Mechanically, I tend to avoid spellcaster type classes, mostly because I don’t want to keep track of spell lists and such.

As far as roleplay goes, it depends a bit on who I’m playing with. The actual players rotate a bit, but in general I have 2 main groups I play with, and the type of character I play tends to be pretty different between them.

In the one group, I tend to play sort of the straight man. The other players aren’t exactly running murder hobos, but a couple of them skew that direction, and their characters all tend to have big personalities and I tend to be the one who’s keeping things a little grounded.

One of our longest-running campaigns was a 5e game that started out as sort of a weird mix of the Rise of Tiamat and Storm Kings Thunder modules that went way off-script. We had an angsty rogue, a drunken warlock who was using some home brew stuff that was roughly like The Fathomless from Tasha’s but a few years before that was officially a thing, an elf barbarian who was absent for half the campaign, and a drow (sorcerer I think) who started off being sort of a Drizzt knock-off but shocked us with an amazing plot twist halfway through that he cooked up with the DM where he’d secretly been an agent of Tiamat the whole time… until Tiamat discarded him and we had to figure out what to do with him after that.

And then my character- Randall, a relatively by-the-book military veteran, sword-and-board fighter, who was nominally the leader of the group, he had a grudge against dragons from a previous battle he’d been in, and a bad case of “just when I thought I was out out, they pull me back in” being pretty sick of the adventuring life and really wanted to retire to a quiet farm somewhere, but adventuring was all he had ever known and he kept bouncing from one adventure to another unsure how to make the transition.

In my other group, I have a tendency to play the wildcard. The most extreme example of that was a pirate called Lotor the All-Beard (so named because he was a raccoon, and so covered in fur, he was “all beard”)

Lotor was a filthy, chaotic idiot and the dice gods smiled upon him. He was remarkably skilled in all manner of crime, including, somehow, forgery despite being illiterate (He needed someone else to put the words together for him but with that and a handwriting sample he could masterfully forge any document needed.) He didn’t speak the common tongue, so couldn’t directly communicate with most of the party, but had a magical talking parrot (named Polly, of course) who translated for him (the bird was far more intelligent than Lotor and kind of hated him. Throughout the campaign there were many hints dropped that there was a lot more to this bird than met the eye, but Lotor was too dumb to pick up on any of it.) He stole from, cheated, swindled, and flirted with basically everyone he met, and pretty much just always let the intrusive thoughts win. If there were shenanigans afoot, it was usually his fault.

A lot of his criminal behavior stemmed from a bit of willful ignorance and childlike naivete about laws and social norms. I hadn’t seen it at the time I created Lotor, but the Guardians of the Galaxy scene where the concept of theft being illegal is explained to Rocket was pretty much Lotor in a nutshell.

It was also a bit of a running joke that he was actually a fairly formidable and well-known pirate captain who ran a very tight and orderly ship (though a fair amount of those organizational skills may have actually been Polly,) but he considered himself to be “on shore leave” and so basically on vacation for the duration of the campaign and was cutting loose.

Those are sort of the two extremes, but probably my two most beloved characters, and kind of give an overall sense of the direction my characters tend to go with either group.

I think of it like this

Let’s say 3 families each have a magic book they can use to communicate with each other. Anything someone writes in one book appears in all 3 books.

Each book is a Lemmy instance. In the real world it would be a server running the Lemmy software.

The family members are the users of each Lemmy instance.

And the spell that binds the books together is federation.

Now let’s say family 1 and 3 have a falling out and break the spell connecting their books. That’s defederation.

Everything they wrote in the books before then is still there. But nothing they write going forward will sync to each other’s book. They can both still see and write on family 2’s pages, but won’t be able to see what each other write. Family 2 can still see all of both of what of them are writing because he’s still federated with them both.

Now let’s add some of the other fediverse services into the mix. Lets say mastodon, it works pretty much the same way, but instead of a book, let’s say it’s more like a stack of index cards, but otherwise you can see whats in everyone else’s stack of cards as long as you’re federated with them.

