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What's your radical opinion?
  • I fucking hate this because it creates ambiguity, usually at times when things need to happen very quickly. It always seems to happen at busy intersections when I've got mere seconds to get through, usually a left hand turn. I'm waiting because I need to make the turn, there's a person across from me going straight who will have the right of way and I can't go til they go, but I'm looking back and forth waiting for an opening for when that person will go (and then me). The opening comes... and I wait... and they wait, and then I see this fucking person is looking at me like a jackass like they were doing me a favor. The favor would've been them following the goddamn right of way, then we both could've gone to where we needed to go, now I have to wait again.

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    Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread
  • I started playing one of the Gacha games a few months back now, Watcher of Realms, I think the only reason I started was because it showed jiggling boobies in a trailer. The name is goofy and the story is almost non-existant, the gameplay isn't terribly deep, but has some nuances to it, it's like a tower defense RPG game. It's kind of dumb as a game because it records your playthroughs of scenarios that you can then use later on to "Auto-fight" for you as you frequently have to grind for different shit. So you basically set the game on auto-pilot and stop playing the game. I've been playing for something like 6 months now, but I've been committed from the start to never pay a single dime for it and I've stuck with that the entire time. Granted, I've put way too much time into the game and, if time is money, I've wasted a bunch that way, but I've never actually paid for anything in currency. Cheap skate 4 life. I honestly don't know why I keep playing, knowing what the game is setup for, but I still log in day after day.

    I can definitely see how it encourages players to spend money, there's so many mini-currencies within the game that obfuscate what you need to do to earn this or that hero or get whatever thing you're trying for, but ultimately the incentive is to buy shit to get further along. In this game though, the rates are so goddamn ridiculous that you'd have to be an impatient jackass to pay the rates they want for simple things that don't even give any guarantees of better performance in the game. On the one hand, I thing games like this are evil for trying to take advantage of people, but on the other, if you're that stupid and that rich that you have money to burn on a game like this... maybe throwing your money away on digital stuff isn't the worse thing you could be wasting your money on (like real world drugs or donating to Trump or something stupid like that). But yes, for kids who haven't mentally developed yet, there probably should be some sort of protections for them, since they'll pay for dumb shit at the drop of a hat.

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    The Animals Entering Noah's Ark by Jacopo Bassano
  • Of all the Biblical stories, this one has the most sci-fi vibes that makes me think that life on Earth might’ve been brought here from another world. That’s assuming we accept the story as having some element of truth and taking a more wild interpretation of the story. It could easily be an exaggerated story about some regular flooding event and people having to migrate a few miles away with their farm animals, but let’s go sci-fi with it.

    Assume that the genetic information for living things of one world was collected and transported to another planet to seed this new planet with life (artificial panspermia). If done early enough, maybe it’d account for the fossil record, it wouldn’t have been modern animals, maybe just microorganisms, basically the Engineers from the Aliens movies (this is essentially the backstory from Prometheus).

    Somehow early man is made aware of this, but their dumb brains can’t even conceive of what it all means, they haven’t even discovered flight or DNA or anything, or the story itself was purposely dumbed down to be understood. So this story gets passed down orally and over generations morphs into Noah building a big ship and taking two of every animal with him to survive a flood. It definitely seems like an allegory about some disaster-induced migration.

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    Trump refuses to criticize Laura Loomer amid concerns from Republican allies about her influence
  • That he’s so easily influenced by the people around him is just one more reason he’s a shitty person to be President. He’s very likely functionally illiterate, so his entire worldview comes solely from the videos he watches and the people he talks to. He only surrounds himself with ‘yes’ people who are likely only there because they flatter his ego and don’t challenge him on anything. And the kind of people willing to flatter Trump are likely either batshit insane themselves or hold even more contemptible views than he does.

    He’s an intellectual void that gets filled with the shitty ideas of those around him. There’s always this very direct line where you can trace some of the things he says right to a specific person or a segment on tv. There’s no processing or reflection or contemplation or anything, just garbage in, garbage out.

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    Remarkable, now $10,000.00!
  • Also love my plain black and white RM2. The pen just works without needing to charge and the simple ability to just twirl it around and erase like an eraser is what makes it the most like paper. Also works great as an e-reader tablet, which is what I end up using it for half the time.

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    Trump’s team was stunned by how badly he did in debate
  • I'm sure he doesn't even care that people are mocking him about it, the fact that everybody is talking about "concepts of a plan" and "they're eating the cats" is still a victory in his mind. Good attention or bad attention doesn't matter, attention for the sake of attention is the only thing he cares about. Nobody is really talking about anything specific Harris said or did, she didn't really have any really breakout moments that I can recall after having watched it, it was just Trump being a jackass and saying dumb shit.

