The Speak With Dead scene I thought was well done, and the heist and sneaking into the carriage I thought was a very D&D plan...

The hilarious thing is, this letter is absolutely intended humourously. It's from the comic Viz, and the "Letterbocks" section regularly contains jokes and letters mocking the letters sent into newspapers.

In fairness, the roles were all written as unisex roles with no specific gender in mind. I'm pretty sure they didn't have three sequels in mind when they were writing the original script...

Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it... But I somehow instinctively feel that a human being "inspired" by other works is different to a neural network being trained on a novel. I don't know that I can articulate specifically why one feels okay and the other doesn't... But that's how it feels to me.

The books of The Commonwealth Saga, by Peter F. Hamilton, have humans in the mix. They are neither the most advanced, nor the least, and the balance changes over the course of the books

We can do more than one thing at once.

I also quit with vaping, but in a roundabout way. I used to smoke, but my wife would not have me smoking indoors, and my office was likewise no smoking, so I was on perhaps 10 cigarettes a day. I switched to vaping, and still couldn't vape in the office, but my wife didn't mind me vaping at home if I restricted it to one room.

Then COVID happened, and I ended up working from home. So... Even though the amount of nicotine I was using in the vape was low, I had nothing stopping me from vaping all the time, which is what I did. I actually began feeling just as bad in terms of lung capacity when vaping as I had when I was smoking, largely because I was vaping pretty much constantly whilst awake.

One day I just had a flash of self control, and. chucked my vape, batteries, coils and all the paraphernalia. That was late 2020, and I haven't vaped or smoked since.

Weirdly, even though I ultimately went cold turkey, I do think switching to vaping from smoking helped me to quit. There was a marked improvement in my lung capacity and ability to smell during that time, and that gave me hope.

Badum-tsss!

Which country are you from?

To the memory of the memory of Lisa Yates.

Hard agree - upbeat, funny, heartwarming!

Einar Solberg, lead singer of Leprous, has a unique voice. It can sound almost fragile at lower registers, very expressive.... And has incredible range.

Alleviate

https://youtu.be/7Ot7Gq1YGm4?t=1m02s

Agalloch - Ashes Against the Grain. Atmospheric black metal - great for dark rainy nights!

https://youtu.be/B1x8q64NXxA?si=ZUeCBiLJ9TBWgJZF

I saw them supporting DragonForce a few years ago, and had never heard of them before - they are fantastic live, and properly won the crowd over!

I love DFHack for the quality of life fixes it can provide. Some of the tools I use:

• Autochop. When the number of available logs drops below a number I set, go chop down trees in a burrow area I've determined, until we are back above another number I've set. So helpful in bigger forts!
• autobutcher. Keep X number of male sheep, Y number of female sheep. Butcher the rest. Again, just useful to be able to manage this automatically, for all your livestock, in a bigger fort.
• Suspend manager. This is a new one, and it's amazing! You know how building above ground structures is a pain in the arse? You can get dwarfs stuck on walls, because other dwarves block them in? Suspend manager basically takes care of that for you ... It temporarily suspends the building of certain bits until other bits are completed, so you never end up with corners you can't get to, or dwarves stuck between sections of wall, on your latest megaproject! Honestly, suspend manager makes building above ground structures bearable!