I’ve got something long and hard for stars.

It’s a telescope.

It’s a social more, nothing more ;)

In other words, it doesn’t matter what you swear by, it’s the open swearing that matters in terms of legality. See, the oath is what makes perjury prosecution “acceptable”. When a witness is sworn in, the process isn’t so much about them actually promising to tell the truth as it is a warning to them that truth is expected and will be enforced.

Yeah, historically, there’s more to it than that, but it boils down to everyone involved knowing that truth is expected, and lying comes with consequences (well, if you get caught at it, and can’t avoid those consequences in some way. The system ain’t perfect at its best, and is rarely at its best).

Swearing on a bible is just tradition based on centuries of christians and christianity being in power. You can opt to “affirm” instead, giving an non religious oath that is just a binding.

But, in any real terms, an oath isn’t necessary to begin with. When the system/state/government/people have the power to punish you for lying, they don’t even really have to notify you that lying will come with consequences. Doing so is a nicety that at least prevents anyone from being able to say they didn’t know they couldn’t lie. Not that trying it in the absence of an oath would be worth spit, but it saves time.

But having an expectation of truth under duress is a cultural thing. And it can be a form of duress. You can be compelled to appear and give testimony, with consequences got refusing. In other situations, being under duress can be a defense against a charge, though the standard for what degree of threat serves to meet that criteria is pretty steep. But it’s an understood thing that you aren’t supposed to lie during legal proceedings. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it certainly does make it easier to have a degree of conformity to the truth among people that might otherwise lie.

I missed it!

My faith in the internet is restored!

Beeeeelzebub has a devil put aside for meeeeee!

Damn, what has you so aggressive here? The other comment wasn’t venomous. Hell, it wasn’t even a little snarky.

Something going on you want/need to vent about? Legit asking, I’ve had days where I got shitty to people that weren’t doing anything, and having a quick vent would have helped.

I am so disappointed in lemmy. Not a single masturbation joke in the comments

Mildly?

My mental health homie, full on coma inducing exhaustion wouldn’t be unusual (well, it’s hyperbolic but you get the point).

There is very little more taxing than the kind of intensive wringer that a serious therapy session can be. Even less challenging sessions can leave people numb, wiped, or otherwise just burnt out.

If you’re doing the work, therapy will at some point be stressful. At the very least, needing nap or a cuddle is totally normal

A few ways you do it.

First is for bigger cukes only, really. You cut it in half first. Seems like it isn’t answering what you actually asked, but there is an upper limit to how big a slice can get before it’s too big. So once a cuke is much bigger than maybe an inch and a half (a little under 4 cm) wide, cut it in half first.

Second is to sacrifice a slice length wise. Take your knife, cut a ribbon off of one side,and you’ll have a flat part thru not only reduces/prevents rolling slices, it also makes the job easier. It’s a little less pretty maybe, but effective.

Third is to slice at an angle. The rounds then fall over before they can roll. It’s also visually appealing, if maybe not better than standard slices.

Fourth, use a barrier. Some damp paper towels (or cloth ones) placed on the edge of your cutting board will stop the slices from going past. Yeah, you can use dry ones, but they tend to move easier, so paper towels will blow away (and cloth ones get knocked away by errant elbows.) But any barrier will do tbh. A long handled spoon, your honing rod, whatever.

Fifth, use a jig. I’m not aware of any brands, but there’s veggie cutting jigs with even slice sizes. They have the side benefit of holding things like carrots, cukes, or zucchini and keeping the slices in place. Haven’t used one in ages, so I’d have to go searching for a link, and you can do that just as easily; but if you can’t find anything, holla back and I’ll see what I can find. But you can make your own with a little ingenuity and access to a band saw or even the right hand tools, but the plastic ones are cheaper and lighter.

Sixth is using a damp towel on your cutting surface. I wouldn’t do it, but if you pay attention to what you’re doing, you won’t fuck up the towel and it does work. Has to be damp though, something about that makes the skin grab better than on a dry one.

Seventh is using your hands and speed. If you’re feeding the cuke along with the ol’ claw finger technique, and slicing/chopping fast, they don’t get a chance to roll.

As an alternative to that, the eighth I’m aware of is to partially slice through on your first pass, then come back and finish. The slices don’t roll. Won’t work on more fibrous veggies, but stuff like cukes or zucchini will stay in place just fine. Takes longer though.

