Independent Bookstores Around The Country Have A Particularly Clever Lifeline, One Perfectly Suited To

Thanks to Bookshop, There Is No Reason to Buy Books on Amazon Anymore

Independent bookstores, and booksellers, get a lifeline just when they need it most.

Independent bookstores around the country have a particularly clever lifeline, one perfectly suited to the unprecedented moment we find ourselves in. The strange part? It came into being just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, and before the bookstores started closing up shop wondering if they’d reopen at all.

The lifeline in question is called Bookshop. 

In simple terms, it’s a super clean, user-friendly online bookstore whose raison d’être is supporting independent bookstores — not simply with exposure or resources (though that’s certainly a factor), but with cold hard cash…

It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

hello dear physics explainer, can you explain to me how/why photons are both a wave form and a particle?

oh that’s easy. light isn’t a wave or a particle.

I mean that’s it’s not a wave, and it is also not a particle.

light is light. it is a strange substance that has a lot of strange properties. we can model the behavior of light in a few different ways, however. If we are working with light and we are interested in interference, then it is useful to model it as a wave and treating it as a wave will predict its behavior reliably. If we are trying to do something with the photoelectric effect, then it’s far more useful and predicative to model light as a particle.

think of it like map projections. this is the mercator projection:

it wildly distorts geography the closer you get to the poles, so it is not useful for finding the area of any sea or landmass; however, the lines of longitude are perfectly straight, which makes it a very useful map for navigation.

This is the Goode-homolosine projection:

This is quite a good map for accurately finding the area of landmasses. But because the lines of longitude point in different directions across the map, it’s worthless for navigation.

asking why light is both a wave and a particle is like asking why the Earth is both Mercator-shaped and Goode-homolosine shaped. It isn’t. It’s not. The earth is round. We just need multiple models in order to interpret it two dimensionally.

photons are quantum objects. the only way to accurately model them in totality is via quantum theory. but that isn’t useful for most of the things you’d want to measure photons for, because it’s much too complex. wave-photons and particle-photons are both practical simplifications of quantum-dimension objects.

We all know this site is US-user heavy, but I wanna know how many are vs aren't from the land of capitalism.

When a “funny” dude likes you and anytime he sees you anywhere he will be like “yoooo wassup it’s Jelissa!” (Or whatever) like “omg Miranda is here whaaaat” for literally no reason why do they do that