We really need to organize and remove the conservatives from power. Peacefully is ideal, but I won’t be upset if all the republicans are hanged.

If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

I don’t think we should ever forgive the anti-vaxxers. I mean, we probably should if any of them come around, but in my heart I want to just brand “STUPID” on their forehead.

This is the best approach I’ve found.

Player says, “I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla’s hatred of our common foe, and that’s why she should sell us these explosives for cheap” and doesn’t have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.

Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn’t do anything I need to discard that. I can’t, in most systems, then be like “ok he just got stabbed in the leg he’s off balance. I can take advantage of that!”. It’s just noise.

Some people have been like “You just don’t have any imagination!” but it’s not that. It’s that the flavor stuff is often actively not true, and it’s tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are fine.

(Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)

“The purpose of a system is what it does” comes to mind. The laws are intended to make life worse for women.

I don’t know you but I’m certain everyone doesn’t hate you. This guy probably doesn’t hate you.

It’s okay to feel bad about rejection. But there are other people. Sit with your feelings for a bit if it helps, but then dust yourself off. It’s going to be okay. If this guy wasn’t interested in you as you are, it wasn’t going to be a good match anyway.

Like, I have the standard set of nerd hobbies (books, video games, etc) and sometimes I go on a date and discover the other person thinks that’s gross. “Waste of time” someone said to me recently. Feels bad. But then I go on another date and the persons eyes light up as they tell me about their Path of Exile build. There’s all sorts of people. Don’t worry too much if any particular person doesn’t click with you.

I’m kind of assuming from the text that you’re young. That means lots more runway, and also your peers are probably on average inexperienced messy people. Dating and relationships are skills that improve with practice.

I think the “I move and attack” stuff can get boring, especially if it’s slow. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you’re basically playing a board game, and that’s fine. I start to lose patience when you get the “can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can’t cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my action? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them.” mode.

I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it’ and “DM decides”. If you’re at the noble’s ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there’s not really a lot of structure there. It can be fine to just “talk it out, man”, but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I’m sidelined.

Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system.

But there’s also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your words? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don’t get to go on.

I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I’d rather have it than the aforementioned “real life sales guy hogs the spotlight” problem.

I suppose you this touches on how I’m in the US, where everything is skewed towards insane nonsense. It would be extremely unusual to find a conservative of any sort here that would support anything remotely anti-car, for example. Even if it would save money.

Oh good. I thought about making stickers to slap on badly parked cars, because they’re really irritating and dangerous. But my lawyer friend at the time advised against it.

Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn’t a utopia where people don’t need to labor for survival.

Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn’t matter that much. But we’re not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.

They’re in favour of things like universal medicare/dental care, because those programs are shown to be a net benefit fiscally and socially.

I’ve never met someone who was “socially liberal fiscally conservative” who believed this.

They’re usually pro good things, but they don’t want to pay for them, so they’re not actually pro those things at all.

“Small government” and “private individuals will handle it” typically means it just won’t happen.

Stupid suburban white people, maybe?

There are people that think if you walk around downtown Brooklyn you’ll be double mugged. People of the land. Common clay of the new West.

That makes sense to me.

But they don’t want to make businesses do anything, even if it means choking the oceans with trash and filling our bodies with plastic. Frankly, they’re bad people that we shouldn’t put up with.

Yeah but like if they find it was fraud are they going to do anything about it? More than a slap on the wrist? Like, jail time? A public hanging? Probably nothing, as usual. but I can hope.

I think there’s a little bit of nuance, at least. Like refusing to call a nazi salute a nazi salute, or excessive use of passive voice (eg: “A man was killed after an encounter with the police”). Those things aren’t making the world better.

A heady mix of stupidity and treason

“This violation, if proven, only warrants a symbolic fine,” Spiro argued

Reminded of the narcissist’s prayer

“”"
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
“”"

I hope when the revolution comes, all the people like this lawyer that enabled Musk also go up against the wall.

I don’t know if that’s exactly a Venn diagram that’s a circle, but I think if you lose all the conservatives you also lose the capitalists. Whoever you’d have left would be amenable to change.

I took a like journalism 101 course in college as an elective, and we had a couple lessons on this. One of them, the teacher gave us a bunch of websites and was like “Tell me which of these are legitimate.” Some were crackpots, some were satire, some were just weird news. When we went over the assignment in class, we talked about strategies for figuring it out.

I think a lot of people never had that class, or they slept through it.

Sometimes I’m really optimistic about humanity, but sometimes I remember the stupidest kids from school. No attention span. No curiosity. A lot of them are probably out in the world making decisions right now.