Fate is maybe the biggest game that uses this. You can spend a Fate Point to declare a story detail.

It’s a big change in mind set from the default of DND, where you’re super zoomed in on your character. Instead you’re more like a writer on a project.

For example, a group of players were trying to escape from an office building. They’d set off alarms and were fleeing upwards. One of the players said, “I bet the executives here have a helicopter on the roof, with a chopper always ready to go.”. Spend a fate point and it’s true. They stole the helicopter and escaped into new problems.

I like being able to steer the game. I don’t like just being along for the GM’s ride. I like when my players provide ideas.

But some players hate it. I guess some players really want to focus on becoming one with their character. I’m more focused on trying to tell a cool story.

https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/fate-points#declaring-a-story-detail

I find vanilla DND really weird after spending time in other games. Like I’m missing limbs and senses.

I usually ask the players something like “if it was this easy, why doesn’t everyone else do it?”. Sometimes they’ll dismantle their own ideas given the prompt.

Or, sometimes I’ll say “are you sure you want NPCs to use this tactic?”

Should be careful not to just shut down player ideas. If everything they do slams into an annoying problem, it can quickly stop being fun.

I sometimes try to sync with the players and be like “hm do you think the 300 year old vampire has had to engage with the city before? What sort of plans and influence do you think he has?”. Then it doesn’t feel like I’m just screwing them, if they’re thinking about it too.

There are of course some weak points, and I’ll gladly expand upon them and any other points it if you’re interested. But I’ve really enjoyed my time in PF2e on both sides of the screen and consider it my TTRPG of choice currently, even as a 3.5 Grognard.

It’s still mostly a spells-per-day game, right? You probably don’t lose the first fight of the day because you can go nova

It’s been really interesting playing Vampire with a person who’s only ever played DND. We keep telling him “you can use your cool powers”. He keeps thinking it’s like a special move to save for a big encounter. No, you don’t have to come up with an elaborate scheme to get past the bouncer. You can just Dominate him. It’s a big shift in mind set!

Personally I hate the “save your cool powers for later” mode of play. I think Pathfinder 2e is less of that, but not free of it?

“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

Why aren’t the pro-brexit people being shamed? Stripped of their wealth and made to spend the rest of their miserable lives doing community service?

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 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.

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.

I’m just going to move on

That’s my point. They’re doing a self-sabotage. Some of them will then complain that they’re not getting good matches and messages, but a big factor is they’re not giving potential good matches anything to work with.

So many people see the prompt “what I’m looking for” and write “my keys”.

A. That’s not a terribly funny joke. It’s fine, but not great.

B. It’s not original.

C. You are wasting valuable space. Now the other person has a little less information to make a good opening message. Do you really want that many people messaging you about your keys? Really? Why are you setting yourself up for unhappy outcomes?

Most people don’t think very hard about this, and hope it’ll just work out.

Meetup.com ? They’re still around.

One problem is users are selfish idiots. They won’t go somewhere that doesn’t already have a lot of users. They don’t care that going there now moves it closer to having a lot of users, so in a few months it’ll be good and vibrant. Most people can’t even think an hour ahead.

Another problem is that there are many scammers and bad actors. You need to deal with them, and convince your real users that the scammers are dealt with.

Lastly, in this capitalist hellscape everything is expensive. How are you going to run a big service that’s got low latency and high quality?

So much so we fight tooth and nail to keep the cars, but once the street is transformed to something like above we absolutely love it and can’t see life any other way.

Things like this support my argument that conservatives are in a very fundamental way stupid. They don’t have good reasons. They just don’t want change for childish emotional reasons.

Yeah, it can be hard, but many things worth doing are hard. If you start with the bare minimum, the other person’s first impression of you is that you half-assed it. Would you be extra interested in someone who’s too half assed to even read your profile?

Put in the hard work. If you don’t have the energy, don’t use the apps. Half-assing it is just going to make you unhappy.

Except when actually trying to make a match, it’s more advantageous to literally swipe right on everyone to maximize matches and then unmatch if you match with someone you aren’t interested in.

This isn’t true if their system punishes people for swiping “yes” on everyone. While I can’t be certain that’s the case, it seems very plausible it is. Swipe yes on everyone, your profile is down ranked, you don’t get as many good matches.

Additionally, tinder and hinge only allow you a limited number of yes swipes per day. If you blow them on the first ten profiles, you’re going to have worse results than if you spend a little longer looking at profiles.

Furthermore, on hinge, you can send a message with your like. Your chances of having a conversation and date go way down without a good message.

Thinking about my friend group, about half the people met their long term partners on dating apps. The other half is a mix of work and large social groups (eg: people who all go to certain kinds of music festivals)

I guess it varies by age and region.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-takeaways-on-americans-views-of-and-experiences-with-dating-and-relationships/

While meeting partners through personal networks is still the most common kind of introduction, about one-in-ten partnered adults (12%) say they met their partner online. About a third (32%) of adults who are married, living with a partner or are in a committed relationship say friends and family helped them find their match. Smaller shares say they met through work (18%), through school (17%), online (12%), at a bar or restaurant (8%), at a place of worship (5%) or somewhere else (8%).

Some other sources I’m seeing say it’s as high as 60% of couples met online.

I live in NYC. I live here in large part because I don’t need a car to live here.

I walk for most daily needs. There’s also abundant bus and subway options. I would bike more, but one bad accident has me scared to ride with traffic again)

Maybe housing is more expensive, but sometimes you get what you pay for.

I think dating apps are mostly used for hookups

This isn’t especially true. Maybe Feeld and Tinder are less “serious”, but the idea of dating apps is mainstream enough that you find all sorts of people and goals.

The capitalism and for-profit nature does make them all kind of suck, though

The top of the funnel I could see an argument for not putting a lot of thought in. You’re just trying to get a pool of potential matches. (The apps are cruel for making you pay for this and not just giving you the list up front)

But once you do have a match, you have to put in some effort to stand out. A lot of people get a match and all they write is “hey”, and then they go right into the trash. Why would I engage with someone who just wrote “hey” when I could instead talk to someone who read my profile and said something personalized?

Also swiping yes on everyone might do strange things to their recommendation algorithm. Unfortunately that’s a black box, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that puts you in some sort of chum bucket shadow ban situation.

And also, yeah, making you pay for basic filters is a trashy design. Match group should be broken up.