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RULES (updated 01/22/25)
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The icing is the only part I like - I literally eat the cake separately so that I can maximize the icing-to-cake ratio in a single bite.
This is mostly because frosting is "wet" and offsets how dry the cake is. I dislike the dryness of the cake so much I prefer to eat most of it in one go and get over it, and then enjoy the rest of the cupcake with my preferred 9:1 proportion of icing to cake. π
The world actually did end in 2012.
This is hell.
Nuclear energy is currently the best way to achieve energetic independence until we find out how to maintain a fusion core running for more than 20 minute.
Solar started to beat out nuclear in terms of LCOE a few years ago. We should continue to operate all of our current nuclear reactors as long as it is safe to do so, but planning new builds today given how cheap solar is just doesnt make sense.
You mean fission, but yeah
The "phones are bad and suck your life away" crowd has gotten way too big. Yes, it's easy to waste time on them, but that's just something you gotta learn, like not watching TV series all night. You're a grown up, deal with it. Also maybe you feel bad for spending all that time on your phone just because feeling bad for that feels cool? It's actually your life you can spend it however you want. You don't need to be productive or successful to be a worthy human. Be a lazy shit that plays stupid phone games while on a train to work.
Blessing someone for a sneeze is the most useless human interaction I know of and we should do away with it.
Bless you
Listen here you little shit lol
The contemporary disdain for postmodernism was a Psy op designed to completely destroy philosophy from the inside. And the supposed replacements for post modernism (metamodernism or whatever) were just pop culture millennial distractions that just took attention away from the philosophical issues of the inadequacies of language and crisis of our communications systems. We became stuck in limbo. Cultural conversation dumbed down by useless culture wars articulated in low attention span pop culture commentary and therapy speak.
First-past-the-post voting should be replaced so people can vote outside the two party system with no spoiler effect.
Electoral Reform Videos
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems
DND is not a good universal game system. It's pretty good at being DND, but that's a particular beast that's mostly about resource management.
You can definitely use it for a game about social intrigue, or horror, or modern day anything, but it's not really good at any of that. Like using a hammer to put screws in, you'll probably get something done, and if you're hanging with your friends you'll probably have a good time. But it's a weird tool to reach for.
Personally, I don't think the core of the rules system is very good at all. Flat probability feels weird. Armor as all-or-nothing is weird. Hit and damage being split into two rolls is slow and weird. In the latest edition, making very few choices about your character often feels bad. Levels are a very coarse unit of growth. The magic system somehow manages to make magic not feel like magic- no wonder, no mystery, it's just safe and standardized. I could go on.
But it's mega popular and people are emotionally invested, so there's not much to be done about it. There are dozens of people playing the thousands of other games out there.
Also a lot of people have never played anything else, so their analysis and defense of it is often lacking. Like if I've only ever played baseball, and never even watched any other sports, I wouldn't feel qualified to talk about bowling. But you get people saying like "no you need to wear cleats that's a universal property of sports" when bowling comes up. Like, not every game has six stats. Not every game has attributes like that at all.
And again, if you're having fun with dnd then that's the primary goal achieved. We don't need to maximize fun and efficiency in all things all times. I just think that it would be a good experience to branch out more, even if it's scary, because that will lead to a richer experience overall.
Completely agree, D&D is overly crunchy and I have no interest in a tedious minis wargame in the middle of my roleplaying. The Basic system that Call of Cthulhu was based on is much easier for newcomers to understand with everything being simple percentages, and the system is open-ended enough to make combat as simple or crunchy as you would like - but either way, it's such a better way to facilitate a roleplay gaming session. It's just sad that the only people I know who play tabletop RPGs are so extremely invested in the D&D intellectual property that they won't even consider anything outside of it. I could give a shit less about D&D's worldbuilding and lore, it's not what I love about roleplaying - it's about the collective story we tell and the fun we had along the way.
I feel there's plenty of interest in other RPGs if you go outside the core community. I have never been remotely interested in playing DnD, so I never got a "real RPG gamer" group, because why play anything if you can run Curse of Strahd for the 100th time.
Well, it just so happens that I got my SO to play some Mothership duet sessions with me and it was great. Then some uni friends who were fans of LOTR to play The One Ring... And now I have an ongoing TOR 2e table and a passionate duet player looking to play more horror games (we're starting Delta Green this week). The most common reasons for these people never having played RPGs? "Too many rules and stats" or straight up "DnD is too hard".
We sometimes talk about DnD as some sort of necessary evil, but it's honestly a hindrance. "Normies" get pretty excited about RPGs once they learn there's more than a fantasy setting designed to be the lowest common denominator and sell miniatures
I do believe that DND is a poor first RPG, and creates a weird survivor bias in the hobby. Because it's so popular most people try it as their first RPG, and then some of them hate it. Some of them then think the whole hobby is like that, and then leave.
So the bulk of the people left in the hobby are people who like dnd, or at least tolerate it enough to stick around.
One of my friends has no real interest in fantasy, tactical combat (as much as DND is that), or resource management. They had no interest in DND. But they really liked Vampire.
I keep trying to get people to play fate, but all of these games struggle with finding people who will show up. Everyone seems to be just barely holding it together, and asking them to be creative and present once a week seems like a big request
I love d&d because I grew up with it, but absolutely agree with you. I think that with new players, involving them in the world for roleplay is the most critical part, and character creation with Fate is the best I've seen for someone to pick up and use in 10 minutes.
I love Fate and think it's much more intuitive. DND tends to crush player creativity with a lot of "sorry that's just flavor", and guides players towards "just move and attack".
The resource management is what made bg3 boring to play (and that's my hill to die on).
Vinyl sounds shit. It reintroduces all the issues digital audio solved decades ago. I have heard vinyl rips made with equipment that costs as much as a new bmw and it has constant and frequent quality issues like static. It also has to downgrade audio sometimes to prevent the needle from physically flying out. It is impossible for vinyl to sound as good as the digital master or flac version of it that it was made from. It WILL always sound worse even thanks to the fact that physical world is very flawed and imprecise.
People arguing otherwise are either deaf or need to look in the mirror and accept the fact that they enjoy vinyl for the experience not the sound quality.
Meh, the under lying extra noise is what those people are looking for and not the purity of the sound. Which supposedly ties back to the inherent sound of live music which isn't cleaned up digitally.
It's all potatoes no matter which kind of audiophile a person is.
Modern flip phones (e.g. Samsung Fold) are stupid and tacky and will never be as good as previous gen flip phones. Just won't. Sorry not sorry.
That exclusive content in physical games is a cruel disservice to late discoverers. "Exclusive" content should just be delayed public release content instead - something for the early adopters, but not unavailable to people years later.
Even just the normal game, if they're discontinuing production, should be made available as a digital purchase (including STL and print-ready files) for people coming along years later. We have the technology to not screw over potential future fans, and it's not that expensive to keep a small website running - especially if they're still going as a company. Looking at you, CMON Games.
2FA is too inconvienient* and I think using a password manager to generate a very long password is good enough.
Software 2FA is not even that much more secure to be worth the inconvienience.
And for hardware 2FA keys, there is a higher chance for me to misplace those keys than getting hacked. (I don't have friends to put a backup key in and I don't wanna pay for a safe deposit box)
[*For me personally, your security needs might be different. I don't work with any sensitive classified info or anything like that.]
honestly computer security has the mindset of authoritarians, you can tell how much law enforcement and legal compliance influences the field