You might consider adding a puzzle element to encounters that can lower the effective difficulty with clever maneuvers or strategies.

As an example, fighting in a room with a big chandelier overhead. A player can cut the chandelier at the opportune moment to pin a major adversary, allowing them to coup de grace or simply flaunt their victory to the villain’s face.

Or perhaps fighting in a room full of mirrors that allow a clever player to reflect a gaze attack. Or doing Battleship style combat, where you have to pick the square of a hidden enemy, but you guarantee a hit if you guess correctly.

In general, try introducing non-dice resolutions to the scene - guessing a magic word that disables a key piece of enemy tech, baiting enemies into an area or formation before springing a trap, completing a ritual that can summon a powerful ally by solving a rubric cube.

If all else fails, you can drop some nice loot them. Awand of fireballs or Staff of the Sun or similar high powered magic item, for instance. Doesn’t matter how you roll with these, you’re going to have some fun.

Every museum is a smell museum and every piece of art is scratch-and-sniff if you’re brave enough

Given the popularity of the AfD at the moment, I’m not sure what message that sends

God I hate this shit. A street gang of state financed thugs tackled an EMT, bludgeoned him in the head, and then executed him because one of them thought he might have a gun.

And we’re talking about Greg Bovino’s outerwear?

Why do we need the fucking Style Section to report on the appearance of fascism? This superficial bullshit is why guys like Bovino were put in charge to begin with.

I’ve been handed a screenplay and it’s just episodes of the Office with the word “AI” scribbled into the margins a few thousand times.

Republican majority house. Republican majority Senate. Republican Supreme court. Republican President.

Remember just four years ago when the Democrats had the House and Senate majorities and the Presidency, with the ability to pack the Supreme Court? What happened back then, again? They got everything they wanted, right?

You could have voted in primaries for the Democrats you wanted.

Oh gosh golly. The dang liberals forgot all about that little thing called a primary. They forgot it so hard that they spent half a billion dollars on primary candidates in 2024. Hey, where was most of that money coming from, anyway?

With a $120 million war chest, the pro-crypto PAC Fairshake is the single largest spending operation in the 2024 elections, and has targeted Democratic crypto critics in key swing states and districts. The PAC successfully kneecapped Rep. Katie Porter’s (D-CA) primary bid for Senate in 2023 with $10 million in outside spending, contributed $2 million toward the ousting of Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and has another $1 million on the line in next week’s primary effort against Rep. Cori Bush (MO-01). The two top Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jon Tester (D-MT), are expected to see an avalanche of crypto spending against them in their critical re-election races this fall.

Quiet angst among Democrats about this outside spending escalated into all-out panic when high-profile figures in Silicon Valley connected to the crypto industry came out in support of Donald Trump over the past month. Those tech tycoons are the very same individuals bankrolling Fairshake: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of the venture capital juggernaut A16z, along with the billionaire Winklevoss twins.

The other top donor to Fairshake is Coinbase, which appears to be in violation of campaign finance laws. As Molly White first reported, Coinbase began a contract on July 1 with the U.S. Marshals Service for asset forfeiture. Federal contractors are not allowed to contribute to campaigns or political action committees. Because Coinbase first sought the contract in March and gave $25 million to Fairshake in May, that donation is actually the largest illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor in history.

Maybe that’s what progressives did wrong. They didn’t buy enough Bitcoins.

On the ground in Minnesota, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz was unable to meet the moment as early as January 7, when Renee Good was killed. Rather than forcefully show up for his constituents, Walz prioritized preemptively scolding protesters, posting: “Trump wants a show. Don’t give it to him.”

Wasn’t it that massive show of solidarity back on Friday the 23rd which finally shifted the discourse in favor of the anti-ICE Minnesotans? Crazy to think anyone in the state would have been better off if that hadn’t happened.

I mean, they joke but inertia is Microsoft’s mightest weapon.

Literally just “My computer works now, why would I want to change it?”

Incidentally, getting someone on Linux (or Apple for that matter) to switch to Microsoft is also like pulling teeth.

it was a matter of Chinese control outside of US government control

TikTok was controlled by a private company based out of Singapore, with investments from a host of international funds including both the US and China.

The “China is controlling our internet” narrative was always bullshit fear-mongering, fully disjoined from the actual business structure. What TikTok enjoyed that Facebook and YouTube and Reddit did not was a sufficient distance from US policymakers such that TikTok’s policies weren’t dictated by Western oligarchs.

not bringing it under US billionaires specifically

That’s exactly what Biden (and then Trump)'s forced sale intended. Bring the US branch of TikTok under American control by awarding it to exclusively American financial interests.

