Lianodel @ Lianodel @ttrpg.network

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2 yr. ago

I went hiking recently. State park, at least a mile from the campground, peaceful and quiet.

Then I noticed something scrawled on one of the trail markers. Some dipshit wrote "Fuck Joe Biden" on it.

Holy shit, how miserable do you have to be to do that? To carry a marker and tag a tree just to express how you can't stop thinking about the guy, and make it other people's problem, even in the middle of nowhere when you're not even around.

I kind of did the same with The Heritage Foundation.

They have a page cataloging every single instance of voter fraud they could find, and they're up to... 1,474. Total. Since 1982. Regardless of party. In the same span of time, just looking at presidential elections, over 1.1 billion ballots were cast.

This is an abjectly evil "think tank" behind Project 2025, which actively pushes the big voter fraud lie to push mass disenfranchisement, and even they could only find an astronomically small rate of voter fraud.

Fair, I guess it depends on what the afterlife looks like in the fictional world. :P I actually didn't get that far in the series, what with real life getting in the way, but I enjoyed it and mean to return to it.

That would also lead to some interesting questions if you give it a divine aspect.

If it's all arcane magic, obviously sure, that all works.

But what if they need a cleric? That means there's a god out there who condones this sort of thing. And that god can do this with the souls of unbelievers... unless they prepare the condemned by making them believers, possibly through gruesome means.

Honestly it's more grimdark than I'd usually run a game, but it's entertaining to think about. :P

Yeah, I used to use it to fix my RPG PDFs. (Seriously, it's astounding how many publishers either omit or completely fuck up bookmarks.) I found out it went to shit when trying to help someone else do the same, and the newer free version was significantly cut down.

I started reading Jhereg by Steven Brust, and it takes resurrection magic into account with the world building. Part of assassination involves hiding the body until the resurrection window passes. IIRC, the legal penalties for murder are also much less severe if you just kill someone, rather than make sure they're permanently dead.

There are also "Morganti" weapons. They're pretty much the Black Blade from Elric, so they eat souls. So not only do they make resurrection impossible, but the victim is extra dead, not even existing in an afterlife. As a result, using one is a high crime, punishable by death... by Morganti blade.

If course! That's always the number one choice, when possible. Sadly, it's just not an option as frequently as I (and plenty of others) would like.

Those minis and terrain look rad, too! I also like that part of the hobby in and of itself. I could spend hours just painting minis and making terrain while watching or listening to something.

I'm just afraid that Hollywood execs will take exactly the wrong lessons from it, as they usually do. They won't see it as a successful fantasy adventure movie that underperformed because it came out between Mario and John Wick, but as a failure because it wasn't mostly a carbon-copy of modern Marvel movies, and trusted its audience even a little bit.

Wikipedia lists him as a founder

Does it? I expected better of Wikipedia, so I checked, and both Musk's page and Tesla's avoid simply listing him as a founder by explaining the situation, i.e., that he was an early investor. Even the sidebar for Tesla, Inc. just links to a subsection rather than listing names.

Just a note to add, addressing a related talking point that inevitably comes up:

It's a very common piece of misinformation that he was determined to be a founder in a court of law. That never happened. It was part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. It's a lie that the relevant parties could all live with as part of a larger settlement.

I like to ask Musk apologists, "Do you need to found a company to be that company's founder, yes or no?" If they waffle or say "no," there's no point continuing in good faith, because they're not serious people. It's not hard to say "Okay, that's a bit of a fib, he should be called an honorary founder, but blah blah blah..." But if they can't even do that, then they aren't operating based on reality.

Very true. Subjectively, it just seemed to have a bit of a peak not too long ago. It was one of those right-wing talking points that got popular before they realized it was embarrassing and didn't work.

And yeah, I'm real sick of reactionary armchair "experts" who think they know more than people who actually study (and experience) the things they talk about with such confidence.

See also the "We're a republic, not a democracy" talking point that swelled a year or two ago (and was even repeated by a senator). It's patently stupid to anyone who knows the meaning of those words, but it was also testing the water for overt anti-democracy rhetoric.

Off, mixed feelings here.

On the one hand, it shows how antagonistic DMing is silly. The DM can just make stuff up, and the reason we're all playing is to have a good time. If you want a competitive game that's (at least ostensibly) balanced, you can play one of those instead, like a board game or a war game.

On the other hand... modern D&D is built around ostensibly balanced set piece encounters, usually combat, usually intended to tax but not kill the characters. So the fact that it absolutely sucks at being a balanced game is an absolute nightmare to DM (assuming you want the game to be fair & fun).

I love that, in a competition between a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars and a FOSS project, all Google managed to do was annoy uBlock Origin users for like a week. I just had to manually update the extension and restart my browser a few times.

Absolutely. While I can be convinced on markets for some things (with regulation to protect consumers and prevent monopolies), it completely falls apart in others. Necessities absolutely should not rely on free markets because capital holders hold an extortionate amount of power, most people have little to none, and if it's more profitable to let some people die, then the profit motive will let those people die.

In case you want the good faith counterargument (I know, I know, socialist wall of text):

I'd be willing to bet you have a different definition of "capitalism" compared to socialists. For most people, capitalism is just trade, markets, commerce, etc. None of that is incompatible with socialism (broadly speaking). When socialists talk about capitalism, they're referring, specifically, to private ownership of capital. It's not the buying and selling, it's that ownership of companies is separate from labor.

We don't owe technological development to capitalists, we owe it to engineers, scientists, and researchers. We owe art to artists, performance to performers. Socialists want those people to be the primary beneficiaries of their own work, not someone who may or may not even work at a company, but whose wealth means they can profit off of other people's labor by virtue of owning the property those people need to do their jobs.

And you've probably been bothered by enshittification in one form or another. Some product or service you like has probably gotten worse over time. That's not a decision made by the people who take pride in their creation, or the laborers who want long-term security. It comes from the capitalist class that doesn't really give a shit about any of that, they just want quarterly profits, long-term survival be damned. That's capitalism, as the meme was getting at.

Go on.

Thank you. The grieving has actually been both smooth & intense, with ups & downs, but I'm gradually doing better, as is my mom.

But anyway, the meme is accurate. :P I just have a more sensitive feeling about it given recent events.

My dad died recently.

He was definitely a flawed man, and there were tons of problems between the two of us over the years. But I also heard plenty of stories about how he grew up, and about his parents—both from my dad and from other family members. Without a doubt, he managed to be a better person than his parents, and a better parent to me than his parents were to him. They were straight-up cruel to him, whether physically or simply using him for the family's gain.

That doesn't absolve everything, and I've still got plenty of my own issues. But what I respect most of him, in hindsight, is that he played the hand he was dealt and managed to be a better man. Not perfect, but better. I want to do the same.

Sorry for being sappy, it's only been a couple of weeks. I also know that this doesn't apply to everyone, since some parents are indefensibly cruel and abusive. In general, though, I hope people can be easy on each other, easy on themselves, and stop letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good."

Ah, okay.

I was inclined to think you were serious because, believe it or not, it's an argument I've heard before. Apart from random people trying to futz through an argument, Ben Shapiro complained that Democrats, when asked what they'd ban, didn't say "crime."

What is your point, exactly? Because maybe there's a misunderstanding here, because you seemed to make a pro-gun argument by forgetting that murder is, famously, a crime.

If that's the case, it would raise the question: do you think we should regulate gun ownership to lower the rate of gun violence, the same way that the penalties for murder are meant to lower the rate of homicide? Or do you think we shouldn't criminalize homicide, the same way people don't want to regulate gun ownership, because if it isn't 100% effective then it's not worth doing?