“secret”?

Yeah , if consoles were a good financial deal maybe I’d buy them. They’re not. Steam is good value for the money.

If I was magically in charge, I would make it so if you got an unwanted text or call you report it and the phone company has to pay you like $10.

They don’t deal with this problem because they only care about profit.

“Exactly”. “Truly”. “Literally, in the traditional sense not the post modern sense where it means emphatically or figuratively”

. I’m a bit surprised the Christian following hasn’t gone there.

Many Christians are theologically incompetent. They don’t know their scripture. They just like feeling good.

People mandating return to office are climate criminals, all. They should be sentenced to picking up litter and other community service for the rest of their lives.

Living without a car in NYC is pretty great. That’s whole categories of expenses I don’t have.

Took the train last night to an event, walked to a nearby bar, walked to get some pizza, took the bus home. Easy-peasy.

Someone in the friend group took a car (Lyft) home, but I can’t imagine wanting to spend like $30 to save maybe 20 minutes in that situation.

In general, you need to make the right thing to do easy and the bad thing to do hard.

If taking the bus was fast and free, and driving meant you had to file a request to get a day license and drive no faster than 25mph, people wouldn’t drive so much.

I remember talking to this one woman who was like “I don’t get polyamory and non-monogamy. Why don’t you just cheat?”

Because I have standards and care about other people, which seems not to be true for many people.

I’m reminded of that post that showed all the people in the “boycott cod” group playing call of duty.

The bulk of video game players seem to be feckless marshmallow eaters.

I’m happy with my linux machine. Consoles would have to be a lot cheaper to be tempting. Or I’d have to make a lot more money.

Yep. Place I’m at is in some sort of “hiring freeze”. They’re not replacing people who left. They also told the many (probably not strictly legal) contractors that they won’t be renewing them. It’s absurd.

I remember once at a diner with some friends I ordered pancakes and orange juice without looking at the menu, and was pissed when the orange juice was like $10. Now I always check.

“Most of the time, once people have lived with it, the opposition softens,”

That’s because people, even me, are kind of stupid and unimaginative. They don’t like change for primitive reasons.

Taking public transport is not something that you do because you are poor,” said López-Aparicio. “It is something that you do for the common wealth of the whole society

If only we could get that idea in people’s heads.

Good. Fuck all this ai slop.

“there’s toxic, radioactive, sludge all over the front yard! What the fuck this is terrible! We need to get rid of that”

“There’s a huge pile of old tires in the back yard, too.”

“Yeah that’s no good. At least my kids can play on it like a jungle gym. The sludge though, we need to fix asap”

“So you love tires and garbage??”

Wages are not up. I’m not going to spend that much money on a redundant toy. Pay me more then I’ll think about it.

I have discovered that a gentle nudge makes them stop snoring. This might not be universal but it has been working for me.

Otherwise, white noise can help. Like a fan or something

I had a really fun game of Vampire back in like 2016. I’d love to have another go at that, or Mage. The dice pool system always felt simple but exciting. Characters started out competent and being able to buy individual skills or powers was more satisfying than waiting for whole levels.

I’ve heard good things about Delta green, but never looked into it.

Alas, my college days where “hey you look nerdy you wanna play vampire?” are long gone.

For the first point, you could use a random generator and make it pick from a Gaussian or Poisson or other probability distribution depending on the situation.

Many RPGs that aren’t so closely related to DND use a dice pool. Instead of like 1d20, you might roll 3d6. Now you’re more likely to get an average result. Only one way to roll 3, but a bunch of ways to roll 10.

The nWoD games you roll d10s and count how many come up 8,9, 10. Very fast, and once you’re good at a task you know you’ll generally succeed. It’s more a question of how well you’ll succeed and how strong the opposition is.

I’m not mathy enough to talk beyond that, but I find it much more satisfying.

I hear pathfinder 2e is a big improvement, but still has some of the stuff I’m sick of.

• rolling a single die means flat probability. Equal odds of getting the worst or best possible outcome
• spells per day is anti-fun for me. I want to do cool stuff, not feel pressured to hold onto it “in case I need it later”
• class and level is very coarse, and makes some concepts impractical, impossible, or awkward to execute
• I’m not as interested in “numbers go up big” anymore, and that’s kind of the default.
• I’m not really in the mood for fantasy. I’d rather do modern day occult