Correct

I got an uncut foil mythic rare sheet from the Magic:the Gathering set Aetherdrift professionally framed and hung on the wall. I think it looks great, my fiance begrudgingly admits it looks better than she expected

There’s a sweet spot in the corporate ladder. People at the bottom get the daily grunt work stuff that’s time consuming and repetitive. People at the top end up with competing responsibilities so they spending most of their time in meetings about other meetings and arguing about planning to make decisions. It’s right in the middle where you blend into the background and can spend half your work day in your underwear playing video games. And that’s exactly where I like to live

One of these is the monkey pet of a pirate leader and the other is an eldritch monster stronger than gods that consumes entire realities for no apparent reason. One of them people wanted banned for being too good, the other is entirely unplayable:

Can you guess which is which?

Airplanes are very time efficient but not very fuel efficient. A modern 737 cargo plane holds about 52,000 lbs of cargo. To transport 3 million barrels of oil (not even 20% of the total oil we’re talking about) by plane would take about 20,000 flights daily and there are only about 13,000 737s on the planet. So ignoring the astronomical cost it would take making the process impossible to profit from, you’d have to commandeer the world’s supply of planes to do so. Also I’m almost certain that the entire middle east couldn’t handle 20,000 fully loaded cargo flights every day. It’s simply too much for their airports to handle, even if humans stopped flying

So the important thing to remember is the sheer quantity of oil that needs to be moved and where it needs to be moved to. The Strait of Hormuz in 2024 had 20 million barrels of oil passing through it daily. That’s 840,000,000 gallons or 3,160,000 cubic meters, or ~1300 Olympic swimming pools each day that need to be moved. It also mostly is going to end up getting moved across oceans to be delivered to the people who need it

Moving that much liquid by means other than boats is very difficult. Building pipelines that can move that much liquid is difficult and prone to problems. Especially considering the very harsh climate surrounding the area and even if you do have a pipeline it’s likely still going to end up in a ship because it has to cross an ocean anyway. Moving it by truck is almost logistically impossible, and trains have more problems than pipelines

In order to have the ships big enough to move that liquid you need ports that are deep enough AND already have the infrastructure to handle ships of that size, of which all are already in the Strait. It also made sense because a lot of oil producing countries were in this area so having lots of ships in the area built efficiency

So a whole bunch of confounding factors led to the Strait being the optimal place to move a lot of oil by ship (which the oil needed to go into anyway), however a natural choke point makes this a strategic position for countries in the area. Oil ships are slow, easy targets, and most countries could pretty cheaply take them out. Which adds to the tension in the region

This Wendover Productions video does a good job explaining why so much oil had to go through the Strait

Turns out mom was wrong. Masturbating too much won’t give you hairy palms, it gives you a hairy lip!

Ah yes, war. My favorite apolitical pass time

The Dutch continue trying to insist they speak a serious language.

Meanwhile:

“kwik, kwek, kwak”

I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion. The ENM community is small and most people when approached with the idea give a polite “Oh, well if that works for you”. Most people don’t have multiple partners which implies they’d agree with you

Personally I’m tempted to agree, I think relationships are where I draw the line. There are plenty of people who have sex outside their relationships and they work just fine. Once you start dating other people is where I’ve seen issues appear

The difference between naturalists and naturists is stark

I haven’t watched Phineas and Ferb but am generally familiar with the concept. There’s probably multiple narrative things happening here

1. Writers are people too. Writing crazy over the top stories gets boring after a while. Sometimes you want to write something more grounded to practice nuance
2. Lower stakes content is generally more relatable and relatable is a high priority in kids media
3. Contrast makes stories more interesting. If you’re always dealing with world destroying calamities then eventually they become route
4. When a show goes on long enough sometimes you try breaking the format as an experiment to see what the reaction is, maybe people like it better and you can pivot
5. Subverting expectations is the basis of comedy. You’ve been led to believe that by their antics Phineas and Ferb would legitimately try to paint an entire continent, the fact that it’s just a regular painting subverts your expectation for a joke

