Americans are whining because they’ve allowed car companies to put out massive trucks that get… 6 kilometers per liter of petrol? And haven’t invested in public transit. And have been allowing for the construction of massive datacenters that, despite burning fossil fuels for most of their power, and also still drianing the power grids and making EV charging more expensive (not that any of these people have enough saved to buy an EV anyway). And the complainers are all a minority of “rural” voters who don’t live in cities, and can’t easily get to a grocery store, a pharmacy, or work without driving 30km there and 30km back. At least.

So yeah, when a daily commute is 10 liters, and most americans who have had a cold in the past 5 years are in medical debt now, going from 50€ per paycheck to 100€ per paycheck every 2 weeks on petrol spend is hefty, especially given how the US federal minimum wage is a little over 6€/hour, and that’s if the person still has a job at all, given the layoffs all over the place. Even if people are making 10€/hour on their commute job, gas price increases have just eatten an additional 5 hours of their labor every 2 weeks. If they go up any more, the Iran War’s ramifications will approach a 10% pay cut for the “average” American. (And this doean’t even account for the tax money being spent on the war, nor on whatever the outcome of the US debt exceeding its GDP will be, probably for the next generation).

Would those Americans have been better off buying fuel efficient cars, finding remote work to not have to drive so much, living closer to cities to benefit from public transit? Probably. But it’s a lot late to try to make those shifts for these people.

When american politics claims that no one has been listening to “middle America,” this is who they mean: the voters who are gullible enough to be oversold on “American Dream” and end up living paycheck to paycheck with no safety net.

The problem is that there is no helping them, so no one really tries. And the far right loves this, because it’s easy to give those people false hope, underdeliver, and then blame it on the left.

So alas, no, it isn’t any consolation that other countries are feeling this pain–that makes the situation feel more hopeless, rather than less.

Mobile keyboard without spellcheck, I make thr exact same typos as thst poster with my thick fingers.

The irony? 16GB is enough for running a mid-size LLM, to not connect up to the cloud.

The irony is that Doofenshmirtz is pretty good standin for an out of touch corpo CEO

“Mysteriously”

Do people not know their own language when they write shit for publication? It’s proscribed, not prescribed. Fuck.

It’s exclusively about the leading vowel sound, rather than an actual vowel. E.g. it is a one-dollar bill, a unicorn, a European country, and an heirloom. There are plenty of initialisms that start with vowel sounds that are even less questionable, e.g. an NFL contract, or an FBI agent, vs a CEO, or a TMI situation. Regional differences exist, but are mostly about whether the leading sound is or is not pronounced, e.g. a historic occasion (american english) vs an historic occasion (british english).

T___T I’m an SEO writer

Help, the potentially intentional grammatical error is making me engage and I hate it!

It’s cool that Vestige warlock can get Spirit Guardians via War domain spells, and the Vestige itself seems pretty big on HP. Can take pact of the blade to be a melee bruiser, with the vestige backing you up from range. I haven’t checked to see if there is any other way to get both SG and Extra Attack by level 5 using only 2024 core-and-expanded rules yet, but this is an exciting development!

It sounds like you are talking about D&D 5e 2024 rules. Under those rules, chains are described as follows:

As a Utilize action, you can wrap a Chain around an unwilling creature within 5 feet of yourself that has the Grappled, Incapacitated, or Restrained condition if you succeed on a DC 13 Strength (Athletics) check. If the creature’s legs are bound, the creature has the Restrained condition until it escapes. Escaping the Chain requires the creature to make a successful DC 18 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check as an action. Bursting the Chain requires a successful DC 20 Strength (Athletics) check as an action.

You’ll want to manage a few separate things:

1. A free hand. If you are grappling with one hand, you need another hand free to apply chains. That means you cannot be weilding a shield or a weapon, unless you happen to have some extra appendages (though I think those only exist for legacy 2014 species right now). So if you’re Dwarf, no shield.

2. Action economy. A Utilize action and an Attack action (the latter of which allows you to make an unarmed strike to perform a Grapple) both cost your one Action for the round. You’d need access to some sort of ability that lets you Utilize as a Bonus Action instead. Thief Rogue 3 providea Fast Hands, which does exactly that.

3. DM fiat for easy access to multiple chains. If it is free, or at most only costs an object interaction to get a new chain from your bag, you’re golden. If it costs more action economy to get a chain from your bag, your DM might effectively limit how many chains you can “wear” for easy access. In a home game, this might be a no brainer, but in a westmarch it would likely require a server ruling.

Your best bet to make this work would be a multiclass of Thief Rogue 3, and the rest in Battle Master. The way you could make your action economy work, once you got to Rogue 3 Fighter 5, would be to:

1. hold a Chain in one hand, and have the other free.

2. Take your Action to Attack.

3. Use the first attack of your Extra Attack to Grapple.

4. Assuming you succeed on the grapple, use your Bonus Action to Utilize the chain and Restrain your opponent.

5. Release your grapple, and use your one Object Interaction for the turn to draw a Finesse weapon elegible for Sneak Attack,

6. Use the second attack of your Extra Attack to attack with that weapon with advantage (adding Sneak Attack and optionally a Maneuver).

