The Luddites should have been dismantling capitalists if they wanted to solve their problem.

Tabletop in person. I miss it. Secondly, in-person co-op. These are two mediums are being extinguished because of how difficult it is to profit from humans relating to one another in person and giving each other things for free.

Satirical, fake AI-generated clips show Rishi Sunak declaring, “Please don’t vote us out, we would be proper gutted!” and making unevidenced claims about how the Conservative leader is spending public money - including how he will send his “mates loads of dosh”.

I thought this article would be making a case against TikTok.

I think the main issue with 5E is that it’s so dominant and well-known people have been trying to make 5E into the game they want rather than seek a system more similar to their desires. 5E can be difficult, but at the many tables I’ve played at it’s almost guaranteed every party member will survive almost everything to preserve the narrative. It’s a system as forgiving as the table wants, and the table usually wants it to be forgiving.

It’s easy for one person to learn an entire system, but it’s easier for a DM to find players who already know 5E than to find a group of people willing to learn a new system. It can make people feel trapped by 5E.

Personally, I love the system but hate what Hasbro has done to the RPG community. While I’ll still probably play 5E since I’ve already had it for years, any purchase I make in the future will be from a third party or from a different publisher.

So many times I wanted to know the name of an actor who played a character after the first episode and the top result was something like “[Character Name] (deceased)” or " Villain: [Character Name]."

Some of my common uses are:

1. Asking extremely niche scientific questions: I don’t depend on these answers but in the answer is usually the specific terminology I can then search and find the answers I was looking for. I have learned a lot about the properties of metals and alloys this way and what the planet could look like with different compositions.

2. Re-phrasing things: At work when I’m drained and out of patience I can tell that what I’m writing in my emails is not really appropriate, so I have GPT re-phrase it. GPT’s version is typically unusable of course but it kicks my brain in the direction of re-phrasing my email myself.

3. Brainstorming: The program has endless patience for my random story-related questions and gives me instant stupid or cliche answers. This is great for me because part of my creative process since I was a kid has been seeing in media something that was less than satisfying and my brain flying into all the ways I could have done it better. I ask the program for its opinion on my story question, say “no idiot, instead:” and what comes after is the idea I was looking for from my own mind. Sometimes by total chance it has a good suggestion, and I can work with that too.

Fun uses which are less common:

1. Comedy use: I once had it generating tweets from Karl Marx about smoking weed every day. The program mixed marxist philosophy and language with contemporary party music to endlessly amusing results. Having historical figures with plenty of reference material from their writings opining on various silly things is very funny to me, especially when the program makes obvious mistakes.

2. Language Manipulation: If some philosophical text which was written to be deliberately impenetrable is getting too annoying to read, the program is decent at translating. If I plug in a block of text written by Immanual Kant and have the program re-write it in the style of Mark Twain, the material instantly becomes significantly easier to understand. Re-writing it in the style of stereotypical gen-z is hilarious.

Welcome to the field of Economics

I have so many memories with this game but I had to quit because of the notorious headaches. There were plenty of flashing lights in arcade games in those days but the way they flashed in Polybius was part of the challenge. I guess having to focus on the lights to play the game caused the headaches but I don’t know. It was always the busiest cabinet at my arcade so at least I saved myself a lot of time. It wasn’t around for long but I can’t really remember much about my life other than this game from back then so I couldn’t say even how old I was when it was out. The friends I would take turns with back then don’t even know what I’m talking about when I bring this game up. It was a long time ago I guess.

This is funny but also an excellent example. There are people who honestly believe that, and those pretending to believe that because it’s to their advantage that others be made to believe it. They are all humans behaving as humans in the context of the system they are in. Despite having the same tendencies, if these same people were living in a system that leveraged their personalities and talents to pro-social purposes we would have a very different world. The part we haven’t figured out yet is how exactly that system would work and also work despite millions to billions of different people interacting with it in more ways that can be comprehended by any individual. This is quite a group project we’re working on.

Edit: Whoops, I thought I was responding to someone in this thread. Interesting how much it connects here.

Reddit didn’t survive its slow death many years ago. The rotting corpse it left behind is just becoming a bigger problem.

