Journal of the American Chemical SocietyDOI: 10.1021/jacs.0c06977

https://ift.tt/36A1aw6

I have to find a group to clique into and do meaningful stuff with them like my life depends on it

It happened late. I suppose these things always do. The end of the world isn’t exactly a rise and shine operation, you know?

It’s a big decision, nuclear war. You think you’re ready to drop the bombs, but then you figure it’s probably best to sleep on it. Then you wake up and think maybe, just maybe, we’ll first see how the day plays out. Maybe somebody convinces you not to press the button. Maybe the world gives you a reason it shouldn’t go up in smoke like the stock market, like the riots in the streets, like the futures of an entire generation.

Or maybe there are no reasons. Maybe starting fresh is all that’s left, and cleaning humanity off of this rock is the only truly moral choice left to make.

I don’t know. All I know is it’s been a week since the blast. A week since I ran to the bunker, alone, forced to leave my family behind. If that sounds callous, then just know it wasn’t me who abandoned them. They abandoned me.

They were disbelievers. All of them.

They called me crazy for building the bunker. Called me insane for stockpiling canned rations ten feet under the dirt. I tried to explain to them that we were running out of time, that if they cared enough to open their eyes, there were signs that the end was coming. But to them, that was just noise. More chatter from a lunatic.

They stuck their noses up at me all the way to the end. When the air-raid sirens sounded, my wife grabbed my son and daughter and screamed at me to leave the house. To never come back.

So I did.

I left them there. There simply wasn’t any time to fight her for the kids, to fight the kids who were wholesale convinced I was a fraud. A liar. The bombs were coming and the bunker was a hundred feet away, buried beneath the forest behind our farm.

I didn’t have a choice, you understand? No choice but to run, so that’s just what I did. I ran and ran, with tears in my eyes for my family, and just as I closed the heavy steel door of the bunker I felt the low rumble of the first explosion. Then the next.

Like I said, it’s been a week. I figure the worst of the fallout has dissipated by now. It’ll be just the fires that are left, the fires that there’s nobody left to put out. Soon though, once the flames have exhausted their supply of wooden homes and fuel-laden vehicles, they’ll die too, and then the new world will emerge.

The Dead World.

The dark truth is that the nightmare of nuclear armageddon takes place in three stages. The first is what people often assume to be the wo

The only way this is going to make sense is if I start at the beginning: August 21, 1982.

A baby girl was born shortly after midnight. I wasn’t the mother’s doctor, but I was the attending on the same labor and delivery floor. Even though the newborn’s Apgar was good, she was clearly in great distress. The on-call pediatrician raced the child to the NICU. Twenty minutes later, I was called to consult.

“You want me to check on the mother?” I’m an obstetrician. I care for pregnant women and deliver their babies. Once they’re born, the infants become pediatric patients. Why was I being called into the neonatal unit?

“No, Dr. Kaizen. It’s the child. Please come to the NICU.” I heard panic creeping into my colleague’s voice.

The baby lay in a NICU incubator, screaming. The nursing staff stood at a distance. None of them were looking at the child. They stared at the floor, or the far wall, or at me. These were experienced neonatal ICU nurses. They had dealt with every horrible condition that could possibly result from birth. But whatever was in the incubator had rattled them.

“How is this an obstetrics case?”

The pediatrician gestured to the incubator. “Please examine the patient, Dr. Kaizen, and tell me what you think.”

The baby girl looked like a healthy birthweight baby – eight pounds or so. But her abdomen was terribly distended. She certainly had a good reason for screaming.

I gently palpated the girl’s bulging belly, expecting to feel signs of fluid or gas. I didn’t. Instead, I felt an enlarged uterus. The fundus was near the infant’s sternum. I gently squeezed the sides of the child’s belly, feeling with my fingertips a miniature version of what I feel with my whole hands in adult patients. I placed my palm on her tiny belly. There was an almost imperceptible flutter, then something gently pushed against my hand.

I turned to the NICU staff. Their eyes were locked on me, hands holding their mouths or touching their foreheads.

I said, “this infant is pregnant. And she is in labor.”

