Gryphon

@Feeds Black-hat guy, you are an inspiration to us all.

@JBH In some kind of post-scarcity society, economics may become less of an issue. For the "propulsion lasers" idea, it is possible to throw those laser beams to other systems, so if you already have some kind of (very expensive and/or time-consuming) method of interstellar travel, you may be able to get some use out of the thing. Not a likely scenario, but cool stories aren't usually built around likely scenarios.

Maybe a massive set of lasers for colony ships (probably only feasible in a "something bad is coming, we gotta get out of this solar system" scenario)?

Also, running a massive set of supercomputers (possibly after uploading humanity to said computers). Although, if it's just to run a bunch of simulated human brains, that's kinda just a higher-tech version of the farmland idea.

@JBH It'd be really, really cool? I mean, we do a lot of things for pretty much solely that reason.

@dot_Sp0T You are not wrong.

Yeah, I still drift by this chatroom occasionally, but I stopped being active on SE in general after the firing stuff.

@Halfthawed It's quite an excellent book, I'd heavily recommend it to anyone who's interested in post-apocalyptic fiction. A bit dense in a few places, as older novels tend to be, but still very good.

Sounds like something I would greatly enjoy watching someone else shoot from a respectable distance.

@Mazura I don't think I've ever heard a gun's recoil described as "grim" before.

@AndyD273 That's awesome!

@WorldbuildingMeta SE's lost another good one. You'd think they'd have learned something by now.

They'd probably head North as soon as they got released. ;)

@AndyD273 I'm a little far south for bears, both fortunately and unfortunately.

Yeah, according to fivethirtyeight, his approval is at an all-time high, and his disapproval rate is below 50% for the first time since 2017. He's been handling the health crisis fairly well (especially over the last week or so), but he was basically running on the economy, and that's kinda gone now, so it seems odd that he's doing so well.

Is this a thing that normally happens during crises? I know Bush's approval rating went through the roof after 9/11, but other than that, I can't think of any examples of this phenomenon.

Is it just me, or is it kind of weird that Trump's approval rating is skyrocketing during a major health crisis and economic crash. He's been handling it reasonably well, but still... it just seems strange.

The dude himself obviously has no idea how anything more advanced than a pocket calculator works, but you'd think he'd have hired someone who did.

I'm just surprised nobody on his campaign team thought to reserve every domain name even close to "joebiden".

“I promise you, the president has a big stick.” is a wonderful quote out of context.

Presumption of innocence applies of course, but this definitely warrants an investigation.

To add more evidence to my theory that all politicians are awful, Joe Biden has now been accused of sexual assault. Apparently, there are also a couple of people who the accuser said she told at the time who have confirmed that much of her story, so that gives this more credibility than a number of other allegations that have been taken extremely seriously.

This is one of the best Babylon Bee pieces I think I've ever seen. It's almost a perfect summation of my feelings on US politics: babylonbee.com/news/…

There should be some kind of rule where bills can't be more than like 10 pages long or something. This one is 1400 freaking pages!

I hate politics sometimes.

And then you multiply that by hundreds of senators and congresspeople, and we get a trillion dollars of random stuff stuck into a bill that has nothing to do with any of it.

But back to the point I'm complaining about, I'm mildly confused as to why Arts endowments and airplane emission standards 5 years from now are in a bill about "let's not have a Great Depression because of a pandemic."

There, that sorta works.

It'd be nice if the m̶o̶r̶o̶n̶s̶ politicians could manage to actually agree on what's supposed to be in the thing, but I believe that is the general point of it, yeah.

Gah, how does one do strikethrough in chat?

@AndyD273 It'd be nice if the <s>morons</s> politicians could manage to actually agree on what's supposed to be in the thing, but I believe that is the general point of it, yeah.

Apparently 3 million people in the States have lost their jobs over the last week. That's horrifying.

@Halfthawed That whole scene is full of wonderful lines. The whole movie is, of course, but that scene is especially full of them

@AndyD273 "No answers in comments" is technically a rule, although it's not really enforced on WB.

@HDE226868 Did you at least comment that?

Italy also has a large population of elderly smokers, which probably also contributes to the extreme death rates we're getting there.

@AndyD273 Ilhan Omar praised Trump? Can I get a link to that? Not that I don't believe you, but this is probably the first time that's ever happened.

Europe is getting absolutely devastated right now, and the death rates in a lot of European countries are horrific.

So far anyway, that is. It is early days yet.

The US does seem to be doing substantially better so far than most other first-world countries.

He's gotten a lot better about it recently, once he stopped saying it wasn't as bad as the flu.

@TerranSwett Not particularly, no. He could have done worse, but he could definitely have done a lot better too.

I can imagine this exact conversation going on between a player and a GM. "If it's too big for us to wreck it, can we steal it?"

Today's Schlock Mercenary is wonderful:

@AndyD273 As the saying goes, "Twitter is not real life."

@Secret Yeah, "creation" technically means making something out of nothing. Although in general use it has become more synonymous with "making" recently.

schlockmercenary.com/strip/7215/0/…