Not sure whether you meant to express disbelief or just to be silly, but you did make me wonder if this meme was legit or not. It is!

Geoffrey Farrow at Raphael, a jeweller on the other side of the street, can only just bring himself to sell lab-grown diamonds. “They are synthetic,” he said. “Lab-grown sounds exotic, but it’s created – they make it by the buckets. There’s no history to it. The price is going to go down further and further.”

I find that a very interesting perspective. I prefer the idea of something we made with human ingenuity as opposed to some thing you dug out of the dirt, probably with a shoddily-hidden special history of slavery and tears, and before that, just sitting in the ground like a bunch of other boring things. The history of a lab-grown is entirely mine and my hypothetical partner's to create.

If I was a diamond person anyways. I'd be more worried about losing the expensive ring somehow and worrying over it, and would much rather buy the cheapest thing that can still socially function as "look, I am married, don't hit on me!" without having to wear some ugly shirt that says that. Ideally both me and my hypothetical partner would just forgo expensive rings (and don't get me wrong, I'm adamantly not a T-shirt and jeans person, I like to dress up, I have just never been a ring person) and spend it on something else we would both like.

For those who do not share my opinions on wedding rings, which is valid, I am also glad to hear lab-grown prices are down so people can still get that ring they love without breaking the bank and without supporting De Beers.

Thanks for the description. I don't follow award ceremonies so just going by the title it is really unclear why is this supposed to be uplifting, and comes off as just typical celebrity news. The description tells me neatly, and lets me click on the article if I want further elaboration.

I wonder how many people actually tried to enter through this door because of the sign.

Epic Games, prompted by a message from the creator of the dating sim Hatoful Boyfriend (in which all the dateable characters are birds), says that they are “looking into” why the creator has not received any royalties for the game in two years.

Headline is misleading because not all the dateable characters are pigeons.

I'd trust a hairdresser when it comes to hair questions… EDIT: Turns out in real life, they did trust the hairdresser, the fact about sewing is true but the overall story is dramatized.

Bad at styling my long hair but I have definitely tried and from what I did in the few hair tutorials I followed, and from knitting, I absolutely believe that making these complicated, pretty, structured knots/loops was done by sewing.

This wasn't actually published in the journal as nobody ever paid the fee to have it published, and considering its contents I'm not sure if it actually fits, so feel free to remove. It's also the only academic paper I personally know that fits here that I haven't had trouble tracking down, and I wanted to share it with anyone who might not know of it yet.

man I always love seeing these posts, idk why but DontDeadOpenInside type stuff just makes me laugh

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

It’s 10:15pm, Eastern Standard Time.

The Sha of Anger dies, as it has done every 15 minutes for the past 10 years.

I stand among two hundred players of all classes, waiting for the second it takes for the game to assign loot with bated breath.

The loot window continues its animation for a half second longer than usual, telling me I’ve been awarded a piece of loot and the game is now rolling a second die to determine what I’ll receive from my class-specific table.

The window flashes to display the piece of loot that’s been selected for me.

I have received Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent.

While I appreciate improvements (disclaimer: I'm not Anna), as far as I know, things pad around floors. I checked that same website for "pat" to make sure I wasn't missing some way that word could be used to describe an animal walking. I am pretty certain cats pad across floors, not pat across them.

Although "padding" is apparently "walking without noise" according to that dictionary I linked, so that might not be the best replacement either considering the sound of the cat walking wakes up the speaker. (I knew the "walking" part but not the "without noise" part until I made this reply.) Then again, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pad is more generous to us here, not requiring the walking be without noise, so maybe it does work.

It’s November 16, 2022, 10:00pm, Eastern Standard Time

After a day of anger, bargaining, and depression (which is honestly hilarious when you remember this is about dressing up virtual paper dolls) the WoW community is moving towards a resigned acceptance that Blizzard will stay silent. The Dracthyr that were lucky enough to kill the Sha in time will keep their mounts, the drop rate will stay as abysmally-low as it’s always been, and the world (of Warcraft) will spin on. For many, the prepatch experience has been soured slightly by the feeling that they’ve just missed their chance to take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Then.

For the second time in as many days.

The unexpected happens.

Blizzard releases a list of hotfixes (small adjustments or bug fixes made to the game outside of a major patch) that went live a few minutes ago.