Most of the fediverse services federate to some extent or another with the other services. It can be a bit weird sometimes, index cards of course wouldn’t have a page number in the book, and pages in the book wouldn’t be indexed in the card catalog, so searching out the content from those other services can be a little wonky, but if you know where to look you can find those cards tucked into your book, or a crumpled up page from a book tucked into your card catalog, and you can interact with them, so you’ll sometimes see, for example, someone from a mastodon instance commenting on a Lemmy post, which is kind of like taping one of their index cards to the page of your book to leave a comment.

I’ve known muskies to do something similar- swim around at the surface with their head out of the water.

I remember looking into it, and it’s definitely a thing, but no one seems to know why exactly they do it. There’s a few theories that have to do with the oxygen concentration at the surface, regulating temperature, buoyancy, etc. but the one I personally like to subscribe to is the same as this, that they’re just looking around.

It makes me feel a little less bad about not being able to catch one if they’re at least more intelligent and curious than the average bass or bluegill or whatever else I’m pulling out of their lake.

For your average d&d party, stuff like getting zapped to another plane of existence, potentially including literal hell or a plane made up entirely of gears, isn’t an entirely unexpected circumstance. I played in a game one where due to some crazy shit happening to us in the feywild we ended up in sort of the backrooms of the D&D multiverse with an impossibly long tapestry hung on the wall that was a physical manifestation of the weave.

Between those sorts of hijinks and flying around on spelljammers through interplanar space with crystal spheres and all of that mumbo-jumbo, aliens, space travel, and alien technology almost look tame in comparison.

I feel like your best bet to really confuse the characters is probably to have aliens simulating a normal d&d environment for them- maybe the room they wake up in on the ship looks very much like a stereotypical d&d tavern, but little details are wrong. Maybe there’s a bard strumming away on his lute but his fingers don’t quite match up with the notes he’s playing, and the bartender asks if the party would like a “brewed and fermented barley beverage” instead of an “ale”

And the clothing the rest of the people there is all strangely generic and maybe a little dated and things are just generally not adding up, like why is there a red wizard from thay happily playing cards with a waterdavian city guard, and why is that guard drinking in his uniform? and are we even in waterdeep right now? because the elf at the table over there is reading a baldurian newspaper, and also holding it upside down. And is it just me, or are there a whole lot of twins and triplets here?

But things like detect magic aren’t turning up anything fishy because it’s not magic, it’s science.

And maybe when you try to tap someone on the shoulder to ask what the hell is going on, you phase right through them because they’re all holograms. A simulation orchestrated by the alien abductors to help the party feel more comfortable and so that they can study them in something close to their natural environment.

If you were able to target it properly to the right species, depending on where you are in the world, there’s a good chance that the rats and sparrows you’re thinking of are invasive.

I know around me in the US I see a whole lot more house sparrows (native to Europe, Asia, and some parts of North Africa) than I do any native Sparrows.

And the two most known rat species- the black and brown rats, originated in different parts of Asia and more-or-less spread around the world with human trade and migration.

So getting rid of those would probably be a good thing to reduce competition for native animals.

I very rarely have trouble sleeping, but when I do, this is what I’ve always done since childhood and it hasn’t failed me yet.

I lay there, with my eyes closed, resist any temptation to look at my phone or do anything else, make myself as comfortable as possible wrapped up in blankets and pillows and whatever

And I just kind of direct my mind towards something pointless and let it wander down that rabbit hole

Maybe I’ll imagine sort of a bunch of swirling lights and colors and just kind of watch them, look for patterns, etc.

