Casual Conversation

The world actually did end in 2012.

This is hell.

Nuclear energy is currently the best way to achieve energetic independence until we find out how to maintain a fusion core running for more than 20 minute.

The "phones are bad and suck your life away" crowd has gotten way too big. Yes, it's easy to waste time on them, but that's just something you gotta learn, like not watching TV series all night. You're a grown up, deal with it. Also maybe you feel bad for spending all that time on your phone just because feeling bad for that feels cool? It's actually your life you can spend it however you want. You don't need to be productive or successful to be a worthy human. Be a lazy shit that plays stupid phone games while on a train to work.

First-past-the-post voting should be replaced so people can vote outside the two party system with no spoiler effect.

Vinyl sounds shit. It reintroduces all the issues digital audio solved decades ago. I have heard vinyl rips made with equipment that costs as much as a new bmw and it has constant and frequent quality issues like static. It also has to downgrade audio sometimes to prevent the needle from physically flying out. It is impossible for vinyl to sound as good as the digital master or flac version of it that it was made from. It WILL always sound worse even thanks to the fact that physical world is very flawed and imprecise.

People arguing otherwise are either deaf or need to look in the mirror and accept the fact that they enjoy vinyl for the experience not the sound quality.

DND is not a good universal game system. It's pretty good at being DND, but that's a particular beast that's mostly about resource management.

You can definitely use it for a game about social intrigue, or horror, or modern day anything, but it's not really good at any of that. Like using a hammer to put screws in, you'll probably get something done, and if you're hanging with your friends you'll probably have a good time. But it's a weird tool to reach for.

Personally, I don't think the core of the rules system is very good at all. Flat probability feels weird. Armor as all-or-nothing is weird. Hit and damage being split into two rolls is slow and weird. In the latest edition, making very few choices about your character often feels bad. Levels are a very coarse unit of growth. The magic system somehow manages to make magic not feel like magic- no wonder, no mystery, it's just safe and standardized. I could go on.

But it's mega popular and people are emotionally invested, so there's not much to be done about it. There are dozens of people playing the thousands of other games out there.

Also a lot of people have never played anything else, so their analysis and defense of it is often lacking. Like if I've only ever played baseball, and never even watched any other sports, I wouldn't feel qualified to talk about bowling. But you get people saying like "no you need to wear cleats that's a universal property of sports" when bowling comes up. Like, not every game has six stats. Not every game has attributes like that at all.

And again, if you're having fun with dnd then that's the primary goal achieved. We don't need to maximize fun and efficiency in all things all times. I just think that it would be a good experience to branch out more, even if it's scary, because that will lead to a richer experience overall.

The icing is the only part I like - I literally eat the cake separately so that I can maximize the icing-to-cake ratio in a single bite.

This is mostly because frosting is "wet" and offsets how dry the cake is. I dislike the dryness of the cake so much I prefer to eat most of it in one go and get over it, and then enjoy the rest of the cupcake with my preferred 9:1 proportion of icing to cake. 😆

Blessing someone for a sneeze is the most useless human interaction I know of and we should do away with it.

Modern flip phones (e.g. Samsung Fold) are stupid and tacky and will never be as good as previous gen flip phones. Just won't. Sorry not sorry.

The contemporary disdain for postmodernism was a Psy op designed to completely destroy philosophy from the inside. And the supposed replacements for post modernism (metamodernism or whatever) were just pop culture millennial distractions that just took attention away from the philosophical issues of the inadequacies of language and crisis of our communications systems. We became stuck in limbo. Cultural conversation dumbed down by useless culture wars articulated in low attention span pop culture commentary and therapy speak.

That exclusive content in physical games is a cruel disservice to late discoverers. "Exclusive" content should just be delayed public release content instead - something for the early adopters, but not unavailable to people years later.

Even just the normal game, if they're discontinuing production, should be made available as a digital purchase (including STL and print-ready files) for people coming along years later. We have the technology to not screw over potential future fans, and it's not that expensive to keep a small website running - especially if they're still going as a company. Looking at you, CMON Games.

Depending on how the next four years go, probably Capitol.

I'm so out of shape right now, it'll probably be whichever one I try to climb next.

All billionaires are evil people that decide to accumulate wealth instead of distributing the surplus and living off enough to not have to worry about the future. All. Of. Them.

Yes, even Taylor Swift and Gabe Newell. They have enough money that they could set 100m aside, live off that and charge break-even prices for their products so more people could enjoy them or they could charge the same thing and redirect their share of the profits into charities, they choose not to.

2FA is too inconvienient* and I think using a password manager to generate a very long password is good enough.

Software 2FA is not even that much more secure to be worth the inconvienience.

And for hardware 2FA keys, there is a higher chance for me to misplace those keys than getting hacked. (I don't have friends to put a backup key in and I don't wanna pay for a safe deposit box)

[*For me personally, your security needs might be different. I don't work with any sensitive classified info or anything like that.]

Respect pornstars.

Fondant isn’t icing and is cheating when making a cake. It also tastes gross.

I will never play a game that needs admin elevation to run, I don't care how good it allegedly is.

I've missed out on playing several games with friends due to this stance. Star Wars: The Old Republic was the first I can remember. Marvel Rivals is the most recent.