I don’t know man, prepping to run a session can be a lot of time and effort. Between the rapidly rising cost of living and the very troubled job market, if someone can help pay their bills by DMing a few sessions I don’t see a problem with it. People need to eat.

I think there’s a lot of demand out there right now for more human entertainment. A TTRPG is a lot more personal than playing a video game, and people want that, but not everyone has a friend group that includes a DM.

I think a lot of what is currently happening is a consequence of the COVID years. People were isolated for long periods, and a lot of small businesses that provided social meeting spaces collapsed. Post-COVID, people want to go back to socializing but so many local restaurants and other such places shut down, and it seems like habits changed too. People don’t go out as much as they used to, and there are fewer places to do it, so it’s a lot harder to meet new friends as an adult.

At the same time, a lot of people lost their jobs and didn’t get them back. They had to find other ways to support themselves and their families, and the rising popularity of D&D in particular (I think largely due to content on YouTube from Critical Role &etc) has created an opportunity for that.

The TTRPG space is changing for sure, and it’s growing. I can tell by looking at the shelves in my local game stores, there’s more and more books for non-D&D RPG games. Plus, there are groups like Legends of Avantris who are now producing their second D&D module, for which they’ve hired a bunch of artists, musicians and other creative people to help with.

I don’t have a problem with the idea that the growing popularity of roleplaying games is producing more opportunities for writers & artists &etc to make a living.

It’s literally the end of thirties.

[ Dennis, 1975 ] Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!

These people are cartoon villains.

Well for starters Thich Naht Hanh has written a lot of books. Personally my next recommendation would be No Mud, No Lotus. There is a fair amount of conceptual overlap between his books, so it’s probably not necessary to read every book he’s written unless you find his specific philosophy compelling and want to emulate it.

I think of Being Peace as a good entry point for a person looking to change their mindset, a sort of reset. It’s good guidance for getting some control of the emotional noise of daily life, especially anxiety, fear and anger.

A good next step is Getting to Where You Are by Steven Harrison. This has practical guidance for regular meditation as a practice, without any of the mysticism. It is a signpost on the path to self-regulation and self-acceptance (but I think not the best starting point if you don’t already have some grounding in mindfulness and meditation).

After the others, I think Journey Without Goal by Chögyam Trungpa is worthwhile. This one does lean heavily on the religious background of its philosophy, and I think it’s necessary for the reader to know what they’re looking for while reading it, to understand the mythology as allegory. The value of this book is in changing your concept of how life might be lived entirely, a sort-of restructuring of your perspective on existence and your path through it. I don’t think it should be jumped into without an established foundation of meditation practice. Frankly, if you haven’t already established patience within yourself and built that place of internal calm, and taken at least some steps toward self-understanding and self-acceptance, this won’t do you any good. I think it’s important to note that in spite of the title, some people heard this message and believed that it was a pathway to enlightment as some sort of end goal. No such thing is promised, and if you go into it expecting that you will get lost.

So yeah,

1. Being Peace - find calm, and begin meditation practice
2. Getting to Where You Are - self-acceptance, and refine your meditation
3. Journey Without Goal - self-knowledge, and looking forward

…in that order.

Some other books I’d recommend which kind of extend these ideas:

• Rules For A Knight by Ethan Hawke
• The Analects (of Confucius)
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
• Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu

I think that change only comes through a big, imaginative idea

This seems overly optimistic to me. I think the historical record demonstrates that broad sociocultural change primarily happens after some great destructive crisis (war, famine, plague, etc) during which the status quo breaks down and a lot of people die, and the survivors have to pick up the remains and try to patch some form of society back together like a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces have been burned in a fire.

Sometimes, the survivors get together and try to imagine a better future, saying to themselves, “we don’t want our children to have to go through what we just went through.” More often, the person or people with the most resources left after the crisis take control, attempt to form society such that it sustains and increases their current power, and repeat the same old cycles of exploitation and selfishness.

Or, hope and fear/despair are two sides of the same coin.

Yes, and both only produce anxiety - either in despairing over what might happen, or hoping over what might not.

It can be difficult to explain why you doing orient your life around something like hope though.

If I understand what you mean, I disagree. Orient your life around something rational. Planning will do you better than hoping, any day of the week.

I suppose, but only if you consciously recognize it as a form of self-therapy (which I would still just categorize as meditation) and don’t expect anything practical to come from the prayer session (which is what most people mean by the term prayer - asking a higher power for help - and which I would categorize as delusional).

Self-determination. It is an individual’s choice to be selfless or selfish, and it is the fact of making that choice independently, without the expectation of reward, that makes the selfless behavior laudable. Similarly we can condemn selfish behavior, but not necessarily criminally prosecute such behavior.

In either case, other people do not get to decide whether the individual in question is allowed to behave that way, at least not preemptively.

I’ve seen some discussion around magister with the short form mage and the abbreviation mg. Allegedly both ms and mr come from the Latin root that magister comes from, so lexically it makes sense.

No one is going to start a professional email “Dear mage” and be taken seriously, no matter how linked the etymology.

I suppose just avoiding gender and professionalism altogether is better though. Instead of “Hello sir,” a polite “Good afternoon” could suffice.

“To whom it may concern…”

Hmm, but a prospective hire in an interview is not an employee (yet). Is there any similar regulation covering interviews?

In Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, Shelley describes hope and despair as torturers:

[…] Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear
Marred his repose;

This is the correct perspective. Hope and despair are the same thing, a feeling about the future. Regardless of whether your feelings are positive or negative, they are just as rational and just as worthwhile as praying about the future.

Hoping that the future will be better than the present is a waste of time, and emotional energy. Despairing that the future will not be better than the present is also a waste of time. Expending any effort on either has the same value as having a prayer meeting about the future with your local tribe of soccer moms.

Determining that you will make the future better, in any way that you can, for as many people as you can, and then making some practical plans to actually do that, is not a waste of time.

Don’t hope. Don’t despair. Do something useful.

Check out somafm: https://somafm.com/home.html

The various channels are human-curated and occasionally live dj-ed. I’ve found several new artists I like just by listening for awhile and picking out things that strike me.

2 gallons per mile

Microsoft Activation Scripts: https://massgrave.dev/

What Is MAS?

MAS (Microsoft Activation Scripts) is a fully open-source Windows and Office activation tool distributed as batch scripts. It implements multiple activation methods that operate against Microsoft’s software licensing subsystem (SPP / OSPP / CLIP) to activate Windows and Office without a purchased product key.

https://deepwiki.com/massgravel/massgrave.dev/2-microsoft-activation-scripts-(mas)

There are very few cases I can think of for location data more precise than a postal code. Active navigation is the only one that occurs immediately.

Most apps that collect location data are doing so because they can, not because they really need it for anything. Most of the time, verifying that a user is within the country that they’re supposed to be should be enough for geolocation security.

Banning sales of the information won’t accomplish anything except increase the market value.

Banning the collection of such information is required.

Nothing causes quite as much unhappiness as the pursuit of happiness for yourself.