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    If the obscenely wealthy benefit most from having Republicans in power; and collectively they have disproportionate control over the economy; wouldn't they use that power to sabotage Democrats?
  • I think choice and/or the illusion of choice needs to be there for either side's fringe elements to have a safe outlet for their frustrations. There needs to be a viable left-leaning party to control potential socialist or communist agitators. If they just completely shut down the Democratic party, then there's the potential that somebody outside of the control of the aristocratic classes comes to power. Having the Democratic party around gives them a chance to funnel those people through the system and subtly bend them and make them more agreeable to the system. So maybe somebody would've been a bomb-throwing anarchist advocating for blowing up the status quo and beheading all the billionaires, but when processed through the Democratic party, maybe they turn into somebody like AOC or Bernie Sanders or something, still willing to work within the system and less likely to advocate revolution.

    I'm still not sure about Trump, he still seems like an abnormality or a glitch in the system. I don't know if he went AWOL and the aristocracy doesn't want to move against their own, or if he's just part of "the plan" to move the country to the Right and having a crazy man-child as president gives them cover to push through all their extreme right-wing policies while everyone else fixates on the latest dumb thing that Trump tweeted. Or maybe it's all just anarchy and there is no conspiracy of the aristocracy, I don't know. Trump's existence just seems like one of those things the TVA would've come in and destroyed this whole timeline over.

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    Lemmy right now
  • Not sure if I’m not getting some cool kid joke now or what. He’s there near the center-right upper portion, but it looks photoshopped or something and off somehow, but I can’t zoom in enough to tell what’s going on.

    There's also a nerd walking on some guy's dick just to the lower right of there as well.

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    People who pirated in the late 90s and early 00s what is the most dramatic change from then till now? And if you had the power what would you bring back?
  • How much easier it's gotten and most of what you download nowadays is usually exactly what you're looking for. In the 90's/00's, alot of what was pirated had the potential to just be total BS or mislabeled, so you were never entirely certain what it was you were getting. I think Madonna had even gotten into it and released a one of her own albums as a fake download with her telling the listener "What the fuck are you doing?" At the time I mostly got music, though the Dreamcast pirating scene was pretty big for me for awhile. I think anymore though I'm probably more interested in obscure RPG books now.

    I think with torrenting, there's a certain amount of trust that's inherent with some torrents by virtue of the number of downloads/seeders there are on a torrent. At least for me, I can assume, ok, there's 100 people seeding this thing, chances are this is exactly what it says it is, otherwise this many people wouldn't be still seeding it (you can fool some people some of the time, or something like that). I don't pirate nearly as often as I did when I was younger, but now I feel the need to use protection (via a VPN) because you just don't know who might be watching. In my entire time having pirated stuff over multiple decades, I had only ever gotten a single letter from my ISP, so it's not something that I ever felt particularly afraid of, but you never know and it's better to be safe about that stuff.

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    Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?
  • Ridiculously enough, it's still a neck & neck race and Trump still very much has a good chance of winning. And he really has no incentive to drop out, he absolutely needs to get back into power in order to quash all these lawsuits against him, because at the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters to him. Biden had the humility to drop out for the good of both the Democratic party and for the Country, Trump has no humility whatsoever and doesn't care if he tanks the Republican party or plunges the Country into some sort of Civil War 2.0 (not likely, but it's a possibility), none of that is a priority to him.

    This is kind of similar to the Roman Republic in some ways. Holding on to power made some Roman officials immune to being summoned to court while they were in office, and our own Supreme Court has almost brought that practice back (give them a few more years for the rest). So the incentive for shitty office holders is to just keep holding on to office so that none of their illegal shit they do comes back to haunt them. That November sentencing will mean nothing to him if he becomes President again.

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    MAGA is straight up losing it after Taylor Swift’s Harris endorsement
  • I'm sure MAGAts are having to do mental jumping jacks from approving of a fake endorsement for Trump to now saying that her endorsement for Harris doesn't really matter and that she's a nobody. The whole thing is dumb either way, but if a pop star's endorsement is what it takes to hold off the fascists for at least 4 more years, then so be it.

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    Many Republicans may vote for Harris, but will Biden vote for Trump?
  • The only reason Trump is even still allowed to vote for himself is because sentencing for his felony conviction has been pushed back to past Election day, otherwise, Trump shouldn't even be able to vote for himself.

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    Steam Families has officially launched with a big Steam Client Update
  • Steam Families is actually awesome, they re-did how the sharing feature works for families and it works great. I’ve been using it for months with my Dad and my son’s accounts and it’s great. Works good on the Steam Deck too. I’ve actually been waiting for it to come out of beta so I can get Decky Loader back on my Steam Deck.

