Are the stabbing pains skin-deep like an insect sting, or deeper like a pulled muscle?
I could make one of these, but first I'll need to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.
I won't say that they're too smart for that (lol), but this administration has been known to walk back major policy changes after powerful interest groups object. See also: H1B visas.
Based on current information, no. But they would reject a passport renewal.

PSA: US State Department Ceases Processing Gender Marker Correction Applications
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18144707
According to the Colorado Name Change Project, the US State Department has stopped processing of all gender marker correction applications. This is confirmed by Notus.org, which adds that the policy change affects passport renewals as well.
At this time, there are rumors that the Minnesota Passport Agency is confiscating documents when denying a gender marker change. These rumors are unconfirmed as of the time of this post, but the situation is still developing.
https://www.namechangeproject.org/gender-marker/
https://m.facebook.com/ColoradoNameChangeProject/
https://www.notus.org/whitehouse/trump-gender-sex-order-passports
The ACLU has a form open for any affected by this policy: https://www.aclu.org/transpassports2025
Update:

PSA: US State Department Ceases Processing Gender Marker Correction Applications
According to the Colorado Name Change Project, the US State Department has stopped processing of all gender marker correction applications. This is confirmed by Notus.org, which adds that the policy change affects passport renewals as well.
At this time, there are rumors that the Minnesota Passport Agency is confiscating documents when denying a gender marker change. These rumors are unconfirmed as of the time of this post, but the situation is still developing.
https://www.namechangeproject.org/gender-marker/
https://m.facebook.com/ColoradoNameChangeProject/
https://www.notus.org/whitehouse/trump-gender-sex-order-passports
The ACLU has a form open for any affected by this policy: https://www.aclu.org/transpassports2025
Update: Marco Rubio has confirmed that the state department has suspended all applicati
Yeah, the video really isn't making the point its title suggests. I think we're all just primed to expect gatekeeping in video games at this point.
If you're using Retroarch, I've found this overview useful. https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2024/10/19/showcase-for-retroarch-shaders-2024/
I strongly disagree with the premise that there's a "wrong" way to play retro games. Don't gatekeep. Imagine if people told you not to listen to Pink Floyd unless it's on vinyl. It would be lost media.
That said, CRTs present images fundamentally differently than LCD displays, and a lot of developers took advantage of those idiosyncrasies. There are scanlines everywhere. CRT phosphors aren't square, and appear smaller when darker. Bright pixels can "bleed" into nearby pixels, particularly when using composite signals.
Before LCDs, many (not all) pixel artists used this to their advantage, basically harnessing the imperfections of analog TV to provide equivalents to anti-aliasing, bloom, extra color depth, and even transparency. Some particularly famous examples came from Sega Genesis games. This video goes into good depth on the whys and hows, and there are some solid examples of the outcomes here.
I've attached examples below (hopefully they upload). If you like the raw pixel art, then no harm done. Enjoy! But if you like the way CRTs interpreted and filtered those signals, you owe it to yourself to look up some shaders for your favorite emulator.


(Zero Tolerance, 1994, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)

