I almost always do physical art. Whenever it has digital elements, the process is very convoluted. I’ll take a physical drawing, scan it, and then trace the lines in GIMP and add colors after. I don’t use any “proper” digital art tools.

If you want to be splattered with extremely aggressive mutagenic alien goo, then yes.

The Canterville Ghost, by Oscar Wilde.

I understand the turn of phrase. I don’t quite know what you mean in the application here.

I’m not sure if I entirely follow what you mean by “turning things on their head”. What are you getting at?

I’m not sure what you mean by this. The industrial revolutions were not just about burning coal.

Robber barons were in many ways also tied to coal.

Robber barons are just a more evocative way of framing the period compared to the dry Industrial Revolution term, similar to calling it the Gilded Age, but all the terms are roughly talking about the same time period.

Either of the first two Industrial Revolutions were not named because of the burning of coal in and of itself. Coal burning was part of the widespread and rapid transformation of society. Coal played a part in facilitating previously unthinkable changes in a short time.

The adoption of cars has been more iterative and gradual. In the U.S. there are certain periods important for them such as, depending on how much you think it had an effect, the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. There was also the post WW2 push by Eisenhower to building National highways. But those didn’t radically and quickly change life in the way industrial revolutions did. There was the post-war boom, which if you want to view it through a certain lens, was a kind of revolution for the U.S., in that people found themselves with much more buying power thanks to the U.S. having assumed superpower status.

Similarly nuclear power production has not caused widespread fundamental change in a short period. Nuclear weapons did become a major part of geopolitics, but nuclear power is as far as society is concerned just another way to make electricity.

I’ll have two number 66s, a Toshi Special- large, a protato bowl with extra dip, a Humbarine chipplet, two Jogan fruit pies, one with cheese, and a large bluemilkshake.

Change your goal from hurting the bad corporations to supporting the individual creators and good companies.

It is a more sustainable mindset.

Mean at the Haunted Chocolatier…

I agree. Tech communities have a habit of drastically over estimating how much everyone else cares about the details of tech.

Even something as simple as PC gaming scares off a lot of people because of the perception that you need to be some kind of tech wizard in order to cobble everything together to make a game run. Actual cobbling together of software to pirate (no matter how simple it seems to people in the know) is just a bunch of technobabble.

It is interesting to me that the chorus always talking about “switching” to piracy after every incident is also intimately familiar with piracy already. Almost as if it’s just people who already pirate talking to each other about how hard they are going to pirate. Meanwhile general audiences don’t care.

How could mods ban all the bots posing as human users?

The comment I replied to said the spike was due to woman’s programs being defunded. I don’t know if it was that, or covid, or something else. Right now it appears everyone is speculating the reason. Some detail, specifically some from the article would have been helpful. In its face, the article is blaming a 2021 law for a rise in mortality between 2019-2022, despite the mortality rate declining overall after the law went into effect. I don’t think that’s the whole story, but the article seems to gloss over it.

Elaborate.

I really wish the article talked about those years rather than just comparing 2019 to 2022, given that 2022 is a drop compared to 2021. Or if the article had showed the same chart with national data of those same years 2019-2022 for a good compare and contrast visual to show the national mortality rate climb and then post-Covid drop. As it is, the law goes into place and then mortality rate drops, which could easily be a talking point in its favor, even if it may be a deceptive point. By not addressing that, and instead glossing over the article seems incomplete.

But then overall mortality went down in 2022 compared to 2021?

What is going on here? The laws came into place in September 2021, but mortality was already climbing from 2019-2021. What was going on those years to cause this? Then a sharp decline in mortality between 2021 and 2022 for two of the three groups.

Wasteland 3 is a good CRPG style game with modern presentation. There is backstory from the first two games, but the third one is self contained enough that you won’t be confused by the story.

I think making regions safe is a great idea but I would want it tied to a challenging side quest. Like maybe you can intentionally fight a harder version of an area’s enemies to make it safe?

That’s one way to tackle it. The point is that there is something to prevent the experience of being super high level and getting mugged by guys with rusty shivs. I’m throwing out many ideas, which could be refined by specific games.

When it comes to random mobs, a game which relies on them is Kenshi, as an example. Without wandering random mobs to encounter, the game loses a lot of flavor. Kenshi does a few things uniquely, with the main one being that many random encounters that end in defeat don’t end in death. Rather than it being a case where a random mob annoyingly forces a start from a previous save, Kenshi can often be played past the defeat with the player now enslaved, in jail, or injured. The emergent story telling from those fights is what makes the game.