Fingers crossed
A few years ago I started purposely parking as far away as possible at work, partly because I was tired of the whole dumb process of circling around looking for a good parking space and partly I was wanting to walk more. It’s been kind of liberating. Instead of trying to sift through a sea of cars to find that empty diamond space in the rough, I’m awash in empty spaces as far as the eye can see everywhere I go. At some places, it’s almost like I’ve gotten my own dedicated parking space.
I think that’s what the internet has done for us, it’s removed that sort “social immune system” that prevented crazy ideas from spreading. Before, if somebody had some crazy ideas, the most they could usually do was rant to people on the bus/subway, maybe make some pamphlets, or some other small-scale thing to spread the idea. At best you might find someone on AM radio broadcasting at weird hours. Individuals would get exposed to it, but would likely never pass it on, this contained crazy ideas and they rarely got traction to spread.
Now the internet comes along, and suddenly crazies are getting hooked up with impressionable people easier than ever before. Crazy ideas have an almost endless supply of rubes that will eat them right up. Our social immune system can’t protect society from all the insane things flying around at high speeds all over the place now. It’s intellectual chaos.
Agree with some of the movies on here, but Robin Hood Prince of Thieves and Shrek being on the list means it just can’t be taken seriously.
Seems like a red herring. Is there a single Republican candidate anywhere that supports gun control?
I don’t understand what’s going on with her hand. I get what they’re trying to show, but something isn’t adding up.
In the US I’ve seen video of white teens walking out in the open carrying automatic rifles, yelling shit like, “Yeah, we’re carrying a fucking gun down the street!” At one point a cop even stops them and talks to them for a bit, then lets them go on their way. Granted, had they been black with obvious toy guns they’d be dead, but in some places openly carrying guns around is apparently a casual occurrence.
Or hell, just eliminate the opposition party. They’ll do it first and we’re just going to stand idly by and let them for the sake of “moral superiority”. They’ll do it and still see themselves as saints.
It's kind of insane the amount of work people will do for free, just for the hell of it. I mean, just thinking of my own small world of tabletop RPG gaming and the number of people GMing and writing up stuff that they just give out for free is kind of heartwarming. It's this weird drive to create and make storytelling worlds that other people can get lost in. I've worked on projects like that before and put shit tons of time and effort into them, not even considering that anybody might ever want to give me money for them (though likely it probably wouldn't even be legal in this case without working directly with Bethesda and getting into licensing and such). Sometimes it's just fulfilling to get lost working on a project that you love.
If these people were any smarter or had better critical thinking skills they probably wouldn't be out protesting for pro-life causes in the first place. These are the kind of people who will believe in whatever crazy conspiracy theories get fed to them, they've probably been conditioned from a young age to believe crazier and crazier things. Their worldview has them believing that taking things on faith is a virtue, that the less evidence you have for something, the more believable it is. As long as it comes from somebody semi-charismatic and it makes them feel good about themselves, it's the literal word of God.
You make the art yourself... using the blood of your enemies as your medium, the countryside is your canvas.
I've been to homes in foreign countries that had little more than a hole in the ground outside for a bathroom, a cow dung hut for a kitchen, and a rain water collector or a river for a water source, it doesn't take much to get those amenities and if you really wanted you could probably make it work with this storage shed. Whether or not it's actually up to code here in the US though is a different question entirely. I think there's alot of municipalities that have banned tiny homes altogether or have such strict zoning laws/building requirements that this definitely wouldn't fly as a "home" in any sense of the word.
It'd be a toss-up at that point, depending on who they put up before the election. Maybe Nikki Haley could actually win again Biden? The other non-candidates that ran during the primaries don't seem like they'd fare well. That'd be hilarious if the party most opposed to women's rights were to get the first female president in office. Losing Trump would be a speedbump for Conservatives though, they're moving towards trying to take America down the road of a theocracy, I'm not sure that losing Trump would really stop that, they're pretty much committed to making it happen at some point.
