Oh dear.

If this whole year had had to be Karlov Manor block you wouldn't have been able to get away with Ravnica but everyone's wearing a detective hat, hey look Magic villains in cowboy hats, hey look Redwall, and We Didn't Get The Stranger Things License Again, so there might have been some good creative, so you've not exactly convinced me with that argument.

Your bounty hunter can only be a bounty hunter if you take levels in the prestige class 'bounty hunter' which requires you to be at least level 6 to meet the prerequisites, so you aren't allowed to be a bounty hunter.

Prize for the worst post-election take on my social media goes to the following:

It's quite impressive to encapsulate so much of what's wrong with the common progressive framing of the political battleground for the last decade, and just how counterproductive it is, in such an elegant single sentence.

i don't think this is how we should be choosing candidates

this is why people were looking up who was even running btw

so here's a conversation I had with a friend just now that sums up a lot of what I think so well I don't want to bother rephrasing it

them

me:

them:

the primary strategy of the "guys who spent five years using 'gaslight' to mean 'disagree with'" appears to be attempted gaslighting. you just aren't allowed to notice things they say and do. every time someone is like "I don't like this thing you're doing," the democrats as a whole are all "That didn't happen and you're a bad person."

this is an effective strategy for winning conversations with people and a very bad strategy for winning elections. when people are upset about things you did or allowed to happen, "nuh uh you bad person" is not a response. "that shouldn't count" is not an effective counter even if you genuinely believe it should not count. a million morlocks-holmes saying "this has nothing to do with the democrats because no democratic holder of office has introduced a bill with explicitly racist language" isn't going to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced. you are not entitled to votes, you have to actually do things to win the election.

focusing on how bad and threatening Trump is is a losing strategy when we had a term of Trump and none of the fascist future we were warned of came to pass. Trump had a fucking vision of the future to really behind that more than zero people believed in. Now, I'm not a "typical" ad-watcher because I only saw campaign ads on YouTube (but I feel like this is not super atypical any more), but I saw a lot of Kamala Harris ads, and zero of them were about any of her plans or ideals or vision and all of them were about "You need to give us money right now to win the election." Like if you're using the money to make ads like this, that's kind of like a one-person pyramid scheme.

the Trump presidency will be terrible in a predictable, expected way. there will be no fascism, just a slow crumbling of our already-dismal institutional competence. I don't think the Democrats would have been much better. They'd still be beholden to an activist core of psychopaths and doing everything they can to cover for those people, while also governing incompetently and completely unable to capitalize on or draw attention to any good things they actually manage to do. Leftists and progressives are already going through the whole "the Democrats move us all to the right they only want to move to the right!" but the Democrats don't move at all; they don't think they should change their behavior, because when they lose an election it is because the voters failed them and not the other way around.

Regardless of the eventual outcome, political science got an unprecedented natural experiment here:

Highly disciplined campaign with comprehensive and competent field infrastructure and the most lopsided debate win in history vs. a shambolic and incompetent campaign headed by a man obviously suffering from either dementia or neurosyphilis, but with the billionaires who control Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and the Washington Post (and multimillionaires who control other media) putting their thumbs hard on the scale for him.

money 👏doesn't👏 buy 👏elections!

yeah this is cope lmao

I don't see how you can read that as coping. It's rather depressing that the combination of people who think fascism is good and people who lack the judgment to recognize fascism when they see it is ~1/2 of the voting population.

arguing Trump is fascist now is the perfect illustration of everything wrong with every attempt to beat him

everyone who isn't already on your side immediately and correctly ignores your opinion when you call Trump a fascist, because we already had a term of him as president and he didn't do the things you said he was going to do. you were certain he was going to be openly white supremacist and usher in a new era of hate crime and racism, you were certain he was going to have journalists arrested, you were certain he was going to begin the purge, and then he didn't, and you don't realize everyone else can remember and notice that.

Using a deep learning model to generate an image uses the same amount of electricity as a computer does in two minutes, and it produces about as much pollution as driving a car six metres. If you're going to criticise the artificial intelligence economic bubble then I'm begging you to pick something sensible to point at.

hate to be that guy but do you have a source 4 this?

Never apologise for seeking confirmation.

Generating one image at 45 W would take 233 seconds⁵ (or 23 seconds at 450 W), which averages out to 2 minutes and 8 seconds.

This electricity would require 0.36 g⁶ of CO₂ to produce. The average car produces 0.11 g⁷ of CO₂ per metre, so this is equivalent to driving 3.3 m.

I mean, I can generate an AI image in about 2 minutes on my computer, so the maths checks out.

Only universes beyond players purchasers get to have an on-ramp to standard. This is consistency.

Previously I was a moderate who would have been satisfied with a no-fly zone, blockade sanctions and weapons inspections for israel but I think I might demand regime change now.

yeah bit on the nose to casually refer to the "destruction and suffering" seen in Gaza, from the person who ordered it

As a threat to the next people he wants to do it to, no less.

16 of those sixteen lived within a 50 mile radius on the same peninsula. Take it back even another generation and 31 of those 32 were born there as well. I am "from" somewhere.

https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jylland

OP is an America-pilled take. Nothing like a long time to confuse them.

It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

And the thing that they all need to be convinced of is that other games aren’t like this

GOD I wish that was true. Reality is worse.

Reality is that there is no rule for how often you're allowed to try to forage. Is it once per hour? Once per day? Does one roll represent how much you can forage if you pause your journey for a week? Who knows! It's not in the rules!

... huh.

exactly

a ranger class feature is that they forage twice as much food each time but, given the rules as written, that really just means their mother-may-I is twice as irrelevant.

Hey uh, stupid question, is there any guidance on how to set a DC determined by the abundance of food and water in the region, or is that also just making shit up so it's irrelevant multiple times over?

the existence of christmas lights on Bedhead Beastie suggests christianity existed on Duskmourn

There are 2 apartments in my current building and 7 in a previous one that say otherwise; lots of people keep strings of lights up year round

Jesus didn't invent strings of colored lights

Isn't that just a Stranger Things reference?

The Duffer Brothers also didn't invent strings of colored lights

Well no of course, but the intentionality behind putting it in the art is 'hey look, remember Stranger Things', not 'hey look, remember Christmas'.

With the information provided, I don't see a Watsonian answer to why there's a string of lights, so we end up grasping for Doylesian ones because we want the thing to make sense. It doesn't make sense! Magic shouldn't have strings of lights because they are distinctly technological! Why is a beast that's attempting to hide covered in them!

the existence of christmas lights on Bedhead Beastie suggests christianity existed on Duskmourn

There are 2 apartments in my current building and 7 in a previous one that say otherwise; lots of people keep strings of lights up year round

Jesus didn't invent strings of colored lights

Isn't that just a Stranger Things reference?

I think there's significant space between 'magic does redwall' and 'magic but everyone's wearing the hat of a famous detective' and 'a who's who of magic villains and also they're cowboys'.

Make fewer candles tokens

I agree, all three are just as much Magic does X, as none of them feel like their own thing they're all just Magic does X