exactly. Petitioning those who have already demonstrated that they don't care unless you have leverage is meaningless.

use leverage, in what ways you can. make a habit of it.

Because they don't know what i put in there.

Cursed ring of acrobatics.

Gives the player great acrobatic skill, but sticks to their finger when they wear it. And they can't stop getting around acrobatically. Any action attempted fails, unless it is done acrobatically. Player has normal or only slightly improved stamina.

Player: i'll get my rope and grappleing hook and scale the wall.

DM: lifts eyebrow you think so, do you?

Player: sigh I throw my pack into the air and leap after it. At the peak of its arc, I flip over it, grabbing my grappling hook and flinging it over the wall as I do.

DM: ok, sounds like difficulty of 15..

So your advice is basically "come on, guys, you can resist russian aggression in ways that don't involve conflict, stop the sanctions and side with Russia pls"?

No. As the instigator of this conflict, Russia can back the fuck down.

Sanctions have effect precisely because they are a broad tool.

Filthy things. They kind of want to be used, don't they?

Yeah, this is something I stand firmly behind. Fundamentally, our issue is social and cultural. We are armed, and so when we lash out, that has greater impact.

That doesn't mean we should disarm. We are armed for good reason. But we should address the underlying cultural issues.

Yeah. Violence is generally not the answer. But when it is, it's the only answer.

The kicker is, this isn't even necessary. It's not LED lights that are the issue, it's poorly-implemented dimming of LED lights.

In some cases (home lighting dimming), you can either buy a dimmable LED light or buy a dimmer made for LEDs.

But sometimes, it's just built in to the device, and there's nothing you can do about it. All it technically takes is a really simple circuit that adds capacitance to the line.

If you have a cheap strip of LEDs dimmed by a cheap PWM controller, you might even be able to just take the positive and wrap it through and around a ring magnet multiple times. I'm not sure that would work, but I've seen it done before for noise filtering, which this is, effectively.

What that does is averages out the highs and lows, significantly reducing flicker. There are some devices out there that do the (small amount) of work that is required not to flicker. It's just.. ..dimming by flicker is really easy, and if a manufacturer can save a few cents at the cost of quality, a lot of them will.

Electric car chargers.

This is the direction the industry is going to go. F#kn standardize it already, with a reasonable future-proofing schema that handles various voltages, and puts out what the car specifies.

There used to be: Signal.

With Signal as your default messaging app, you could just tell people to switch to Signal and use one app. If both parties had Signal, secure messaging was used automatically.

Friends and family slowly started using Signal, because it's just a nice messaging app, plus it's potentially more secure.

Then Signal decided to tank SMS. ..and slowly, friends and family started leaving Signal, and now it's just us security-conscious folks again.

Yeah. Having used Linux for quite some time, I've watched it slowly go from being the better option for geeks and nerds to just being the better option.

One of the biggest, most useful Linux tips is:

• use supported hardware

Don't mess around forever trying to fix things that almost work. Get supported hardware instead. It's worth it, and once it's supported, usage is generally plug-and play - far more so than in Windows.

That aside, Linux won't shove crap in your face, sell your data, mine your data, cause major problems for you, force you to do installations when you don't want to (except Ubuntu's Snap), nor will it degrade in install quality over one year to the point where you think you need a new computer.

Linux allows you to make a hardware investment, rather than driving you towards cycling out to the newest thing ASAP.

The old ThinkPads I have become media servers or home automation rigs. They sip power and chug along for years.