pronouns: she/her is fine.
I am a conniving rat with plans of an international uprising against tyranny! I keep getting distracted by tasty food, gardening, gadgets, games, and books though.
Inside me are two wolves, I desperately need surgery.
I understand, today my own nation votes to slap down a hand outstretched in peace and warmth. In my own state police deploy anti terror powers to crack down on anyone attending a rally against Israeli militancy.
But if we give up nothing will improve, and everything good we have started small and grew into unstoppable movements.
Larger scale action takes smaller scale first
The Israeli government is able to pursue its horrible policies because of a lack of support for palastinian people.
Preventing protest in powerful nations stops public opinion changing. Public opinion allows the political establishment to continue to avoid historical responsibility.
If western nations drop support of Israel and start using sanctions etc it would be much harder to destroy Gaza.
This ban will allow the Israeli state to continue murdering an entire people unchecked
I don’t think that’s likely, we are apes not angels.
Sometimes we have conflicts, some are probably resolvable, some represent fundamentally opposed interests.
We can try to make society different, so there are fewer situations that lead to irresolvable conflicts. That project will never end.
Whether this gives you hope or grief is largely up to you.
While it is true that insane propaganda is off the charts, for example in my own country Australia we’re chaining ourselves to the fading star of the usa and the UK militarily despite having:
all while the usa government tries it’s hardest to undermine our economic policy, erase our culture, and distort our politics towards their own demended lines.
There is zero evidence the chinese government does not want to do the same. They have interfered in our media, our education systems, there has been stupid petty trade squabbles with both “sides” using us for their own ends.
When chinese diplomats speak to our media, even in excruciatingly fair interviews, the pattern is the same slimey deny deny deny and legal quibble that usa diplomats engage in. Their media is insanely critical of Australian life too.
There are no good guys in this power struggle and looking for one is childish thinking.
Even this article refuses to address the notion that the chinese government has ever conducted itself in a condemnable manner.
Find a sense engaging ritual and do it regularly.
For me it was having elaborate spice teas or herbal teas. I’d mix up batches and keep it in the office, when I needed some sanity taking the time to just focus on a damn good cup of tea helped me relax some.
A treat you enjoy, a stretching routine whatever you can do that is highly engaging would be a good choice. Force work out of your head even for 5 minutes. We aren’t meant to work like a steam engine.
Thanks, that’s a lot to think about. We currently use an oled computer monitor as a TV (hooked up to a pi) and it’s beautiful but there are limits on screen size and it’s crazy expensive (you’re paying for stupid fast refresh rates and the Gamer™ markup)
our house is very bright during the day, lots of glass in sunny Australia, so it’s probably not a great candidate for a projector generally but it does have me thinking about one in the bedroom for late night movies. Probably a lot cheaper and neater than another absurd monitor.
How dark do rooms need to be for them to work? Are there issues with shared spaces where someone might want a well lit workspace?
But I’m an insecure person. I speak maybe 100 words aloud a week outside of gaming.
It’s not easy to enforce rules without confience, much easier to build consensus than be a dictator
I’m not experienced at all! I’m dming my first campaign at the moment. I did play as a teenager in the 2000s but that was pathfinder which worked quite differently.
It does ask more of players, and it wont work with a group that doesn’t have the confidence to ask meta questions about the game but you can definitely foster that! when disputes come up there are multiple ways of handling things, I haven’t had any bad ones but 2 come to mind.
In one I didn’t adequately communicate to the players the threat of a foe and they felt frustrated, we just rewound time and tried again after a brief chat about non combat options. In another I just asked a player what they thought was fair and they ended up coming up with something reasonable.
I think there’s a harmful view that ttrpgs are like a meal the GM cooks and delivers to the players which they either enjoy or not rather than a collaboratory effort of mutual play. Players should add to scenes etc (e.g. “Is there/could there be a window we could jump from?”), be part of adjudication when it wont kill pacing or during tricky situations.
Like all play it requires trust, but that’s true in modern DnD too with all sorts of broken interpretations of rules and zany magic items etc. All games where players and DMs are adversaries break down.
Ok so we can take that stance. I would disagree that these are useful semantics because of the case I mentioned where I feel like adding a turret to a sandcaste is something meaningfully distinct from reducing a sandcastle to a pile of sand, walking 100 meters down the beach, and making a new one with the turret.
Do you disagree that this is meaningfully distinct? If you do would you feel that it’s equivalent to do those two things? That you feel the same way about them?
If you agree that it’s meaningfully distinct then why insist on framing it in the same concepts instead of using the concept of change?
You’re gonna have to start by pinning down terminology a bit.
Change is a term often used which I think most people would feel is a usefully distinct word for example if I said: said:
I think those would mean something different to most people despite all reductively applying to the literal rearrangement of a pile of sand.
So the obvious potential confusion here is in the case where I changed a sandcastle how would you decribe it? adding a turret could be taken as destroying the old one and creating a new one but it seems strange to me to argue for the throwing out of change as a concept since what I did seems meaningfully different from smashing a sandcastle, walking 100 meters, and building a new one.
So could you elaborate on what you take creation and destruction to entail?
I might be misunderstanding but what you’re talking about is basically just failures of a DM.
DMing osr style games requires being more than a simple automaton applying the rules. The systems are simple to allow you to spend your energy elsewhere. I’ll use OSE as an example as that’s what I’m currently DMing.
Let’s take perception. Firstly if something matters from a fun perspective it should be obvious. For example, if overcoming a trap is fun then the overcoming should involve play, not dice rolls which are there to abstract over tedious or uncertain play. For example a large magical fire blocking the corridor requires no perception but will involve a lot of experimentation to find a way past.
Or if we are wanting a perception roll like event: Lets say players are stuck and have no ideas for finding a secret door they think is likely there. Who are the characters? not their stats who are they? Ok someone was a farmer prior? huh ok. Give them a clue to follow like “hey Jake the farmer, you notice the air in this room smells familiar, there’s a maddening scent of petrichor which has no place on a dry stone chamber like this one” see what happens. Alternative if Jake asks for a clue ask Jake to describe some way in which who he is applies to the context and set an ability check for a true or false clue. Suddenly a lack of rules is freedom for players to build up their character mythos on the fly.
Likewise for player skill stuff. No reason a player needs to narrate a conversation anymore than swing an actual sword. If a player asks me if they can make an impassioned arguement based on legal precedent, a sense of justice, and the illegitimacy of a ruler who cannot protect their vassels to the King’s guard then they make such an argument as appropriate to their character’s level of skill.
I admit to being out of the game for a while but how common is RAM encryption?
wouldn’t the overhead violate half the point of RAM?
This sounds like a giant security risk?
the smell of frying onions
Smoking: easy way to quit smoking plus weed during the worst withdrawal to avoid snapping at everyone
Weed (earlier lmao, I still use sometimes but less than a gram a year really): having other things to do that require concentration and memory I enjoy. Weed is easy as it’s mostly habitual. The sleeplessness is the worst and it’s only a couple of days
Opiates: Exercise, avoiding boredom (v hard! video games, gardening, easy books, podcasts etc), lots of walking those restless nights, preparing easy food for the worst few days, counting days to know it was going to end. Be careful after surgery kids that shit sucks to come off.