I’m outside so I’m not sure how to evaluate “the room”. My phone is the most immediate at hand (pun intended) useful thing right now though.

There was a (fiction) book I was called “all the birds in the sky”. I really liked it. Highly recommend.

One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that’s like “the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project”. And I’m just screaming at the book “use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey”.

There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they’re difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.

There are other RPGs that may scratch slightly different itches, if the fantasy + combat + resource management parts of DND don’t really appeal.

I really like Fate. it’s a lot more focused on story and is overall a lighter system. it does ask more from the players though.

I also really liked pillars 2, and am sad they’re not making a third one.

This pains me.

One time in a tabletop DND game, the party wiped over bad rolls. It was partly my fault for over tuning the fight, but also bad luck. The party had a potion that was like “you can make an extra full attack this turn, all your hits do an extra 1d10, and you’re hasted. Afterwards, you are paralyzed for 1d4+1 turns”.

Fighter drinks it and proceeded to miss like 6 attacks in a row. I think he needed to roll above like 13 and just couldn’t do it.

This is also why I prefer games that give players more tools to tell the dice to fuck off, like fate points in Fate or willpower in CofD.

Targeted ads should be illegal.

Contextual ads are a compromise I would accept. That is, you can buy ads based on the page content, but not the viewer details. So if I’m looking at a website about bikes, you can have bike ads on there. You don’t need to know I’m a xx year old living in zip code 10001. That’s how ads worked for like decades (centuries?). It’s fine.

Climate change deniers should have to stay. Everyone else should probably get assistance moving somewhere else.

Guild wars 2 is a very good game, but very different than guild wars 1.

They both avoid the endless gear and level grind, but gw2 is generally easier and less tactical. You can solo most of it. Builds are a little more limited, but it’s also harder to make a useless character.

They addressed the most common problems with early mmos: other players are never a bad thing. there’s no kill stealing. If you’re doing some event to fight off demons that have invaded the town, and other people show up, the game silently scales up a to accommodate more players, and everyone gets credit. it’s great.

I really like it. I don’t play it every day, but I go back to it all the time.

Have you played Nioh2? It has diablo-like items, but actual combat. It’s very good.

What if leveling up didn’t make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?

Horizontal progression is pretty cool .

Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want that. They want to feel cool and competent without actually doing anything. That’s not to say like you need to “earn” your fun or whatever. But that the progress quest number go up don’t think too hard is immensely popular with a lot of people. They don’t want to be challenged.

And that’s fine. It’s a game. It’s just not a game I want to play all the time.

I still remember the thrill when I was a teenager when I clicked a random corpse in Diablo 1’s hell and the unique staff Mindcry popped out.

Been happy buying music from Bandcamp and not having a subscription. Didn’t even make it onto the chart :(

A response (or status!) on slack that’s like “I’m at the grocery, back in 20” is fine with me. It’s more annoying when someone wanders away with no status and is unresponsive for hours.

Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.

Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.

Sex work should be legal, regulated, unionized.

Frog core anyone? https://froglord.bandcamp.com/album/save-the-frogs

Don’t forget about the halo effect. Someone on stage doing a killer set is going to seem hotter. When someone is good at one thing, we start to think they’re good at everything (where being hot is a thing).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

It’s a little hard to square “steam is over charging for games” with “look at all these games I bought for 80% off ($5) off”, but I guess there’s more to it.

HR is not likely to side with the worker over the company.

There’s also a certain kind of “hr energy” that makes my skin crawl. Like if you worked at a company called AB Tech they’d be up front in the meeting going “I SAY A, YOU SAY B! A!” and I’m just like no, please stop, I’m not that excited to make charts for assholes.

The hr person where I work now seems nice, at least. My old job the main hr person gave me the creeps.

Just guillotine the rich already