So obviously the die rolls in 2x140 were B-A-N-A-N-A-S and the instant stuff of D&D legend, but let’s think about what they mean narratively.
Matt’s die rolls for Mollymauk’s resurrection were, first, a natural 1, and second, a 12.
All resurrection spells in D&D have one caveat: the creature’s soul must be “able and willing” to return. Even True Resurrection can’t force an unwilling soul into a body. Consider also Matt Mercer’s house rules for resurrection rituals: DC starts at 12, goes up by 2 each time a creature is revived, and can be reduced by up to three contributions to the ritual. That first roll is an auto-fail, the closest the dice gods can get to slamming the door in your face. The second, on the other hand, would have succeeded in resurrecting him even if no one had contributed to the ritual. If you want to interpret that narratively, it’s like Mollymauk refused to return the first time (nat 1) but, after the Wildmother intervened, he was eager to come back (nat 12).
So consider: Mollymauk’s fragmented consciousness, dragged back into the flesh along with Lucien by Cree’s resurrection, forced to live out his nightmare (he’s back, the person who had this body before me, he’s back and he’s taken it back and he’s not a very nice person at all) perhaps watching all along, perhaps only surfacing in brief moments as his friends pulled him to the surface, but still fighting back, savaging his captor from the inside out, screaming along with the subjugated Somnovem in horrible chorus–
–and then silence. Molly is free.
Lucien is dead. He’s dead and Molly is free and he’s ready to go on to whatever’s next because there’s nothing left back here, nothing was his to start with, not even the body he tried to claim. Nothing but the grisly past he never wanted to see in the first place. He was empty after all.
Then there’s an all-too-familiar spark. A call, a hook, a tug on the silver cord of his soul that beckons him back. And Molly thinks: absolutely not. Hell no I’m not going back again. Whoever you are, dead Somnovem or Cree or de Rogna or some totally new asshole who’s tangled themselves up in this bullshit, you can leave me the hell out of it. I’m done. Nat 1. Mollymauk out.
The silver cord snaps. He flows along in the torrent of newly-released souls, ready to pass into the outer planes, to embrace the afterlife…and just before he crosses over a divine hand pauses his flight and whispers, Take another look.
The Wildmother can’t make him come back. But she can show him what he’s leaving behind. She shows him his friends kneeling on the skin of the dying city, weeping over a corpse. It’s not some new terror trying to summon Lucien back to life; it’s the Mighty Nein calling for Mollymauk, his friends who fought to the edge of reality and leapt off it just to find him again. Who saved the world on the way to their real goal. She shows him how much they’ve changed, how much they miss him, how much they want to tell him. And in the shapes of them kneeling, standing, weeping, stunned, they trace out a place in the world that’s not a leftover, not stolen, but his. He does have something to leave behind, Molly realizes. He’s leaving everything behind.
The Wildmother shows him the path, but the choice is up to him - and now he takes it gladly. Lucien is dead. Molly’s friends are waiting. Molly’s life is waiting. And Mollymauk’s never missed a chance to live life.
I’d seen some of these pub stills before but not all of them, imagine middle America looking at this and thinking they were just bachelors sharing a house holy fuck
Cary grant and Randolph Scott lived together for 11 years in their mansion entitled the bachelor pad there are press pictures of the two of them living in a completely wonderfully domestic setting
When Cary grant has to marry as to stop the rumours of their gayness he became very depressed, him and his wife divorced 13 months later
Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?
Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?
So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.
So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.
There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.
Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.
See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:
So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.
Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.
Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.
Graphics cards!
Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.
Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.
So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage.
OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.
Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.
But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.
Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.
Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.
What a waste.
was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem
The basic principle of vaccination is to prime the immune system so it is better prepared to meet a pathogen. Historically, the earliest way to accomplish this was to get a mild infection that conferred immunity to a stronger disease; for example, exposure to cowpox to prevent getting the much more deadly smallpox. Modern approaches use weakened or inactivated viruses, or even fragments of a virus, but the principle remains the same: safely expose the immune system to a pathogen so immune cells learn to recognize it and can react quickly and effectively the next time it appears.
