China aren’t strictly speaking allies. They get a lot of oil from Iran and have plenty of deals in place, to the point that many people believe that the Venezuela coup and Iran war are a US ploy to destabilise China specifically.
China basically stay out of geopolitics far more than people assume. They are very unlikely to enter the Iran war on either side, ever.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the word rizz. Not just is it a shortening of charisma, so more sensible than other zoomer words, but I grew up playing D&D, where wisdom is frequently shortened to Wis, and Cha is bad to say and doesn’t rhyme.
And everyone please stop using it as a forum for the love of God. I have no use for discord as a platform, but every damn FOSS program asking me to go there for troubleshooting is insanity.
I mean as a first language speaker, it is.
I’d love to see US bases go, but I’m not convinced a lack of trust in America would be the tipping point when they haven’t behaved in a trustworthy way ever really. America would find some way to make any country that rejected a US military presence experience difficulty, be that via tariffs or vague threats about their military absence.
I don’t mind it being deep, just don’t fill it with your actions and deeds. A big part of fun for TTRPGs is ‘play away from the table’, which for the players is typically making art, backstory or builds for current or future characters. Most long backstories I read don’t invalidate a level 1 character but mostly explore values, just as my real life story could be as deep as I choose to write it and I’d not even have the skills to be level 1.
My suggestion is:
Get people together for a session 0. Only pitch the campaign and tone then, if not construct it collaboratively too.
Hand out pieces of paper or card face down, have each player take 1, and ensure there is one between each player. These cards say Love, ally, rival, or enemy.
Explain that players should make an NPC for their backstory that matches this word, and should make a shared NPC with the person next to them based on the card between them.
Now let them take another card of their choice. They can either make another NPC with this, or use it to make the relationship to one of their shared NPCs asymmetrical.
They can design their NPCs and backstory now or before session 1, up to them.
Finally, explore what the players can choose to do to contribute between sessions to the game. If they don’t do anything, that’s fine, but they should have a way to meaningful contribute to something. Typically I encourage world building and cultural lore, such as unique foods and why that has a thematic resonance.
This is hard to structure, I had a player who was a former forever DM, who played a knowledgeable librarian in a former monster hunter guild. I asked her to make some monster statblocks, as she’d know them inside and out in character.
My advice to players:
Make your backstory show that your character has done no huge deeds yet, and most importantly, have everything that matters in it revolve around NPCs. Not just is this the best drama, but NPCs can move, join factions, be redeemed, betray you, die and everything else.
That cost halfling village you design that perfectly exemplifies your character, but will never be seen in this urban campaign halfway across the continent? Make the most important part of it the mayor’s daughter who happens to be your childhood friend.
The strange necklace that made you stronger but more angry when you wore it? The final time you saw it was when your brother stormed out of your co-owned business after a bitter argument.
The lord who helped you smuggle your liquor into the city? That’s the same lord that wrongfully imprisoned the player character next to you.
One of my favourite scenes from a campaign came when a player, after spending a session getting the chance to meet with a resistance leader, turned to the others and said “this is my ex-wife”. That whole dynamic was interesting too, as both had come from a warrior culture and initially parted due to neither being the “strong warrior”, now both trying to fight against that same faction a decade later.
My all time favourite NPC was a talented tailor in an urban campaign, who owed one player character a favour and was generally fond of them all. Nothing like the party having a go to guy for fancy or silly outfit amendments.
It’s interesting how Discord absolutely nukes its own trust by pretending to be more than it is. I loathe discord, to the point I’d use a competitor (not teams) just to evade it. I’m sick of finding a hobby group using it as a Frankenstein forum / chat / info hub when it’s only built for chat.
Discord is fine for this use, but I’m getting used to the distrusting it so often that it blends into reasonable use.
I chickened out of avoiding Google at the last minute because my primary bank is app only and I’d heard that it doesn’t work on different OS’s.