I mean, I wouldn't mind the current President exercising this power over their political rivals, in the election, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, purely as a defensive measure to protect America. It sets a shitty precedence, but do we really want He Who Shall Not Be Named to set the precedence first?
I just think it'd be a hilarious way to piss off Conservatives as another way to get an Obama back in the White House. And we'd have Barack there again too as First Gentleman.
I feel like there wasn't really a single golden age for PC gaming, since each genre has had its own golden age. Doom, Duke Nukem, Unreal, and others probably comprised the first FPS Golden Age, but that was happening separately from other Golden Ages that were happening. You also had RTS games, Strategy games, and a bunch of other PC genres.
As far as when that first FPS golden age ended? I'd almost say that 1997's Goldeneye 007 for the N64 marked the "end" of the PC FPS golden age, since that's when console gaming got its first big exclusive FPS hit. EVERYBODY I knew was playing that game when it came out and you just couldn't play it on the PC at that time, it marked a shift from PC to console gaming. Some genres would never make the jump successfully, like RTS games, but FPS games and Adventure games seemed to work well and that's where all the cool new games went to. Obviously consoles had had hits before this, but that seemed like the first time they got something above and beyond just Mario or Sonic-style platformers.
Calling it a "tiny home" is a bit of a stretch. Wal-mart itself calls it a "storage shed" (https://www.walmart.com/ip/Best-Barns-Arlington-12x20-Wood-Storage-Shed-Kit/1567768995). So I guess if you really wanted to, you could call it a "tiny home", but by that standard we could just call a cardboard box a tiny home as well. BOOM! Instantly solved the homeless crisis.
We’re talking about Trump here, right?
That's surprising, it seemed like such a bad idea from the get-go, but who knew it would actually turn out that way? I'd say hopefully it can serve as a warning to other countries that might want to leave the EU, but the kind of people that would want to leave in the first place probably aren't the kind of people to actually consider evidence anyways. I'm sure we'll see this replay in other EU countries as these far-right, oddly Russian-friendly parties start getting into power and wanting to weaken the EU/NATO.
Being a Contrarian Makes People Feel Good
Whether it's a sense of superiority or just to be funny or asinine or out of a genuine need to spread the truth, people online generally try to be contrarian as often as possible because it gives them some sort of personal gratification or a sense that they're correcting something wrong in the universe.
Streamer Perrikaryal uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) device to play games
TTRPG Product Category terminology?
I settled on using Zotero (meant for academia, but whatever, it does what I need) for cataloguing/organizing my ttrpg pdf hoard and I'm trying to set up some top-level tags to make it a bit easier to sift through what I'm looking for. One set of tags will be genre tags (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc), with another level below that for sub-genre (cyberpunk, supernatural, low fantasy, post-apocalyptic, etc).
Another set of top-level tags will focus on the actual types of books/products one might see for an RPG. These are just all the terms I've come across before, setup in a hierarchy that makes sense to me, though sometimes terms aren't used consistently across different RPG lines. Since some products can straddle multiple genres/categories, I'm hoping tags will help make it easier to sort through everything. Does this set of categories/sub-categories make sense? I'm still at the early stages of just importing everything into a library, so I'm sure there's categories I've not thought of or considered.
- Core Rulebook (books required to play)
- Player Handbook (this might straddle the line between core and supplement)
- Supplement (books that expand the rules/setting)
- Sourcebook
- Bestiary
- Splatbook
- Adventure/Scenario/Module
- Campaign
- Setting
- Accessory (mostly non-book related items)
- Cards
- Maps
- Fiction
- Music/Audio
- Screens
- Sheets
- Character sheet
- Rules/Cheat sheet
- Misc sheet
- Resource (more for general books on RPGs, system-agnostic)
- GM aid
- Player aid
- Educational
- Tables
Organizing TTRPG pdf collection?