I did my best to remain calm, but I heard my voice crack as I spoke. Something was inside this newborn. Something had grown Inside her as she developed in the womb, and it wanted to get out. I have as much experience as the NICU nurses with the terrible effects of abnormal pregnancies. No matter what condition my patients and their fetuses had suffered from, I had never felt what I felt at that moment: fear. Fear of what was inside of this baby.

I delivered the

Hi everyone. I know pillows aren't technically a BIFL item, but Reddit doesn't have a dedicated pillow shopping sub and you guys seemed to have the most pillow-related posts. Also I might have posted this before but I got a notification saying it was auto removed by a spam filter. I'll remove the original post if that's not the case.

So, without further ado, allow me to begin my multi-paragraph monologue of whining.

TL;DR version is that I'm a side sleeper with a single-shoulder width of seven inches looking to solve my pillow woes. Ideally, I'd prefer something cheap that I can buy again in a few years, but I understand that my needs are incredibly specific here, so anything up to $1,000 is welcome. Also I live in the U.S.A. Sidebar says that's pertinent information.

Long version: I've always struggled with hella tension in my neck and shoulders, and I'm finally in a spot where I can invest in a good pillow. But finding a good one has been a real uphill battle, for several reasons.

The biggest obstacle has been finding a pillow thick enough to fill the space between my shoulder and head. As I mentioned in the TL;DR, the width of one of my shoulders, from the base of my neck to the end, is seven inches. Finding pillows that lofty has been a big challenge. Even when I do find ones that seem to be plump enough, they always seem to deflate into pancakes after only a few uses. I'm really trying to avoid having to hunch up one of my shoulders to make my head reach the pillow, or having to put one of my arms under it. Both have caused me a great deal of pain and stiffness upon waking up.

The other big reason I've been unable to find a good pillow is, well, I seem to be incredibly persnickety when it comes to head support. Originally I had a link here to an imgur album with picture of some stick figure drawings illustrating my pillow issues. But I think the link is why the automod flagged it as spam. So, instead, here's a wall of text explaining what was originally in the picture:

• If a pillow's too short, I wake up with a crick in my neck and some real intense shoulder pain from having to scrunch up one side of my body to meet the surface of the pillow.

• If the pillow's too high, I lose circulation in my shoulders and/or also get a crick in my neck.

• If a pillow's too hard, I have to rotate my head real weird to get any semblance of neck support and...say it with me...get a crick in my neck.

• If a pillow's too soft, my head sinks in too much and I f

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

In the middle of August, I set out to start running again to get my weight under control. At the time I was 253 pounds / 115 kg. I am 5'11" / 180 cm, which puts my BMI at 35.3. My high weight earlier in the year was 275, so I had already brought that down a little with some running and elliptical, but I needed to sustain a workout program in order to really bring off the weight.

I have enjoyed running in the past and normally "run to my heart rate" so that I can run further. What I mean by this is that I will set my max heart rate to 162 (or 151 on an "easy" day) and run for as long as I can, even if this means running slow. While I like running outside, the weather here isn't great (almost always too hot or too cold) and as I have gotten older, I find that running on an indoor track is better for me because it puts less strain on my joints of not having to go up and down on curbs or having to quickly dodge obstacles.

My first run was 5.2 miles in 1 hour 14 minutes. (14:18/mile). In one of the runs in August, I was passed by a woman who was walking fast (not speed walking, just walking fast), but I didn't let that bother me. Everyone is on their own journey and this was mine. By the end of August, I was really hitting my stride, running 6.6 miles. I decided in September I was going to run more than 6 miles every day, and I did that, and actually ran more than 90 minutes each day after the 19th, including 4 runs over 2 hours (the longest being 12.56 miles in 2:15:53).

In October, I made an ambitious goal of running more than 90 minutes every day and I accomplished that, with 346 miles in the month, and the best week running 91.7 miles, which worked out to a half-marathon distance every day. My average pace in October was 10:17/mile, so I had obviously come down quite a bit from the start.

