I have GMed hundreds of sessions of Fate Core and I think is the best of all the systems for just getting the mechanics out of the way and having fun and letting the players go wild with their imaginations.

You can play it with the classic fate dice, or modify it to just use coins, a D20, whatever. There’s even an easier system called Fate Accelerated that boils it down that even a fairly little kid can grasp.

I like both systems because rather than try to be a “realistic” physics and combat simulator, it’s a just a loose set of mechanics for making any type of game.

Last week I ran a session that was the main characters getting ready for a fancy ball where they needed to convince the regional governor to quarantine the station against a deadly plague.

They prepared by:

• designed costumes and dresses to blend in
• invented a new makeup style to help catch her attention (that went on to become a huge trend in the net)
• organized evidence of the plague into a punchy short form video
• collected more data from the local station researchers
• planned how they would get the regional governor alone at the ball to have a few minutes word with her to make the pitch
• hacked into the station network to control the lights and music and see where everyone was

All of that played out with dice rolls using their skills.

Fate has an easy mechanic for preparing advantages in advance, so they were able to do all this before even showing up for the ball, so they rolled in with a pile of advantages like consumables they could use to boost bad rolls when trying to build trust with the governor.

At the ball they had to race against their competitors who were trying to sow distrust with the governor, stopping them while at the same time building confidence with the governor. Impassioned speeches, perfectly timed dance moves, the best etiquette at dinner, and even intimidating the lead researcher so he didn’t panic and cause the station to fall into a riot.

This isn’t even anything weird or crazy, Fate is more flexible than any other system: your players make an impassioned speech, swing from the rafters, or take the epic sniper shot. They can alter the fate of the universe with a new makeup style or the right cut of dress (my players spent a good ten minutes deciding if they should wear a princess cut or Cinderella cut gown!)

Highly recommend it for a kid’s game or adults! It’s just better for playing games that are only limited by the imagination of the players.

Eh kind of but just don’t buy anything and you’ll be fine. And read the actual literature and studies out there

like a pretty hot take backed by the science, there are much better bioaccumulators than comfrey

Yeah watch out for this one then. Especially if you get into the mods that turn a 30-50 hour campaign into 500+ hours with 20x more complexity.

I’m very curious what the details are. A Linux Vision Pro sounds very enticing. It could be a lot of fun for inventing new user interaction modalities.

React has changed a lot with the addition of contexts but that’s the modern way to handle it without using some kind of state management.

I think most state management libraries are far more expensive to use than people realize. Contexts are pretty straightforward and Just Work so I’d keep using them unless you have a very good reason to switch.

scrubbing intensely … still not clean…

Yeah for all we know stars are black hole poop

My friend is giving away some free copies of his book for learning vim, it’s been super helpful for me. First come first serve

https://leanpub.com/deliberatevim/c/p1cPq3Bb9

The worst Trek is still better to watch than a heck of a lot of other TV

“a person looking into the stars with increasing horror as he realizes the dark forest theory and the terror of the endless expanse of space”

(the dark forest theory is that we don’t hear from aliens because any species that attempts to communicate is immediately destroyed by more advanced civilizations. This is basically what happened to me, while out hiking in the woods for a couple months. Any time we hiked at night it was super creepy)

Whoa ok ok so this is bad ass

this is brilliant, I’m slain

Godzilla Vs Lego!

Thanks!

My hypothesis is the decline is caused by a multifaceted change in environment:

• cost of living crisis caused by inflation, folks are making only about 1/3rd what their grandparents made for the same labor
• debt crisis caused by the above, crippling debt causes anxiety
• educational treadmill, folks are working harder for top jobs, so schooling takes longer and is much harder
• hormonal crisis, many young women are on hormonal birth control which is well known to significantly reduce libido in a large percentage of the population
• food supply crisis, cheap, poor quality highly-processed food make folks just slightly less healthy all the time, possibly can affect libido with lowered testosterone caused by preservatives
• social media crisis, evolution caused us to want to be nosy about 70 members of our tribe, not hundreds of millions. Social media is causing us to have the social equivalent of Daredevil’s acute hearing, but it’s addicting so folks can’t easily shut it off (as I write on social media…)
• fitness crisis, many folks just aren’t healthy enough to lift and run, so they have less testosterone which lowers libido for everyone regardless of sex/gender
• reproductive fear, folks realize they have it bad with little hope of improvement, so they don’t want the same for their offspring
• perfectionism causing a lack of confidence, being able to see the best in the world at any second on your phone causes acute perfectionism that prevents folks from even trying. Look up rates of musical instrument playing to see how few are even starting compared to 20 years ago. Skills in an area lead to increased confidence which makes a person more confident
• protective parenting combined with extremely restrictive schooling, leads to less “free time” where folks can hang out and build social skills
• hyper niche porn on demand, every person can access the porn of their choice on demand at all times. This causes unrealistic tastes and lack of confidence.
• infection fears, everyone is taught from a young age to be afraid of STDs and pregnancy, so it’s a looming fear in many
• entertainment quality, we’ve created the most addicting games, movies, shows, and apps. These make it more interesting to sit and zone out than socialize
• anxiety/depression crisis from the above leads to a population with lower libido, SSRIs are well known to reduce libido in a large subset of the population

All in all, we’ve got a society that is nearly perfectly designed to reduce libido in the population. Those that manage to avoid or ignore these challenges find a very small dating pool compared to decades past. Those that pair off are less likely to have offspring, such that we will likely have a population collapse in the next hundred years. Hopefully by then have figured enough of this out that we build a society that makes it easy to be a human who finds joy and love in other humans and not in a screen.

wordsmith, you’ve caused me to laugh, well done!

I’m playing through Another Crabs Treasure and this post gives me flashbacks