When you can attract large foreign investments, the order matters less. You’ll experience more pain by imposing tariffs first and building out infrastructure second. But we’re governed by a party that seems to relish in the pain of their constituents. So this might be more of a feature than a bug.

Talking budget decks and then quoting a budget format is misleading

The standard budget deck right now is 500$ (Izzet Lessons)

You can build Black/Red Blight Goblins for $21 or a Mono-Blue Towns deck for $20. Both play competitively.

Vivi cauldron led to a one deck standard and cost about 1000$

That’s because Vivi Ornitier runs $100/ea and Agatha’s Soul Cauldron runs another $130/ea. Don’t build a deck where a single card is going to run you three figures. Problem solved.

It’s why formats like Pioneer are basically dead and standard is nearly on life support at local most LGS.

Well, that and the online scene cutting into the physical game’s player base, sure.

Capitalism is welcome to stay

“The wolf is welcome to stay, so long as it doesn’t plan to eat”

Unfortunately, controlling, abusing and extracting everything is the sole purpose of capitalism.

Marx recognized it as a socio-economic improvement over feudal aristocracy, as capitalists generally recognize the value of social investment for private accumulation. Historically, aristocrats chronically under-invested in anything except a military for more real estate accumulation.

But capitalism accumulates only to the individual, which renders it a long term hazard to social progress. If your only concern is personal wealth accumulation within a single human lifespan, the machinery of economic progress devolves into an engine of speculative and fictitious investment.

You need a social movement with leadership capable of planning intergenerationally to own and operate the machinery of capital. That is what the Soviets struggled to create. And it is what modern socialist institutions ultimately pioneered. The surviving post-Cold War socialist states are these ideological seeds that are prepared to leapfrog the dinosaur of state-capitalism.

Adverse selection. The folks that stick around are going to be the meanest, dumbest, and most cynical

I care. It’s nice to know they’re miserable.

Superman has never died from Kryptonite but he has died from getting punched in the face by a big dude with boney hands.

If the NBPC says that their leaders should be fired

Why would Donald Trump care? ICE is largely stacked with new recruits entirely loyal to the President. The NBPC isn’t representing them in any material capacity.

Puppy Bowl but it’s all feral German Shepherds? No, that might actually be entertaining.

It’s probably just “We Are Charlie Kirk” on a loop for fifteen minutes

Gavin Newsom was enthusiastically in favor of forcing the sale of TikTok to US-aligned billionaires under Joe Biden.

Wonder what changed.

There is little will to shave margins when industries and nations are broadly effected, insufficient margins to absorb much, and little reason even bother to do so save to preserve future business with the expectation that tariffs will be dropped.

There’s plenty of will when a commodity is fungible and margins are high. We can see this in retail prices relative to tariff rates.

Our observed average price increases — at 5.4% for imported goods and 3% for domestic goods — are moderate relative to the size of announced tariff rates, particularly on Chinese products. We find that roughly 14 to 20 percent of the tariff changes were reflected in retail prices within six months. These rates are higher and materialize faster than those observed during the 2018–2019 U.S.–China trade war, but remain well below full pass-through, reflecting gradual transmission and continuing uncertainty about policy persistence.

When profit margins on a product are high, the retailer is more comfortable absorbing the tariff rate through lower marginal profit. Its on products with lower margins that we’re seeing the highest inflation rates.

What’s more, as imports rise in price they raise the clearing rate for all products, which encourages domestically produced products to rise in price to match. So you’re “paying the tariff” on goods that aren’t even being tariffed, because they’re chasing rising prices of low margin imports.

How much actual work vs future commitments again?

More actual work with each month these tariffs linger. There’s other factors, of course. The declining value of the dollar is inducing demand for US capital and real estate from overseas, as well as cheapening the cost of US labor. And with three more years of Trump in office (plus the real possibility that we get more MAGA Republicans in years to come) business leadership is inclined to believe a high-tariff / low-tax economy is the future for America.

This makes the US an ideal tax haven. We’ve been a popular safe-harbor for Chinese, Japanese, English, German, and French billionaires to shield their own wealth from their home countries. And if the EU commits to a uniform income or wealth tax policy, this trend will only continue.

Ah, my mistake. They didn’t even do collector numbers until Exodus. God damn, that’s crazy in hindsight. Makes counterfeiting almost trivial.