Tbh though, I’ve always had more trouble with carrots, even with very thin knives that don’t wedge much. Which, that helps too, btw. If you pick up a cheap Kiwi nakiri (kiwi is a cheap brand of stamped steel knives, but they rock for some jobs better than the fanciest and most expensive knives. Try one with onions and you’ll see what I mean for sure), you’ll have way less wedging, so there’s less force applied along the side of the slice, meaning they don’t roll as much.

Shit, you could probably just push the end of the cuke/zucchini against something weighty as you slice and as long as you don’t push hard, it would at least reduce the force the slices would roll with, meaning they wouldn’t go far.

Sharp knives also reduce the problem because they go through with less force, leading to less motion as the slices part from the body of the veg.

Legit though, doesn’t matter what you do, you’ll have some escapees with thick slices. Cukes are much rounder than most similar shaped veggies, and often have smoother skin. So they roll easier than most. Like I said, I had more trouble with carrots, until I got my techniques down and knives that let me do the job smoothly. A decent knife with a thin profile, kept sharp and used appropriately to the design of the knife tends to apply the force in a way that slices fall laterally rather than roll. Plus, if you slice conservatively, the force you’re applying across the veg doesn’t have enough energy to get the slice moving much. That’s easier with a well maintained knife.

Shit, that’s the part of prep that’s fun

Ignoring established world building, which I don’t count as campaign building, I tend to have an overall plan, plus a handful of probable diversions. Each path is going to have NPCs as appropriate, though I tend to keep them as just notes until maybe a couple of sessions before they’re likely to be used.

As an example, I might have “lvl 10 chronomancer; drow, w/magic staff, 1 ring, and familiar” when I rough out the campaign. Once I’m sure the players are going that direction, I’ll pick the specific gear, build the NPC’s spell list, and have a plan for the encounter that includes combat, non combat, and usually a combo of the two. But the encounter plan is all mental, no need for written notes of that kind of thing.

If they’re going to a location I’ve already got on paper, it’s easy prep. But I do have a lot of room that isn’t labeled on the map, as well as locations nobody has gone during play. For those, it’s usually just writing down existing ideas, and cooking up details if there’s a divination or scouting run, or whatever.

It’s one of the benefits of having an established world to play in that’s also huge enough that there’s room to grow. I never have to build from the bottom up, it’s only for one off and/or “non canon” play that I do much of that at this point. So most of the depth of those is in my head anyway, not on paper at all.

Mind you, I still have worlds I haven’t used, and likely never will. It’s a long standing mental hobby. But I really enjoy both depth and breadth for my setting.

Fuck no

Every paycheck for twenty plus years, I calmly and without complaint saw taxes and fica taken out of each check because that’s how you have a social safety net.

I sure as fuck didn’t pay in because I could afford it, I paid in because it’s mandatory.

So you, me, whoever, is 100% justified in using the social safety net we all paid and pay into because that’s what it’s for in the first place.

Never, ever feel guilty about it brougham.

I tell you hwat

When I bought a laptop after self publishing my first book, I went with a thinkpad specifically because they handle linux so well. t480

That’s been a few years now, and it’s still running smooth, no issues at all, even with mint having been upgraded a few times.

deleted by creator

Those are different things, and I think it important to say that because your question reads like you’re conflating them, when you aren’t; you’re asking how far it does stretch, not saying that locker rooms are the same as a social club.

Which isn’t directed at you, but any passersby that didn’t catch it

As far as that goes, I’m actually okay with shared lockers/showers/bathrooms, so long as you can find privacy as an individual. Stalls with good isolation for them what care in other words. I don’t, however, think it would be okay to enforce that at this point in time

Sure, of course they are.

I’ll even go so far as to say that even more fine grained groups are okay. What becomes a problem is when every group excludes people that really shouldn’t be.

You get a chess club, why the fuck can’t a woman join? Right? Calling it a men’s club is just exclusionary for no purpose. Even the girl/boy Scout divide was pointless in any real sense, and was a missed opportunity for those scouts to have guidance on how a scout is supposed to treat others.

Hell, when it comes right down to it, even a specific cis organization is fine, just the way trans specific ones are. The problem, again, is when a club is exclusionary just for the sake of it.

