They can succeed, their modifiers might push them over the line. The title suggests a 21 DC, so even a +1 modifier to wisdom would do it. The ominous face is just because a DC that high means it’s really tough.

RAW in dnd, criticals only affect attack and death save rolls, there’s no such thing as a crit save, so they should apply the modifier. Rules vary from table to table though, so if your group prefers crits to apply to saves, go for it.

I actually think they just have that wrong. If you include the stars marked in red at the front as the head, and change the body shape to include the red ones at the back to make it bulkier, you get something much more obviously bear shaped.

The constelations were first passed from generation to generation orally, and at a time when you could actually see more than just the brightest stars, so the original ideas have been lost over time and we’ve received a much changed, and less sensible version of them, even after they started being recorded on paper.

Building up tolerance? That’s a smart move. When the vampire hoards attack you’ll be able to fend them off without risking harming yourself.

It might not be windowless; consider midwinter, when a real window will just be a dark rectangle for most of the important parts of the morning and evening. Having a fake window showing somewhere bright and warm could help lift one’s spirits if you didn’t think about it too much.

That’s pretty much what a mercury thermometer does. As the temperature changes so does the volume of the mercury, which causes the level to move up and down, and the temperature scale on the side is just a measure of how high the mercury reaches.

“…ok”

I’d love to think that his next words involved acknowledging that he didn’t know what he’s talking about, but they didn’t, did they?

I can’t work out if he’s trying to be ironic, because that would genuinely delight me.

I don’t think it’s abuse they love exectly, it’s being told exactly what to think and how to act. It removes a huge amount of cognative load and uncertainty and leaves them feeling more sure of themselves.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve used sleep on a laptop, but it worked well on my Dell (latitude I think, as I said, it’s been a while). It did take a little experimenting with sleep levels to get it reliable, but once it was it worked for years.

ETA: I realise that saying “it worked for me” is probably intensely annoying, my appologies for that, but I thought a counterpoint might be a useful extra data point.

Hmm. /me Makes you disappear entirely except for your mouth.

Promptly get stuck in a boobytrapped express elevator.

Ok, fair enough.

Believe it or not…straight to jail.

I’ve just spotted your username, I feel sure one of your relations had some sort of run in with the sysops already, and now you’re trying to convince people that there can’t be server reboots? Suspicious. Very suspicious.

No need, you just allocate users to servers depending on theie average sleep/wake cycle nd bounce the servers one at a time, when usage is at a minimum. Ever had one if those late night brain’s gone blank moments? Now you know.

Destroying the encryption key tends to be the only reliable way to put the data beyond use. Physical destruction techniques like the obe in the article have been tried before, and iften leave the data intact, just destroying the driver side of the chips. It’s not easy to retrieve the data, but a sufficiently determined and resourced oppinent can do it.

Obviously, there’s no reason not to do both, for added certainty, but if the encryption protocols used in proper FDE are compromised, we have a lot more to worry about.

It does seem like it would be simpler and more reliable to use full disk encryption to encrypt the data before it’s written, and just destroy the key if you want to nuke the data.

It’s a bit ambiguous, so you could be right, but I took it to mean that activation of the receptors was that active mechanism, regardless of cause. Psilicin is just the compound they’re focused on, and maybe it does activate them in some unique way that has this effect, but the summary didn’t make that clear.

If there are alternative pathways to activate the receptors they may be better suited to thereputic use without the psycadelic side effects.

I haven’t gone looking forthe souce paper, but from the article it looks like seretonin was the actual compound that’s having a beneficial effect, specifically serotonin outside the brain.

Well put. This is also why they can’t just cancel one debt against another in a lot of cases. If country A has sold $1t of bonds to institutions in country B, and country B has sold $1t of bonds to institutions in country A, both countries are in debt to the other for $1t, and it would be in the benefit of both countries to cancel those out so they can stop paying the coupon on them, but they can’t because different parties have issued the debt and own th£ other countries debt.

As it says in the article, the citizens of New Caledonua rejected independence in three separate referendums. It looks like they’ve gone for an intermediate option that they hope will give enough autonomy to satisfy the separatists, and enough of a link to satisfy the non-separatists. Hopefully it’ll mean people can focus on improving life there, rather than on politicing for a bit.

The bash man page is full of useful bits like this, but is is densely packed. It’s definitely worth reading though.