That was months ago, and with the news, I’m beginning to look into ways to Jump ship, it’s just happened to coincide with my jump to Linux setting up my first home server and work being busier, so I’m not really setting any time aside for it for a while.
I can’t picture a service which beats Spotify in what they offer which isn’t just the same business model but more ethical.
Discovering music for free is an enormous benefit, and the fact that Spotify has practically all mainstream music is nice. People often cite that one quote by Gabe Newell that is “Piracy is not an economic problem. It is a service problem”, as a highlight for steam, but largely Spotify offers what consumers want in a way Netflix or Audible can’t. They have everything you want and guide your discovery in even more, and as long as their encroaching enshittification doesn’t undercut this service, they will continue to underpay artists and fund immoral activities.
The developer of Ultrakill, Hakita, said something which I’ve often thought about. “You should support indies if you can, but culture shouldn’t exist only for those who can afford it. ULTRAKILL wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t had easy access to movies, music and games growing up. If you don’t have money, you can support via word of mouth”. There are plenty of independent things I financially support, particularly things I attend in person in the city I live in. I may spend £100 per month paying for art and entertainment all said and done, and when that’s spent, I will pirate everything else.
I split a Spotify family plan between 6 friends, I think that’s about £3.50 per month, and I pay for no other media services. With video, I run a jellyfin server with a “parent friendly” interface, so they can have “netflix with everything”, which I have at my place too. I don’t read that much any more, if it’s physical I just go to the library and if it’s an audiobook I’ll just pirate it. The benefit here is that even if I’m on a reading binge, that’s not even a book a week. With Spotify, I often pick something and play it via song radio, which is probably 50/50 music I know and new music. Sometimes I just stick albums on, but it’s not like that’s harder. If I had a locally hosted music repository that I’d “paid for”, I could enjoy albums, but not as easily have a radio like discovery experience.
One day, a pirate tool may appear that rivals Spotify, but until that day, I can’t see myself moving away from it.
Go to your local live music, drag shows, theatres, independent cinemas and libraries. Don’t feel obligated to pay for any internet service.
Yeah, he looked like he did on the left through the entire 2010s without changing appearance much, from Narnia 3 to Midsommar. This is absolutely styling above just growing up.
Without arguing politics, the world is sliding very quickly towards facism and being on guard against it is incredibly important. I’m not buying a laptop and putting money in the pockets of someone who may then donate to or fund facism. None of that applies to a developer of a free open source software whose political ideal world is not rapidly approaching.
He was actually just there in the water for the reference images, and got left in by mistake.
Thank god I display my status amongst my peers by rejecting mainstream status symbols. Yay for counterculture being part of the system!
I’m in the UK too and the gradual shift to WhatsApp has been a relief considering it used to be WhatsApp, Snapchat, messenger, Instagram, iMessage and twitter about ten years ago, not that anyone did all of them.
It’s a shame it’s meta but it’s so nice that it’s not a huge pile of useless features, just a few.
I don’t even understand the purpose. Who the hell cares what colour your texts are?
I’ve never made the link between that and gender before (linguistically), it seems obvious in hindsight.
I could tell from mthe outset that this was going to be sexist, probably the fact it took the stance of “men do x” over “men also do x”, but I didn’t anticipate the final line being outright misogyny.
There is less pre-modern art by women because women were either censored or indoctrinated into roles where they couldn’t create, which is the primary sin of the patriarchy.
There is a myth of men knowing love because the myth of the powerful, rational man doesn’t accommodate for this, and what perpetuates that myth? That’s right, the patriarchy again.
It’s heartbreaking to see someone see through the patriarchal myth of masculinity and arrive at the conclusion that men are objectively better at creation and love than women
Coming from the UK is correct, it was literally an artistocratic flex at having literally useless land. I read a dissertation a few years back that also linked this to a Baudrillard style simulationist desire for the upper class not to see land with any practical value immediately besides their homes because they were resistant to accept that their wealth was exercised from any real action, and instead they’d pretend it was just a truth. But beyond the lawns were forests and fields, because they had to exist.
