And I distinctly remember The Chosen One being a cliched trope before Harry Potter. This is certainly not a new trend at all. Feels like the same folks grumbling about hundreds year old language shifts, like being upset about “literally.”

Dietary calcium is great for preventing stones, actually. Calcium is bound to a couple different things that cause stones, but the body actually makes those things specifically to bind with calcium. When it happens where it is supposed to, this is a good thing. If you are low on calcium, these things get flushed, and may get trapped in the kidney. Then any calcium that passes through may bind to it. Having higher calcium intake helps prevent them from building up in the kidneys to begin with. Though extremely high amounts of calcium from vitamin supplements etc can increase the risk of getting stones, but high calcium diet is one of the best defenses against them.

It is actually not an excess of calcium that’s usually the problem, calcium deficiency is actually a greater risk for most. While yes, the most common types are both chemicals that are in part calcium, the body is meant to produce them, just in different parts of the body. Usually, a deficiency in calcium allows those other compounds that should be used up in other places to be flushed through the kidneys, possibly building up. Then incidental calcium that does move through the kidney binds to them there. Higher dietary calcium intake is associated with a sharp decline in stone risk, though extremely high intakes from vitamin supplements etc do increase risk. But in general, it is an excess of the things that bind to calcium that are the things to avoid, apparently almonds are pretty much the worse thing ever, with a fairly distant second being chocolate.

Yeah, I have rejected increased cost games for this very reason. But Nintendo is one of the few companies I believe would do it to cover their costs instead of just preying upon general apathy towards inflation since covid to jack up profit. They are too rich for my blood at the time, but if I had the income to splurge this would be one of a vanishingly small number of places I would be willing to put up with it.

Just speak the incantation of motive energy and light the incense to soothe the machine spirit.

For a while people tried to differentiate roguelikes, which maintained the lack of metaprogression, with roguelites, which did have progression. But that was pretty clearly a losing battle, the two names were far too similar to stay distinct as long as one or the other took off. Some few pendants still try to maintain the distinction, but that ship sailed ages ago.

I don’t think that’s true, is it? I think Gondor had a small handful of kings before the line was broken and had a long string of stewards. Didn’t Isildur sail from Numenor and establish Gondor himself? So, one single king, right?

Remember, they are still pretty much children in Hobbit society. Both the Tooks and Brandeybucks hold fair bits of land, it’s just their wild kids running around giving the farmers trouble. And of course there’s never any real consequences for them beyond a slap on the wrist.

People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It’s true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn’t really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.

Pretty sure the whole point of this article is we have confirmed tiny black holes do rapidly evaporate. We’ve theoretically known that any black hole just about our sun’s mass or smaller will spew more Hawking Radiation than it can consume mass and will shrink. And this process should accelerate as the mass shrinks. This seems to be the first expiremental evidence to support the well established theory.

Everything bends when you move it, usually to such a small degree that you can’t perceive it. It’s impossible to have a truly “rigid” material that would be required for the original post because of this. The atoms in a solid object don’t all move simultaneously, otherwise swinging a bat would be causing FTL propagation itself. The movement needs to propagate through the atoms, the more rigid the object the faster this happens, but it is never instantaneous. You can picture the atoms like a lattice of pool balls connected to each other with springs. The more rigid the material, the stiffer the springs, but there will always be at least a little flex, even if you need to zoom in and slow-mo to see it.

Neesh is actually the much newer pronunciation apparently, TIL.

The way read it they were using it as an example where absurdity makes sense to poke a hole in the logic that infinity can be used as a number.

The cost is less from the design and more from the safety regulations. Best case scenario the state just starts making nuclear power plants, it’s just not a good idea to mix profit incentive with nuclear.

Pretty hard to detect. But… probably easier than finding the petunias I guess.

There is an argument, but I don’t think it’s convincing. The single best way to cripple their most deadly foe (so far) is to be less evil and make everyone’s lives less shit. They could hamstring chaos by simply ceasing their eternal crusade and focusing on improving the average peon’s life. The Imperium as a state only exists because of a “well-intentioned” checks notes… galactic crusade of conquest and omnicide against any non-human. In pretty much any other media they are unambiguously the bad guys, having other bad guys to fight doesn’t change that. They are literally a characture of every evil space empire. We just get fed so much propaganda that it starts to work a little.

Allegedly.

Pineapple is so metal, fucking fruit that tries to eat you back.

I think I see the direction they wanted to go. Show that she’s still obsessed and starting to fray at the edges, but then give her a redemption when she realizes she doesn’t need a biological child when she has Ciri right there as a daughter. It’s just that every show like this seeks to have to be CW’ed these days. It’s a big reason why I had to drop Supernatural too. It worked really well for 5 seasons. But after that, the 3rd time the brothers fought about X and the 6th time they kept Y secret, I realized there was never going to be any development past this and had to step away. It’s exhausting.

It’s value is still great though because it costs nothing. Every time you draw it you may as well have just drew 3 cards, for absolutely nothing.