In your first examples, you are using female as an adjective. A female troop, a female Sargent, a male soldier. That's usually fine. Even "that female cashier over there" is probably fine. However if you say "that female over there" or like you pointed out, "get over here right now, female" or really any other instance where female is used as a noun instead of an adjective, that's where it becomes gross. It's all about adjective vs noun. Adjective: usually fine. Noun: usually not.

SMS doesn't handle pictures, videos, gifs, reactions, or group conversations. Things I use all the time. MMS handles some of that, but implementation varies greatly by carrier and device. If you want consistency of that functionality, you have to go with an app. Apple and Google have created replacements for SMS and MMS that could be the next version of "texting" but Apple refuses to let anyone else use theirs (iMessage) and Google has only half opened up theirs (RCS), so those don't really fix much.

When Meta bought Oculus, I boxed up my OG Quest and threw it in the basement,

Meta (at the time it was still just named Facebook) bought Oculus before they ever released a retail product. Facebook bought them between the release of the original dev kit on Kickstarter and the dk2 in 2014. They had already been owned by Facebook for 2 years when the first Retail Rift came out in 2016. The first Quest didn't come out until 2019, 5 years after Facebook/Meta bought Oculus.

An average EV consumes .32 kilowatt hours of electricity per mile. If you are driving 60 miles per hour, that means you are spending 19.2 kilowatt hours of electricity every hour. So you need a generator that's at least 19.2 kilowatt. Tack on some more because you are now towing the extra weight of a generator and because you are probably wanting to go 70mph and let's just say you need 25 kilowatts. This is what a towable 25kw generator looks like. It costs $22k. I'm sure cheaper ones could be made, but even at $10k, is it worth it? Just buy some plane tickets or rent a gas car for a week or take a train.

https://herogenerators.com/products/25-kw-caterpillar-towable-diesel-generator

Estimate includes property taxes.

It basically means trend. It's sorta evolved from the concept of "metagaming" where you're not just playing the game, you're gaming the game. People now use "the meta" to refer to the collection of viable strategies for a game, and "the current meta" to refer to what is popular at this moment. This could be types of decks in a card game, character builds in an MMO or a MOBA, or other things like that. Presumably, for twitch, "the meta" is referring to not strategies of playing games, but strategies of gaming twitch. In other words, strategies to maximize viewership and income, and specifically, what is working at any given time.

It is not. It is pretty easy to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen.

The DLC added 48 tracks. The Average Mario Kart game has 36 tracks. They also added 8 new characters. They added a whole game worth of content in the DLC. The DLC is Mario Kart 9.

Spock photo. Instead of Stock photo. lol

Sorry in advance for random stream of consciousness.

There's definitely a learning curve to being a DM. And some people, like myself, just aren't cut out for it. If you want to keep playing with these people, I would suggest being honest with your feedback. Talk to the group about how you'd like to incorporate more roleplaying and cut back on combat. It might be a good idea to try running a pre-built campaign if you aren't already. But even those can be kinda dry without the right DM.

I haven't really played in years, but my DM got to the point where basically, the rules were just guidelines. If a player wanted to try something, the DM would just roll with it. They'd try to come up with a reasonable check for you to roll and then just see what happens. Most of the "funny" moments come from massive failures or critical successes. Ham those up. Instead of saying, "nope, you fail", make up a consequence. "You tried to mount the giant moth, but you couldn't get a grip and it flung you up to an outcropping" or "you missed so bad you hit the column and it comes crumbling down, you and the enemy both take 2 points of bludgeoning."

The rules are great for combat simulation, but if combat was all you wanted, you'd be better off playing Warhammer. The best advice I can give is just loosen up. And again, like Jack Sparrow says, it's more like guidelines. We eventually got to the point where we said, no opening the books during the session. If you don't know a rule, make it up. The goal is to have fun, not to follow the book.

So yeah, it's about mindset and teamwork and cooperation and communication. Being honest in what you want out of a session is the most important thing, because nobody knows what you want unless you say so. They may be able to tell when you aren't having fun, but they may not know why or how to fix it and may just throw more monsters at it because that's what they think will fix it.

As for player death. We embraced it. If we really liked our character, we'd just come back as MyGuy the 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th, and when we got tired of that character we'd move on to something else rolling a new character at the level everyone else was at and picking a few items to keep (assuming someone else made it out alive).

The solar system only has 1 star, so it's accurate

Yeah, that's definitely a Costco food court receipt for pizza and soda