For November, my goal went back down to 1 hour a day, but to increase my pace, ending up with 220 miles and a 9:21/mile pace. It's obviously much easier to run without that extra 60 pounds - I'd imagine my run times would be much slower if I wore a 60 pound vest while running.

All together it was 947 miles in 100 runs (which is easy math at 9.47 miles per run)

I also augmented my running with at least 30 minutes on the weight machines at my university gym, and by October I added a morning 15 minute abdominal workout at home before going to the gym. Plus, on many days (5 out of 7 normally), when my wife got off work, we would go back to the gym for an hour on ellip

Do your worst!

TL;DR: The respondents here had sex about 5.9x on average during the entire year of 2021.

Male here, in my sixties, (the sex-seeking partner, with a high libido) long married to a beautiful woman (non-seeking, low libido) of the same age who I still desire very much. I posted the same question for 2019 and 2020 so, if the mods don't mind, I'm back for 2021.

(Note to mods: I hope this post is acceptable given Rule #9 in the sidebar. This conversation is one that is just not possible in real life and it is super helpful to me to know what others are experiencing. I discuss details of my own relationship and I'm very grateful to this community for sharing their thoughts as well. Thanks, mods, for your consideration!)

I'm interested in the frequency of sexual encounters for other couples here as a point of reference. Estimates are fine. It's not really a scorecard, of course, but I do a lot of record keeping as part of my business and it helps me in my personal life as well. Sex is important to me and I keep accurate records and have done so my whole married life.

Frequency of sexual encounters is, to me, one indicator (among others) of our intimate health as a couple.

Some background on us: my wife and I have been married for 35+ years and during most of that time we used to have sex between 100 to 150 times a year (2 to 3 times per week on average). In my opinion, we used to have a very good sex life and I always have and still do find her very attractive and I continue to desire her greatly. I have a strong libido and a high desire for my wife and I'd still have sex with her 5+ times a week if given the chance. However, the count over the last few years has been:

2016 - 24 times

2017 - 14 times

2018 - 15 times

2019 - 6 times

2020 - 4 times

2021 - 0 times

I felt the sex was very good when we had it (we agreed, no duty sex, we both have to be actively "in the mood" or we don't do it) but the trend is pretty obvious. For us, in early 2019, our couples therapist told me my high libido was pushing my wife away and I should stop initiating completely. My wife wholeheartedly agreed. Since then, I have not asked her for sex, not once, and I think the therapist was right, my wife has been relieved with the lack of pressure to have sex.

I'm interested in hearing, how did your year go? Estimates are fine.

Again, your answers here help me as a point of reference. 2020 - 2021 as pair of years felt very abnormal anyway and very stressed for a variety

As the title says, the full HoOD lore is finally available. The English version is below, along with my personal interpretation, as well as some things I noticed when comparing the translation with the original CN, in brackets. A summary of the events described, in chronological order, comes after, followed by a TLDR of what we can confirm about him so far, as well as what we can expect to see.

Of course, do expect spoilers for the story up till now, as well as possible spoilers for future development.

Credits to Wangsheng Funeral Parlor Discord for the artifact description text, and JakeFromStatefarm#5828 for discussing this with me and smoothening out the ideas.

(These were sent to me as text files with the numbers as file names. I’m not sure yet which artifact piece each number corresponds to, so I’ll just use the numbers as they are.)

1

Amenoma, Kyoushin, Isshin, Doume, Senju.

These were, once upon a time, the five branches of the Raiden Gokaden,

But today, only Amenoma still maintains its line of succession.

While the Isshin line can just barely be said to have extant descendants.

In the eyes of the people, this is just the natural result of the ravages of time.

They never once suspected that such sudden falls from grace might have some hidden mystery behind them.

The wanderer would never admit to this.

He would never admit that he had done this as an act of revenge against the bladesmith.

Nor would he ever mention the truth,

That he had abandoned his schemes halfway because they had suddenly become dull.

He would only say, in that tone of voice he had learned from a certain researcher: (Dottore)

"It was all just a little experiment into human nature."

In Inazuma's traditional theater, there is a certain character known as "Kunikuzushi."

