I’ve been happy with Bandcamp. They got sold recently so their future is uncertain, but I downloaded all the music I bought.

They don’t really have an algorithm, but you can see who else purchased something, and they do blog posts about like “what’s new in [genre]” that’s worth reading. So far as I can tell it’s written by real people.

NYC had good turnout despite the rain.

Adams is a turd and I hope he rots somewhere out of sight and removed from power.

There was a post recently saying the total sum of wage theft, including conventional theft and the results of suppressed wages, totals to like $50 trillion over the past few decades.

Shit’s bad. But other than the rich, people in the US have like no class consciousness.

CEO seems like an idiot and/or coward.

DND is tricky to recommend. On the one hand, as far as RPGs go it’s mega popular. On the other, it’s a very specific kind of game and rather finicky.

Many people who don’t want to play fantasy dungeon crawling tactical combat would enjoy other genres, but finding those groups can be harder. One of my friends has no real interest in fantasy, but immediately was like “LET’S DO IT” when I mentioned a game of Vampire.

The tabletop game meetup I know of (in New York) is explicitly friendly to new players. One of the hosts said their first game ever was at the meetup many years ago.

On the one hand, yes. On the other, I don’t want them to stick around doing evil for a long time. Maybe something immediately debilitating that takes a long time to finish?

Classic RPG. My half orc “beat with an ugly stick” master of time magick and backstab lives on fondly in my memory.

Also my extremely pretty elf, also a master of time magick.

I was hoping you would explain what you meant by “There’s not a reason to fight most enemies in most video games to be honest”. I don’t think that’s a true statement. I think most games do give reasons to fight enemies.

I haven’t played enough BotW to really weigh in on it, specifically.

One of the reasons I prefer playing on PC over other platforms is there’s usually fan made mods / cheats. Like, yeah, I could do something really tedious for four hours, or I could get a mod to skip it. This is my leisure activity, not an exam.

I try to be mindful that too much cheating can water down the experience. Like, if I was playing BG3 and just set everyone to max level from the start, I would probably have less fun, personally. But if someone just wants to do the story and have fun with exploding barrels? Not for me to judge.

(I do draw the line at multiplayer. Cheating against other people is rude as heck. )

There’s not a reason to fight most enemies in most video games to be honest.

Hmmmm… that’s a thinker.

In the older zeldas, you didn’t especially need to fight stuff on the overworld. I’d usually just run by, or kill the ones that were in my way.

In most FromSoft games, you can run past enemies but that can quickly spiral out of control. Killing them gives you time to explore safely, on top of the XP rewarded.

In shooters like Doom, you could probably run past most enemies, but they’ll keep attacking. Clearing them makes you safer.

Monster hunter it’s the whole point of the game.

What games are you thinking of where fighting is pointless? I don’t think it’s “most” games.

Yeah. Often when I talk to people who say they “don’t have time” I wonder where their time is going. Often to watching TV. Sometimes podcasts. Social media is a big time suck.

But like if you have time to watch all of the office again this year, you had time to play video games.

A friend of mine realized they were just losing hours a day to Instagram. Delete that, and you have time for better hobbies. Play a game. Read a book.

Having children seems like a bigger factor. The only couple I know that has kids still has time. One spends it on DND, and other on TV and simple phone games.

Unknown Armies is kind of like this. Most magic requires obsession, and you don’t get a lot of well adjusted, friendly, people who also, say, collects all many of coin and money (money is power) but won’t spend any (that’s giving away your power!)

There’s a bunch of schools of magic but they’re all built on an obsession and paradox. The book is really well written, too. (At least 2e is. I didn’t spend much time with 3e)

Right, humans are bad about that kind of thing. I think it has to do with Dunbar’s number? The monkeysphere? It’s hard for us to model a lot of people as full people in our head, especially as they’re more removed from us.

Like you probably don’t really think about the garbage man as a fully fleshed out guy with hopes, dreams, a favorite band, a love that got away, and all that. When you have some absolutely rancid trash, you probably just throw it in the can and forget about it. But if it was your mother or best friend that was going to have to deal with it, maybe you’d be more careful. Wouldn’t want the bag to rip and spray maggots all over Mom.

That’s fine. That’s all of us.

But I think there’s degrees. Shades. Like you mentioned cell phones. Most of us accept the out of sight horrors that go with them. But, like, some people are absolute assholes to wait staff. Just treat the waiter like shit, are rude to the coffee shop people, whatever. I think most of us recognize that as bad.

Somewhere between those two points I think is “I’m going to build software to spy on people”. Personally, I think that should be ok the far side of the line. The not okay side. Why? A bit of self preservation, a bit of ethics, and a helping of “I don’t want to contribute to bad things happening to people, even ones I don’t know”.

This post is getting long. I think you’re right that it’s not as simple as “doesn’t care about other people” but I think that’s a factor.

this is a question I often want to ask the pearl clutchers.

I think some of them don’t have an answer because they actually support the regime, and they’re going hard on “non violence” because they don’t want people to fight back

Some probably haven’t thought it through, and don’t have an answer.

Some probably have an answer that’s a variation of “too late”. You know, after they came for the unionists, the jews, the catholics, the mexicans, and there’s no one left to stand with them.

Men are not okay

You know how scam emails intentionally include mistakes because they want to filter out smart people? Same idea.

Reasonably smart people will see this and go “this is garbage”. The idiots will go deeper, and become loyal gop voters.

Did anything even happen to the cop that shot that journalist? Seems like everyone just accepted this instead of bringing charges or vigilanteism

I think this is one of those pearl clutching communities. Borderline collaboration, but it’s their power to enforce their rules.