We all have aspects of our lives that aren’t shared by people with other genders and/or types of genitals. There’s struggles and discrete experiences that a trans man can have that I never will, and vice versa.

But, again, once it ceases to be about that kind of specificity, it starts being bigotry in disguise and needs to fuck right off. Ain’t no good reason women shouldn’t be allowed into things like community action groups. A gender division there is just pointless and stupid. If they also exclude trans men, it’s as bad (maybe even worse).

Hell, the masons are full of shit in that regard. Fraternal orders are hypothetically okay, but since when have the masons actually been about men sharing the unique aspects of life that men share? It’s just exclusionary bullshit (and I’ve seen it from the inside, so I know it’s utter bullshit). They’re the best example of how not to be a gender based organization.

I’m not saying that men shouldn’t be able to gather and just hang out. We should, as should women. There really is a different vibe, and there’s no way around that. But once you start organizing that on a bigger scale, you have a different threshold to meet.

Since, historically, most of the men’s organizations not only excluded women, but actively served to continue oppression of women, being a de facto patriarchal enforcement group, those groups get the worst attention. They weren’t really men’s groups, they were power control groups that men only could use to gain, maintain, and exploit control. That’s why there’s pushback on them, not the fact that they were/are gendered.

My chicken, Sesame, would like a word with you.

I don’t think they approach necessity tbh. At best, they’re a bandaid, and a crutch for parents.

But the drawbacks of the laws that have been implemented so far, and are trying to be, as vast overreaches that give a false sense of security with no real benefit. They also do that by placing even more information into the hands of the very companies causing the problem in the first place.

That’s where regulations would focus in an ideal world, limiting the companies from causing the problems in the first place, not slapping bad patches over them.

You don’t ignite the sacrifice, you place it on a pyre.

Those can burn hot when well constructed. Not quite the kind of heat a modern crematorium can produce, so it is slower. But it wouldn’t have been a full day of burning.

Cooking can take longer than burning. If you threw your steak directly into fire, it would be inedible in the same amount of time it would be medium rare on the grill above the fire (as a rough example, don’t expect precision here), and burnt into a brick in maybe fifteen minutes at most. I’ve lost meat in just coals before, and that’s about all it took, so an open fire would likely be even faster.

Waaay back in the day, to the best I’ve ever read, most sacrifices that were burnt weren’t single sacrifices. This means the fires were also bigger, more intense, than what you might have in your home fireplace. So, once the sacrifice was on the heat, it would ignite relatively quickly. Then, you’ve got fats rendering and burning, which burns pretty damn hot; hot enough that you’d only need an hour or two for the bones to fragment.

Think about it (or look it up if you have a strong stomach), people and animals caught in house fires aren’t in them for massive amounts of time, but they’re essentially carbonized well down towards the bones, and sometimes the bones are “falling apart” (there’s fancy terms for that, but I can’t be arsed to pull them from memory) in the time it takes for the structure to collapse.

Anyway, the rules of sacrifice really varied. In some cases, they weren’t actually burnt, they were cooked. It was the taking of the life that was the sacrifice, so burning wasn’t always part of it. Iirc, it was mostly sun, fire, and similar gods that fire sacrifice to destruction weres the norm. But general purpose sacrificed animals were sometimes cooked and eaten. It really varied a lot over the millennia across the world.

One aspect was though, the burning of the sacrifice was so that it could “rise” to the god/s. A form of transubstantiation, destroying the earthly form and sending it to the divine in its constituent essence. In other aspects, the fire was the god or gods consuming the sacrifice.

Fwiw, if you stack the pyre right, with enough fuel, a human body is reduced to ask and bone fragments in maybe six to eight hours. Something with less mass (a lamb as an example) will be faster.

Plus, some of the really big sacrifices were done en masse in huge fires. Literally tons of wood, often resinous woods that burn hot enough to damage stone at that scale. Can’t recall where, but there’s sacrifice spots that had stone show some melting, which is fucking hot.

To sum up, I guess the answer is that it depends on when and where the sacrifice happened, and why.

Yeah, and that’s how you get shitty age verification laws.

It’s a double edged sword

Man, the long earth series is so fucking good. It isn’t as well known as his discworld stuff, obviously, and it isn’t fantasy based in the usual sense, but the story arc over the series is just so well built, and the world building is a delight.