Such characters are often schemers and usurpers of nations.

At the end of his wanderings, he chose this name as an act of his own will.

And as for the name he had once used, even he no longer remembered it.

It is a norm in Inazuma's traditional theater to join the names of a play's three acts together to form the play's name.

For example, "Sumirezome," "Sangetsu," and "Kogetsukan" come together,

Thus forming the play "Sumirezome Sangetsu Kogetsukan." (The play that talks about Torachiyo)

Perhaps a day will come when this body's adventures, its experiences,

Will become tales to be passed along by mortals, distant memories that flow through the

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

Hello from your friendly neighborhood storm chaser! Some of you will recall my rants about the poor severe weather alert system in place in Hamilton county, but this is not a rant, it is a manifesto. Storm season approaches!

TL;DR WE DO NOT HAVE TORNADO SIRENS HERE. Every home in this region needs a weather alert radio. Now is the time to buy one.

YOU CANNOT RELY ON ALERTS VIA YOUR PHONE. They may be delayed by 10 minutes or more, and in some cases they may never arrive at all. There are links to weather radios below.

You also need a plan for seeking shelter in the event of a tornado. Now is the time to make one.

We are likely in for an unusually intense storm season.

For those of you who are new to Chattanooga, welcome! As evidenced by events on December 10th, you live in a region storm chasers refer to as "Dixie Alley". It is a region which has always had tornadoes, but which is also experiencing a rapid increase in the frequency of tornadoes due to climate change.

The severe thunderstorms here are a different animal from the lumbering giants of Tornado Alley. There are more tornado deaths in the southeastern US than in Tornado Alley. Why? Four main reasons:

1. In tornado alley, the scenarios that generate tornadoes tend to favor daytime or evening thunderstorms when people are awake. In the southeast, hot, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico supports tornadic thunderstorms 24 hours a day. Night time outbreaks are far more common here than in the plains.

2. Our storms move faster on average. In Oklahoma or Texas, a tornadic storm with a forward speed of 55mph is relatively uncommon. Here it is not just common, it is the norm. The further east you get, the more time the weather systems have to accelerate with the jet stream. This means storms hit faster, and can travel further. The Mayfield Kentucky tornado on December 10th covered more than 160 miles in 3 hours, averaging 55mph. It was not particularly exceptional in how fast it moved. Tornadoes moving over 70mph can and do occur.

3. Our storms tend to generate rain-wrapped tornadoes. High humidity from the Gulf makes "high precipitation" supercells far more common here than out west. This means that tornadoes are much less likely to be clearly visible as they approach, giving you less time to react. Intense pr

It really does, I swear!

Because she wanted to see the task manager.

Heard they've been doing some shady business.

Brahmacharya, Celibacy and Training the Nervous System

I decided to pick up an old book the other day and one of the chapters was titled, Is Celibacy Necessary? I came upon some choice paragraphs which really sum up a few key concepts of semen retention nicely.

“To be a celibate in the true sense of the word, you have to become a master of the processes in the body. You must be able to control the various influxes that are created by this primal energy which is present in you and in every living being. Because, if you are not going to expend this energy in the sexual act itself, then you wil have to learn the art of harnessing and reconverting it into higher energy without doing any serious damage to your own body, mind and emotions. Of course, this whole process cannot be accomplished overnight.”

Simply put, when one starts to retain semen, you start to build up your sexual energy, your jing. Unfortunately for most guys, they can’t handle this build up of energy and it never makes it up past their genitals or first two chakras, causing them to relapse. That energy has to go somewhere, so it takes the path of least resistance, the path it’s always known - right out your junk.

Some guys with more grit and determination are able to refrain from masturbation, for a bit longer, at least. The lucky few are able to go years. They are able to naturally put that energy to good use - there are ups, there are downs, there are occasional relapses, there are flatlines, but eventually, intuitively, they learn how to - mostly - manage this increase in energy.

But that only works if you’re able to resist the urge to release long enough for that energy to make its way past the first two chakras, up past your groin. And the method used? Sheer grit, determination, and pouring oneself into work, working out, hobbies, etc. That’s great stuff of course, but it just isn’t direct and is a bit haphazard.

