I like a short backstory that provides hooks. “Disgraced son of a noble family that became a warlock when everyone expected a sorcerer” is fine.

12 pages where all the cool stuff already happened is bad. Write that as a book.

I’m sure there are companies that are at least more good than bad. Teachers pay teachers. Meetup. Bandcamp before they sold. That’s all I have off the top of my head. But even so capitalism invites cruelty, and the best intentions can easily wither under the pressure to make more money.

I work for a very large company involved in medicine. They make machines to do like blood work. That’s fine. People need that. But they treat many of their workers like trash. I don’t get paid for holidays and get the legal minimum sick leave per year. Their mission isn’t especially evil , but their behavior sucks.

I think a good step would be if people could admit the companies they work for are making the world worse. I’ve met some people who work for Google who do some backflips about how no the company is good and definitely they’re good people and it’s not the $300k salary talking.

I get my clothes from the thrift store. Sadly, even that’s getting more expensive. Used to be could get jeans for $5 and now it’s more like $20

After a particularly potent evening of farts, someone whose identity I will protect had their ass dubbed “the gates of hell”. I can imagine this hanging in their bathroom.

I remember 20 years ago an adult friend of mine (I’m getting old) told me “you can only start a business in the US”, and that’s why she wanted to stay here. Showing her businesses based from elsewhere was not persuasive.

People believe weird things about the US.

People don’t really like change.

Think about free public libraries. They’re fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there’s a bit of a backlash if there’s a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.

Imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It’s stealing from the authors. it’s ruining publishing. We don’t need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.

It’s the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.

So what I’m saying is many people don’t really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don’t like change.

There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

This is very heteronormative and gender binaried. Queer people exist and date.

That said, anecdotally, from the handful of women I’ve talked about this with: many don’t like making first moves on these apps.

Using dating apps is a skill, and if you haven’t been practicing sending messages you’re going to be bad at it. The vast majority of first messages I got from women were “hey”. Trash tier. Probably because they just haven’t done it very often.

The problem is most people are lazy and don’t understand anything. They just use the app they know, even if it sucks.

If you got it to be popular it could work , but I don’t see how you could.

ls never asks you to create an account or to update.

Don’t give anyone ideas.

“Pay $2.99/mo to see hidden files!”

I feel like most people don’t buy software anymore. Everything runs in the browser.

Like, nerds and enthusiasts and game playing people sure. But most people? Nah. It’s all Instagram, Facebook, tiktok, Reddit, YouTube. Maybe like roll20 if they’re a dnd nerd. Most people aren’t doing Photoshop or blender.

6th grade is reading for plot. It’s able to read the story and understand that the hobbits brought the ring to Mordor, and Aragorn fought in Gondor.

Anything about symbols, themed, subtext, unreliable narrators all comes later.

Managers are often idiots in over their heads. AI is really aggravating that problem.

Yeah, it mostly worked. Mostly.

It’s hard to say if my previous group worked better because they were used to my style, or just a better fit for me, or some other factor.

“I’m a Grok guy,” said Vance. “I think it’s the best. It’s also the least woke!”

What a fucking idiot. Really wants everyone to go back to sleep

I think most games get shut down when they still have players. Plus they could release server code so people could host their own games, like in the olde days of the 1990s. They don’t because they’re primarily concerned with profit.

That aside, “it brings joy” is not sufficient on its own as a justification. Heroin brings joy, but you likely wouldn’t say that’s a fine gift for a child. Why is that? Probably because we recognize the potential harms and unhealthy habits. Maybe you accept the risks and harms of digital slop are acceptable. I don’t think I’d want to encourage that in children.

Wizard I ran DND for in didn’t love this, but understood it.

The real problem with that group is we kept changing DMs, and some were a lot more easy going. You gotta get on the same page as a group

I worry about how I would raise a child in this landscape. Two of the people I know with kids, the kids don’t care about video games. One of the kids is super into iPad games, and that feels like a haazrd brewing.

Maybe I’d try to stick to real games for any child I was responsible for, but I don’t think that would survive impact with peers.

Physical cards last for years. Maybe the online game will be around in ten years, but maybe not.

I have most of my magic cards from my youth. They’re a thing I own. I can do what I want with them- play the game, use them for decorations, sell them. Digital shit is transient with few options for the buyer.