I think the simple answer is that DnD is a game focused on combat, so it'll have a lot of cool hostile creatures, while Lord of the Rings is focused on exploration and drama, so it'll have a lot of cool places and friendly creatures.

But when I compile a mental list of all the fights in LotR + The Hobbit, they do feature quite a varied assortment of monsters. Trolls, orcs, spiders, a dragon, a balrog, wargs, nazghuls, ringwraits, wights, the watcher, olifants. Then there are the non-hostile monsters like ents, eagles, ghosts, and shape-shifters.

So I'm not sure the enemy variety in DnD is that much greater in relation to the amount of time spent fighting.

I've mostly read the new PHB, but I feel like the clarity of the updated rules make it obvious how needlessly confusing much of original 5e was.

Sure, charging full price for what is mostly rephrasing and polish does feel a bit rich.

But refusing to give the new edition it's own damn name makes my blood boil. Trying to explain to my players that while most parts of fifth edition is compatible with fifth edition, some parts of fifth edition is actually not compatible with fifth edition, has significantly shortened my life span.

I have no idea if this is true, but it certainly fits the very strange vibe of the game.

It's like how I would imagine the most violent cops see the world.

All people are awful. Every criminal is a heavily armed, highly trained, fearless lunatic, who does not care if they live or die, as long as there's a tiny chance they can hurt more people. Civilians are uncooperative, ungrateful, and suicidal.

Every deployment, no matter how routine, will likely lead you into an ambush by dudes with assault rifles.

Avoiding bloodshed is almost impossible and even trying is likely to get you killed.

The game has some of the strangest bugs.

The last time I tried to play, I had no UI at all, but only in multiplayer. It worked fine in single player, but if I joined or created a multiplayer game, the whole HUD was just gone and nothing could make it appear.

That's really the only time I've tried to play it since 1.0, and I'm not going to blame them for bugs in early access. But loosing the mission after the last civilian (Daniella Voll) managed to trap two officers in a bugged closed and slap us to death was as infuriating as it was hilarious.

Never found even harvesting to require more than the occasional puff of smoke. But we had Buckfast, and made sure to replace the queen of any aggressive colony. Maybe you have more aggressive breeds.

Looking around there does seem to be people who use tobacco. I guess poisoning the bees probably makes them more docile 😅 Still a bad idea though

This sounds strange. You really don't want to make them abandon the hive. You want to disrupt the hive as little as possible.

I don't believe they'd use tobacco, as nicotine is especially toxic to insects (and has a long history of being used as an insecticide).

Beekeepers burn paper, woodchips, or really anything that burns well that they have on hand (that isn't toxic). Source: Have used smoker while handling beehives.

I honestly feel that the motivations for someone from a happy home are often better. They are people who want to adventure for some very compelling reason (that you are forced to come up with). They are invested in the world, with things to loose, things they want to accomplish, loved ones to threaten, history and interests they want to share etc.

If you actually look into it, the original accusation was completely made up.

Even if it had been true it would have been a storm in a teacup. An incredibly tiny indie developer had their lover write a positive article about their incredibly niche indy game. Who gives a shit?

Gamergate was a psyop to politicize young white males by making them believe their hobby was under attack by feminists. It was largely created by Steve Bannon through Breitbart News and its editor Milo Yiannopoulos.

The ongoing "culture war" is not an accident or an emergent fenomenon. Powerful figures have worked long and hard to bring about fascism.

I could change it in the settings. I just hadn't used it in a long time and it took me a bit to realize that this default was why I suddenly had trouble telling the tools apart.

But if the differences are that big I'm probably still on 2. Looking forward to seeing what 3 will bring then :)

A stronger argument IMO is that those types of crimes are premeditated, calculated and committed by those who have many other options. So deterrents are likely to actually work against them.

Not that I agree with you. But there's an argument to be made for using deterrents where they are likely to work. Rather than against the desperate or impulsive.

If it's pornography of an unwilling subject, surely the distribution and consumption is harmful to the subject, as it's a violation of their privacy and integrity.

If someone had put secret cameras in your bedroom, would you be completely cool with them selling the pictures online?

What if you were abused, let's say threatened with a weapon and forced to undress in front of a camera, a traumatic experience for sure. Afterwards you learn that the film is being traded between people who get off on this stuff. Would that really not feel like a further violation?

Would you really be unaffected by the knowledge that for the rest of your life, at any time, there could be creeps getting off on your abuse?

I found Inkscape when I needed to make some diagrams, and even though that's not really what it's for, it blows dedicated diagram tools out of the water.

Inkscape is actually fun to use because it strikes a nice balance between easy and powerful.

My only problem with GIMP lately has been that by default it's used monochrome tool icons which are really hard to tell apart. Which seems like a real form-over-function decision (likely made by the distribution though).

My experience with Jetbrains was that they did not rely on vendor lock-in, but on actually making a product worth paying for. I could move my projects away from their suite easily, the build tools and scripts where all third-party open-source. I just didn't want to.

But perhaps things are different in other spaces. I can imagine using Kotlin might lock you in more.

It's not necessarily true. There are other interpretations that are equally valid as far as we currently know. They are just less famous.

They really are letting the milk go slightly rancid as a method of preservation. Which is why their chocolate tastes like rancid milk (or vomit).

Now I understand that those who grew up eating it are just used to the flavor. The real mystery is how it became so popular in the first place. How was vomit-flavored chocolate preferable to not having chocolate?

I've yet to see any that are of any use.

A pet peeve of mine is documentation that describes how the code works. If I want to know that, I can just read it (perhaps assisted by an IDE or debugger).*

What I need documented is why the code works like that. How is it intended to be used? What quirks and gotchas are there?

*If the code is not readable it needs to be refactored, not documented.

Just shifting the tax burden from salaries toward capital should make it less of a problem. When capital income is taxed less than salaries wealth concentration gets worse as workers are replaced.

But hey, GDP line goes up, so it must be good right?

Completely depends on how you live.

Someone who lives in a house with plenty of storage and a 30 minute drive to the nearest store will have a lot of food at home. Whereas someone who lives in a tiny apartment with a five minute walk to the store will not.

In general, places like American suburbs, with huge single-family homes, no stores and complete reliance on cars, are rare in Europe.