🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

@MichaelWhelan@mastodon.art Absolutely one of my favourites of your covers. It's instantly recognizable as your work as well.

@NicolaElle @courtcan The same place I did: books read out of curiosity. Or these days on the Internet. If you have the curiosity. The missing ingredient isn't information. It's curiosity.

@anilmc @NicolaElle @courtcan There is clearly too much information in the world today for us to know everything. This is trivially obvious. Just look, say, at the Library of Congress and count the pages. It would take hundreds of lifetimes, I'd wager, of full-time reading to read what's there this very instant, and it's growing.

What's missing is curiosity. That desire, when told something, to double-check it instead of just accepting it at face value. That way lies manipulation.

@HeyeBodo@rollenspiel.social Travelling down Canada's west coast as the family moved from the high arctic to Germany; stopped with old family friends. Their son had this weird-looking game called Dungeons & Dragons. It appealed to my drama flake side and I was hooked. Living in Germany, playing AD&D with a little circle of outsiders. Someone brought DragonQuest to our lunchtime gathering and I learned that there were better ways to do things. Dropped D&D forever shortly thereafter. Haven't looked back since.

@futuresprog @essjax Ah... You have this EXACTLY backward.

The US uses the system of measurements that was in effect when it declared independence. In 1824 the UK redefined its system of measurements.

For a change the USA is actually in the right on something related to measures. Sort of. (I mean they're both horribly, horribly wrong. The USA is just slightly less horribly wrong.)

@hairylarry@gamerplus.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org Yes. Join us. Be one with us. ... Wait, that's probably bad wording.

@Da_Gut@dice.camp @futurebird@sauropods.win @llewelly@sauropods.win Wolf spiders are cute, though! Why would you be skeeved out by them?

@alternativeto It's so weird to me that web site makers think their stuff is so good I'm willing to let them shove ads and bad software down into my computer.

@HeyeBodo@rollenspiel.social C&S5, HARP, Sig: Manual of the Planes right now.

@rasterweb I use fountain pens almost exclusively (when I'm not usin glass or bamboo dip) because "new" isn't "better". But I do use modern eternal pencils because "new" is "better" in this case. I prefer books to phones/tablets/computers for serious reading because *nothing* invented since has improved upon them in any useful way ... except reference. That I love in electronic form. "New" and "old" have a complex relationship it turns out as they relate to "good" and "bad".

@cerement @yaodema @neauoire I was about to answer this myself, but decided to check first. Perfect answer. So I'll add that you can have similar mishaps in China with chi-cun-fen measures (often still used in tailoring). Indeed the Imperial inch is referred to in China as literally "English cun". The shaku-sun-bu measurements were almost certainly derived from older chi-cun-fen measurements, but have diverged over time. The Mainland chi today is 33+1/3cm, IIRC, to the shaku's 30.3cm.

@papageier @reading_recluse Ah, yes. Another clank-fucker with the "inevitability" argument. Desperation is reeking from the LLMbecile camp.

@stefanlange @FotoVorschlag Ooh! That is a pretty ruin!

@ObsidianUrbex@mstdn.social 🤘 I have been known to listen to some distorted, downtuned guitars, yes.

@xvf17@sfba.social @VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social And only in designated free speech zones.