🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

I’m still here too.

I use water and soap. For everything. Including my hair. Unscented soap with no industrial chemicals to make it “smell good”.

I horrify my coworkers when I tell them this. They’re convinced my hair is going to fall out, and that my skin will dry out and slough off despite literally years of me not showing any of this.

I’m pretty sure the makeup industry is purely a scam.

I think even darker (as the response to @Glide@lemmy.ca indicates). When I see incel behaviour from a man, I make damned sure that man is always in my sight and at a distance. And I won’t accept any drink from him, nor any invitation to go somewhere else, even if it’s in the same building.

Well yes. It’s about sex and specifically forcing sex.

They’re wannabe rapists, in effect.

There is absolutely a cure for incels, yes, but nobody in the west would like it. So you’re kind of stuck with them.

The prostitution thing won’t work, though. I actually got fed up with a loud incel peripheral to a social circle I was part of and snapped, offering to hire him a hooker right then and there so he could STFU about how he’d never been laid.

Immediately he moved the goalposts and said he didn’t just want to get laid, he wanted a “genuine emotional relationship”. Saying this despite for the previous two hours only ever talking about sex, sex appeal, sexual characteristics, etc. with not a word spent on “genuine emotion”.

Some people just want to whine, and when they gather in groups they spiral destructively.

The pipes tend to be insulated, the temperatures don’t really get very low (coldest I’ve ever seen is -10° and that was for a couple of hours), and that’s at night, and the cold “season” is very short. It takes time to freeze pipes, and here it just doesn’t get cold enough to do that.

That’s the most polite way I’ve ever seen of edging away from my obsessive tendencies. 😀

We used, as I said above, a PU (PVC? I don’t know, I’m not a polymer expert) sheet the same size as the table to protect the glass under it. 1.5mm is all you need, it rolls up nicely to set aside, and you can put maps and stuff under it to keep it visible but protected.

And the metal dice won’t shatter your tabletop like one evil d10 did mine. 😬

Central China. Wuhan to be specific. If you’re going to visit, go to the south. It’s pleasantly warm in winter. Or bundle up and go north. They heat their homes in the north. It’s the poor suckers near the Yangtze that get screwed.

I caught the 2009 total eclipse here and it was awe-inspiring. It was also the longest solar eclipse expected for the 21st century at 6 minutes, 39 seconds, so it made a deep impression on everybody standing on the roof of the apartment block to watch it.

I don’t wish to see a second, though, because the next one will be in the year 2200 and that would mean I’d still be alive in 200 years. Not something I want.

I’ve seen the Aurora Borealis hundreds of times. (Living in the high arctic does that to you.) But I have heard them only once.

I’d like to hear them again.

Usually only the one, but if I’m going to run a game I’ll bring several sets because there’s always someone (possibly more than one) who doesn’t have one.

And yes, there’s no insulation anywhere here. The walls are mostly concrete (with plaster, etc. over top, natch) and when cold weather hits actively start to radiate cold. (I know, I know, technically they’re sucking heat out, but it FEELS radiative!). All the windows are single-glaze and they’re not particularly well-sealed either, so drafts are common.

Blue is supposed to be the colour, yes. The verbiage is that “blue is an ancient symbol—dating back to Ancient Rome—representing love, purity, and fidelity”. This is, however, absolute poppycock. Blue was a symbol of fidelity, this is true, but to the emperor, not in love. And indeed there is no single colour that symbolizes all three things in Roman times.

White symbolized purity and innocence. Yellow represented marriage and fidelity. Red represented violence (Mars), yes, but also passion and love. Green represented beauty, fertility, and love. Purple represented passion, but chiefly reserved for the royal classes.

Blue was not related to any kind of love symbolism whatsoever. The Victorians just made stuff up. Again. Like the so-called “medieval” torture devices (like iron maidens, etc.)

Central heating (and insulation) is not common here. And cold weather rarely lasts longer than two weeks. We make do with small space heaters at need and I’ve got the space heater I’m using under my desk right now, keeping my legs nice and toasty. But the thick wooden desk is insulating quite well from the heat source, sadly.

3D printing in metals of various kinds is pretty common these days.

As the proud (and almost exclusive) user of metal dice¹, however, let me warn you that metal dice have a few problems.

1. As others have noted, you can really scar the wood of tables. What they didn’t note is that they can also, if they land just wrong, break glass. I have a nice coffee table that had a glass overlay about 5mm thick or so. (Note the past tense.) One of my d10s landed JUST WRONG, apparently on a hidden flaw that left a stress point, and that lovely glass overlay broke into three large shards. Replacing that was too expensive for my tastes. The solution was to buy a transparent PU (I think?) cover to the same dimensions—only 1.5mm thick was more than enough—and always unroll that over the replacement glass. But you have to be aware of just how damaging metal dice can be. (Other alternatives include using dice towers, rolling bowls, etc., but the PU cover has an added bonus of letting you put key documents, maps, etc. under it for quick reference without worrying about getting pizza grease on it.

2. They’re heavy. Indeed that’s part of their appeal, but if you carry multiple sets it can get a bit unpleasant. Sometimes my purse feels like I’m carrying several sets of knuckle dusters or something.

3. This is one I haven’t heard comments on, but they get very cold in chill environments. Were I playing today (3°C at my desk at the moment) I’d use plastic dice.

¹ E.g.: https://i.imgur.com/X11DeQ2.jpg

Looks like I hang out with the wrong (right?) people then.

I’ve only played one deck building game (Star Realms) and there were times when it felt like two people playing solitaire, only to suddenly burst into hard exchanges. It was kind of interesting.

In card games I always like that little spice that’s added when discards can be picked up by someone else and used. It adds an element of “should I perhaps continue with this less-than-perfect hand, or should I risk helping someone else build the perfect hand?”

I have literally never seen that “tradition” followed except on television or movies. No wedding ceremony I’ve ever attended had any of that going on.

Maybe I hang out with the wrong crowd.

Ideally you’d translate it into an idiom in the target language, yes. “Red booklet” would immediately be translated to “little red book” anyway. Red Note was better, but a little off idiomatically. There’s a reason, though, why there are actual marketing professionals who get a lot money for doing translations in branding.