Those are just my thoughts as someone who is relatively familiar with what TV and Movie writing is like

Since most people are unbeatable at tic-tac-toe I have a variant I like to play that has nested boards. Sometimes I call it tic-tic-tac-toe-toe or nested tic-tac-toe. Here’s some shitty MS Paint to explain (red numbers indicate the board, the blue the squares on the board as they correlate to bigger board):

Rules:

• You have a tic-tac-toe board where each square is itself another tic-tac-toe board
• The outer board is numbered 1-9 going from top left to bottom right
• Each sub-board is also numbered the same way, 1-9, left to right
• When you play on board, the square you play in determines the board that your opponent must play in next
  • For example: if you play the middle left square (4), on the bottom right board (Red 9), then your opponent must play on the middle left board next (Red 4)
• Winning a sub-game wins that square on the overall board
  • You may tie a sub-game by filling a board, those squares are dead and nobody gets them
• Getting tic-tac-toe on the overall board gets you a win
• You cannot play on a finished board
• If a play would force a player to play on a finished board then that player may play anywhere instead

It sounds confusing on paper but once you draw the board and play like 2 turns people immediately get what’s going on. It’s really funny to observers because they watch people make “obviously” bad plays on these disjointed boards and they have no idea what’s going on

I also once nerd sniped an intro programming class because I thought making this in the command line would be a fun project for one of my intro assignments. It turns out updating and printing nested python lists can get very confusing very quickly

Getting sick when traveling is absolutely more common, you’re exposed to foods, diseases, weather, and people that you aren’t used to. However if it’s happening reliably and specifically after flying as opposed to other forms of travel that does sound like it could be a specific problem. It could be an inner-ear thing since airplane compression can fuck with that

It’s not a perfect solution but sometimes when I fly I wear a mask to reduce the odds of getting sick, though it’s pretty rare I get sick from travel myself, and I travel internationally annually

Dune is like 10,000 years past the Butlerian Jihad which is supposed to be an existential war against AI and humans that leaves Earth unrecognizable. Even generously that’s still not even close to this millenia

Not at work but I briefly lived with that guy. I just started agreeing with him on everything. “And we all know what the correct opinion on net neutrality is” “Yes we do.”

“People just don’t understand what Trump is doing” “Yeah, you’re so right”

There’s really nowhere to go when you just vaguely agree with what they’re saying but don’t commit to anything

I saw around 70 movies in theaters last year alone, I’m sure my lifetime number is in the hundreds. Here’s a list I put together earlier this year:

https://lemmy.world/post/41059248

It’s not exactly the same but plenty of people make a living playing video games on twitch

Since you’re here I’ll assume you’re a nerd and suggest getting into Magic:the Gathering. You can learn to play on Arena for free and then buy a pre-made commander deck. At that point you can go to local game stores and ask when they have open play nights. The nice thing about magic is that the games take a long time to play so there’re a lot of opportunities to socialize with the people you play with and people nearby. Similarly if you can find an active Killer Queen cabinet around you those people are always desperate for players and it’s super fun

If you’re less of a nerd dance classes are more active and likewise force you to be in an intimate space with someone which will usually force you to socialize. You seem opposed to bars but karaoke crowds tend to be the same week after week, and you have to wait your turn, so it’s another socialization venue

Dwarf Fortress bug reports are incredible. Since this is lemmy I’m sure people have heard of the alcoholic cats but it’s a fun reread

I just can’t beat the drunken cat bug… That was the one where the cats were showing up dead all over the tavern floor, and it turned out they were ingesting spilled alcohol when they cleaned their paws.

I think that bug explains very well just how deeply complex Dwarf Fortress really is. Drinks can be spilled. Some drinks have alcohol. If cats step in something it sticks to their paws. Cats clean their paws, causing them to ingest what’s on them. Enough alcohol will kill a cat. Put together: dead drunken cats.

I vaguely remember that part of the problem was the game didn’t differentiate between licking a small amount of ale and drinking a whole glass. So the cats were basically chugging a beer each time they cleaned their paws