(Sonic the Hedgehog 2, 1992, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)
I don't know whether or not an entire month is the right timeframe, but I definitely agree with the principle of counting to ten before you speak. I've already made at least one discussion worse by failing to consider my tone. If my ideas are worth sharing now, they'll be worth sharing when the moratorium is over, and they'll only gain nuance by being left in the oven for longer.
They made their decisions and you made yours. If you decided that we'd be better off with Trump, that's on you. Own it.
Putting Trump in office makes Gaza worse. He's promised us as much. Maybe you proved a point to the Democrats, and maybe you didn't. Maybe now they'll lean even harder to the center. Who knows. That's a gamble you took, and you made steep sacrifices to make that gamble.
Gambling with someone's life to make a political point does not make you their ally.
In the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrats (SPD) were the largest party as late as 1930, and had control thanks to a coalition with centrists.
In 1931, the Communists of Germany (KPD) -- who had long taken offense at the compromises of the SPD -- caucused with the Nazis to topple the Prussian government and remove the SPD from power, believing that Nazi rise would accelerate the collapse of capitalism and would trigger a "German October," a proper communist revolution that would eliminate the Nazis and solve the shortcomings of the SPD.
On April 1, 1933, the Executive Committee of the Communist International stated:
Despite the fascist terror, the revolutionary upturn in Germany will inexorably grow. The masses' defense against fascism will inexorably grow. The establishment of an openly fascist dictatorship, which has shattered every democratic illusion in the masses and is liberating the masses from the influence of the Social Democrats, is accelerating the tempo of Germany's development towards a proletarian revolution.
They were... incorrect. Their gamble cost 85 million lives, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced back to the knock-on effects of the war. Accelerationism is creating a monster to defeat an enemy you cannot, then being startled to discover you can't defeat the monster either, and then blaming your original enemy for the product of your own hubris. No matter how you justify it, no matter what issues drive you, refusing to find common ground and build coalitions against the fascists helps nobody but the fascists.
The initial contract is plausibly just for 12V car batteries, but if Zoolnasm's goal is 10GWh/yr, they definitely have their eyes set on larger-scale applications.
Also, if they're actually capable of 190Wh/kg, that's better than current-gen automotive LFP. That's a pretty huge "if," though.
I'm guessing (hoping) you're joking here and having a laugh at us all taking you too seriously. But I've seen enough of lemmy to doubt that.
If your accelerationist ideology is unironically promoting nuclear holocaust as its self-evidently ideal endgame, you're long overdue for your "are we the baddies" moment. Maybe (definitely) stay off social media for a bit as you re-examine how you got here and who's lied to you along the way.
Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations -- or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.
This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.
So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we're gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.
While I don’t say this as a criticism of the author, it is worth pointing out that she’s also failed to adapt to the new technologies. She talks about how teachers will need to adapt to the new tools but ultimately places the blame on the students rather than reconsidering who her audience is.
How would you propose adapting to this? Do you believe it's the teacher's responsibility to enact this change rather than (for example) a principal or board of directors?
The average teacher does not have the luxury of choosing their audience. Ideally you'd only teach students who want to learn, but in reality teachers are given a class of students and ordered to teach them. If enough students fail their exams, or if the teacher gives up on the ones who don't care, the teacher is assumed to be at fault and gets fired.
You can theoretically change your exams so that chatbot-dependent students will fail, or lower your bar because chatbots are "good enough" for everyday life. But thanks to standardized testing, most teachers do not have the power to change their success metrics in either direction.
This article is about PhD students coasting through their technical writing courses using chatbots. This is an environment/application where the product (writing a paper) is secondary to the process (critical analysis), so being able to use a chatbot is missing the point. Even if it were, cancelling your technical writing class to replace it with an AI-wrangling class is not a curriculum modification but an abdication. Doing that can get your program canceled, and could even get a tenured professor fired.
The author was really stuck between a rock and a hard place. Re-evaluating the systemic circumstances that incentivize cheating is crucially important -- on that we absolutely agree -- but it's a responsibility that should be directed at those with actual power over that system.
[Edit: taking the tone down a notch.]
If resin is a non-starter for you, FDM printing can also make cool miniatures, but it will take more effort and the details won't be as fine.
People are getting good results printing minis on the Elegoo Neptune printers which are around USD$190. The latest fad is multi-material printers like the Anycubic Kobra 3 combo (USD$380) and Bambu A1 combo (USD$490) which can make colorful figurines at the cost of wasted plastic.
Tomb of 3D Printed Horrors has been getting pretty good results and is a good channel to follow if you go down the FDM route.
(Elephant-in-the-room sidenote: If you look at FDM printers, you'll run into fans militantly promoting Bambu Lab as part of an ongoing corporate-sponsored flamewar, and the community has a laundry list of grievances against the company. It's a mess. Bambu printers are good but not spectacular, and easy to use but hardly the only user-friendly printers out there.)
I think for a small, detailed figure that you're going to photograph, I'd recommend resin sprayed with a food-safe clear coat such as shellac.
Resin of all kinds requires rubber gloves, cleanup, and a well-ventilated room because it's smelly and generally bad for you in its unfinished liquid form. A small resin printer will cost under USD$200. Creality has one on sale for USD$100. They also sell washing/curing stations -- I built my own stations out of junk, but for USD$99, I'd go with theirs. Much more compact.
Nerdtronics made some excellent videos introducing resin and explaining how and why we print the way we do. These days, almost all printers are plug-and-play and the software is super smart, but I think these videos are highly educational anyways.
First, what kind of models are you curious about making? Big, small, decorative, springy, strong? Cosplay helmets, bike parts, tabletop miniatures?
This will inform whether you should look at tutorials for FDM (filament) printing or MSLA/DLP (resin) printing.
It's more about the how and why.
How: CCS pumps liquefied or pressurized gas into an exhausted oil or saline reservoir. These reservoirs didn't hold pressurized gas before, so it's difficult (if not impossible) to prove they won't leak. In the Decatur case, about 8 kilotons of CO2 and saltwater either found or created a crack in the reservoir, exactly as critics predicted. Locals are worried about groundwater contamination.
Why: CCS is largely unregulated in the US, and the companies interested in it are ones with awful environmental track records -- ADM is no exception there. To claim the 45Q tax credit, they only need to store the CO2 for 3 years. Why would they care about preventing leaks if they already got their payout? Doing shoddy work is in their best interest.
Does this event prove that underground CCS is literally impossible? Of course not. But feasibility isn't a pass/fail test, it's judged by factors like cost and risk. This event proves the approach isn't foolproof and the companies aren't trustworthy. So it's high time we stop acting like they are.
It seems that IPL effectiveness varies a lot based on the texture of the hair, not just color. It eventually worked on my legs, but not my face.
Beyond All Reason is my favorite RTS at the moment. I enjoyed Planetary Annihilation (despite its flaws), and BAR provides the same sense of exponential growth, escalation, and strategic pivots.
One of my favorite things about the game is that it's not ridiculously APM-intensive. The controls have a learning curve, but they enable you to "fire and forget" most of your tasks.
If you want to get a sense for the game before diving in, Brightworks does some good casting for both competitive and community-level games. https://www.youtube.com/@BrightWorksTV