Or I’ll make up stories. I’m no author, but I’ll imagine myself as maybe a super hero, or an astronaut, or a wizard, or any of those sort of stock characters, and I imagine myself saving the world, or fighting a dragon, or boldly going where no man has gone before. These stories I’m making up aren’t deep, they’re a crappy universe full of plot holes and the kinds of characters an elementary schooler playing make-believe would come up with, because of course the superhero I’m imagining myself as can fly and has heat vision and wolverine claws and can turn invisible and has super strength and…

Or I just kind of think about simple things I enjoy. Places I could go hiking with my dog, date nights with my wife, meals I’d like to cook for friends, etc.

Whatever it is, I just kind of let my mind wander down that road, it takes my mind off of whatever was keeping me awake, and after I while my focus begins to falter and I just sort of slip into sleep from there.

I’m pretty sure this kind of falls under the category of some kind of meditation. My work once did a mandatory “wellness retreat” as a “training” thing I had to go to. One of the things we did was a guided meditation session, and that felt like the same sort of thing (but for people who are boring and lack the imagination to think of a scenario to meditate on by themselves, imagining myself flying an x-wing through an asteroid field beats the pants off of imagining I’m walking through a meadow to the beach or whatever that lady was having us imagine)

Sometimes a little background noise is helpful. I’m not personally too picky about what it is, I like trip hop music for this purpose, or forest sounds, or just random YouTube videos (not even necessarily anything relaxing, I’ve fallen asleep to some machinist YouTubers plenty of times and the sound of a mill, lathe, band saw, grinder, etc. isn’t exactly what I’d call soothing.

And when all else fails, I rub one out

I kind of think of the 50s as kind of a major turning point for the US. There were a lot of seeds of greatness then that weren’t properly nurtured in the following decades so that they could grow.

While just about every other country in the world was trying to put themselves back together from WWII, we had emerged not only unscathed, but in almost every measure better than we were before. We had military might, we had a booming economy, manufacturing, science, technology, arts, entertainment, cars, appliances, TV, electricity all on a scale previous generations could only dream about.

Even if you were part of a marginalized group- black, LGBTQ, female, etc. there were some glimmers of hope that looked like things might get better soon- the civil rights movement was picking up steam, there were some early LGBTQ rights movements and demonstrations taking shape, women entered the workforce in a big way during the war, and after the war mostly returned to the home afterwards but those seeds were planted, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that little girls growing up in the 40s watching the women in their lives being the Rosie the Riveter would become the ones who embraced 2nd wave feminism 20 or so years later.

And of course we had high corporate taxes helping to fund it all.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses of course, and you will certainly find no shortage of people here on Lemmy who will happily spell out all of the many reasons the 1950s sucked, and I don’t disagree with them, but that’s not what you asked, so I’m not going to go into that.

The 50s were a major leap forward in the quality of life for many people in america, and while far from perfect, there is definitely an angle you can look at it from where things looked like they were more-or-less on the right track.

My thoughts on kangaroo are, kind of unsurprisingly, that it tastes exactly like it evolved on a different continent than any other meat you’ve ever eaten.

It’s still definitely in the red meat family, but it’s different and it’s hard to explain how. I’d say it’s maybe more like venison or maybe lamb than beef, but it’s definitely its own thing.

There’s a lot of cases where depending on how you prepared and seasoned it, I don’t know if I could necessarily tell you with 100% confidence if I was eating venison or beef, and maybe even a couple things you could probably pull that with lamb or goat vs beef. I’m pretty sure I could reliably pick out a kangaroo dish from a lineup 100% of the time.

It was good though, I would absolutely eat kangaroo again if it was more readily available around me. It’s kind of a stronger flavor that some people might have an issue with.

Tasted like fishy dirt meat

I’m not a fish-eater in general, but I am an avid fisherman (I just catch them, the wife eats them,) so I’ve heard a lot of stories from my fellow anglers (which should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, there’s a reason they’re called “fish stories”)

There is a persistent rumor I’ve heard that some people will take catfish and other bottom-feeders like carp home alive to let them swim around in a bathtub of clean water for a day or two to sort of flush all of the mud and everything out of their system before cleaning and cooking them

Allegedly it’s more of a southern thing.