But lemme ask you this - how much better would it be if you knew the exact techniques to begin immediately transmuting - not just sublimating - that coarse, unruly sexual energy into the higher and subtler forms that your body, mind and soul can more readily use?

Sublimation vs. Transmutation

This may come off nitpicky and normally I don’t make a distinction between the two words, but let’s get a clear definition for “sublimation” vs “transmutation” -

Sublimation ; Psychology - to divert the energy of (a sexual or other biological impulse) from its imme

BamBOO!

They’re on standbi

Howdy all and welcome back to the last post of this year! Well, for some of us anyway. Some of you may have already jumped past that line.

In relation, sorry for the late post. I have had a bruiser of a headcold this week, and getting myself to focus through the sinus pressure has been difficult, to say the least. But today has been better, and I got it finished.

Here you can find the last chapter: Part 9

Here you can find Part 1 if you are new.

And here you can find the post that Started it All, now with over 1k up doots!

Finally you can find the next installment Here with Part 11.

Everything else can be found with Wafflebot below.

Thank you for joining this story. As always I am open to both ideas and criticisms. Enjoy!

______________________________________________________________________________________

​-Ruufarrl-

Ruufarrl gave a deep smile that showed fangs, "A dangerous hunt is it? But of course. What are these... Hellboar?"

"Come with me and I will explain."

Conrad led them to the back of the barn, where a number of sealed storage units were kept. As he unlocked them and pulled items out, he gave Ruufarrl the information he needed.

"Wild Boar are a type of feral pig from Earth that eat dropped fruits, grubs and fungi. Riosian Ridgebacks are a local animal that is armored and uses ankle spurs to dig up and eat roots, shoots, grubs and bark from trees, loose earth and rotting logs. Hellboar are a hybrid animal of Wild Boar and Riosian Ridgebacks. Back when the colony was first founded some idiot named Frederick Rogers brought boar with him as his "farm animal of choice", getting them by the checkers who didn't know any better and simply saw them as pigs. He didn't take enough precautions and they did as boar do and broke free.

Wild pigs breed quickly, are territorial, destructive and tenacious. But to make matters worse, he'd had them genetically modified to be more resilient overall and resistant to disease in order to better survive in this new environment. When they got loose here, they scattered and multiplied. Somewhere in that mix, the impossible

Secret societies of human psychics called greys and invading aliens, aka what happens when the Shil'vati recruit the grain of truth behind the human myths of vampires and sorcerers.

Lets see if anyone can guess what sci-fi the Armourers son took inspiration for the Exo wrecker from

And yes Edgar is channelling Yuri Orlov

First Previous Next

Part forty-two: Stunned silence

Edgar had been teaching their prisoner a little bit of earths grey history, The sorcerers of Temujin, the bloody battles of Vlad the Impaler, and others notable aspects of his kind’s secret history.

He had confessed that his people knew how to synthetically grow the metal demonstrating that the short sword he carried was what he called a devil blade able to create a plasma sheath around the living metal blade to aid its cutting potential.

He even explained that they had found uses for it in powering Exo armour starship’s and weapons.

They were all awaiting the transfer to a ship bound to Ahriman while inside the military shipyard’s brig, apparently the military had finally pulled its finger out and was sending a crew to begin assisting the engineers and perform a thorough examination to ease the fears of the generals and admirals about the Draculesti

“So where does the name Drake come from.”

“Oh that, it means a male duck,” he said imagining such an animal for her to see in his mind, “but it was chosen more due to our tribe living in England at the time and its phonetic similarity to our old family name Draculesti or rather the house of the dragon, a Wallachian noble house founded by one Vlad Dracul or rather Vlad the dragon, Vlad Tepes one of his sons is the one I told you of earlier known on earth as Vlad the Impaler.”

“You are descended from this Impaler warlord.” She said cocking up an eyebrow in surprise.

