A good post.

I personally find DND unsatisfying for many reasons (little to no degree of success, static magic system that encourages hoarding, the primary defense is all or nothing avoidance, very coarse progression, some character concepts are simply not representable, etc)

But what is even more annoying than that is when players respond with “but you can just change the rules!”. I know! That’s true of any pen and paper game! It’s not some unique property of DND. But sometimes I don’t want to do the work of designing a system, and I almost never want to play some stranger’s pre-alpha homebrew.

This supports my hypothesis that most players “playing” DND could easily swap to some other rule system and not even know. Many of them would probably be happier in other systems.

On the one hand, this might help fence sitters that are like “there’s no content there”.

On the other, I just don’t personally care for a stream of random images like Instagram et al do.

It’s not “retire and live a life of luxury” money, at least in many parts of the world.

It’s a lot of money in terms of paying down debt and covering rent for a while, though.

Poor emotional regulation.

Someone speaking another language makes them afraid (maybe they’re talking about me) or feel bad (I only know one language am I stupid?). Getting angry at the other person is easier on the ego than healthier options.

I dunno man. I’ve had a lot of conversations with players that go like “do you think your character is the first to come up with this hijink? If it works, why doesn’t the entire setting revolve about this infinite damage trick you’re trying to sell me?”

Like, if it was as easy as casting Charm Person on the king to become the new ruler, other people would already be doing that. Therefore, there must be reasons why it doesn’t work.

My parents are difficult. Not the worst people and not monsters, but at many times unpleasant.

Plus it was a house in the suburbs. Not ideal for socializing or culture.

And lastly, living with parents in the suburbs would be huge negatives for dating.

All it takes is one cop to be like “he was resisting arrest and I feared for my life so I had to shoot him 17 times in the back”.

“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Yep.

Management is often out of touch and full of shit

Sounds like a good start

I don’t like to think of people as immutably good or bad, but I get what you meant.

There’s a bunch of factors.

• are they honest?
• are they kind?
• do they care about things other than themselves?
• do they try to make the world better?

So, someone who lies, is cruel, doesn’t care about anyone else, and leaves the world a mess is being a pretty bad person.

Someone who just keeps their head down, goes to work, and is polite to people they meet is kind of middling.

The cap was in place because the Social Security benefit doesn’t increase above the that income.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a good reason for the cap to exist. I expect it’s a compromise to get rich people and idiots on board.

I’m not rich to the point of no longer needing to labor, but I did hit the social security cap one year. I was pissed when I learned why my take home jumped up. I would have rather kept paying.

It’s selfish to want to keep a little more of your vast wealth like you describe. That’s cartoon villainy.

It’s kind of insane to me that there’s an annual cap on social security payments. If your salary is high enough, you stop paying into it partway through the year. That’s ass-backwards. You shouldn’t pay anything for the first chunk of money, and then pay more as you make more.

Why aren’t the pro-brexit people being shamed? Stripped of their wealth and made to spend the rest of their miserable lives doing community service?

It’s always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.

Even the idealized stuff of “buy a house on one income” was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, “and then the white people burned down our house” were all realities.

This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.

This was a favorite for a long time, by the high water marks: https://thehighwatermarks.bandcamp.com/track/suicide

It feels like suicide or something worse

I’ve got this curse on me

It seems I only dream about the things

that shouldn’t come to be

always I try to find a way it feels

it seems to real to me

I just can’t let it go

I’ll let you know

Just what it means to me

As days go past and it all moves too fast

And I won’t think about it

And when I do it all comes back to you

And I don’t want to change that

Markdown fornatting is really tedious to do on the phone so I’m not going to fix that more.

But the song sounds upbeat, but it’s lyrics are a sad loop they want to break and also don’t want to.

There was discussion about what the NYC subway announcements should say instead of “ladies and gentlemen”.

My vote was “listen up you little shits, [this train is going express until canal Street or whatever]”

I think they went with “everyone”, however.

Depends on the app. Some let you see all versions, I think.

41.3 / 50

Kind of hard, but partly confounded by not knowing the best way to use the sliders. Once you start messing around and seeing other colors, I start forgetting the original.

From the copy I thought it would be harder, and more people would be scoring badly, but the comments here seem to show most people near my score. But maybe only people who did well are commenting.