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    Kamala just Jim Halpert’d Trump
  • She should’ve mouthed the words, shook her head, gestured towards him, and looked at the presenters like, “Are you seeing this shit?”, that would’ve been icing on the cake.

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    Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris for president after debate ends.
  • Same, but if that’s what it takes to prevent America from falling into fascism, then so be it. I would’ve hoped “preventing America from falling into fascism” was enough of a reason on its own, but whatever, alot of people are stupid.

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  • Whether it's a sense of superiority or just to be funny or asinine or out of a genuine need to spread the truth, people online generally try to be contrarian as often as possible because it gives them some sort of personal gratification or a sense that they're correcting something wrong in the universe.

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    prompt: "generate an image of Patrick Bateman as Batman"

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    Copilot: "create a picture of Marvel's Fantastic Four in Leonardo's the Last Supper painting"

    alternates:

    ! ! !

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    Streamer Perrikaryal uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) device to play games

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    I settled on using Zotero (meant for academia, but whatever, it does what I need) for cataloguing/organizing my ttrpg pdf hoard and I'm trying to set up some top-level tags to make it a bit easier to sift through what I'm looking for. One set of tags will be genre tags (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc), with another level below that for sub-genre (cyberpunk, supernatural, low fantasy, post-apocalyptic, etc).

    Another set of top-level tags will focus on the actual types of books/products one might see for an RPG. These are just all the terms I've come across before, setup in a hierarchy that makes sense to me, though sometimes terms aren't used consistently across different RPG lines. Since some products can straddle multiple genres/categories, I'm hoping tags will help make it easier to sort through everything. Does this set of categories/sub-categories make sense? I'm still at the early stages of just importing everything into a library, so I'm sure there's categories I've not thought of or considered.

    • Core Rulebook (books required to play)
      • Player Handbook (this might straddle the line between core and supplement)
    • Supplement (books that expand the rules/setting)
      • Sourcebook
      • Bestiary
      • Splatbook
      • Adventure/Scenario/Module
        • Campaign
      • Setting
    • Accessory (mostly non-book related items)
      • Cards
      • Maps
      • Fiction
      • Music/Audio
      • Screens
      • Sheets
        • Character sheet
        • Rules/Cheat sheet
        • Misc sheet
    • Resource (more for general books on RPGs, system-agnostic)
      • GM aid
      • Player aid
      • Educational
      • Tables
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    I've been searching around for a way to organize my TTRPG collection of pdfs (numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands) and haven't really found a silver bullet for it yet. Everything I've looked at has some sort of weird thing that's off about it that doesn't seem to make it ideal. Is there something out there that others are using that works well? Here's what I've looked at so far:

    • Folder system: This is what I'm already using and it's serviceable (PC), but it really doesn't give me any tagging function and so it's hard to organize based on genre or come up with really any categories outside of just alphabetically naming folders based on the RPG name, then putting whatever subcategories I need as folders below that. It just feels so clunky going about it like this. Being able to organize/search via tags just seems like the way to go.

    • Calibre: This gets recommended everytime, but honestly I'm not interested in duplicating my library of +10,000 pdfs and following their organization system. The desktop app looks ugly (which is apparently fixed with Calibre-web but still requires the desktop app).

    • Jellyfin: Really not geared towards books in general, it's functional but not great for it. This may end up being what I fall back to if I can't get anything else working.

    • Kavita: Looks nice and works nice EXCEPT it has some weird ass naming convention with regards to numbers in the folder/file names. Only top-level stuff can contain numbers, everything below has to have roman numerals? Such a weird thing that just breaks it for me.

    • Komga: It looks nice and works nice, but is more geared towards comics, and thus doesn't work so hot with RPGs with multiple categories (Core rulebooks, Scenarios, Settings, etc), since I tend to break those out into different folders. It ends up treating sub-folders as a different series altogether, so it sort of demands that you just keep everything in the same folder.

    • Ubooquity: Tried it, it ran like ass on my machine and didn't seem to do as good a job. Making updates in the folders themselves took awhile to propagate and it just overall didn't seem to work well for how I wanted to use it. I just didn't particularly care for it.

    • Zotero: It's actually more meant for academic journals and such, but it could be used for organizing TTRPG pdfs, though not sure how well it scales up once you start throwing thousands of pdfs at it. Downside though is that it's not as flashy as some of the others, it doesn't display book covers and you have to create additional objects for each item. You also can't just add tags to the PDFs themselves, you have to create an additional 'Book' object and attach the pdf to that item, then add whatever tags/notes/metadata you want to add. I haven't figured out how to automate the process and the one item I tried where it automatically found it, it created a 'Journal Article' and renamed it based on the authors of the book (which it did correctly find), which is not ideal for going through thousands of items. I just want it to keep the file names in most cases as I've already gotten most file names where I want them.

