A sort of country blues song about how my cat would ignore my friend until they went into the bathroom to poop, and then the cat was all about hanging out and being affectionate.

“You only love me when I’m pooping…”

I don’t think I’ve ever played fortnight, and the crass, advertisement, nature of it is extremely off-putting.

I also don’t think I’ve ever paid money for a skin in a video game

D&D, especially 5e, is just missing broad sections of game stuff so it can “leave it up to the DM”. Other stuff is really underbaked. Degree of success, succeed at a cost, non-violent conflict, ending combat other than totally wiping the other factions…

That can be fine if everyone’s on the same page, but since D&D is the mega popular game you’re likely to be playing with new players, or just randos, and that can lead to tension.

We used to talk about how to cure Vampires in Mage (awakening, 2e).

The easiest is probably time magic. With Time4, rules as written you can rewrite their history so they never became a vampire. It persists until the spell elapses, but you could make that last a year without too much trouble (assuming time4, gnosis3, a rote skill of 4).

With Time5, the “fuck you” level of Mage, you can use the Unmaking practice and prevent them from being embraced, though that’s big hubris and risks butterfly effects at the GM’s discretion.

Other approaches I’m less sure about. You could probably do something with Life5 (make a new body), 5 or so points of Death or Spirit to get a new soul (fun fact: in awakening, souls are fungible), and Mind5 to put their mind in the new body. Kind of a ship of Theseus situation.

Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. I think speed and accuracy of reading is also pretty low (I read like 80 wpm and 80% accuracy somewhere, but i couldn’t immediately find a good source for that).

If you’re on a text forum like this you’re probably well above the average person, and your experiences are not universal.

That said, I don’t have any data on hand about readability so you could be right. I’m sure people have studied it.

I think it’s partly because many people are only semi literate, and breaking the text up helps people read it. A larger block of text is "intimidating’

I think it’s funny that people get mad at that but don’t get mad about someone born into $50mm of wealth collecting $166,666/mo partly insured with no obligation to work or even fill out forms.

I’ve worked with a few people who are just incomprehensible. One refuses to write commit messages of any detail. Just “work in progress”. Cast him into the pit.

There was another guy that refused to name his tests. His code was like

describe(''. () => {
  it('', () => {
     expect(someFunc()).toEqual(0);
  }
 it('', () => {
    expect(someFunc(1)).toEqual(0);
  }
 it('', () => {
   expect(someFunc("").toEqual(1);
 }
}

He was like, “Test names are like comments and they turn into lies! So I’m not going to do it.”

I was like, a. what the fuck. b. do you also not name your files? projects? children?

He was working at a very big company last I heard.

edit: If you’re unfamiliar, the convention is to put a human readable description where those empty strings are. This is used in the test output. If one fails, it’ll typically tell include the name in the output.

Friends are almost all on signal. Parents are bad at technology and can barely figure out sms.

The funniest part is, the poorest people i know have a hatred for the poor.

I think people often hate things that remind them of things they don’t like about themselves

Google should be broken up and its leadership fined into oblivion for anti competitive behavior

I do feel like sometimes players have a sort of laid back, “we should just win without too much trouble” attitude. Sometimes this manifests as “we take a long rest after every fight”. And that’s a fine way to play, so long as everyone’s on board.

It can be kind of bad when half the group is kick-in-the-door-lol and the DM is expecting more tactical depth.

I think because D&D is many people’s first RPG, you’ll find a lot of bad habits there as new players rediscover them.

I had a job that paid stupid well. I’d give some money to almost anyone who asked on the street. They need it. I have plenty. I’m not going to notice the $1 or $5 or even $20 that I gave away. I make more than that in interest every day.

Rarely, I’ll talk with them a little. Ask their name or their story. There’s a regular around me that seems delighted that I remember his name.

Sometimes someone will seem unsafe, but most people are alright. It helps that I’m a bearded man, so certain classes of danger and harassment are rarely pointed at me.

I got laid off in February. I still give to people who ask, but I carry less cash so sometimes I don’t have anything to give.

When I’d be out with coworkers, before we all got laid off, none of them would give anything to people asking. I know they made as much or more than I did. I don’t judge people for not giving cash out when they’re in debt or struggling to pay rent, but I do judge my coworker for like wearing a high five figure watch and never helping the poor.

That management and leadership are smart, visionary, people without whom everything would fall apart.

It doesn’t matter what my line of work is. Management is mostly out of touch idiots everywhere.

“We need to redesign the web page to be more modern! Get me a big hero image and an image carousel!”

“Customers are complaining about how they can’t save their search settings. Maybe we should do something about that?”

“No that’s not a priority”

At my local bars, I tell them I’m (still) unemployed and then ask for the saddest, cheapest, beer. Usually it’s High Life or a sad little green can I can’t remember the name of. $4 or $5. One of them’s a local enough bar that I know most of the bartenders now, at least.

The whole “return to office” thing is a cocktail of like… “Feelings Driven Leadership” and “The Cruelty is the Point”. Oh, and “I’m incompetent so everyone else must be incompetent in the same way, too.”

Many managers make decisions based purely on feelings. You can show them data but they don’t care. They feel like being in-office is better. And maybe, maybe, it is, on some metrics. Are those metrics better for workers? Probably not.

And the cruelty? Well, as others have said, some people get off on having power over others.

The last point, there are some people who just can’t manage themselves so they seem to think no one else can, either. Like someone the other day was saying he can’t work from home because he’ll just play xbox. To which I respond, from the depths of my soul, fuck off. Grow up and stop making everyone else around you suffer because you’re an incompetent, unmedicated, shit. You can go into the office if you have to. Don’t make everyone else suffer a pay cut too because you’re trash tier at self control.

Online meetings are largely useless

Oh! Oh! This is where people say “skill issue”, isn’t it?

If you can’t run a productive meeting over zoom you probably can’t do one in person, either.

Most people can’t or won’t do that

Google still has a chat embedded in Gmail, but because Google is grotesquely incompetent they’ve never succeeded in making a good messaging service. I think they’ve had like 15, but they are too fucked up to just make one work.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/

One of the things I bring up if someone says “we should run the government like a business”

Running games has definitely helped me run meetings.

• Establish turn order.
• let people finish their thought instead of immediately following some dumbass tangent
• take notes