One of my nephews asks about these sorts of things all the time. It’s a delight that he’s frequently interested in the answer. Usually I have to abstract it by a bit, but he’s smart and will often bring up my answers later.

Adrian. Tchaikovsky. Children of Time.

If you don’t like spiders, he at least makes it hard to hate them.

So when do you think they’ll apply “If any, then none” logic to corporate lobbying, campaign finances, …guns?

Never? Oh, really then.

The suffering is the point.

Genuinely curious:

Is the author saying that ACO and VBC were decent ideas that got UHG’s fingers grafted into the legal structure, or are they just saying that ACO and VBC are bad in general?

And I knew that we had some awful structures within our healthcare system, but I LOATHE UHG and didn’t realize that they OWN our medical system. Disgusting.

My party went through a low level campaign and killed a dark mage boss in the same dungeon as a flaming skull. A party me came back for a side story later to take on a a necromancer with a flaming skull for a head. They split and attack from all sides.

Hmm…

So I only use Brave for YouTube. I definitely won’t be recommending it, but I’m torn between whether I’m being a leech of ad-free user generating what should be near zero revenue or if I’m being valuable as a number to ad to user counts.

Never mind. See below.

In addition to residential, Heat pumps are absolutely showing up in commercial constructions. Recent US climate incentives are targeted at just this change and you’ll see a LOT of new buildings claiming that credit.

I used to build my stories out of glass, but my players broke them and it hurt. Now I make them out of clay and we can all build it together.

I beat Hyper Light Drifter for the first time. And I think I spent some time on the new Mario kart levels, though that might have been last week.

HLP is a fascinating game with a novel approach to gameplay and world building. A few controls issues annoyed me, but they were growing pains and not fully learning the system. I love games that use that particular art style. I think I’m doing Mario Galaxy next.

I’m trying to figure out my second Voucher game to get.

My top choices are: Arceus - I enjoy pokemon, but it sounds like a lot of “research” busy work. Pikmin 4 - I haven’t clicked with Pikmin demos previously, but the idea has always seemed pretty interesting if I’d let it go farther. Mario Wonder - feels shorter, and more peripheral to my interest, but I’ve heard great things. Xenoblade 3 - I’ve only played XBX before and not all the way through. RPGs aren’t completely my thing, but I’ve heard great things.

None of them are THE game I’m after with pros and cons to each. The decision paralysis is rough and I don’t see anything worth waiting for before May.

Aldi’s Clancy’s chips. Name brand are just too greasy for me. Also, I just tried their garlic bread chips and those are dangerous.

The key is that we started by pushing against it and the DM didn’t listen and made us get to the hook of the content before deciding.

Because he didn’t listen when we started trying to ignore it, we had fun we wouldn’t have otherwise had had he stopped when it seemed like we weren’t going to have fun.

Counting ammo creates a vibe. There are tools to get at that vibe without as much hassle, but whatever tool you use, you should be relevant to gameplay.

There also comes a point in the game where the vibe is established, the characters have advanced and you don’t need the tool as much or anymore.

I played in a game called Trudvang where part of the experience was tracking everything using decreasing tracking dice. We kept pushing away from it at first, but our DM enforced it and we had a lot of fun for it. As we leveled up, the tracking was less relevant and the conflict more, so we shifted focus there.

I still remember meticulous food, water, and ammo tracking, desperate health, and having to hunt and forage to keep up stock despite risking troll attacks. We even had to sit down and talk out whether to allow rescued people into our party because we were low on resources and didn’t have much time left before an event.

Tracking ammo on its own is usually meh, but that part of the game tracking everything, while harrowed and desperate, pushing against a time limit? That sticks in my mind.

Came here to say The Locked Tomb is FANTASTIC meme humor and so witty in almost every way. However it’s a series that I’m convinced I’ll never actually understand. I’m on Nona now and things are barely better. Harrow had me second guessing every fact and almost pulling out a cork board, pins, and string to just understand when what happened to whom.

One of my favorite new series, though. And it’s been a delight to buddy read with my wife.

That game should be mailed directly to dictators and war mongers everywhere.

“THIS. THIS is what you want for your people? For ANY people? “

For me, my “misery is the point” game was This War of Mine. I got it just before Ukraine, but still couldn’t stomach it. My first character had a kid that was constantly crying and whimpering and I just couldn’t do it. I was bad at it—if you can be good. I couldn’t help others in the ways that I wanted to. I couldn’t stop the whimpering. Then I went out as someone else and came back and the dad and kid left. And I had to stop there for a bit.

I set it down to come back later, then Ukraine happened. Where it was hard to stomach while I knew this was hypothetical and the Euro-setting was pretty abstracted from the current reality there—though still very present elsewhere—knowing that people on the ground were looking and sounding similar to what was happening in game and seeing that in news daily just cut off any desire I had to play. It’s powerful and DEEPLY empathetic, but that spiral of misery and failure was the point and it made it in spades.

Gold Mario and Gold Kart parts. It started as a self brag (I usually just play solo) then turned into a challenge, then turned into my main. Mainly due to weight and speed.

Petey Piranha and Wiggler have recently shown up as contenders for weight and speed, though, so I might end up trying them more and more.

I’m a few hundred dollars in and I’m actually on my way out thanks to their grossness this spring. I’m too slow to have gone for many modules, but rules books were super fun and thus a money sink. I’m trying to move my group over to PbtA (cheap by comparison) or Genesys (have you seen the cost of those DICE?!).

My wallet is happy I can’t manage to get groups together to play games and justify buying more games. I’m not.

That’s definitely my hope.