partiallycyber

I read a really excellent breakdown of this years ago that I'll attempt to paraphrase:

Modern-day guns are the endpoint of centuries of evolution! Evolution that, at nearly every step, is trumped by either magic or a simple bow and arrow.

Which isn't to say that guns can't or wouldn't exist in a fantasy world; "metal tube with an explosive that shoots something out" is fairly intuitive design.

But that basically gets us to, what, blunderbusses? Or maybe something even less functional, I'm no historian. Point being that, in a world with magic, innovating on a boomstick that has an effective range of ten meters may not be an attractive use of time when you have other, better options.

N

Monster Hunter: World + Iceborne was on sale so I snagged it and I've enjoyed it quite a bit. Runs just fine on the deck and even though the game is clearly intended for multiplayer it works totally fine as a solo game.

The main issue I had with the game is that there's no pause button (as mentioned, it's a game oriented towards multiplayer) which isn't really compatible with my current life but with Decky Loader and the Pause Game plugin installed I can easily pause the game mid-quest without worrying about failing the time limit.

Disclaimer: I'm not well versed in astrophysics.

Ok, so: you know how Earth is part of the solar system? And the solar system is part of a large collection of stars and planets called a galaxy?

Well, there's lots of galaxies out there! And scientists for a long time have been trying to figure out how they formed - how did all the stars get close to each other? Why aren't they just randomly drifting around?

Currently, everyone believes that there's this magic stuff called "dark matter" that pulled the stars together to make galaxies. Kinda like how magnets pull things close to them!

And because galaxies are so big it would take a long time to pull the stars close together! Which means young galaxies would look less bright because the stars aren't all close together yet, like they are with older galaxies.

So that's what everyone believes.

But we're getting pictures from a really strong telescope that's showing us that young galaxies are brighter than we expected! Which is weird and exciting because it means that young galaxies might have been pulled together faster than we used to think! And our old theories about galaxy creation might be wrong!

There's a theory that explains how galaxies could come together quickly, without dark matter, but it doesn't really fit with many other theories we have about how the world works, so lots of people are thinking really hard to figure out how they might fit together.

And that's what science is all about! Finding out new information that shows you that you were wrong in the past, and using that information to figure out new ways to act and think in the future!

Why this is important:

Given what we see in the cosmic microwave background, the first light we can detect after the inflation of the universe, structures can only grow so large within our current models. Yet this, and other similar discoveries, appear to be larger than our current models predict.

Kids open their mouths when their heads are upside down - great way to quickly investigate what exactly they're chewing on

Consider a Magic Bullet! Or something similar - there are a bunch of small blenders out there designed for single-portion smoothies that fall in the $20-$40 range.