Buried among them, with no other mention of the chaos that has occurred over the last 24 hours, is one sentence:

“The drop chances for Son of Galleon's Saddle, Reins of the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent, Reins of the Cobalt Primordial Direhorn, Reins of the Thundering Cobalt Cloud Serpent, and Solar Spirehawk have been greatly increased.”

It is not clear what greatly increased means.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s 10:15pm, Eastern Standard Time.

The Sha of Anger dies, as it has done every 15 minutes for the past 10 years.

Two hundred players of all classes (although there are probably a few more Dracthyr, since it never hurts to hope a little) stand around its body. Each waits for the second it takes for the game to assign loot with bated breath.

Two players receive the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent.

The drop rate is ~1%.

After ten years spanning six expansions, the dream of the adventurers that first set foot on the shores of Pandaria so long ago are finally realized.

The Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent is farmable.

“Compared to all else that has happened, it is a small change to the timeline, and one of which I approve.”

-Nozdormu, Dragon Aspect of Time

Epilogue

So what of your humble narrator?

Well, dear reader, it’s not a HobbyDrama post without a little personal investment on the part of the author. For you see I was one of those players that stormed the shores of Pandaria more than ten years ago in hope of securing a Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent of my own.

When the community finally determined just how rare the mount truly was, I gave up on farming it. Instead, like Jibbles or Bodehn or that first Dracthyr, I limited my attempts to the occasional pitstop on my travels. I racked up a few hundred kills between my alts this way over the past 10 years, but like a person buying a Powerball ticket when the pot gets large enough, I had never seen these kills as anything other than a fun shot at a mount I never actually expected to get.

I was among those who suggested blizzard raise the rates to 1% over the years, as I don’t think any reward in a game like WoW should be so rare as to make it unfarmable. But much like with my occasional Sha kill, I never expected these recommendations to bear any fruit.

I was not, sadly, among the garish waves of sacrificial drakes that felled the Sha on that fateful evening of November the 15th. I’d played for about an hour when the patch went live and leveled my Dracthyr through the starting area, but as those second and third Dracthyr were first discovering that something had gone wrong, I was logging off for the evening.

When I woke up the next morning to news that I’d missed a coin toss for a mount I’d wanted for the past decade. I was bummed that I’d missed my chance, but happy for the players that had been luckier than I had. Glitches like these (and the stories that come with them) are part of what make patches fun, and at the end of the day we’re all just trying to make our virtual little paper dolls look as cool as possible. I expected Blizzard would ignore this glitch now that it was fixed. “Exploit early and often.” is a saying in the WoW community for a reason, after all.

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the news that Blizzard had raised the drop rates, even if we didn’t know what they were yet. Like any good researcher I knew the only way to find out our collective odds was to contribute by adding yet another player to the kill data that is so critical to have, so I logged onto my character, flew to Kun-Lai Summit, and waited.

Next and final part here

Pleased to see everyone solving the math problem in the antimeme, I did too!

And for a world where the dinosaurs made good use of the supercontinent…

Feel free to nix this for linking to a website linking to AI-generated stuff and not a real paper. Although I think for the purpose of trying to spout bullshit on purpose as a humorous lesson on bad academic methods, it's okay.

I think the key part is whether it's being done in good faith or bad faith. Sometimes I ask a stupid question on Lemmy, but because I am honestly curious and not trying to get into a fight, and I usually accept the reply to me and don't take it as an invite to get into a debate, I think people can tell I'm not sealioning.

If I replied "source?" for your comment right now, I'd be trolling. I almost certainly know that it is a bad idea to discourage sourcing information, and that should not be something I need a cited source for. That would probably be sealioning. Someone asking for a source on a meme I posted is probably genuinely curious and not sealioning.

And as per usual, judging intent can be difficult, especially when people (including me) come into a forum with my own sets of biases, pieces of knowledge I have that I incorrectly assume that everyone else knows, and absence of knowledge that others incorrectly assume everyone else knows. So people who are not sealioning might get mistaken for it just because they want a source on something they do not know that most people do. I see where you are coming from.

Wow, you identified the entire reason I have avoided meme communities online. Glad to know I wasn't alone in that. Thanks for making this! Now I can add some online humor back into my day.