I love learning new rules. It’s honestly almost as much fun to me as actually playing the game.

I feel like I first saw this pic before AI image generation was any good, so it might just be good old fashioned Photoshop.

Took this one just now. It’s hard to get Xena to look at the camera!

Nah man, the older I get the less I trust adults. They let me be one and I’m the biggest fuckup I’ve ever met!

OP already accounted for social situations where you would expect to meet people, though, and his parents seem to think that he should be approaching people in other situations—like in a store, or on the street. I’d be very cautious about that.

Inspire allies to perform better or push their limits, bolster them against mental damage and heal mental damage they’ve sustained, raise the morale of a group (especially if that group shares my religion). Bonuses to public speaking, negotiation, religious knowledge, etc.

If I belong to a more fire-and-brimstone type religion, perhaps I can intimidate sinners, make my allies more effective against heretics, etc.

Yes, I think we should abolish the police and dismantle the army. That’s, like, the whole point. They’re responsible for most of the violence!

What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?

Visit Granddad.

Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our American history textbook had a sidebar about the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. The bit that stuck with me: a French dignitary interviewed on the scene was unconcerned about the protesters. He pointed to an untouched BMW (or similar luxury car, I forget the exact make). “In Paris,” he said, “That car would be burning.”

Smoking proves that you officially Don’t Give a Shit about your long-term health, and Not Giving a Shit is the essence of being cool. I mean, I guess for a long time now “cool” has just meant “good,” but the original “cool” aesthetic was all about acting like you were probably going to die young and looking sexy doing it.

Edit: And smoking definitely contributes to the sexy part. Smoldering embers. Oral fixation. Taking a long drag and letting it out slowly. Maybe it’s not for you, but it sure pushes my buttons, and I know it’s not just me.

I had to look up “The Happening.” From context clues I thought it might be like “The Day of the Triffids,” but I guess it’s a little more subtle. XD

Oh phonics is the old one (although it’s making a comeback). The “new” one that they’ve been promoting for a couple decades (and have recently realized isn’t very good) is cueing, the one where you just show kids words and encourage them to use context clues to guess what they mean, and hope that they eventually learn to read by doing that. Phonics is the one where you start with letter (and letter group) sounds and learn to sound out words by reading out loud.

She hated the concept of… teaching what sounds letters make? Was she a big proponent of cuing, or something else?

Yes, I think so. I also did Hooked On Phonics with my grandfather before starting kindergarten which meant I could already read by the time we started school. This was in Texas in the early '90s.

If you call someone “daddy,” it means you’re having sex and you consider them to be the dominant partner in the relationship (or are roleplaying that for sexual reasons). Your language partner is being a creep.

There is some very old slang, “daddy-o,” which isn’t sexual and would be used with a friend, but using it makes you sound like a jazz musician from the 1940s.

Oh damn I think I read this:

The ton of TNT is a unit of energy defined by convention to be 4.184 gigajoules (1 gigacalorie),[1] which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a metric ton (1,000 kilograms) of TNT.

And immediately brain farted “gigajoule” to “kilojoule.” Thanks!

I think that might be an underestimate. Mass and energy should be conserved, so if the entire black hole evaporates the total energy output should be E = mc². An A4 page has a mass of 6.25g. c is the speed of light, 299,792,458m/s.

0.00625kg * (299,792,458m/s)² = 561,721,986,710,511.025J

The explosion of 1 metric ton (1000kg) of TNT is considered to be equivalent to 4,184 Joules. So 100KT = 418,400,000J. That’s not close at all, we’re gonna need more TNT:

561,721,986,710,511.025J / 4,184J/ton of TNT = ~134,254,776,938 tons of TNT.

Rounding off to significant figures, we’re looking at 134 gigatons of TNT. For comparison, the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, had a yield of 50-58 megatons. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 Tsar Bombas!

Maybe this paper folding experiment should be performed away from anything that might be damaged by the explosion. Like, uh, inhabited continents.

As pointed out below, I biffed the joules-per-ton-of-TNT thing, sorry!