In the case of COVID-19, some of the vaccines use a new technique based around messenger RNA (mRNA). In this approach, patients are never exposed to the virus, even in a weakened form. Instead, the vaccine carries mRNA from a key virus gene that makes the spike protein. Once inside cells, the mRNA serves as a template to make the spike protein, and our immune system then learns about it and is ready to fight off the virus. The mRNA template is then quickly degraded by our normal cellular processes.
When enough people are vaccinated, a disease can no longer spread through the population. That’s how vaccination campaigns have helped bring many diseases under control. COVID-19 vaccines have been developed on an accelerated timeline because of the exceptional circumstances, but they nevertheless went through the entire regulatory review and approval process. Though there will be immense logistical challenges in ensuring that everyone has timely access to a vaccine, we are one step closer to a post COVID-19 world.
–Children under 14 (13 for agricultural labor) can only be employed by their own parents/guardians
–14-15 year olds are limited to 3 hours per day, 18 hours per week during the school year (up to 8 hours on weekends/holidays), and 8 hours per day, 40 hours per week when school is not in session.
–They are also limited to working 7am-7pm (or 9pm during the summer), and only outside of school hours
–Only a specific list of jobs are permitted for children of this age (relevant to this, they are allowed to reheat food, wash dishes and equipment, and do some limited cooking/food prep such as washing vegetables). Any work outside this list is prohibited.
–There is also a broad list of jobs/duties they are prohibited from (including any work with ladders, or work with powered meat slicers or several types of powered baking equipment)
(An entirely different set of rules apply to agricultural work, and for working directly for one’s parents or family. There are also some jobs allowed to children under 14. I’m not going into those.)
Now, I’m not opposed to 14 and 15 year olds working appropriate jobs. I babysat at that age, other kids mowed lawns, raked leaves, life guarded at pools, etc.
But there is something a little predatory about this sign, particularly going up now.
And as people have pointed out, kids that age don’t know their rights. They don’t know the laws. And even if they do, they don’t know that the laws are there to *protect* them. I’ve known plenty of teenagers who think they boss is *doing them a favor* by allowing them to work outside their limited hours, or continue working while clocked out for their lunch break. When I worked as a waitress, my manager suggested this as a way to earn extra tips. Heck, I was almost THIRTY, and you wouldn’t believe how many little ways they tried to wriggle around the rules to get a little more work out of me. (Unless you’ve worked this kind of job, then you’d absolutely believe it.)
Another thing–these jobs are *exhausting.* I’ve worked manual labor, I’ve worked in schools, retail, all kinds of jobs, but nothing made me end the day, back throbbing, fling-myself-into-bed tired like working in a restaurant. I don’t know what it is, maybe the hectic pace of the busy hours, maybe the way you’re expected to be busy every second of your time there, maybe it’s the fact that I spent most of each day walking as fast as I could from one end of the building to the other. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t wish that on any 14-year-old.
So, anyway, I’m looking at this little flyer, and I’m concerned. Not because I don’t think a 14-year-old should ever work. But because I’m trying to think why a BK would put out a sign SPECIFICALLY asking for the youngest age they can employ, with NO details suggesting this is a special youth-support or training program, only A FEW WEEKS before summer vacation, and targeted to their PARENTS who, let’s face it, are probably eager to get some time away from the kids after the last year.
Why would any business make this SPECIFIC ad? I don’t know, but every answer I come up with doesn’t sit well with me.
With the current shortage of adults willing to work an exhausting job at a non-living wage, they are looking for anyone else they can exploit. A business should be considered failing if it can’t pay its adult employees enough to get by.
Also relevant: these kids are almost certainly not vaccinated, and its extremely clear they will not be protected, especially as places relax mask mandates. In 2020 being a line cook was the most dangerous job in the country, the conditions that caused that danger haven’t changed. This will get some of these kids killed.
