• 0 Posts
  • 111 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 26th, 2023

help-circle


  • I’m not depressed, at least I don’t think I am. I don’t really feel sad.

    Society equating depression with sadness is a great disservice to the condition. It’s quite common for it to present as just … nothing. An emotional void where you might expect emotions to be. Things that would be expected to make you happy just don’t. Things that would make you sad, the same. Your feelings are depressed in the sense that their impact is just muted across the board.

    A lack of motivation is also a very common indicator. You’re just missing the drive to do something because the emotional rewards that you expect to happen when you accomplish your goals just aren’t there.






  • vithigar@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzOxygen
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    2 months ago

    The short version is that life needs something that’s at least a little unstable in order to extract chemical energy from things.

    The post is correct when viewed in a particular light, on a technicality, if you squint. By that same technicality iron rusting is also burning very slowly. They’re ignoring the rapidity which is implied by “burning”. But yes, oxygen is unstable, oxygen helps burn things, and oxygen is toxic if you get too much at once. Though you’d need to be breathing pure oxygen pressurized to about 1.4 atmospheres, or regular air pressurized to about 7 atmospheres, for that last one to happen. It’s a legitimate concern for deep SCUBA divers.

    But why does life need instability? Chemical instability is, in basic terms, just stored chemical energy, and that energy wants to be released. The more reactive something is the easier it is to get energy from reactions involving it. There’s a balancing act here where more reactive means easier energy, but also more dangerous. Oxygen is in a kind of sweet spot where it’s stable enough that it’s not generally going to explode or catch fire on its own, but can be coaxed into doing those things in controlled ways with other chemicals to extract energy when needed.






  • Yes, if you consider just a human-mass equivalent portion of the Sun then it’s not doing much, but that’s not really a useful comparison. We’re talking about total net entropy here, not entropy per unit mass.

    But yes, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll concede that if you had octillions of people our total metabolic energy output would, in fact, be significantly higher than that of the Sun.



  • For those of you who’ve never experienced the joy of PowerBuilder, this could often happen in their IDE due to debug mode actually altering the state of some variables.

    More specifically, if you watched a variable or property then it would be initialised to a default value by the debugger if it didn’t already exist, so any errors that were happening due to null values/references would just magically stop.

    Another fun one that made debugging difficult, “local” scoping is shared between multiple instances of the same event. So if you had, say, a mouse move event that fired ten times as the cursor transited a row and in that event you set something like integer li_current_x = xpos the most recent assignment would quash the value of li_current_x in every instance of that event that was currently executing.





  • In the moment at the table, arguably RoC, but that’s still not necessarily going to convey well to anyone who wasn’t there.

    Also, assuming OP’s previous submission is the “player shenanigans” which prompted this then it’s my opinion that it wasn’t cool at the table, either.


  • A pretty large proportion of “player shenanigans” stories amount to “we ignored the rules and allowed something ridiculous to happen”. This is fine if that’s what your group wants to do, but can’t really be expected to be relatable to the community at large.

    It’s similar to the stories about level 5 groups who miraculously defeat an ancient red dragon or whatever. It invariably only happens because of some utterly absurd homebrew/ruling, or the GM just played the dragon as an idiot.