I don’t find “lol 5% of the time something WACKY happens!” very fun very long, no. That is too high a frequency for freak events. Actually, it’s 10% because people do wackiness on natural 1s and natural 20s. That’s too much! That’s so much it’s distracting.

I outlined the dice system I liked from nWoD in another comment. You can get some wild outcomes there, but it’s not the absurd flat “10% of every roll is insanely good or bad”. You get the occasional “I can’t believe I rolled three tens convinced the vampire I was a wizard!”, still.

I am a huge fan of dice pools and absolutely done with “roll one die vs target”. The flat probability you get from one die doesn’t give results that feel good.

I was a big fan of the nWoD’s S10 system. Add up your stat, skill, and relevant bonuses, roll this many d10s. Every one that comes up as {8, 9, 10} adds to degree of success. Roll another die for every one that came up {10}, possibly repeating if you keep rolling 10s.

You get pretty consistent results. Someone who’s a professional will throw ~6 dice on average, so they’re very likely to succeed on basic tasks. Much less of that “lol the wizard rolled a 1 and forgot how to read” or “barbarian rolled a 20, I guess he can speak infernal?” weirdness. You still get freak outliers every once in a while, where someone rolls like six 10s in a row and everyone’s cheering. But not 5% of the time, and not so binary.

Plus there’s other “dice tricks” you can apply for different circumstances. “Reroll all failed dice once”, “reroll 9s like 10s”, etc.

1d20+stuff is just so basic and threadbare. It’s not even easier. nWod’s dice pool you don’t even have to add. You just count. We all know players that can’t add 16+7, but they can probably count to 4.

Not a fan of the “lol natural 20 zaniness happens” trope. That’s 5% of the time.

Also Shadowrun doesn’t even use d20s

Do the other ones have forums? I don’t remember even seeing them.

Is the steam forum supposed to be moderated by valve or the developer? I always assumed the developer.

I did some webdriver stuff for reasons I don’t remember anymore.

I also made a simple Django app to track job applications.

Unsolicited advice:

• use type annotations. You’ll thank yourself later when your IDE tells you “hey this can be None are you sure you want to call .some_func() on it?”
• use an ide. Don’t just raw dog it in notepad. You should have syntax highlighting, red squiggles for errors, the ability to go to definition.
• learn to use a debugger. Pdb is built in and fine.
• don’t write mega functions that do a thousand things. Split things up into smaller steps.
• avoid side effects. You don’t want your “say_hello” function to also turn on the lights

People mandating in-office without a very good reason (vibes based “good for collaboration” don’t count) are climate criminals and should be treated accordingly.

There was someone a while ago who was trying to get a web ring going for like nerd stuff. They said so many of their friends and people they talked to loved the idea, but no one made a site of their own.

I posted it in a local community group, and everyone said the same thing.

The other contenders mostly are bad.

Drm-free still exists.

They provide a lot of value without charging the end user very much.

Microsoft could have done this except they’re run by idiots and assholes. Nothing technical stopped them from launching a good store platform. They just didn’t want to.

I use them as reactions on platforms that support it. Someone sends a PR and I react with eye emoji for looking at it, checkmark for done, or speech bubble for comments. It takes less space than a full text response. Especially in damned Teams that doesn’t have threads in chats, so you can’t even group your responses.

That’s pretty much it. I don’t use them as punctuation and rarely use them in an actual message

Yep. Infrastructure shouldn’t be privately owned.

Yes that is the legal justification. I am not interested in the legal justification. Laws are not inherently good. They were clearly paid less than their worth if there’s six figure payouts to be had here.

This is the fundamental injustice of capitalism. The owner pays you a small amount and keeps all the profits. A child would recognize that as unfair.

This matches my intuition. I extremely rarely do any city driving (I don’t even own a car anymore) but like… You’re not going to go that much faster. You’re probably not driving very far. The total amount of time can’t be that big.

I didn’t personally find it difficult, but I have thousands of hours in video games.

This feels like theft. Maybe not technically legally but the people who did the chatting aren’t getting the money. Capitalist hellscape

Parents raised their own alarms, with several pointing to the political division Kirk’s presence would inevitably import onto campus

Peeve: it’s not the division that’s the problem. It’s the hate and lies.

There’s also the class of comments that explain strange business decisions.

# Product guy said to return January 1st if the user doesn't have a birthday on record

Kind of arbitrary but someone with decision making power decreed it.

I feel like the penalty for wage theft should be extra severe to make up for how rarely it’s reported. Like, complete forfeit of the business to the workers, leadership banned from holding a similar position for life. Then if you only nail one, the others might learn a lesson.

The other person’s reply about how you present it is pretty apt. There’s a big difference between “I have a shitty two-year old spawn I have to see on the weekends” and “I have joint custody with an amazing toddler. He loves the park and Legos, and so do I, so that works out”

But also imagine how you’d feel if you only found out the other person has some deal breaker for you after investing time and effort. Probably annoyed, right? Don’t hide stuff or assume you’re so great you can trivially change their world view, trauma, allergies, etc.

My advice will be as a guy who does not date men.

The dating apps suck but they are widely used. I will give some advice about them, because from what I’ve seen people are bad at using them.

You don’t have to spend money on them.

Write good messages. Don’t use AI. Don’t use the same message copy-pasted. Ready their profile, and ask a question about it. If they’re doing it right, the stuff on their profile is stuff they want to talk about. If they say they love Star Trek, ask if they watched the new stuff.

If they reply competently (ie: not a one word answer, some spirit, ask you a question back), repeat once or twice, clear any deal breakers, and ask them out. Too many people fart around chatting on these apps for days and then are surprised they’re not getting dated. They’re being preempted by people who actually show up.

About deal breakers: be up front. Don’t hide stuff. What’s a deal breaker is subjective but things like having a kid already.

You will be rejected far more than not. That’s fine. Once you swipe yes or send a message, put them out of your mind. Keep going.

When you get on the date, ask questions. Don’t interrogate them. I’ve had some where it felt like a job interview where they quickly brought up and dropped topics. If you’re talking all about yourself and not giving them space, they’re not going to have any fun. Follow up on topics.

Ask for consent. If it’s going well, you can just ask to kiss them. Almost every person I’ve been with has said they appreciate that a lot more than the “oh things are happening uh oh” default.

That’s all I feel like typing now.

If we could channel their cognitive dissonance to turn turbines, we’d solve the energy crisis.