I have yet to find seafood that I like.

Irony of ironies is that I love fishing. Luckily anything I catch worth keeping my wife is more than happy to eat.

People always tell me that good fish shouldn’t taste/smell fishy. I retort that I suppose good beef shouldn’t be beefy either.

I’m willing to hear people out, try different fish prepared in different ways, still haven’t found one that I liked, at best they’re mostly tolerable.

I’ve figured out that I generally tend to enjoy freshwater fish over saltwater. If I catch a couple nice trout I’ll eat that for dinner with my wife instead of having to make a separate dish for myself, I won’t hate it, but I won’t like it either and I’d probably rather have a hot dog.

And I like raw fish better than cooked.

I might actually kind of like raw oysters, but they are in no way worth the cost.

Lox isn’t bad, but I’d prefer just about anything else over it.

There are a couple fish-based products out there that are so far removed from fish that they’re hardly worth mentioning for the purposes of this comment that I do enjoy, like Worcestershire sauce and Asian fish sauces, katsuobushi, Caesar dressing, Crab Rangoon (let’s be real, you could probably leave the crab or “krab” out of most takeout rangoons and it wouldn’t change much) some Japanese fish cakes, etc.

The absolute worst is shrimp though. Nothing about shrimp is appealing to me, the taste, smell and especially the texture are all pretty repulsive.

I’m not otherwise a guy with a lot of food hangups and consider myself a pretty adventurous eater. Weird tastes, textures, bizarre fermented stuff, strange meats, etc. are all generally OK in my book, there’s not many other foods out there that I don’t enjoy. In my house right now I have some double salt salmiak licorice, a bottle of Malört, a wide selection of hot sauces going up to around 1 million scoville, I’m pretty sure I have both Vegemite and marmite somewhere in my fridge, some very peaty scotches, and plenty of other very divisive foodstuffs that I enjoy.

I have tentative plans to visit Iceland next year, so I’ll probably end up torturing myself with some hákarl at some point. And I don’t intend to seek it out, but if it happens to be offered to me for free somewhere I may consider trying whale, which I suppose is technically seafood.

I think there’s a fine line to be walked

Personally the only lights on my PC itself are the Ethernet ports on the back, and one little blue power indicator on the front

And since I built it in an HTPC case and stuffed it into my entertainment center, you kind of need to be looking at it from just the right angle to even see those. The case itself is a pretty unassuming black rectangle that looks pretty much like any other piece of AV equipment you might expect to see under a TV. About the size of a normal AV receiver, with a disc drive, a power and reset button, 2 USB ports, and a headphone and microphone jack.

My keyboard is a Keychron Q6 max with side-printed shine-through key caps, and my mouse is a Gameball Thumb (I like trackballs, and it’s nice since I’m gaming on the couch so not much convenient flat space to move a mouse around) which has single ring of LEDs around the trackball and a small indicator LED to show the DPI settings on the mouse. Both of those turn off when they’re idle, and when they’re in use I have them set to a pretty simple spinning color mode.

My setup is in a finished basement and the lights are usually down so it’s nice having them light up for the ease of seeing what I’m doing, and the simple color animations aren’t too distracting.

Where my lighting excess does come in though is with the Philips hue lights I have synced up to my TV the overhead lights, a light strip behind my tv, and a light tube underneath it. Between that and the surround sound I think it’s really immersive for movies and gaming. I think I’ve hit a good balance of it having some wow factor without being too distracting but opinions will of course vary on that.

I don’t know if I can pick just one favorite hot dog, so instead I’m just gonna wax philosphical about hot dogs at whoever cares enough to read this.

Most importantly is to start with a quality hotdog, something with a natural casing, that snap is critical I like all-beef personally but I’m not outright opposed to some frankenweenies either.

