On the one hand, this might help fence sitters that are like “there’s no content there”.

On the other, I just don’t personally care for a stream of random images like Instagram et al do.

It’s not “retire and live a life of luxury” money, at least in many parts of the world.

It’s a lot of money in terms of paying down debt and covering rent for a while, though.

I love mage, but its magic is so involved and powerful I wouldn’t want to use it in a game unless everyone was a mage. You don’t really want one players options to be “I hit him with my club” and the others to be boundless.

Awakening 2nd edition was really good, imo, but I never actually got to play Ascension

I used nWoD for fantasy games. The core dice pool system works pretty well, and few things are tightly coupled to any setting in particular.

I mostly don’t like d20, so when someone tells me they’re doing a game about secret vampire societies in it, I’m a lot more disappointed than if they ported a system I like or am neutral on. Also 5th edition in particular makes a lot of assumptions about how things work.

Isn’t that what people were calling it anyway? Well that’s nice I guess.

I dunno man. I’ve had a lot of conversations with players that go like “do you think your character is the first to come up with this hijink? If it works, why doesn’t the entire setting revolve about this infinite damage trick you’re trying to sell me?”

Like, if it was as easy as casting Charm Person on the king to become the new ruler, other people would already be doing that. Therefore, there must be reasons why it doesn’t work.

My parents are difficult. Not the worst people and not monsters, but at many times unpleasant.

Plus it was a house in the suburbs. Not ideal for socializing or culture.

And lastly, living with parents in the suburbs would be huge negatives for dating.

All it takes is one cop to be like “he was resisting arrest and I feared for my life so I had to shoot him 17 times in the back”.

“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Yep.

Management is often out of touch and full of shit

I don’t like to think of people as immutably good or bad, but I get what you meant.

There’s a bunch of factors.

• are they honest?
• are they kind?
• do they care about things other than themselves?
• do they try to make the world better?

So, someone who lies, is cruel, doesn’t care about anyone else, and leaves the world a mess is being a pretty bad person.

Someone who just keeps their head down, goes to work, and is polite to people they meet is kind of middling.

The cap was in place because the Social Security benefit doesn’t increase above the that income.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a good reason for the cap to exist. I expect it’s a compromise to get rich people and idiots on board.

I’m not rich to the point of no longer needing to labor, but I did hit the social security cap one year. I was pissed when I learned why my take home jumped up. I would have rather kept paying.

It’s selfish to want to keep a little more of your vast wealth like you describe. That’s cartoon villainy.

It’s kind of insane to me that there’s an annual cap on social security payments. If your salary is high enough, you stop paying into it partway through the year. That’s ass-backwards. You shouldn’t pay anything for the first chunk of money, and then pay more as you make more.

It’s always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.

Even the idealized stuff of “buy a house on one income” was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, “and then the white people burned down our house” were all realities.

This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.

I know a couple people here who own apartments. Median income here I think is like $115k. None of them are much more than that.

I’m pretty sure property taxes aren’t progressive and I’m baffled as to why.

Make it so like the first 100k is taxed low, and then ramp up so people with millions of property pay through the nose.

I don’t know if it’s favorite of all time but I thought of this one now:

haha and then what ;) by jawbreaker reunion. Probably gave some software nerds a headache trying to incorporate the semicolon and parenthesis. Points for a confusing band name, too.

https://jawbreakerreunion.bandcamp.com/album/haha-and-then-what

“Patches” might be my favorite track on it.

Feel like the neighbors that complained should be named, shamed, and had the ire of the state turned on them. They seem to have poor empathy, so maybe some personal experience would stir some up in them.

It’s really hard to get people to suffer mild inconvenience when they don’t emotionally connect with the benefits.

Most of facebook’s evils are remote and impersonal. Seeing your cousin’s baby photos is real and at hand.

Why are each of your lines wrapped in ellipsis?

…what many anti-fifth-edition positions miss is that it’s not about learning a new system, it’s about compatibility across a vast ecosystem of disparate settings and campaigns…

I don’t think 5e is especially compatible with disparate settings and campaigns. It’s not an actually generic system like Fate or GURPS. It’s got underbaked or entirely missing whole RPG subsystems and mechanics (eg: social conflict, succeed-at-a-cost, metagame currency). It’s highly opinionated in other regards- hit points, class and level, resting. You can hammer the peg into the hole, but you could do that with anything.

It’s not a good system for modeling anything outside heroic fantasy.

It’s certainly a popular system, but many things are popular without being good. But, if your top priority is going where people are, by all means stick to D&D 5e, reddit, facebook, etc.