I've been searching around for a way to organize my TTRPG collection of pdfs (numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands) and haven't really found a silver bullet for it yet. Everything I've looked at has some sort of weird thing that's off about it that doesn't seem to make it ideal. Is there something out there that others are using that works well? Here's what I've looked at so far:
-
Folder system: This is what I'm already using and it's serviceable (PC), but it really doesn't give me any tagging function and so it's hard to organize based on genre or come up with really any categories outside of just alphabetically naming folders based on the RPG name, then putting whatever subcategories I need as folders below that. It just feels so clunky going about it like this. Being able to organize/search via tags just seems like the way to go.
-
Calibre: This gets recommended everytime, but honestly I'm not interested in duplicating my library of +10,000 pdfs and following their organization system. The desktop app looks ugly (which is apparently fixed with Calibre-web but still requires the desktop app).
-
Jellyfin: Really not geared towards books in general, it's functional but not great for it. This may end up being what I fall back to if I can't get anything else working.
-
Kavita: Looks nice and works nice EXCEPT it has some weird ass naming convention with regards to numbers in the folder/file names. Only top-level stuff can contain numbers, everything below has to have roman numerals? Such a weird thing that just breaks it for me.
-
Komga: It looks nice and works nice, but is more geared towards comics, and thus doesn't work so hot with RPGs with multiple categories (Core rulebooks, Scenarios, Settings, etc), since I tend to break those out into different folders. It ends up treating sub-folders as a different series altogether, so it sort of demands that you just keep everything in the same folder.
-
Ubooquity: Tried it, it ran like ass on my machine and didn't seem to do as good a job. Making updates in the folders themselves took awhile to propagate and it just overall didn't seem to work well for how I wanted to use it. I just didn't particularly care for it.
-
Zotero: It's actually more meant for academic journals and such, but it could be used for organizing TTRPG pdfs, though not sure how well it scales up once you start throwing thousands of pdfs at it. Downside though is that it's not as flashy as some of the others, it doesn't display book covers and you have to create additional objects for each item. You also can't just add tags to the PDFs themselves, you have to create an additional 'Book' object and attach the pdf to that item, then add whatever tags/notes/metadata you want to add. I haven't figured out how to automate the process and the one item I tried where it automatically found it, it created a 'Journal Article' and renamed it based on the authors of the book (which it did correctly find), which is not ideal for going through thousands of items. I just want it to keep the file names in most cases as I've already gotten most file names where I want them.
Have you ever gone down a gaming rabbit hole?
That is, have you ever started getting into a game, only to discover that the community is much deeper than you initially ever suspected?
My kids and I started playing PlateUp! for funsies, it's a 4-player co-op kitchen/cooking/restaurant simulator that has you doing fun things like cooking food, taking customers orders, and washing dishes. We kind of play it for laughs and barely make any headway in it, usually as a result of all the chaos that comes from multiple people trying to run a kitchen. I started looking deeper into it because apparently there's ways to automate your whole setup and have the whole kitchen run itself. The amount of diagrams and setups that people have created are just insane, way deeper than I ever even considered with this innocent-looking game and it's made me reconsider what I thought was just a quirky little party game.
Comment Removal Criteria?
I literally only wanted to use Instagram for looking up porn star accounts and viewing softporn material, yet SOMEHOW I seem to mostly see non-porn material. Artwork and craft projects and whatever, everything but porn. Whatever, one thing I've noticed though is that if I make a comment on a porn star account and it's something lewd and inappropriate, it will never get removed for any reason, no matter what language I use.
YET, on multiple occasions, I've made completely G-rated comments on non-porn posts, the most recent one about the difference between Star Wars & Star Trek (fantasy vs sci-fi), and that comment will get removed, there's not even any curse words being used. I have no idea why it's happening, is it that I'm writing too much and using too many big words? I'll write the most offensive horny things on porn accounts, and nothing, but as soon as I write up a semi-intellectual comment on a non-porn posting, it gets removed. I'm just mystified as to what's happening and what's triggering it.
TIL about Eugene Debs, a 1920 Socialist candidate who ran for President while jailed in Federal prison for sedition, receiving 3.4% of the vote at the time. He promised to pardon himself if elected.
