Khrux

I mean as a first language speaker, it is.

As much as I don’t disagree, I think the “Apple is closest to Nazism” comment touches on something different. Other massive American companies have awful practices but they don’t care particularly how their way of making money looks. Apple wields a specific aesthetic power that generally dictates a hegemonic uniformity, that strays the line of being to their detriment at times. I don’t think any other big tech company would care in the same way if not for their desire to copy Apple.

I don’t mind it being deep, just don’t fill it with your actions and deeds. A big part of fun for TTRPGs is ‘play away from the table’, which for the players is typically making art, backstory or builds for current or future characters. Most long backstories I read don’t invalidate a level 1 character but mostly explore values, just as my real life story could be as deep as I choose to write it and I’d not even have the skills to be level 1.

My suggestion is:

• Get people together for a session 0. Only pitch the campaign and tone then, if not construct it collaboratively too.

• Hand out pieces of paper or card face down, have each player take 1, and ensure there is one between each player. These cards say Love, ally, rival, or enemy.

• Explain that players should make an NPC for their backstory that matches this word, and should make a shared NPC with the person next to them based on the card between them.

• Now let them take another card of their choice. They can either make another NPC with this, or use it to make the relationship to one of their shared NPCs asymmetrical.

• They can design their NPCs and backstory now or before session 1, up to them.

Finally, explore what the players can choose to do to contribute between sessions to the game. If they don’t do anything, that’s fine, but they should have a way to meaningful contribute to something. Typically I encourage world building and cultural lore, such as unique foods and why that has a thematic resonance.

This is hard to structure, I had a player who was a former forever DM, who played a knowledgeable librarian in a former monster hunter guild. I asked her to make some monster statblocks, as she’d know them inside and out in character.

My advice to players:

Make your backstory show that your character has done no huge deeds yet, and most importantly, have everything that matters in it revolve around NPCs. Not just is this the best drama, but NPCs can move, join factions, be redeemed, betray you, die and everything else.

• That cost halfling village you design that perfectly exemplifies your character, but will never be seen in this urban campaign halfway across the continent? Make the most important part of it the mayor’s daughter who happens to be your childhood friend.

• The strange necklace that made you stronger but more angry when you wore it? The final time you saw it was when your brother stormed out of your co-owned business after a bitter argument.

• The lord who helped you smuggle your liquor into the city? That’s the same lord that wrongfully imprisoned the player character next to you.

One of my favourite scenes from a campaign came when a player, after spending a session getting the chance to meet with a resistance leader, turned to the others and said “this is my ex-wife”. That whole dynamic was interesting too, as both had come from a warrior culture and initially parted due to neither being the “strong warrior”, now both trying to fight against that same faction a decade later.

My all time favourite NPC was a talented tailor in an urban campaign, who owed one player character a favour and was generally fond of them all. Nothing like the party having a go to guy for fancy or silly outfit amendments.

Also worth adding it sadly doesn’t really exist anymore, the iconic look here is gone, although game mechanics still begin getting weird.

Also although people have teleported to it, Minecraft is so big that I assumed nobody would ever reach it in survival. I’m not surprised it took 14 years.

I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.

I was trying to look up a quote I thought was from parody CEO Hand Scorpio from the Simpsons, but it’s from Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec.

“Metaphors? I hate metaphors! That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick; no froo froo symbolism, just a good simple tale about a man who hates an animal”.

Either way, it’s a great parody of artistic illiteracy of business bros, even without the A.I summary, they would have said the same shit. Most the time they’re reading non-fiction guru-self-help with a bro friendly veneer anyway.

As an entirely different tangent, I’m someone who is qualified in the arts and pretty bad at the sciences, but I’m always amazed how naturally people in the sciences pick up the art. I’m talking mathematicians and electrical engineers. I have no idea if it’s that they know how to learn from a background where it’s necessary, or if their brains have just developed connections in a transferable place. Maybe it’s even just a coincidence and just random correlation I’ve seen. Either way, I’d worry art was deceptively easy if not for the fact that armchair pseudo-intellectual business bros are absolutely awful at making and understanding it.

And sometimes just super plain ones. I remember getting my favourite Skyrim potion texture mod from there specifically.

Purple: Magic??

Green: Life/death??

Red: Life/fire??

Blue: Magic/cold??

Honestly the only colour I don’t feel uncertain about is orange, that’s always bad.

Also on the topic of health potions, a great piece of advice I once heard was that if your players are in a foreign land, remove health potions. Give them health biscuits and watch them reconcile with God.

That’s the real thing I wasn’t ready to admit until you said it. I don’t want a screwdriver because it’s less impressive to see. People will look at me and make the mistake of thinking they couldn’t do it, but when it felt like LEGO, people were more likely to be interested.

I’d really really like a phone with cameras that are flush with the back of the case, and don’t care whatsoever how thin my phone is once it’s under 1cm.

It feels like the entire ethos of smartphone design (led by apple) had sleek minimal design as it’s guiding light, but keeps adding exceptions. As much as I enjoy a versatile, bulky laptop and photography camera, I really enjoy the style of a smartphone being a piece of glass in my pocket.

