The most important thing to keep in mind with celebrity actors is that they make a living pretending to be someone/something they’re not. And they’re damn good at it too.
Not to cast doubt on everyone in that profession. Rather, proceed with an abundance of skepticism when considering celebrity endorsements.
Considering that was probably penned in the late 1980’s, why isn’t that standard kit for every other system?
Still, as a DM, it’s far too tempting to give a little bit of this away and join in on the hijinks.
Me: You find yourselves in a hidden library. On one shelf you see a series of tomes named “How Not to be Seen”, volumes I-XX.
Newbie Fighter: Oh sweet, those look handy.
Seasoned Rogue: Aw fuck. NOBODY TOUCH NOTHIN’!
Ten minutes later:
It would sit well with my conscience that I likely prevented a worse fate for exponentially more people, and prevented another person from having to make a worse choice. Which they themselves would likely only make twice as worse, and so on. I could live with that.
What I’m not sure of is how I would handle being a deicision-maker N steps down the line. Being the first guy, sure. The 16th? I dunno.
232 is roughly four billion. We’ll need one or two more doublings to get every last person alive on the tracks.
This introduces a new wrinkle in the experiment: all the switch operators are also tied to the track. Somewhere.
Also the more I get into languages like Rust, the more these doubts are increasing and leading me to believe that most of it is just dogma that has gone far beyond its initial motivations and goals and is now just a mindless OOP circlejerk.
There are definitely occasions when these principles do make sense, especially in an OOP environment, and they can also make some design patterns really satisfying and easy.
Congratulations. This is where you wind up, long after learning the basics and start interacting with lots of code in the wild. You are not alone.
Implementing things with pragmatism, when it comes to conventions and design patterns, is how it’s really done.
NGL, writing pure functions in Rust is fantastic. Writing responsible code that handles all the error conditions turns the “happy path” into hamburger. Even with the ergonomics of Result, Option, and even ?, code just sprawls and becomes a readability tradeoff. I’m only a few months into Rust at this point, and I have a lot to learn, but it’s tempting to just .unwrap() and .expect() where I think it’s unlikely to fail.
Gurpreet is your co-worker on the sister-team, over in India. He’s hard-working, a family man, and takes care of his aging parents, all in their home village over the weekend. He spends nights in Bangalore, debugging and reviewing your code while you’re asleep. His contributions to the project are pretty solid too, even though he’s only been coding for four years. His management treats him and his team like garbage, but they don’t let that stop them from showing up and doing a good job. If you ever came to visit, he’d roll out the red carpet along with his co-workers, and give you the kind of hospitality typically reserved for a minor god; doubly-so if it’s a holiday.
Gurpreet is awesome.
Best I can do is strong coffee.
One of many reasons why I love BSG. As a retro-computing enthusiast, the idea that antique systems are naturally impervious to conventional digital attacks, just felt so validating.
Sure, our navigation system is based on a Commodore-64, but good luck getting it to divulge mission-critical information over bluetooth. Or any information for that matter.
Not really, at least, not anymore.
There are some people that come to RPGs to escape reality and man, do they need it. D&D holds out a promise of agency, power, and control, in a fantasy setting free from real consequences. Provided a player lacks these things in real life, they can cling to it like a life-preserver. Then, take any of that away - as a DM must do - and things can get ugly.
I really want to say that there’s a known and practiced way to get people like this some real help, like a free hotline or website. After all, if it’s going to come up, this is the place it’s going to happen. Sadly, I know of no such resource.
Warning: this will destroy medication if it’s left out. You may want to move your pills to the refrigerator first (after first checking the temperature - see article).
Actually, if you live in a hot climate and don’t use A/C, you should probably do that anyway.
i was gonna say. Properly deep/stacked pizzas, casseroles, and calzones are the way to go here.
You’re lucky. They’re well-intended, but really awful. You’re supposed to traverse the intersection in the order you arrive. All it takes is for one jackass to waive* their right of way, or run the intersection, and the other three drivers are thrown into disarray. Add multiple lanes to this and, well… good luck everyone!
* Often literally waving at you to go. Through the intersection. At the wrong time.
I learned on a 1st gen Saturn. That’s before GM ruined the brand. It had a good deal of pickup to it, and was a lot of fun in the snow.
I don’t miss it though. If I lived somewhere I could joyride with zero hills, traffic or parallel parking, sure. Otherwise? It’s not worth it.
Needs more trans-duractance and magneto-reluctance for the thermal wasel-vanes.
New, “hard-core mode” for Tennis just dropped. Just check out how heavy the new regulation balls are. Hedgehog for scale.
Wait if I assume you are Americans, do you have limited work hours per day over there?
Yes and no. Depends wildly based on industry, job type, and income level. Generally we stick to a 40-hour a week at your place of work, unless you’re a wage earner (which could be much more or less). That said, it doesn’t always work that way.
The worst case is a suburban or rural lifestyle that is one hour (or more!) from the office, where logistics (e.g. groceries, auto maintenance, healthcare) and friends are almost as far away from home. That adds up to a ton of time in transit, with a handful of hours to yourself each working day for the rest, if you want to sleep a healthy amount. Then you add kids, daycare, after-school activities, and there’s literally no free time left.
All I know is that a simple 4-way stop, with multiple lanes in all directions, has an effort:chaos ratio that is off the charts. No need for multi-million-dollar engineering projects.
Exactly. Pragmatism wins the day. Or at least it does at my table.
I’ll have to shop around for more and better tools. Thanks for reminding me that there’s a wider world out there.
This resonates with me. But I also have to give an obligatory nod to Palladium Games where the nit and grit is the entire point. If you’ve never had the pleasure, the RIFTS character sheet makes (American) taxes look easy to file by comparison. You practically need a session zero and a session zero-zero to get started.