An advanced technique: ask your players to make shit up.

Like, the players decided to go to the wizard university the wizard PC graduated from. So I ask him, “what’s their entrance hall like?” and let him just riff on it for a while. Players feel more engaged with the world, and it’s a little less work for me.

Warlock is trying to commune with his patron. I ask, “what is your patron usually like?” and the player is delighted to describe “the great sculpin” in detail. This then inspires me further.

Note that some players are very much “just tell me a story” and don’t want any input, and won’t like this. Some players are also shy and don’t think well on their feet. And some players are just really bad at staying on theme. But if you know your players , this can be a powerful technique.

Anyone who seriously proposes privatizing the US postal service should be removed from power. They’re either trying to harm the US, or are too stupid to be trusted with anything more dangerous than a paper towel.

I’m reminded of a post from elsewhere: “You hate all the parts of capitalism separately, without realizing they’re all the same thing”

Is there a reason conservatives dislike congestion pricing other than spite?

Gods, they’re just the worst fucking people.

Musk seems like the kind of D&D player who would

• Build a horrible character (frankly impressive in 5e, which is pretty simple in terms of choices to make at the start). Like, a bard with 8 charisma, or a rogue with no dex
• Or, pay someone else to build their character, and then not know how to play it.
• And/or induce the other players to murder him (in the game)

This is a good point. Seeing other people get onto the street can motivate people who weren’t feeling enthusiastic.

But I do worry that protests will fizzle out and be, as you say, an ending point. Maybe they won’t be.

“a peaceful movement”. Ok. Unilaterally disarming seems like a dubious move to me.

I don’t think protests where you just stand around and chant are especially effective. Maybe in 1950 when seeing people get firehosed was shocking, but the world is different today. Media is captured by the wealthy and most people don’t care.

I’m glad you liked the comic.

I read the tweet as saying “Actually learning about history, the good and the bad, is better than avoiding it to whitewash (pun intended) slavers and spare their feelings”

How did you read it?

This also reminds me of a separate post I saw about how social media, and tweets especially, is a really bad format for communicating. The length constraints and incentivizing being clever don’t make for fertile ground for ideas. Most people aren’t going to read an essay, sadly.

I also can’t imagine someone getting offended about people mentioning the Tulsa Race Massacre or the fact that the founding fathers held slaves.

Actual racists aren’t going to be offended by those historical facts, they just might argue that they were justifiable in some way. Which is obviously super fucked up, but it’s not like racist people are going to deny the fact that slavery happened or that black people got massacred by white people in history. They literally get off on that shit.

Many racists definitely do get offended by those facts. It’s because they’re coming at it from an emotional place, and the historical facts make them feel bad. Instead of dealing with that, they lash out. Not all racists are intentional about their racism.

I link this a lot, but it’s worth a read https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Which is why the tweet seems so strange to me. Black people getting enslaved and massacred and persecuted? That slaps? I fucking hope not.

That wasn’t the intent of the tweet and that is a bizarre misreading of it.

I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

But…

If we know where this “CEI” is headquartered and we know who their leadership is…

That seems fine to me.

There will be a lot of pearl clutching. Some people will literally walk themselves into the gas chamber while saying “we have to be tolerant” and “well they won the election”

But also organizing is hard.

It was kind of wild going from D&D to games that don’t have tons of HP.

Players make different choices when they have a maximum of 7 health, and a random mook with a baseball bat hits for minimum 2, maximum “well if the dice keep exploding…”

Among other problems, people knowingly spread falsehoods because they feel truthy.

The problem is people. We’re all emotional but some people are just full on fact free gut feel almost all of the time.

Match should be broken up. But apparently some people learned nothing from history and some people don’t care as long as they make money

Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

You can do transactions.

There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.

Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.

Fans were happy to run the servers at their own expense.

In the distant past of like 2000, you didn’t have to pay for online functionality. Also, people could host their own multiplayer servers. It was nice. Consoles and capitalism did a team-up to make things shittier for the end user, though.