This is one of those “technically true, but missing the bigger picture” pedantic gotchas.

Yes, Hercules is the Roman name not the Greek name. Yes, barbarian as a term originally meant not-Greek or not-Greek-enough for some Greeks.

But it’s not like you’re going for full historical accuracy already (or even could if you wanted to). It’s just a subjective scale of how accurate do you want to be in what ways that you think are important.

You’re not going to speak ancient or koine Greek when playing the game. You’re playing game rules that aren’t based solely on Greek mythological cosmology. Barbarian isn’t a term in DnD for non-Greeks the same way chai tea in English doesn’t mean “tea tea,” but rather “a spiced Indian tea.” Words have multiple meanings. Those meanings can change over time. Those words can have a different meaning in a different language even if adopted from the same source.

I prefer writing short stories because it prevents you from wasting a lot of time with possibly interesting but ultimately superfluous world-building details. There’s a balance to be struck between keeping the story moving and describing enough to let the reader’s imagination take over and fill in their own details, even subconsciously.

I’ve taken to starting stories in media res more often because it keeps the attention long enough to build curiosity and drop in the details as you go along.

The older I get, the more I find I lose patience reading novels that spend too long with excess dialogue that ultimately doesn’t drive the plot anywhere, serving as unfulfilled promises or red herrings at best.

Even some otherwise good writers will let you get halfway or more through a novel before you understand where the plot is going. I wonder how much some novelists add primarily due to expectations for longer word counts, the way broadcast TV shows were constrained by half hour or hour long slots with commercial breaks and that dictated the flow.

It may not encompass all that you’re referring to, but false dilemma is the informal fallacy they’re using when they artificially try to limit the perception of choices.

Yeah, that makes sense for your frustration. I get stabbed under my fingernails trying to take PETG remnants off the textured beds. I typically just deal with it because the solutions I’ve found are more time-consuming, but I guess it might depend on how much.

I’ve had people suggest heating the bed as high as it will go. PETG’s glass transition temperature is usually less than 90° C. I’ve seen some people print over bits to try to merge them to make them pull up easier, but that just seems like a waste of material to me. I generally don’t care for solutions that involve applying liquids or gels to the bed.

What material and what kind of plate? PEI textured plate or smooth plate? PLA, PETG, something else?

I asked the instructor of a lichen class I took a couple months ago and this was her response to the photo:

It’s just moss with some dry spots in it. Mosses don’t lichenize; the photosynthesizer is going to be either an algae, a cyanobacteria, or both.

Not what you’re asking for, but I’d recommend using a laser cutter with a sheet of acrylic if you can get access to one since you’ll get a better quality stencil than 3D printing one. A vinyl cutter like a Cricut or Silhouette machine might also be able to do a better job of it on something like chipboard if you don’t have access to a laser cutter.

“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.

You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.

But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word “incorrectly” but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically.

I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.

The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn’t sufficient.

But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.

This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it’s so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don’t know any better.

Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren’t up to the standards they claim.

Les Québécois sont entrés dans la conversation.

Seems like a variant of hypercorrection.

Yeah, I’m prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It’s great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.

Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don’t make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem “through faith” but its meaning is from the larger phrase “deceiving through faith.”

My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it’s more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.

So in this case is the moss the photosynthesizer of the lichen symbiotic network in conjunction with fungi and yeast…?

Orko from He-Man

Definitely not the world’s first AI generated font. I imagine there are many out there already. Not everyone is likely advertising it though.

It’s a relatively limited set of characters and the design is nothing new. Dripping fonts have been a thing for a while.

Looking at the font closer shows where an LLM can’t replicate human effort well enough yet - the kerning is non-existent.

The space character in the set is blank:

The punctuation is disproportionate in size to the letters:

Which brings us back to the fact that you need a human with expertise/experience to understand that the LLM isn’t performing as well as a human creator, just (potentially) faster and more recklessly, and to fix the issues with the output to make it actually usable/functional, which just feels like correcting someone else’s homework for them while they get the credit for the result.

In my makerspace, we’ve printed using the ends of rolls just to make random multicolor prints. I also recently bought a cheap 3D printing pen for repairing prints or other random purposes, so that’s also a good use for the ends of a roll.