Should’ve Luigi’d the boss.

Words aren’t likely going to change minds anymore.

Right. You can’t pick the lesser evil in the election today, then go do nothing, and expect good outcomes.

Harm reduction has a place but it’s not the whole solution

Any modern robin hood would be vilified and most people would believe it.

Monogamy often allows some less healthy facets of people flourish. Sometimes people will be like “oh I’m just so jealous I can’t help it. I don’t like when he plays soccer on that co-ed community team, so I don’t let him”. Like, what. That’s so immature and untrusting.

At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.

Every time I see this I think about opportunity costs. What got skipped in favor of this dubious effort?

ICQ was a key part of my realization that most people are lazy, short-sighted, idiots.

Everyone I knew wanted to use AIM. ICQ had better features (offline messaging, style overrides, you could change your name without changing your account, file transfers worked better, etc etc). But no one cared.

It’s like how people won’t get off facebook or reddit. Sometimes you have to have a little inconvenience for the greater long term benefit.

Heh. A typo where I meant drive, but it’s funny so I’m going to leave it

Meanwhile, in the city I just get on the train. Going out and then having to drink your drunk/tired/etc self home is miserable.

I kind of hope that will have the bonus effect of making the ownership class ease up on return-to-office. Sure, have your executive meeting in-person. Oh shit, someone flew a drone in and it exploded, shooting nails everywhere and killing half the c-suite? Shit. Anyway. We’ll be working from home until at least they clear the blood out of the carpets.

(Though realistically, they’d make workers go in physically while being remote themselves. But maybe someone will bomb their house. No mercy for the ultra-rich.)

Maybe we should put the prosecutors to death instead.

People should organize. If management demands that people go back into the office for nonsense reasons (eg: control, spite), management should be removed. I don’t care if that’s because they resign, or because 20 of us showed up at their house just before dawn for a surprise party.

I don’t know PBTA well but I believe so.

Basically, every scene and character can have ‘aspects’, which are things that are true about them. They’re free form. Sometimes they’re just there, like if you’re in a bar it might have “Bubbling with drunk banter” or “Loud Pop Punk Soundtrack”. Aspects can then affect what makes sense in the scene. “Loud Pop Punk” can make it easier to move without being heard, but harder to make a speech because no one can hear you, for example.

You can also explicitly create aspects. Turn off the jukebox and the aspect might change to “Weirdly Quiet Bar” or whatever. In a fight, you can use the “create an advantage” move. That’s for stuff that isn’t about taking them out of the conflict right now, but setting things up. Like pushing them off balance, disarming them, screaming “LOOK! A DISTRACTION!” whatever. If the roll comes out if your favor, you can create an aspect that’s true and can also be invoked for a numeric bonus on a dice roll. So if you pants the guy you’re fighting, he can’t run full speed to chase you because his pants are down. You can also invoke that if you want to kick his ass, for a bonus on the dice roll.

These are all free form and it’s up to the group to decide what it actually means. Most groups probably wouldn’t let you invoke “I’m literally on fire!!” as a bonus if you’re trying to sneak through a crowd.

Typically, as I understand it, you’re either trying to take them out of the fight or trying to create advantages for side of the conflict. On a dramatic success on trying to take someone out, you can also create a small advantage.

Maybe something that reflects on all the loss. Dead from COVID, chaos from government programs shutting down, allies betrayed, and a mirror in the center that says something like “you did this”.

If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

This is the best approach I’ve found.

Player says, “I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla’s hatred of our common foe, and that’s why she should sell us these explosives for cheap” and doesn’t have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.

Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn’t do anything I need to discard that. I can’t, in most systems, then be like “ok he just got stabbed in the leg he’s off balance. I can take advantage of that!”. It’s just noise.

Some people have been like “You just don’t have any imagination!” but it’s not that. It’s that the flavor stuff is often actively not true, and it’s tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are fine.

(Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)

I think the “I move and attack” stuff can get boring, especially if it’s slow. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you’re basically playing a board game, and that’s fine. I start to lose patience when you get the “can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can’t cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my action? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them.” mode.

I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it’ and “DM decides”. If you’re at the noble’s ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there’s not really a lot of structure there. It can be fine to just “talk it out, man”, but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I’m sidelined.

Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system.

But there’s also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your words? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don’t get to go on.

I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I’d rather have it than the aforementioned “real life sales guy hogs the spotlight” problem.

I suppose you this touches on how I’m in the US, where everything is skewed towards insane nonsense. It would be extremely unusual to find a conservative of any sort here that would support anything remotely anti-car, for example. Even if it would save money.

Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn’t a utopia where people don’t need to labor for survival.

Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn’t matter that much. But we’re not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.