism.

A global pandemic that large numbers of people: Swear didn't happen, or Was artificially created, or Was a hoax to encourage people to have vaccines that contain something sinister.

Widespread demonisation of an entire religion.

A sharp increase in people who don't believe the holocaust happened.

A baffling increase in people who believe the Earth is flat.

In short, people are stupid and surprisingly willing to believe nonsense, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Were the Jedi actually magical? Nah it was just propaganda by a corrupt council. It was all special effects - seriously, a sword against blasters? Wake up, sheeple.

Absolutely - if anything, there's a reluctance to use formal titles in the UK in general.

I used to teach at university - students and staff alike just use first names when addressing each other. When signing emails, we just use our first name, no letters, job title, anything.

It's even something specifically touched on in our orientation guide for foreign students.

As for newspapers and Prime Ministers specifically, one of the biggest newspapers, The Guardian, has a cartoonist who has always drawn David Cameron with a condom covering his head. There's absolutely no deference shown to Prime Ministers here.

Welcome to your doom!

Primary sources? No, but there are independent secondary sources by people with no skin in the game.

Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus (circa 93–94 CE).

Annals by Tacitus (circa 116 CE)

The earliest Christian writings are also more about the teachings of a disruptive Jewish preacher who was then crucified, than they are about magic.

Let's not do the 'every Christian' thing. It's worth remembering the US has a very 'unique' type of Christian.

This. There is evidence that a preacher called Jesus existed, was crucified, and was well-regarded enough to start a following that persisted even after his death.

There isn't, however, strong historical evidence for any of the magical parts of it.