I’d have preferred a click lock of sorts, because in the cases I’m wanting to swap my battery, I’m probably on the move with no access to power / charging, such as hiking, coach rides, camping etc.

Currently I’m pretty happy with a portable charger but I’d much rather have one or two fully charged batteries, both for the speed of getting back to full charge and reducing the speed of battery degradation.

I’m already a big fan of having a minimalist daily carry, I have my phones with my bank cards on it, my house keys and maybe my camera or water bottle, and that’s all. If be happy to shove a few spare batteries in a little case when I know I’ll be out the house for some time, but a screwdriver is something I’d prefer to not have to carry every day.

I 90% agree, I swapped to wireless earbuds about a decade ago when my aux port on whatever phone I had then broke, and I immediately preferred it. I went from buying £10 wired earphones from a supermarket what sounded shit and broke every month to £25 wireless earphones that sounded shit and broke every 6 months, so for me it was am improvement. I was also a chronic “catch headphone cable on every handle” victim, to the point that I immediately preferred the wireless solution. Another thing is when my wireless headphones break, they fucking break; I go with one earbud for about a month then inevitably buy a new pair. When my wired headphones started to degrade, I always fought it, ending up in a losing battle of finding that perfect way to hold them to make them still work. The only downside I have nowadays is when I’m listening to music or a video and realise I’ve misplaced my phone, which isn’t really an issue, just that it was impossible when it was tethered to my ears.

But I’m probably part of a very small minority when it comes to my preference. I carry a compact camera any day I leave the house intending to take photos, so my ideal phone would have one rear camera that prioritises efficiency over quality. I’d have no headphone port, and to be honest, I could live with no ports and wireless charging and data transfer. I’ve had two smartphones in the last that had their USB-C ports fail as chargers (both galaxy S8s), and I could go years without needing to use the port for anything else. My dream phone would have no ports, one rear camera without a bump, no front camera, minimal tactile side buttons, be pretty slim, have a swappable battery and run a FOSS OS and mostly FOSS apps.

I respect the voices that want a smartphone equivalent to a ThinkPad a lot, but I don’t really think it’s anywhere near as necessary as a ThinkPad would be, because for most tasks that need something like that, I’d just use that.

That being said, there’s two reasons I don’t 100% agree. The first is to do with the fairphone specifically. More battery space and better waterproofing don’t really apply to a phone where I can swap the battery and it comes apart so much that it’s not really competitively waterproof. The second is larger, which is that I can just not use a headphone jack if I prefer wireless, while people who prefer wired are having increasingly few options available on the market.

I’m actually quite fond of a large screen, but it’s not enough of a selling point for me to not go for this as my next phone. I have large enough hands that I don’t struggle with reach on a large phone, so the main drawback is the additional battery power. But the fairphone has a swappable battery anyway, so that issue is more or less nullified.

My pet peeve is the front camera, I cannot wrap my head around the lunacy of having a large dead spot on the front of the phone, to the point I’d rather have a phone with no front facing camera than a big dead spot. People throw out screens for less.

Fairphone is almost the ideal phone for me, except this, and although I can probably remove the camera module, I can’t swap the screen for one without the dead patch.

I doubt any major power will intervene for Iran unless it looks like a regime change that actually benefits Israel / the USA happens. China and Russia have basically been minimal allies with Iran for the sake of funding an enemy of America, but they’ve always wanted Iran to remain weaker.

The small pro Iran groups, largely the groups Iran trained will act, but they have been already for the past 3 years.

Book your time travellers grand tour feast of flood beer, butter, cheese, whiskey, wine and chocolate.

For the cheaper package, there’s the toxic runoff, coal and radioactive material tour.

50% of the list is “The great chocolate and beer flood, where everyone got drunk and full.” And the other half is “The terrible toxic fossils fuel slip or ecological disaster and death”, except both have equal deaths.

In the countryside, we fucken too

I agree, knowing other people have sex is absolutely fine, in fact I assume it as default for basically any adult in a relationship. Not using protection may be unwise in almost all cases, but trying for a baby with a partner is the main exception, and it’s never been gross.

I understand that a lot of people have been raised with shame, and I feel a certain pity for them, but I’m not a fan of treating this shame as righteous.

The pentagon knew Israel was about to attack, they said so themselves, but denied any support or involvement. This seems to a valid reason for the pizza party, just to track, observe and be ready for any unexpected counter response.

I am in the camp where I believe the USA hasn’t actively been involved yet but fully intend to be in the coming days. We have a seen Israel do anything they weren’t already capable of, and the massive shift of US jets, missiles and an aircraft carrier to the middle east has largely happened after the initial attack.

Also I actually have less of an issue with other people buying Gaiman’s work. I have no love for the man and won’t buy anything myself again, but if you buy something of his, the money goes to him, and stops there. Rowling directly funds bigotry; the money people spend on Harry Potter is in a direct pipeline to funding the suffering of innocent people.

At the very least, before everything happened with Gaiman, he was known for having positive philanthropic ventures. Even if you gave him money, a sizable portion went to him, another portion went on to better the world. I’d presume he still supports these trusts and charities too.