­xkcd thread

D&D has been having a bit of a renaissance recently, which is why these alignment charts have been popping up so much.

That said, as a D&D player since the 70s, I have yet to see one that is more than mildly amusing.

In 1/10,000 scale world, are air molecules 1/10,000 smaller than life as well? Because if so, they’ll be no damn use to your lungs or your metabolism in general even if you respire them.

That’s the problem with overthinking charmingly silly hypotheticals. :confused:

I’m thinking a snorkel that goes down to the thicker air?

Agreed. The designations were systematic yet ???

As to your carton mayhem, do you cut the carton to have a 2x3 array of egg holders, or a 6x1 array of egg holders? I can be pretty anal-retentive about compacting, repacking, and optimally organizing things, but this is way beyond my personal pale. Are you OK? :slight_smile:

Thank you. Still useless. Everybody publishes some filler sometimes. IMO this episode was that.

In the SF classic Fantastic Voyage (at least in the book adaptation) there was much discussion of how “miniaturized light” interacted with the normal-scale world. Lots of hand-waving is required to get past these issues.

Of course, just as one can build a model railroad that still works, one can build a 1:10000 model of the physical earth and populate it with fake underground lava, minature cities, oceans, mountains and such. If you built it stoutly enough real normal-sized people could indeed walk around on it, wade in the mid-oceans, etc.

If installed in a vacuum chamber with just a smidgen of air added you could even simulate the full atmosphere. To lethal effect even using real-world sized molecules.

I actually really liked the egg one, as someone who frequently argues with my wife about the optimal egg-removal strategy. And I felt like the descriptions were close enough to the spirit of the D&D classifications to be amusing (although I would have switched chaotic good with chaotic neutral).

I too have had the egg debate. Some topics are universal when you share a house with somebody else. :wink:

But when the labels are meaningless and the examples seemingly arbitrary samples of a much larger space, there’s just not much there there.

OTOH I suppose, like any joke, you need to be in the target audience to “get it”. Speaking as a non-D&D person …

For me he could as well have used certain letters of the alphabet where the joke was that they were the letters of the spectral types of stars. I probably wouldn’t have recognized the pattern, but if I did I’d have gotten the joke. And if not, not.

2x3. It takes, I dunno, 15-30 seconds to cut the carton in half that way? Basically, I do shit like that if it’s easy, and say ‘screw it’ otherwise unless I’m absolutely desperate for space.

I’m just interested to learn that there are apparently lots of other people who take eggs out of the carton in any particular order. I’d thought it was just me.

(I seem to be Lawful Good about eggs; unless I’m combining eggs from cartons of two different dates to save space, in which case I’ll go for the Neutral Good arrangement.)

Speaking as a D&D person…

Many arguments have been had as to what the alignment system means, and whether it is descriptive or prescriptive. About the only agreement is on lawful good and chaotic evil, with everything else in between being a matter of opinion.

The joke that is to be had in the comic is on the chaotic evil part, as every other alignment has some sort of way of dealing with the eggs, the chaotic evil character just murders them all.

Anyway, the chart’s got CE wrong. My wife puts the egg shells back in the carton. That’s chaotic evil.

Agree it’s chaotic and evil, but beyond that … WTF???

I’ve seen a lot of people do that. They expect to just toss them out eventually together with the carton, and it probably keeps the sticky bits of egg white on the shells contained; though I don’t think I ever asked anybody why they were doing that. I just asked them to cut it out in my house, because I return the cartons to the egg suppliers for re-use and nobody wants them if they’re all sticky with egg white.

I would ask them what other garbage they store in their fridge for a week or two before throwing out. Color me amazed. But thank you for the enlightenment.

When I used to work in restaurants, and had big crates of eggs, 15 dozen, IIRC, I would do that when I had to crack a few dozen eggs.

But at home I only do that if I am using the last few of a carton.

I think it was indeed usually when either they were making a lot of eggs at once so that at least one carton was being emptied, or were finishing off a previously started carton.

Does she put them in such that you can’t tell that they’re empty shells until you try to pull them out?

My brother does that, and when we were living in the same house, that was one of my pet peeves.

That’s like something from the Far Realms, the Lovecraftian expanse beyond the known planes of existence.

Let’s see, the Earth has a circumference of 25,000 miles, so in the 1/100,000 world, its circumference is 1/4 mile.

Hardly need to worry about limited cell coverage when nobody’s more than 220 yards from where you’re standing. :smiley: