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Is there a difference in meaning between the words *people* and *persons*?
  • You'd get even weirder looks if you said "those persons travel a lot", while also sounding like someone who doesn't really speak the language.

    "Those people" can be a racist or classist dog whistle, but isn't always, and also there isn't really an alternative. Say what you're going to say, and don't worry too much about it. The people who would misinterpret it to fit an agenda are probably going to do so regardless of what words you use.

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    When a medicine asks you to "take with food" how much food is enough?
  • The pharmacist did say that it was to reduce the queasiness since both the antibiotic and the steroid I was prescribed are apparently quite rough on the stomach, so I have to take the pills with food, which I inferred to mean as a meal. Which was fine when I took them with lunch and dinner yesterday since obviously that's gonna be tons of food to go with it, but then it came to this morning, and I don't normally eat breakfast. I wasn't sure if something simple like toast or a granola bar which I would take with the morning dose would be enough food to counteract it, since obviously I didn't want to spend my morning with a miserable stomach.

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  • Like, is it enough just to have something like a granola bar with it, or do they really mean a full meal?

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    Does anyone else have trouble remembering Abzan, Bant, and Sultai?
  • First three letters of Abzan are a,b, then z. Then a again. Like a life cycle. You're born, you grow, you die, then you get resurrected by one of Abzan's many graveyard tricks.

    Bant is like "banter", like friends do. It's the friendly colours of white, blue, and green. It helps that my group hug and pillow fort decks are both bant to help me glue that association together.

    Sultai starts with an "S", hissing like a snake. Vraska has snake hair and she's green/black, but sultai also follows the S with a U to remind you blue is in there.

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    Do other languages have similar acronyms to 'tbh', 'imo', 'smh', etc?
  • It's sometimes used here, I think it depends how English you are. I just use "lol" but my fiancée does use "mdr" with other French speakers.

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    Do you fake falling behind in Commander to avoid getting focused on?
  • I think generally it's hard to "fake" being behind because your board state is your board state. Unless you have something giving all your stuff flash or something, in most cases it doesn't really matter if you have an Ulamog in hand and castable if on board you only have a vanilla 2/2 and the green player has an army of 12/12 tramplers. If you have lands in hand, for instance, you're generally better off playing them than holding back to hope that "oh, I'm so mana screwed" gets you further later.

    On the other hand, there's also playing smart. If you know there's a boardwipe coming you probably want to hold on to your creatures. I try not to play turn 1 sol ring, even if I draw it, because that makes all eyes turn to you and any big thing that you might drop as a result of that will be coming out when everyone else is most likely to have some kind of removal, and often when there's nothing better to spend mana on. If a player is sitting on two untapped blue mana what are the odds that he's sitting on a counterspell? Can you bait out the counterspell with a threat now so you're able to do what you really want later? Or hold off casting in the hopes that it gets dropped elsewhere?

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    How long does it take for neurotypical (or just typical) people to get over a minor fight?
  • Depends on how the fight resolved. Sometimes you get snippy for a bit but ultimately either come to an agreement or the fight resolves and that's it. You rankle for a bit after, get over it, and move on.

    Sometimes the fight isn't about what you're fighting about. They've had a bad day and it manifests as some bitchy comments about how the dishes were done. You stop fighting about the dishes but you're still upset because they're taking their bad day out on you, or they're still upset because they feel you don't care about them. These can last much longer because the fight revealed bad blood, but didn't do anything to address it.

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    Do other languages have similar acronyms to 'tbh', 'imo', 'smh', etc?
  • A French one is common enough that it's used in English- "Répondez, s'il vous plaît" (Respond, if you please) is where we get RSVP. "SVP" is also sometimes used as a shorthand for "please", at least in Quebecois.

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    Is this a vertebra?
  • They sell them cut like that as dog treats, with the hole packed with food. Probably either dragged out as a treat for some camper's dog or scavenged by wildlife and abandoned when the good stuff was gone.

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    Who is your favorite MTG artist?
  • I'm terrified to respond. Every time I find an artist I like it seems like they turn out to be a completely garbage person. Therese Nielsen, Seb McKinnon, Noah Bradley....

    Jeremy Wilson, Magali Villeneuve, and Johannes Voss are probably my highest ranking active artists right now, but now I'm looking forward to finding out one is an actual cannibal or something.

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    Most Canadians changing clocks to spring forward for daylight time
  • I truly do not care even one little bit about whether it stays on daylight time or standard time, I just want to never have to perform this absurd little ritual ever again.

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    How come running hard (especially when out of shape) makes your lungs feel like they are on fire?
  • Could be exercise-induced asthma? I get this as well and only found out it wasn't a common affliction a few weeks ago, when it was pointed out that this might be a cause. For me at least, after a while the pain gets so bad that every time I swallow it feels like my throat doesn't want to reopen.

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    Imagine a furnace that heats the whole neighbourhood, not just your home
  • Vancouver has a steam heating system around Gastown, which is what powers the famous steam-powered clock there (at least since they repaired it).

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    Mathematicians finally solved Feynman’s “reverse sprinkler” problem
  • The big question then becomes: "is that behaviour inherent to all systems like this, or just this one?" Like, if you go to the store, buy a basic sprinkler, and then test it and it behaves exactly opposite to how you might expect it to. Or it does something completely unexpected, like phases into another dimension and starts pumping strawberry jam. Your next step shouldn't be to say "Oh, weird, I guess that's that." You'd start knocking down variables. Is it the same with every sprinkler or just this one? Does the amount of suction applied affect it? If I replace the water with something else does the outcome change?"

    If you're doing research like this, you're kind of expected to do the same sort of elaboration even if the result of a basic experiment conforms precisely to your hypothesis, because the question isn't if any given sprinkler setup behaves in this way, it's about whether this is a universal phenomenon across all similar setups. Because there's an xkcd for everything, it's this.

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    How to Use Dungeons & Dragons' Most Terrifying Homebrew Monster (False Hydra)
  • I've found that in general it doesn't matter. If the party gets in their head that it's a False Hydra, then they will typically ignore or justify the discrepancy.

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  • Each commander deck I own now has got an NFC tag linking it to the Moxfield decklist. With a quick scan, anyone borrowing my decks or just curious has a quick and easy way to see what's in the box! Really easy, and I thought it was a cool idea so I wanted to share.

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