I’m told that in Iceland hot dogs generally contain at least some lamb, that sounds delicious to me, I like lamb. I’ve actually made and smoked my own hot dogs before so that may be something I experiment with in the future. I actually have a trip planned to Iceland next year so that may be something I try to recreate after I come back (I swear I’m not actually going for the hot dogs, just a happy accident, but I figured I might as well do some recon while I’m there)

A good bun is also important, something well-sized to the dogs, soft but structurally sound that’s not going to fall apart and get gross and soggy. When I made my own dogs I decided to go all-in and make my own buns as well. Pretty sure I used whatever recipe was the first Google result was for “sourdough hot dog buns” (because of course the crazy foodie who’s making his own hot dogs is also maintaining a sourdough starter) and I was very happy with how they came out. Barring that, get any decent brand of bun, there’s not that much variation. I like potato buns, but a regular ol’ white bun is fine. I also decided at some point that I like top-split as opposed to side-split buns, but that’s more of a nice thing to have than something I’m going to agonize over if I can’t find them.

Grill your dogs, or roll them around on a hot pan or griddle, don’t boil them. If you’re really fancy (even I’m not this nuts) get yourself one of those hot dog roller machines you see at gas stations and sports stadiums, I think those are the perfect hot dogs.

Now onto the real meat of the question - toppings

I don’t know that I have any one favorite dog, it all depends on my mood.

I hail from the philly area, so when in doubt when I’m presented with any cheap food item in need of a sauce or condiments, my answer is Cheez Whiz (keep that shit off of my cheesesteak though, that’s for tourists, I’m provolone all the way)

Closely-related, you have the chili cheese dog or plain old chili dog. These are all options where you really need to make sure to have a bun that’s going to hold up to some heavy, wet toppings. I think mustard is not unwelcome on a chili cheese dog, along with chopped onions and maybe some jalapenos. I’m normally a fan of beans in my chilli, but I don’t think they have any place in a chili intended to be a hot dog topping.

I’ve been to Cincinnati and sampled skyline chili from the source. If you expect chili you’re going to be disappointed and confused, but if you go in expecting a spiced meat sauce, you might really enjoy it. I think it makes for a damn good hot dog topping.

Outside of the situations where you’re going to have chili available for your hot dogs though

I’m also fan of sauerkraut. For the love of God though, don’t rinse and squeeze all of the sauer out of your kraut. Let it be sour and funky. Serve it rwith or without heating it up onto your dogs just as it came out of the can, jar, plastic bag, or crock.

For your typical backyard BBQ where you’re grabbing the usual condiments off the shelf to have out on a picnic table for the 4th of July or whatever- ketchup has no place on a hot dog. I’ll always go mustard, and often relish (I prefer dill relish over sweet if available) and chopped onions are a welcome addition. I think you’d do well to serve them with some baked beans on the side.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the Texas Tommy, allegedly another Philly-area invention, possibly originating in nearby Pottstown (though that’s a big " ^[1]^" IMO)

I was recently at IKEA and on the way out the door before a fun night of assembling flat-pack furniture, I grabbed a hot dog with some red cabbage and crispy fried onions, and I also thought that was a great combination (the hot dog itself was nothing special)

For a quick & easy weeknight dinner, I don’t think it gets much better than a hot dog or two or three prepared in any of the above styles, accompanied with some boxed Mac & Cheese, and some stewed tomatoes.

For a couple local ish places to me that I’ve felt like I’ve always gotten a stand-out hotdog, there’s Yoccos in Allentown, Jimmy John’s near West Chester PA, and of all places, the gift shop behind the chapel in Valley Forge National Historic Park

And of course, honorable mention goes to Costco for being one of the best deals going.

I think all clad is severely overrated

They’re fine pans, don’t get me wrong, almost certainly better than your standard department store celebrity-chef branded pans by Cuisinart or whatever

But the handles are kind of uncomfortable, and I dislike the rivets through the pan.

I’m personally a fan of demeyere pans.

Kind of reminds me of the daisyworld simulation.

It’s been a long time since I read about it, so I may possibly miss some details.

Daisyworld simulates a planet entirely covered by 2 species of daisy- black ones and white ones.