When lawns were adopted by the bourgeoisie, who only had half an acre of property, it was already trendy to have the surrounding acres of the house be only lawn. The bourgeoisie simulation was to have the house surrounded by lawns as if it were to then give way to fields and forests, which of course did not exist, just your neighbours equally ugly plot of land.
What I never understood about all of this though, is that gardens are equally cosmetic vanity. I have fond memories of the garden of my grandmother, which has a small greenhouse and two raised vegetable beds at the back, but everything else was flower beds, a pond, a summer pavillion, a small lawn, a shed and a scattering of trees and bushes. Other than the small sections for growing vegetables, it was all entirely for vanity. But it was beautiful. Hell, the small lawn was even pretty functional as the primary place to set up chairs in the sun and play ball games.
I am British, and once this island was forest and mountains from shore to shore, with meadows and plains being rare. The lawn never made sense here, and caught on less in in the Soviet Bloc as plains become more common in nature. America is a land with far more natural plains, and the lawn is further removed from it’s original status. It’s imitating an imitation of a denial of reality, Baudrillard would have a field day.
But I did mention, in my grandmother’s garden, playing ball games on the lawn. American sport is largely built on the suburban madness that is lawns. I’m not talking about sport born in urban centers like basketball, or sports from true rural areas, which I can only assume is rednecks drink driving, if watching US shows has told me anything, but Baseball, American Football and even golf are sports made for lawns. It’s hard to detangle lawns from middle class America without stopping middle class kids play sports in their gardens.
One day they’ll add vegetable gardening to the Olympics and America will be saved, and Joseph McCarthy will be stuck in hell on his fucking lawn.
At least I expect that from him and basically all his characters. It’s most irritating when it’s a character who should have eloquence, ht doesn’t.
Also by extension, film / TV is the ideal medium for imperfect dialogue. The medium took queues from theatre and literature in it’s inception but there is truly no other medium suited to the imperfection of real dialogue like real life.
Mediums which demand a high critical analysis like most paintings invite the viewer to study and puzzle over the narrative, but film has it’s roots in cinema, and lowbrow cinema at that. I don’t really mean that critically, it’s my preferred medium, but nothing expects an easily digestible narrative like film and TV.
I don’t think it’s inherently the mediums flaw, duration and viewing time dictates a lot.
Film and TV his a wired niche. Although mainstream TV also takes days, weeks of months to compete, the vast majority intentionally invites you to consume without analysis. Mainstream film fully invites the average viewer to see it once, and anything further than that is for chance or deeper fans.
However film and modern high budget TV is mor* e venture capitalism than art, it’s just that in it’s method of consumerism, it poses as art. This gives it its own rules, and one of those rules is that comprehension is only a useful tool when it favours creating and retaining viewers/income.
But as it’s rose to dominate all other media, there and many, many people who enjoy film and TV without any media literacy outside of it, and therefore their only touchstone is reality. That paired with the fact that we’ve largely cracked our ability for movies to direct focus via mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing sound etc, means it’s the ideal medium to not just emulate realistic performance, but focus on it and celebrate it. This often comes with unclear dialogue.
Then the only way for deeper fans to enjoy this mediu BBm is to re-experience it By re-exploring rit. Each additional delve, albeit short - often just an episode or feature film length - gains that viewer status unlike other mediums.
This forces realistic dialogue to be idolised by fans bove clarity, while being irrelevant to the casual viewer. At last in my opinion.
This is a lunatic ramble, which I’m writing at 3am in my time zone after being unable to sleep. Beyond any typos, I apologize if this is entirely incoherent or just wrong and assumptive.
Mushroom circles grow in circles because they drain the nutrients from the ground, and eventually you have a nutrient barren center that grows with the ring of mushrooms around it.
I wonder if this is something similar, although I’ve not heard of mold using up a resource before.