I think it’s less of an issue of LLMs being drunk and more that ostensibly sober people put them behind the wheel totally aware of how drunk they are while telling everyone that they’re stone cold sober.

Chaotic evil is cousin Gala, the weapons dealer with his own moon.

The Prime Directive is one of those weird artifacts of the context of the original series. When naked imperialism was starting to be challeneged in pop culture but was still very much considered the status quo in the West, the idea not to interfere in other cultures was a bold stance. However, the idea of a “natural cultural progression” is unfortunately a product of its time and wasn’t even something Kirk actually believed when it came down to it. Picard was more by the book but even he couldn’t watch innocent people die when his crew pushed back. It’s now pretty much universally regarded in canon as a stupid rule.

This is kind of like saying in war, old weapons getting phased out reduces violence. While I am relieved I don’t have to worry about musket ball injuries, the new weapons are more effective at what they are designed to do and the people driving the need for newer and more effective weapons have not fundamentally changed in their motivations.

The businesses themselves aren’t driving the economy or how the megarich really make their money. Businesses are only the tools used by what’s actually driving the economy which is Capital. The same Capitalists which drive businesses to behave ruthlessly in a marketplace, grow rapidly, and ultimately collapse under their own weight will simply reinvest in an entity which will competently bring in a return on investment. The only redistribution of wealth happening is Capital investment being diverted to other tools of Capitalism. Capitalists don’t care which businesses or industry they’re investing in, they only care about maximising the return on their investment and using their influence to ensure that happens as much as possible.

When I think of historical wealth distribution which has had major impact on the lives of regular people, I can’t think of any which were caused by an outdated business clearing up some room in the market for newer and more lucrative capital investments to take its place. I have seen it through government action though.

Archive can be spotty depending on factors I’m not completely aware of. It didn’t work at all on my Windows PC but works fine on my android phone and Linux laptop. I am not a skilled enough tech person to figure out how why Windows won’t play nice with archive.

Make no mistake, this is an early release survival/crafting budget game. The engine itself is fairly limited and feels more like a free mmo from 10 years ago than an Ubisoft game. It’s fun, though. It has all that stuff which is advertised, and I’ve been having fun with it. It’s a Skyrim kind of enjoyment, vast and shallow, but the vastness has its own appeal.

Unfortunately this seems like the kind of game which is going to be completely ruined in about a year. It is clearly set up to farm microtransactions in the future. Right now in the goodwill period the game functions like an actual game. Some people may want them to “finish” the game before they get it, but that’s not the kind of game this is. The full release is now. In a year the game will be an unplayable skinner box.

Too true. Being able to jump over buildings was the basis for many of my old Oblivion shenanigans. You can’t really get weird with the Skyrim options without modding.

I think of it as a branching development becoming different design sensibilities. CRPGs influenced the game Dragon Quest, but JRPGS after DQ were influenced specifically by DQ and the games inspired from it such as the original Final Fantasy. CRPGS, MUDS, Dnd games, and Ultima became the basis for the Western sensibility which initially developed separately from the Dragon Quest branch (although there is still some crossover). This being the case, nowadays each region can make either Western RPGS or JRPGS because we all have pretty easy access to a lot of each others’ games and developers can make the games they prefer to make influenced by what they like regardless of its origin.

Undertale is a JRPG from the West. The maker of the game began making Rom hacks for Earthbound, a JRPG, and used the skills they learned doing that do create their own game. Dragon Quest>Earthbound>Undertale is pure JRPG. Other examples I can think of are messier, but that’s kind of the point.

Looks like Freeman’s HEV suit. Classic Valve aesthetic.

After Fallout 3, each Bethesda release was less ambitious than the last. Oblivion tried to do tons of stuff and ended up as a beautiful and memorable total mess (It’s my personal favorite). Fallout 3 was a bold new direction and a more stable but fudamentally compromised experience. Skyrim established the trend of scaling back and making what’s left more consistent, simple, and flashy. Fallout 4 was the last major fan outcry from those who believed Bethesda could have done better while Starfield is a confirmation that everyone’s worst fears about Bethesda are true.