Eh. Depending on where those parts were sourced…

What, no Microslop?

No way this runs on Windows. It’s Linux or bust.

They trained a tiny patch of neurons to respond to low-voltage electric impulses. The cells don’t know they’re playing Doom. They don’t have any kind of social context or even video feedback.

Imagine if I stuck you in a sensory deprivation chamber, handed you an NES controller, and asked you to hit the buttons. Then, periodically, I said “Yes” or “No” based on the buttons you pressed. And when I pulled you out of the tube at the end of an hour, I told you “the yes and no messages were intended to encourage you to correctly navigate Mario through the first level of the original game.” What if, instead of Mario, I’d been telling you how to play Street Fighter?

It doesn’t matter if its Doom. They likely picked Doom because the I/O is so rudimentary that you can install the game on practically anything. The cellular matter has no idea what it’s doing beyond the “Yes/No” signaling.

I mean, I wish that were actually true.

One of the bleakest turns of the post-war Eastern Bloc was the speed at which they re-incorporated ex-Nazi officers into the Stasi. I’d have to dig it up, but there’s a whole line about a German describing his career as roughly “First I worked for the monarchy to suppress fascism, then I worked for the fascists to suppress communism, then I worked for the communists to suppress capitalism, and now that the communists lost I’m old enough to retire.”

Built to Fail: The story of 21st century consumer technology.

That’s the one.

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Wind is a highly cost-efficient and abundant form of electricity generation.

And Communism Doesn’t Work

Ergo, the Communist Chinese could have never built wind farms.

QED

You’re going to trigger so many libs with this link.

My motto: Rhetorically cocks gun

ICE Officer: Actually cocks gun

:-/

So many keyboard commandos. Vanishingly few actual leftist militants.

Reminds me of the old (apocryphal) story of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill debating what to do with the Nazi officers’ corps after their defeat.

"The German General Staff, [Stalin] said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.

The tendency to treat enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries while foreign civilians are resources to be exploited or speed bumps to be flattened is extremely fascist.

What separates Hitler and Hegseth isn’t their army’s treatment of survivors of a military operation, but their view of their targets as military or civilian. Hegseth knows he’s targeting civilians and treats them just like a German military commander would treat other civilians.

“Wow, are you going to give further details?”

“Then we might have to actually do something, so… no. But hey, elections are coming up! Maybe we can form a committee to look into it in the next ten to sixteen months if we win.”

Hey, friendly reminder that this bitch voted for Marco Rubio right along with everyone else in the Senate.

Slaps

2001

I believe we didn’t invade Iraq until 2003.

Although, curiously enough, Iran helped us do it.

Doubly ironic, given that Bush Sr was so instrumental in beefing up the Iraqi military ten years before the '91 invasion… for the purpose of invading its neighbors. (https://archive.is/HwX3A)

What is it about hardline reactionary Islamic governments getting baited by American neoconservatives to spin around, show us their backs, and point to the spot a knife would sink in most deeply?

rules lawyers are as happy as a pig in mud

In my experience, rules lawyers get a certain special high from remembering some obscure piece of info and digging it out at the right moment. It’s their own special kind of magic. And - from time to time - it does make the game better, because you’ve got a guy who can say “Actually there IS a rule for jumping off a cliff, grabbing onto a big vine, and swinging onto the back of the rampaging Wyvern”.

But when the DM thinks they know the rules and the Player thinks they know the rules, and then they spend half an hour arguing over the results of a dice roll, it is my experience that neither of them walk away from the table happier than when they started. The best you can ever get is the table stakes and the worst you get is feeling robbed or cheated.

Fate is definitely among my top games. I recommend it to everyone who brings up gaming, but I never seem to be able to get into a group with it these days. I personally hate d&d for how it not only is the name everyone knows, but somehow has cemented itself as the only game people are willing to play.

The d20 system is pretty quick to pick up but contains enough depth to allow for wide variations in setting and style. So many of the variants are just right there at surface level. Nobody has to work hard to make fireballing a goblin legion or sneak attacking a mind flayer cooler than it already is.

FATE is perhaps too vanilla and really relies on the players/DMs to pick up the slack in their descriptions. The fundamental problem with a very story-based game is where you go with it when other people at the table just aren’t exciting enough to keep it compelling. Easy to say “I like this system over that system” when what you really liked was the group of Theater Kids (or just the friends you knew with a good set of in-jokes) that made the game pop.

I know a few friends who swear by Call of Cthulhu as a system. But their DM is a phenomenal amateur horror writer. So, I feel like it isn’t the system that’s doing a lot of the work.

Idk about “winning”, but definitely “flooding the zone so hard that you struggle to find normal music anymore”.

Check out Bandcamp if you’re looking for “same vibe, different artist”. They’ve got a ton of musicians on the platform that do a great job of churning out period and style specific material that’s still human-made and different enough from the original that it doesn’t feel like the same song.

But YouTube Music, Spotify, and Soundcloud are all just drowning in the slop. The only winning move is not to play them.

Rogue: “Hope you like your STAKE medium RARE!”

Vampire: “Can’t believe after 500 years I’m going out to a bad pun.”

Cleric: Winding up to club him with a Holy Cannoli

makes everything turn into the rules lawyer heaven hell.

👹

As a personal experience, mutants&masterminds is just, so, horrible about the arguments for how powers interact, and they didn’t help by mixing fuzzy and binary rules

I’ve never played. But if that’s the Palladium version and it’s adjacent to Rifts… ye-gods. Why even have game mechanics at all? Just give us the setting material and a bag full of random dice mixed with cheetos and Chucky Cheese tokens.

I remember people excitedly snapping up the d20 version of Exalted back in their 2e, almost entirely because they adored the world but despised the White Wolf mechanics. Also seen some decent mileage taking games like this to FATE or Big Eyes Small Mouth, just because it does become much more of a narrative auction than a dice game.

Take a page from Rand Paul and shut down the Senate until it passes a War Powers Act

The American People don’t have Kompromat on our president

Half the county outright acknowledged the President as a pedophile.

Kompromat doesn’t work on a man without shame. He’s doing this shit because he wants to do it