try to talk them out of the idea of “Leveling” they get scared and run back to the system they’re familiar with.

I still think about the time in college I tried to get a D&D friend to consider Mage. I was telling him about how you can just do magic, and the real limitation is paradox and hubris. Like, it’s often not about ‘can you?’ but rather “should you?”

He couldn’t get over “you can just cast whatever you want? Fireballs every turn?”

“Yes, but that’s probably going to make a lot of paradox, and probably isn’t the best way to solve your problem”

“Sounds broken,” he said, and lost interest.

I started using recently. No complaints.

Does anyone know what you can put for the “suggestions API url” in Firefox? It’s optional so I left it blank.

Everything Bethesda does is kind of bad. I’ll probably get them when they’re on sale, but I don’t expect anything good.

Get Larian to make a fallout game

Feels like we’re going backwards now with like anti-vax stuff. A lot of tech seems to be getting worse for users, too, like IoT gadgets that stop working for remote reasons

I’m partial to Fate.

It’s very open. You don’t have to worry about looking up the right class or feats. You just describe what you want to play, and if the group thinks it’s cool and a good fit for the story, you’re basically done.

Now, the downside is this requires a lot more creativity up front. A blank page can be intimidating.

I like that players have more control over the outcome. You can usually get what you want, even if you roll poorly, but it’s more of a question of what you’re willing to pay for it.

Every roll will be one of

• succeed with style
• succeed
• a lesser version of what you want
• succeed at a minor cost
• succeed at a major cost
• (if you roll badly and don’t want to pay any costs) fail, don’t get what you want

It’s a lot more narrative power than some games give you. I don’t like being completely submissive to the DM, so I enjoy even as a player being able to pitch “ok I’m trying to hack open this terminal… how about as a minor cost I set off an alarm?” or “I’m trying to steal his keys and flubbed the roll… How about as a major cost I create a distraction, get the keys, but drop my backpack by accident. Now I’m disarmed, have no tools, and they can probably trace me with that stuff later. But I got the keys!”.

It’s more collaborative, like a writer’s room, so if someone proposes a dud solution the group can work on it.

The math probability also feels nice. You tend to roll your average, so there’s less swinginess like you’ll get in systems rolling one die.

Plus, I don’t know any other system that lets me pull my intestines out of my abdomen and use them like a lasso to climb a cliff when I forgot my rope at home.

Nitpick: more narrative systems like Fate let you do this, but then you typically don’t get a lot of crunch. Plus it can vary if your group isn’t on the same wavelength about what’s cool and appropriate for the story.

Unfortunately, most of the maga hats are idiots. They’d rather lose all their money if it meant they could be more racist

Capitalism is giving bad outcomes. Labor is divorced from the results of their work, and people who contribute little to nothing (or less than nothing) grow wealthy.

We don’t need to go all the way to full communism in one shot, but I’d like to think most of us can agree the current system is unacceptable

You don’t understand small talk if you think it has no functional purpose. Small talk has several purposes.

One, it sends a bunch of signals. I see you. You see me. Neither of us are threats. We have a shared language.

Two, it’s how you find deeper topics to talk about. “What did you get up to this weekend?” “Oh, hung out with my friend. We saw a band I like - All Dogs - do a surprise anniversary show. You do anything big?”

Three, it lets people choose their level of engagement. “Cool, sounds fun. I stayed in, watched some TV” signals minimal interest vs “All dogs? Never heard of them but I love live music. What’s their genre?” signals interest, and now you can a little deeper on music.

If you just plunge directly into deep stuff that’s like skipping foreplay and lube. It’s probably going to make people uncomfortable.

I had the same thought, mostly because distracted driving is such a present threat that it’s hard to find humor in it.

But whatever. Someone’s probably going to be reading this while driving. Please stop.

I rarely use a cart anymore because I do more frequent, shorter, trips and just bring a tote bag. But the other day I went with someone to a store and we used a cart. I returned it to the cart return place and she was like “good. You can learn a lot about someone by what they do with the cart”

Outside of like NYC you have a car. It’s a bad system economically, ecologically, and socially, but many people are kind of stupid and reactionary. You show them how putting in a bike lane and adding a bus stop will lower car traffic, improve air quality, and increase economic activity and they just go “no because I feel so”. Or, “one time I had to move a refrigerator so we need to prioritize large privately owned vehicles”.

If you had been buying games you’d have a library 🤷

Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don’t care.

Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it’s so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won’t or can’t think ahead

If more people had a backbone and spoke out / refused to implement shitty stuff, this wouldn’t happen.

Thus, it’s more than just the web developers 😄 . Product needs to have a backbone to stand up to their boss, too. I fought really hard to get rid of the mouse tunnels at that job, but was blocked by product and one of the directors of eng. It was mostly [office] political nonsense

Also, many design choices are entirely on the web developer.

Not at most of the companies I’ve worked out. There’s a design person or team. Eng can give feedback, but it’s pretty rare for them to be given a blank check.

I’m not gonna change my opinion until websites become usable again, you’re wasting your time on me.

That’s fine. Some web developers are morons, but some of everyone are morons. We can partially agree.

Most web developers are morons in the sense that most people are morons. They’re not especially moronic.

A lot of problems on the web aren’t coming from the developers. They’re management pushing for stuff.

Like, at an old company the UI had really bad mouse tunnels (mouse over menus and sub menus that close if you mouse out). Terrible interface. But someone in management liked it and no one would approve changing it. Easy to look at it and say we’re all morons, but most of the stupid there was from leadership.

Capitalism is a root cause. Let’s get rid of that, or if that’s too extreme that severely regulate it.

Jail all of Facebook’s decision makers. Seize it (investors get nothing), and either shut it down or revert it to a simple message board. Require moderators. Ban the trash (eg: sovereign citizens groups). Remember that time they tried to see if they could make people sad by changing the algorithm? Find those people and ruin them.

Pay labor more. Work them less. I’d just do basic income, personally.

Make more walkable spaces. Fuck car culture. You don’t meet anyone when you drive. Everywhere could have local spots where you see regulars.

More free public events. Brooklyn does “movies under the stars”. There’s also like yoga classes, bird watching, concerts. More of that.

Offer free education for anyone who applies in good faith. Offer classes on a range of subjects, but honestly I think a lot of people would benefit from lessons and practice on “how to talk to people” and public speaking.

Kind of a ramble. But I think if you leave capitalism in place, you’re going to have problems. “Everything has to make the owners as much money as possible, immediately” isn’t a formula for a good life.

I don’t know man, i think the simpler answer of “capitalism and profit motive create incentives that don’t yield good outcomes” is compelling. Okcupid was better and more feature rich before Match bought it.

There is some user error on the apps, though, as you say.

I would prefer basic, subtle, black. I don’t want rainbows and lights. I’m very function over form.

I’d also rather play a game on medium settings where it runs flawlessly and doesn’t make the fans go hard, than at high settings with worse performance.

Perhaps a universal icon for “pick language” would be helpful, like we have a icons for volume control and share. Good luck getting it adopted though.