egg🐧irl
So I've been thinking about Linux recently, and I'm told this is where the Linux experts hang out. I have a lot of questions that I can barely articulate, so I'm just hoping someone gets where I'm coming from.
I always knew there were more than two operating systems, but the closest I got to open-source software was dabbling with Firefox and OpenOffice in college. I'm an engineer, and trying to stay compatible with all the engineering programs means you're probably going to use Windows whether you like it or not, so I never seriously considered another OS until now. I'm proud of being good at Windows, but also bitter about it… I can't shake the nagging feeling that I've been missing out.
So I started looking up guides on Linux, and I have so many questions.
I'm astonished by how many distros there are. It's not just Ubuntu, we have Mint and Zorin and MX and enough options to make my head spin. So how do you choose a distro? Do you just know, or do you have to try them all? Try

My latest tabletop mini painting efforts
I've been getting back into printing and painting D&D miniatures lately I'm not very good yet, but I felt like sharing some of the things I've learned.
Bearded Devils https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/635943923575160832/1129061019772256376/20230711_085409.jpg
I printed these from a Loot Studios 3d file I got a few years back. The skin is a basecoat of purple with a wash of Citadel Reiksland Fleshshade. I did not use primer, and time will tell if that was a mistake. For the clothing, I used a different color for each model, because I like color coding my enemies instead of numbering them. I used basecoats like Reaper Bleached Linen with a watered-down topcoat. I find that if you get the consistency right, watered-down acrylics act almost exactly like contrast paints, so that's my go-to for fabrics.
A Bearded's Devil's beard is supposed to be prehensile and snakelike. I tried drybrushing, but it didn't make the tentacles look slimy. I tried edge highlighting, but I don't want