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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • A few months ago, my work got everyone Copilot 365 licences. I have yet to use it, and I haven’t seen anyone in my immediate vicinity using it either. So from my perspective, it’s wasted money and bandwidth. I do work at a very large organization, so maybe there are people elsewhere who do use it, but it has yet to contribute anything to my work.

    You want to know what would make my job easier? A password manager or unified login of some sort. I’m currently juggling nearly a dozen unique passwords, and it’s mentally taxing.



  • This recently happened in my campaign.

    We were fighting a dragon, and it kept flying around its lair, making it very hard for my Barbarian to hit it. We ultimately won, but 3 of the party of 5 died.

    Later, while dividing loot, I saw that I had been carrying a Potion of Flying the whole time, and the fight probably would have gone better if I had used it.



  • You’re right, they don’t.

    The ones beginning with “d” generally translate as “of the,” while the “à” ones generally translate as “to the” or “at the.”

    French has three words that mean “the”: “le” (masculine), “la” (feminine), and “les” (plural).


  • I had an surprising one, actually: I went to a private religious school, but I had a strangely comprehensive sex education.

    It started with unvarnished discussions of human anatomy and cautions about sexual abuse around age 8, and then moved on to the basics of (hetero)sexuality by the time I was a preteen. In high school that continued, though talk about birth control was postponed until the health units of later physical education courses, which not everyone took. Of course, the stress was always that sexual activity should be limited to monogamous (heterosexual) marriage, and there was no mention of anything outside of the hetero-normative.

    The last wrinkle was that it was all opt-out. At every point, there was at least one person who would leave the room for the duration of the class because their parents really didn’t want them learning about naughty bits.

    So it ended up actually providing a pretty good foundation. It was still incomplete and biased, but a lot better than what you would expect when you hear “private religious school.”


  • I’ve been cautioning people as well. Right-wing politics aren’t unpopular in Canada, it’s just that the the centrist voters got spooked my Trump.

    No one should bet on another miracle for the next election. The best case scenario may be that the PC wing retakes control of the federal Conservatives and we just get a raft of deregulation and privatization without all the culture war grievances.










  • That’s the one.

    I don’t know if my memory of that era comports with actual history, but this is how I remember it playing out:

    It looked like the Conservative attack ads were going to win the election for them again, just as they had against Dion and Ignatieff. They were ahead and gaining in the polls, and the Liberals seemed to have no response. The slogan was, “Trudeau: he’s just not ready.”

    Then the polls stabilized for a few days, and the Liberals released that ad. The polls started rapidly reversing, and the Liberals decisively swept into power. I don’t think I even saw another, “he’s not ready,” attack ad from the Conservatives again after that.

    EDIT: One can debate how much of an effect that ad had, and whether Trudeau’s actions matched it’s promises, but for me it will always stick out as a good bit of political strategy.




  • As Liberal party leader, it’s Mark Carney, a former central banker and economic policy guru.

    As Prime Minister, it remains to be seen. In theory, Carney could take over from where Trudeau left off before Parliament was prorogued. In reality, the opposition parties have already promised to topple the government and trigger an early election.

    Our election cycle is much shorter than the USA’s, so even if there’s an election called tomorrow we’ll have a new government and PM by the summer.