“The earliest clearly recorded history we have of our tribe is as the siege breaking sorcerers of the great khan Temujin, we were called at that time the tribe of the dragon when his conquest reached the lands of Romania, they recognised it through the ancestral memory as being very similar to the lands of the first elder and possibly close to our people’s birthplace so as the Mongol army retreated a gr

One-shot

Noris was a Horuous, bipedal, purple skinned, bald and very rich.

Too rich for this dump.

She looked at her tiny little room she had to share with another trainee and the few possessions she was allowed to bring with her.

I'm the heiress to the Vasun galactic conglomerate but my Grandpa said I needed to learn a trade or he would disinherit me, so here I am as a trainee engineer on a tiny station on the edge of the Great Void.

She walked to the cafeteria, grabbed what could generously be called breakfast and moved to watch her favorite show in the gym.

There she is, the pilot trainee I was assigned to, Anna Dawning. A Human no less, she wakes up hours before anyone else and begins training, first she lifts weights heavier than me, then she moves into this complex dance routine she repeats for over an hour.

A young, blond woman was dancing to music:

“Pal-Pal, Palpatine, greatest Sith that ever lived, he was cat that really got on.

Pal-Pal, Palpatine, Naboo's greatest love machine, it was a shame how he carried on...”

Noris watched her teammate and really, really wished she didn't know what the song was about.

**********

She had joined the drab little training facility 3 months ago and was shocked to learn she would be paired with one of the hated Humans.

Well, okay no one really hates them, it's just that when they were found and then integrated into the galactic community everyone had to take a different vaccine every other day... For three months, just to avoid dropping dead if a Human breathed anywhere in the station or planet they happened to be on. Plus every time they met a new species even remotely similar to them, the ensuing “fraternization” lead to a new round of vaccines for everyone everywhere...

Her being here was peculiar, Humans are by no stretch of the imagination pacifists but they hardly ever joined any military organization that is not lead by their own.

I remember finding this odd, eventually I worked out the courage to ask her, she had told me “have you seen the ships!?”, which made no sense to me at the time. In hindsight this should have being a bigger flag, the short range star-trackers are obsolete fighters by the standard of every known sentient species. The only reason they are still in use is that precision tech is worthless so close to the Great Void.

Noris remembered her first day of orientation, the senior engineer showed her how to fix a damaged engine, she moved closer to obser

Pilot on me!!

Is entropy in general path independent or dependent, I am extremely confused at this point. The book I am studying from mentions about entropy change under reversible process but says nothing about what happens in an irreversible process. Like there is something called entropy generation but does it make entropy path dependent under irreversible process.

Nothing, he was gladiator.

Good morning all! My wife has suffered from digestive issues for going on 8 years now. It had gotten to the point where she could hardly hold down a meal or function. Long story short, we went to a nutritionist who has given us a glimmer of hope. She has been on an extremely restrictive diet for a few weeks now, an lo and behold many of the issues she once had are dissipating. HOWEVER, she is starting to get antsy with all of the same basic boring meals over and over. I need a few ideas for meals (breakfast lunch or dinner) which use these AND ONLY THESE ingredients:

Chicken Trout Sole Lemon juice Olive oil Arugula Spinach Potato Carrots Brow Rice (in all of its forms: grain, flour, pasta, etc.) Agave Blueberries

We can play it fast and loose with our herbs and spices for the most part but no alliums whatsoever!

Tldr; need meals using ONLY the ingredients listed above!

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

I'll be posting one update a day until HFY is caught up! In case you missed the previous topics:

Link to Chapter 84 (Part 1)

Link to Chapter 84 (Part 2)

--

On the next day, the Fiends returned with their decision, and – rather unsurprisingly – acquiesced to Rob’s demands. In exchange for full disclosure of the purpose for their journey southward, and for the exact mechanics of how their Blight barrier functioned, and for their best physicians to make an earnest attempt at restoring his Soul-Burnt arm, Rob would divulge the secrets of Crystal Bearer and explain his theory on how to cure Corruption. Their next meeting was scheduled to take place in the early afternoon; Rob and some Elves were already hard at work setting up a rendezvous point that would act as sufficiently neutral ground.

