Someone pointed out that capitalism loves subscriptions and rentals. They can sell you a widget, sure, but then they only get money once. If they can rent you a widget, then they get money forever.

AI is a path for rent skills to people. You don’t need to learn to write python or learn Spanish. Just pay for LLM access. Rent the skill.

It is extremely dystopian.

Unfortunately, most people don’t care about much of anything. You could tell them, with undeniable proof, that every AI search kills a puppy, and most people would be like “well puppies die anyway and I always use Google, so…”

Kind of a big topic so I’m not sure where to focus.

A friend of mine has ADHD and we were talking about it. Specifically about why she always has dishes in her sink. She said what happens is she goes to do the dishes. She’ll wash one. Realize it’s the dish she had popcorn in, and she needs to clean the popcorn machine. She puts down the dish, and goes over to the popcorn machine. She goes to unplug it, and realizes the power strip it’s plugged into is kind of shitty. She’s looking up new power strips online, and no dishes are washed.

Contrary, I do my dishes. I wash one. I realize it’s the one I had popcorn in. I note I should clean that, too, later. I wash the next dish. I wash the next dish. I continue until the dishes are clean. I’m thinking about stuff but I’m still on task.

I don’t know if her experience is representative.

No. Many other things you can do have a bigger impact on dating success, without any real downsides.

It’s very common to need to work hard to find relationships. That’s not going away.

Also at 26 you’re still very young. You have a lot of time to keep rolling the dice on meeting new people.

Privately owned centralized platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are a recipe for disaster. So I left.

A. This is from 2022

B. Yes. Obviously. Anyone who doesn’t understand car-first culture is a nightmare has no business making policy decisions

Did you mean “should” or “should not” because you wrote “should” but then I think you meant to say they should be nationalized.

I think Jane Jacobs figured this out in 1961.

There’s always foot traffic by me and I wouldn’t want it otherwise.

Now if we could get rid of on street parking and put in separated bike lanes…

For one thing, tech bros are stupid. They’re the kind of stupid where they think they have all the answers, and don’t know what they don’t know. So sometimes they’re completely sincere when they think they have a genius new idea (eg: a small private room where you can make a phone call. And maybe we can just put a phone in there, in case you don’t have yours charged or whatever. And then we can charge a fee. A phone booth. That’s a phone booth.)

But sometimes they do know the idea already exists, but they’re selfish, capitalist shit heads. They don’t want to make a better world. They want to make a profit. If they can run a “bus” service, drive all the other competitors out of business, and suck up all the money from a handful of people? That’s a win. That’s better than actually getting people where they need to go. People who live in out of the way routes? Fuck 'em, not profitable. People in wheel chairs? Not enough of them to justify the cost of making the buses accessible.

Alito is such a shithead I’m suspicious of anything he says.

Some other games use other terms. Like wod uses “storyteller”.

GM is the generic term

Are they going to keep voting for Republicans? Then they are really quite foolish.

Sometimes I ask them to give me a summary of the problem before the call, so I can have some context.

Sometimes if I’m lucky they’ll rubber duck themselves into a solution.

But sometimes it just helps me context switch to whatever they’re going to talk about.

The kind of scene where one person is excited to meet a fan and the other just liked the shirt can be so awkward and sad for everyone involved :(

But sometimes you make friends anyway!

I (~40 year old dude) had a similar thought when I saw this post. I like spaceslug a lot (and I’m wearing one of their tshirts right now!) but I don’t really know individual songs. Lemanis is a great album and Memorial has some good tracks, but names? Uhhh

I’m going to assume this is DND 5e, but this advice is system agnostic

Add objectives to your scenes that aren’t “kill everyone else”.

Add traps and environmental hazards to your scenes. Add enemies they can’t kill.

Add a third faction that has its own goals

They need to get books out of the library before it burns down, while the crazed wizard and his fire elementals are doing a ritual that’s going to make things worse for everyone.

The mansion is haunted, and this ball room in particular. Anyone who steps on the dance floor and doesn’t dance is accosted by angry ghosts.

The room is filling with water. There are a series of levers to control the water. There are priceless works of macguffin that will be damaged by the water.

Each egg host killed explodes into a mist of parasites, potentially infecting everyone nearby. Some enemies don’t care about being infected.

Security just wants everyone out, both the PCs and the cultists they’re fighting. Security has powerful control abilities- a fire hose to push people, a sonic weapon to prone people. (Don’t stun your players or prevent them from actually playing on their turn, but move them around and add costs to some actions)

Several NPCs are channeling spells. They are individually weak, but spread out. Each spell that completes adds consequences and complications. Perhaps they affect the current scene (eg: blow a hole in the wall allowing demons from outside to flow in) or maybe it affects the plot (they conjure a plague upon the player’s home city)

Yeah this is why facts and evidence aren’t that persuasive. We’re all emotional first. All of us

Oh, I personally agree. I want my players engaged and adding flavor to the world. If I didn’t, I’d be better off writing a book.

But I used to be more of a “you’re having fun wrong” jerk in my youth, so I make extra effort now to be clear that something might not be for me, it’s okay if you’re all having harmless fun with it. ( I still struggle when people tell me about their game of modern day vampires doing political intrigue run in D&D 5e instead of Vampire, but we all have our foibles. )

I discovered a couple years ago that some players hate being given any creative control over the setting. They’re extremely passive and want to be told a story. that’s a valid way to play, but very alien to me.

When I had a wizard character mention his wizard school I let him color in a lot of details. I’d intervene if it was badly breaking established canon (eg: we said it’s in a remote desert and now you want it to be in a coastal city), but generally it’s great.

Right. We could argue details but that’s more or less acceptable to me.

But getting to somewhere like that from here is a real uphill battle.

I’ve posted it a bunch lately but it really does feel like people hate all the pieces of capitalism without realizing they’re all connected.

This feels like an origin story for a Punisher reboot.