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    That is, have you ever started getting into a game, only to discover that the community is much deeper than you initially ever suspected?

    My kids and I started playing PlateUp! for funsies, it's a 4-player co-op kitchen/cooking/restaurant simulator that has you doing fun things like cooking food, taking customers orders, and washing dishes. We kind of play it for laughs and barely make any headway in it, usually as a result of all the chaos that comes from multiple people trying to run a kitchen. I started looking deeper into it because apparently there's ways to automate your whole setup and have the whole kitchen run itself. The amount of diagrams and setups that people have created are just insane, way deeper than I ever even considered with this innocent-looking game and it's made me reconsider what I thought was just a quirky little party game.

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    Eugene Debs, a Socialist leader in the early 20th century, ran for President five times. His fifth and highest vote count came in the 1920 Presidential election, in which he was running while in Federal prison for sedition. He received about 3.4% of the vote at the time (which included women for the first time since the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920 as well). Not naming names, but yes, it's possible to run for President while in prison, though results may vary.

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    I just got done with a chat with Sony Customer Service regarding fraudulent activity on my account, I figured I'd share my experience in case anyone else has the same issue come up (I assume it's a relatively common experience).

    Somebody apparently got access to my account a few days ago, changed the email address linked to the account (so that I couldn't reset the password) changed the password, activated 2-step verification, then started buying up a few games on it (as my Sony account had been linked to my paypal account).

    Of course I discovered all this on a Sunday, when their phone lines are closed, which left me having to go through their "online assistant" (ie chat bot). It took me about 30-40min to finally get transferred to a live chat rep, but because I had keyed in my "online ID" wrong in the chat form ( misremembered it), he was unable to help me, because that chat instance is restricted to whatever info I entered originally. So I then had to start a new chat instance with the correct info, which left me waiting for another 30-40min, which by that time put me into about 1.5 hours and I just closed out and resolved to get to it today.

    Fast-forward to today, the wait this time was only about 20 min. Everything seemed to go fairly well, I got access to my account and changed the password back out. I then went ahead and activated 2-Step Verification for myself, to improve security to hopefully prevent this kind of thing in the future. After verifying my email address, this action apparently flagged my account for suspicious activity and my account is now suspended. I'm now having to wait for another specialist to resolve that issue. And because of that issue, the refund on the two games that were fraudulently bought is on hold because the agent can't process it while the account is suspended.

    After all of that, I requested to know what the email address had been changed to during the time that my account was hacked, as I want to file a police report at least and give that information out if I can. However, I was told that they could not give that information out for security reasons. In my mind, that email address became part of my account record, did it not? Why wouldn't I have access to that info for my account? The agent literally just gave me back access to my account, I'm obviously the account owner.

    Overall, I appreciated the help that CS gave me, I've worked that kind of job before, so I understand some of what they go through, but Sony's process for resolving these issues was just kind of a lot of needless waste on my end and infuriating that I don't have access to my own account information. There was some other strange things about the whole experience that I won't go into here, so just be prepared if you ever have to contact Sony about this.

    Thank you for reading my long rant.

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    I was curious if anyone else had tried out bringing in boardgame content/ideas into their RPG games? Minis are always great to bring in as some boardgames have some great figures to use, but also, just incorporating mechanics, settings, as a mini-game, or just the general idea of a game into an RPG seems like a great resource. There's already alot of RPG-esque games out there that are ripe for plundering and just converting into full-blown RPGs if you wanted, you'd just be adding some additional depth on top of an already defined world. We've just seen Gloomhaven make the leap into an RPG as well with their new crowdfunding campaign.

    I just wrapped up a one-shot game (over 3 sessions) of **Mothership RPG **where I merged the RPG with the boardgame Nemesis and it seemed to go well (everyone died, very on brand). I basically used the Nemesis map/rooms/plot and ran it as a sort of pointcrawl via FoundryVTT with randomized encounters in each room. I brought in Nemesis' idea of giving the players competing goals and added some other elements to amp up the paranoia. The two games seemed to compliment each other fairly well, though not really suitable beyond just a one-shot. It probably could've went into a campaign if I had wanted, but I was happy with one of the players rigging the engines to explode and leaving on an escape pod.

    Some other ideas I've had merge RPG elements with tabletop games have been with Kingdom Death (I had drafted up some ideas for merging it with The Quiet Year awhile back), Shadows of Brimstone (Hexcrawl, basically adding another layer on top of the game to give it more depth), and Heroquest (I tried out a Savage Worlds conversion of the game).

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