For Meyneth, this represented a small window of opportunity within which to act. Keira, as per usual, would be joining the meeting as a member of Rob’s guard detail. That left Meyneth the span of a single morning to corner their wayward Warrior and have a long-overdue discussion regarding matters of the heart. Perhaps the timing was ill-advised, what with Keira taking part in a critical gathering mere hours after their dialogue would finish, but if Meyneth put off this confrontation every time there was a stressful event in the imminent future, then they would never have it at all. More to the point, Meyneth was by now rightly convinced that Keira might never solve this matter on her own. The world would hardly sit and wait for her to work up her courage. Too much longer and she may miss her chance altogether.

Meyneth would be the first to admit that she was not a typical Dragonkin, but she was still a Dragonkin. Frontal assaults held a perpetual and undeniable allure. The core difference between her and many of her brethren was that she recognized the wisdom in constructing a plan before charging forth into uncharted territory.

Step 1: ‘Enlist Help’ was vital, and without it, Meyneth’s endeavor would have been stillborn in its conception. The backbone of any plan was to recognize what you could and could not accomplish on your own. Meyneth’s contribution to this endeavor would be her general forthrightness and her friendship with Keira and Rob. She was willing, able,

Dear ACC racers!

ACC v1.8 major update is out now on Steam, refresh your Steam client in order to download and install the update!

____________
v1.8.0 Changelog

GENERAL:
- Updated project to Unreal Engine version 4.26.2.
- Added Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe 2021 season as bonus content with all entries, liveries and drivers and championship season.
NOTE: certain entries are subject to DLC ownership.
- Added all-new BMW M4 GT3 as bonus content as part of the 2021 season.
NOTE: as with any major update, game menu settings (stored in menuSettings.json) will likely reset on first initialization.
IMPORTANT: reloading of Video presets will be necessary.
IMPORTANT: it is strongly suggested that custom engine.ini modifications and other third-party plugins (graphics or controllers) be removed before installing the update.

GRAPHICS:
- Added Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 2.0 support for compatible GPUs (RTX 20XX series or newer).
Please check manufacturer GPU driver requirements.
- Added AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) support for all GPUs.
Please check manufacturer GPU driver requirements.
NOTE: both DLSS and FSR are selectable and functional in Triple Screen and VR rendering modes.
NOTE: DLSS is a temporal sampling method with a proprietary antialiasing solution, while FSR is a spatial upscaling method that can be used in combination with other Temporal AA solutions.
NOTE: please read the ingame help texts in the Video Options to learn more about the functionality of each method's respective sampling, antialiasing and sharpening solutions.
NOTE: DLSS implementation includes a custom DLSS dll version by Nvidia, manually updating to generic version releases might result in regression of image quality.
- Added Temporal Antialising Gen5 option support.
Offers improved aliasing and clarity at a moderate performance cost. Optional over the existing TAAgen4 and KTAA implementations.
NOTE: only functional with Temporal anti-aliasing mode selected.
NOTE: FSR is incompatible with the Projection Correction view setting feature.
NOTE: it is STRONGLY suggested to remove other open-source or third-party implementations of any of the features above (such as via OpenVR etc.)!
NOTE: due to the large number of changes in rendering, it is STRONGLY suggested that custom engine.ini or third-party shader modifications be removed for this update!
- Added the new rendering mod

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

Christopher Walken

I won't be doing that today!

One-shot. "Terran" and "Human" are interchangeable terms in this story. *** I have not marked this overall post as NSFW although it contains one clearly-marked and hidden NSFW paragraph. If that is judged later to be incorrect, please just LMK so I can change it.***

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Humanity had been a boon to our federation in wartime since their acceptance into the federation. Their talent for privateer work and sabotage was highly regarded, and had been demonstrated several times. They had a knack for spotting weak points and a cutthroat efficiency in the execution of their strikes. Terran primary space forces and especially their ships of the line were also renowned for their displays of stalwartness and honor. The UNSC Constitution's holding action above Ryloth I is legendary with reason.

Both of these traits are highly valuable, but we *were* confused by the combination. Most species had a preference or a leaning with their mentality. How could such a stalwart species be so effective at sneaky combat? It wasn't until we fought the psionic forces of the Cavalcade that we began to see the foundations of why.