The black ones are better able to absorb the suns rays, so initially outcompete the white ones, however because they’re absorbing more of the rays, that leads to the planet warming up.

At a certain point the planets temperature gets too warm and the black daisies start dying off. Since the white daisies are better able to reflect the sun’s rays, they’re less effected by the increased temperature and start to outcompete the black ones.

After a while the white daisies are dominant, and since most of the planet is now reflecting the sun’s rays the temperature starts to drop, until it gets to a point where it’s too cold for the white daisies but since the black daisies can absorb more of the sun they start to outcompete the black ones again

Lather, rinse, repeat until they reach a sort of equilibrium.

As I said

pay is livable but not amazing

I personally came up just a hair short of 69k last year, I’m paying my bills, treating myself to some luxuries, and usually manage to save a bit, but I’m not rolling in it by a longshot.

But like I said that varies a lot around the country, I believe that’s a decent bit above the national average, but not a ridiculous outlier either, it’s fairly average for my area.

For context, I’ve been there about 6 years, so I have some seniority, but I’ve also elected not to pursue some training and certifications and such that could have given me a bit of a pay bump. I rarely come in for overtime, but that’s always available if you want it (there have been a couple years where one of our supervisors ended up being one of if not the highest paid county employee here because the man is an overtime machine, he’s a supervisor so he of course makes more than me to begin with but not so much more that you’d expect him to be in the running for that without the insane amount of overtime he does)

On average the county I work for is fairly wealthy and we’re not hurting for funding. We’re not union (although every few years someone starts talking about it, hasn’t gotten off the ground yet but we’ve gotten close a few times) but most of our surrounding counties are so that helps keep our pay competitive.

It’s absolutely not a job for everyone, but assuming you’re in the US, damn-near every 911 dispatch center in the country is always short-staffed and hiring, and usually only require a high school diploma or GED.

Since you have a computer background, I think it’s safe to assume that you can type at a halfway decent WPM, that’s a pretty big chunk of our aptitude test that a lot of people fail on.

A lot about this job varies from one jurisdiction to another, but in general pay is livable but not amazing and the hours are usually weird, but the benefits and job security are pretty solid.

Background checks, drug testing, etc. are of course usually part of the hiring process, and again it’s just not a job everyone is cut out for.

I remember coming across the thing you’re describing years ago while digging through my dad’s collection of miscellaneous cables, adapters, etc. back in the 90s or early 2000s. It wasn’t quite so low-profile, it definitely stuck out from whatever you plugged it into maybe about a quarter to half inch or so, but otherwise it was a 3.5mm jack with a plastic cap on the other with no wires or holes or anything that muted whatever you plugged it into.

The shade of beige the plastic was on that particular example makes me suspect it was a relic of the 80s. I do feel like I remember seeing them for sale somewhere at a later time, but I couldn’t begin to tell you where.

A little googling turned up this eBay listing

Based off of that and a little more googling I think the term you’re looking for might be a shorting and/or blanking plug or or cap or dummy/dummy plug

Without too much effort I was able to find “shorting caps” for RCA jacks, various coaxial connectors, and banana plugs, but had no luck finding any more for 3.5mm

Personally I’ve gone in on Hawaiian shirts, bit less good for a laugh, but still attention grabbing and easier to show off in public. No one wants to see my fat hairy ass sporting a whale tail.

Small typo in my comment, was supposed to say get a laugh out of my wife

It served its intended purpose. It was for Valentines or our anniversary or something, so I was waiting in the bed for her to come home in my leopard thong, rose petals scattered around, and some funky 70s porno music playing, and she cracked the fuck up.

I’m a fat, unsexy dude, I bought a goofy leopard-print thong to get a laugh out of my life wife once

It’s not my favorite pair of undies by a longshot, I still prefer my usual boxer-briefs, but it’s certainly not uncomfortable. Even wore it to my city’s naked bike ride to bike around in.