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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Sometimes I go to a meetup that does one-shots. They’re a pretty good group.

    Most of my friends either aren’t interested, or aren’t interested enough to actually show up. It’s easier to make friends with people who want to play RPGs than get your friends to play. The worst outcome is when your friends are kind of people-pleasers, and they say yes to the game even though they don’t really want to. Then they half-ass it or flake, and the friendship suffers.



  • One time when I was on a grand jury, I tried to convince the other jurors that we don’t have to send people to jail for marijuana. It’s stupid and unjust, and we can just say no. They don’t make you show your work. (Yes, on a grand jury the prosecutors can just try again, but it wastes their time.)

    Those half-awake bootlickers weren’t having it. “We have to do what they told us!” “What, are you a dealer?” “The law is the law. Call your rep is you want to change it.”

    Maybe an ad campaign would move the needle, but there are a lot of stupid, selfish, people out there ready to lick the boots.





    • it’s free
    • runs on a wider range of hardware
    • is more customizable
    • can run much windows software with wine or proton
    • has a large ecosystem of native software
      • much of it free and open source

    The advantage of Mac is it’s more widely used and thus more widely supported (for things that are supported at all). You can just buy an apple computer from a trusted source and it’ll work. Linux doesn’t quite have that yet. If more people move to Linux , you’ll find better drivers and stuff.


  • Yes! I usually take any opportunity to gush about Fate but I restrained myself here

    The main weakness of Fate is you need more engaged players. Stuff like DND can mostly hum along with passive players, but Fate falls really flat if people aren’t engaging with it.


  • On player training, I like systems where you can bribe players to let bad things happen.

    Like in vampire: the requiem, a player can always turn a regular failure into a Dramatic Failure, and get a little XP. This meant the players went from “oh no the cave is probably full of monsters let’s take forever stressing” to “I ROLLED GARBAGE CAN I JUST BARGE IN LIKE A CONFIDENT IDIOT FOR MY DRAMATIC FAILURE?”

    Tastes vary, but I found it made a more interesting and snappier game.


  • How will it reduce demand for parking? Do you envision the car will drop someone off and then drive away until it finds a parking spot that’s farther than the person would want to walk?

    That sounds like a very hard problem , and people wouldn’t be happy waiting 5-10 minutes for their car to navigate back to them. Or it would just cruise around looking for parking, causing more traffic.

    Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.

    Once again reinventing buses and trains






  • I don’t have the means or motivation to do research now from the couch, so I’ll concede you may be correct. However, I think it might be even safer to take those same billions of dollars and invest them in mass transit and other infrastructure changes. That would mean fewer car accidents, less pollution, nicer spaces, healthier people, healthier economies, etc. private car ownership cannot be the long term solution. If it’s not an outright dead end, it’s certainly a side street instead of high speed rail (if you’ll pardon a strained metaphor).