---

At the first engagement, the Skitian 7th fleet engaged with a Cavalcade force and was decisively defeated. After action reports indicated that the Cavalcade forces had activated lunacy fields, rendering the vast majority of the Skitian crew members violently insane. The resulting chaos had allowed the numerically inferior Cavalcade forces to win with almost no damage. Several Skitian vessels had even self-destructed prior to being boarded at all.

At the second engagement, a federation third-tier armada was annihilated by a far inferior Cavalcade force. We were reduced to fighting only the most brief of skirmishes, desperately seeking to deal damage and retreat before lunacy fields could be deployed by the Cavalcade. Any skirmish lasting longer than a few minutes ended in disaster. We could not hold ground.

By the third major engagement, yet another decisive loss at the shipyards of Kjalo, we had nearly abandoned hope. Human reinforcement fleets were arriving finally, but we didn't expect their fleets to make much of a difference in our main battle formations. Their raiders were anticipated with eagerness, but raiding can only do so much when our shipyards were so vulnerable to frontal assault. You may wonder at their tardiness, but the Cavalcade invasion was on the opposite side of federation space. Terran forces c

I'm an author currently working on a science fiction novel, and I'm trying to design a spaceplane within my story that is relatively scientifically accurate. In order to have the vehicle operate in atmosphere I needed it to have wings, but in zero/low g's wings are relatively pointless. I was looking at the radiator design on the STS-118, and while it is relatively functional, for a combat encounter in space that type of opening would provide a noticeable weak point. In analyzing these issues I came to the idea that having the wings double as radiators would give them an essential role while in space rather than providing zero benefit, and would take away the need to have a separate radiator that could be exploited as a vehicular weak point. I'm curious, is such a design possible (or more realistically pragmatic), or would the other potential issues - such as designing the radiator/wings to both be shaped in a way that allows them to gain lift while still maintaining enough surface area to dissipate heat effectively - outweigh the potential design benefit?

/u/azusfan has opted to post another screed in /r/creation, which is unusually getting a positive response -- most of his posts being low-effort non-understandings, this is counter to expectations.

Unfortunately, it's fucking terrible and creationists are lining up to demonstrate their awful taste in arguments.

Azusfan is claiming that these traps are ones we set out for them to fall into. Unfortunately, these are pits creationists will frequently dig for themselves.

In order of /u/azusfan's original set:

>1. Natural selection. ..is not the debate. Creationists do not dispute natural selection, or human selection (breeding). It obviously happens. We dispute that natural selection is the ENGINE for common ancestry.

He really should just skip to common ancestry, because natural selection is a base concept. If that's a trap, then creationism is pretty much fucked, since it's very, very real. Given that creationists fail to understand how natural selection operates, so far as insisting that mutations will build up indefinitely as selection fails to parse them, it's rather clear that creationists do in fact dispute natural selection, by limiting it to what they can accept in their theological model.

Their definition of natural selection includes no chance for upward mobility, and they exclude it through fuzzy definitions, which is an issue he brings up again.

>2. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. ..Is NOT a creationist argument. It addresses heat transfer in a closed system. The creationist argument is that ENTROPY conflicts with the belief in common ancestry, abiogenesis, and the atheistic big bang, the 3 pillars of atheistic naturalism.

Once again, Azusfan demonstrates he has no understanding of thermodynamics or entropy: the second law is not just about heat transfer. Entropy doesn't exist outside of thermodynamics, and no, it doesn't conflict with common ancestry, abiogenesis or the Big Bang. Otherwise, evolutionists never invoke entropy or thermodynamics, since we orbit a star that radiates us in 1KW/m^2 of almost free energy, and so chemistry can progress against entropy, upto 1KW/m^2, before thermodynamics suggests something odd is going on.

The Big Bang is also barely atheistic, it's a descriptive model: it explains what we actually see. It just doesn't match the 6000 year timeline, so they can't accept it. However, they have no explanation for our observations

[Removed]

When I got home, they were still there.