Eugene Debs, a Socialist leader in the early 20th century, ran for President five times. His fifth and highest vote count came in the 1920 Presidential election, in which he was running while in Federal prison for sedition. He received about 3.4% of the vote at the time (which included women for the first time since the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920 as well). Not naming names, but yes, it's possible to run for President while in prison, though results may vary.
PS Account Hacked, my experience with Customer Service
I just got done with a chat with Sony Customer Service regarding fraudulent activity on my account, I figured I'd share my experience in case anyone else has the same issue come up (I assume it's a relatively common experience).
Somebody apparently got access to my account a few days ago, changed the email address linked to the account (so that I couldn't reset the password) changed the password, activated 2-step verification, then started buying up a few games on it (as my Sony account had been linked to my paypal account).
Of course I discovered all this on a Sunday, when their phone lines are closed, which left me having to go through their "online assistant" (ie chat bot). It took me about 30-40min to finally get transferred to a live chat rep, but because I had keyed in my "online ID" wrong in the chat form ( misremembered it), he was unable to help me, because that chat instance is restricted to whatever info I entered originally. So I then had to start a new chat instance with the correct info, which left me waiting for another 30-40min, which by that time put me into about 1.5 hours and I just closed out and resolved to get to it today.
Fast-forward to today, the wait this time was only about 20 min. Everything seemed to go fairly well, I got access to my account and changed the password back out. I then went ahead and activated 2-Step Verification for myself, to improve security to hopefully prevent this kind of thing in the future. After verifying my email address, this action apparently flagged my account for suspicious activity and my account is now suspended. I'm now having to wait for another specialist to resolve that issue. And because of that issue, the refund on the two games that were fraudulently bought is on hold because the agent can't process it while the account is suspended.
After all of that, I requested to know what the email address had been changed to during the time that my account was hacked, as I want to file a police report at least and give that information out if I can. However, I was told that they could not give that information out for security reasons. In my mind, that email address became part of my account record, did it not? Why wouldn't I have access to that info for my account? The agent literally just gave me back access to my account, I'm obviously the account owner.
Overall, I appreciated the help that CS gave me, I've worked that kind of job before, so I understand some of what they go through, but Sony's process for resolving these issues was just kind of a lot of needless waste on my end and infuriating that I don't have access to my own account information. There was some other strange things about the whole experience that I won't go into here, so just be prepared if you ever have to contact Sony about this.
Thank you for reading my long rant.
Merging RPGs with Boardgames?
I was curious if anyone else had tried out bringing in boardgame content/ideas into their RPG games? Minis are always great to bring in as some boardgames have some great figures to use, but also, just incorporating mechanics, settings, as a mini-game, or just the general idea of a game into an RPG seems like a great resource. There's already alot of RPG-esque games out there that are ripe for plundering and just converting into full-blown RPGs if you wanted, you'd just be adding some additional depth on top of an already defined world. We've just seen Gloomhaven make the leap into an RPG as well with their new crowdfunding campaign.
I just wrapped up a one-shot game (over 3 sessions) of **Mothership RPG **where I merged the RPG with the boardgame Nemesis and it seemed to go well (everyone died, very on brand). I basically used the Nemesis map/rooms/plot and ran it as a sort of pointcrawl via FoundryVTT with randomized encounters in each room. I brought in Nemesis' idea of giving the players competing goals and added some other elements to amp up the paranoia. The two games seemed to compliment each other fairly well, though not really suitable beyond just a one-shot. It probably could've went into a campaign if I had wanted, but I was happy with one of the players rigging the engines to explode and leaving on an escape pod.
Some other ideas I've had merge RPG elements with tabletop games have been with Kingdom Death (I had drafted up some ideas for merging it with The Quiet Year awhile back), Shadows of Brimstone (Hexcrawl, basically adding another layer on top of the game to give it more depth), and Heroquest (I tried out a Savage Worlds conversion of the game).