7. Edit: Optionally, sheathe the weapon for free after this attack, to get both hands free again. You can do the full combo on round 1 and 2, but then have to attack first, sheathe, and then grapple on round 3 (assuming you wanted to do the combo again). Chances are you’ll still be working normal attacks on the first target tho, so its unlikely that the economy of drawing, sheathing, and getting chains every round will truly be necessary.

I think that if you are playing this character from early levels, I would take Battlemaster to 5, and focus on just attacking and using maneuvers to topple or some such, and then at 5 attack and topple, then maybe grapple to keep them prone. Work on the Rogue levels after you have Extra Attack, to be “feature complete”.

You might be able to make some version of this tactic work across two rounds earlier than level 8, but I think it would be more complex and prone to getting disrupted. You can do it once using Action Surge onxe you reach level 5 tho, which is nice.

If your DM is really kind, they might let you Utilize Chains as a BA even without Thief 3. Or maybe as a homebrew Maneuver. That’d probably be the best way to play that fantasy!

He happens to be a well spoken oldster

You missed like, a huge amount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis

It’s a good rule of thumb that if you do not pay, as the result of some sort of contract, for the service of security, and you do not own the software or hosting within which you expect something to be secure, then you don’t actually have any security.

The browser could be storing your data in plain text, and making it available to other software or malware on your system (or even on websites you visit, or to scripts which run in ads on websites you visit); the browser could be making it available to their internal tools or external “partners”; the browser could be storing it in the cloud and be subject to a breach for which you will never receive a cent; the browser could be doing everything “right” right now, but change their terms next week and your convenience will turn into a liability.

Host it yourself, as you do with bitwarden, and manage your own security, or pay a company to host it who makes it their business and is therefore legally liable if they screw up.

Crane’s law.

If you are skilled at task or knowledgeable in a field, you are better able to provide a nuanced prompt that will be more likely to give a reasonable result, and you can also judge that result appropriately. It becomes an AI-assisted task, rather than an AI-accomplished one. Then you trade your brainpower and time that you would have spent doing that task for a bit of free time and a scorched planet to live on.

That said, once you realize how often a “good” prompt in a field you are knowledgeable in still yields shit results, it becomes pretty clear that the mediocre prompts you’ll write for tasks you don’t know how to do are probably going to give back slop (so your instinct is spot on). I think AI evangelist users are succumbing to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

Ah yes, the plot of Caprica

You’re resorting to personal attacks without knowing who I am, what I do, what I do or don’t have on the wall behind me. You apply a blanket label on all people who you class a certain way, and when I disagree with your label and its implications, and recommend nuance, you class me further.

It sounds like you think very highly of yourself, or lowly of everyone else, or both.

What makes your opinions here worthwhile?

You just described Geeks. Geek and Nerd group labels can sometimes apply to the same people, but they are not synonymous, and a person can be one without the other.

People with toddlers often keep the knobs off as a form of baby proofing, when the kiddos are tall enough to reach but not old enough to listen. It’s then easy to lose a knob that isn’t in the right place.

5e? Goblin. Obvious fit for the vibe, and mechanically gies you a bonus action disengage after you booming blade in melee, which covers you for the first 3 adventures. Bonus action Hide will be useful for all 7, especially if you opt for Infiltrator.

Great! Then either talk to her to come up with ideas, or if you’re determined to ask the internet, telegraph your united front in your question so that we don’t assume that the primary reason is that you are a shitty partner. Read your question again, just the words, and see if it sounds like the author actually likes their partner, or wants help from the internet changing them to make this game more fun for themselves?

Anyway.

A live session with just voice chat is already a heavy mental toll for some people. Players and DM alike are filtering and translating ideas through one or more layers (what should be done? would this PC/NPC think to do X? How does doing X look like in this setting? Do they have the materials necessary? Would they countenance doing X based on their personality? What would they say alongside it, with what accent and affect?) in real time. Imagine trying to also type while thinking through those thoughts, and wanting your words to be well written, and your grammar and syntax to be correct, and your immortal words to be self-consistent across multiple posts? AND while you are working on all those things there is also distracting crosstalk? Or worse, you’re in a quiet room typing by yourself, but you know that three or more people are talking about what you’re typing in a little huddle? There is no consistent human response to this situation.

It’s an objectively complex format. Some people may find it easy. Some people may be able to ignore or eschew some of their own internal requirements that are consuming their mental energy and game time. And some people may not, and then external pressure to do so can make them stressed, which makes all of what I wrote harder to manage.

You could go text-only, with multiple text channels (roleplay vs ooc vs initiative) and strict timers, e.g. 5 minutes (which, speaking from personal experience, is also draining) just get rid of the voice chat. Or as others said, go with truly async play-by-post with 24 hour timers. Sure, a single combat may take a week to resolve, but it gives everyone plenty of time to do all of the mental load required to play, without all the pressure of realtime translation.