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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • Cursed ring of acrobatics.

    Gives the player great acrobatic skill, but sticks to their finger when they wear it. And they can’t stop getting around acrobatically. Any action attempted fails, unless it is done acrobatically. Player has normal or only slightly improved stamina.

    Player: i’ll get my rope and grappleing hook and scale the wall.

    DM: lifts eyebrow you think so, do you?

    Player: sigh I throw my pack into the air and leap after it. At the peak of its arc, I flip over it, grabbing my grappling hook and flinging it over the wall as I do.

    DM: ok, sounds like difficulty of 15…


  • Yes. It’s a scalable hobby, and can run from virtually no cost to why-are-you-burning-money. But you can do a lot in gaming with little monetary investment.

    There are lots of budget indie games that are lots of fun, and if you find out you like gaming and want to try more fancy titles, you can always upgrade hardware.

    Minimal entry: your current pc. Install steam, and buy/try what you like, returning it if it’s too slow/doesn’t work.

    Light entry: get familiar with your pc’s ram size, hd/ssd size, cpu speed/type, and graphics card. Use that to ensure your pc can handle the game by looking at the game’s minimum requirements.

    Medium-heavy entry: Upgrade things.

    • ssd if you don’t have one. The difference between that and spinning disks is night and day. If you wished things loaded faster, get this.
    • 8 gb graphics card in the $150 range, amd or nvidia-based. Get this if you want a smoother experience / if you can notice individual frames happening. You don’t need the most expensive tech to play most games that are out there.
    • Genuine XBox or PS4/5 controller. These standard controllers are generally pretty solid and durable. $60ish
    • new cpu ($$$, and may not even be an option): most games won’t be processor-bound. But some are cpu-heavy. Get this if you really want to upgrade overall, or have a particular title in mind that needs it. Or…
    • Low-mid range gaming computer ($900 ($600-$1500)): wait until you want to do a pc upgrade, and get a low-end gaming computer. I recommend Lenovo LOQ or Legion. Lenovo in general has provided laptops that don’t fall apart on me, and that’s not something I can say about most computer manufacturers. That said, keep them long enough and you’ll have to replace the keyboard - but that’s every laptop out there that I’ve run across.
    • or: go crazy and buy everything all the time at the moment it his the market because it is a game or has “game” written on, near, or associated with it (not recommended)

  • Late stage capitalism.

    The issue is that capitalism fundamentally requires forward thinkers and enlightened (or at least rational) perspective to function sustainably.

    But capitalism rewards short term thinking, everywhere from corporate leadership, to the workforce, to the consumers caught by ads designed to catch and hold their ever-shortening attention spans.

    Fundamentally, it needs regulation to thrive. The true cost of a purchase, including environmental and decommissioning/disposal costs must be tied to the initial purchase value. Through this, we might get a functional capitalism.









  • If the concept of the universe being deterministic interferes with one’s concept of free will, then one of these must be true:

    • the universe is nondeterministic, or has nondeterministic elements
    • one’s concept of determinism is incorrect
    • one’s concept of the impact of determinism on one’s own free will is incorrect

    But of course, that begs:

    • ones concept of free will is incorrect

    But that cannot be, because your notion of free will is for you to decide, even if the universe is somehow determinate.

    But that doesn’t mean the universe is or is not deterministic, it just means one or more of the above three things.

    Ultimately, though, I was not making an argument concerning the fundamental nature of free will and determinism, or whether or not the universe is deterministic. I was arguing for completely processing fundamental concepts before you accept them to be true, because often times we accept a lot of false implications alongside the true things we accept.

    One’s world view holds immense power in one’s own life. People do not intentionally act in accordance with things they do not believe to be the case. To accept determinism without fully processing the implications thereof, particularly if it “feels wrong but seems true” is to enter into and sign up for those internal conflicts writ large in one’s own life.

    I also don’t believe that the universe is absolutely deterministic, but that’s a different argument that others have made better than I likely would.



  • Look into Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and the philosophical implications of that.

    A lot of times, when we’re dealing with the assertion that we don’t have free will, we’re analyzing that according to rule-based systems. The system that we use to evaluate truth isn’t entirely rule-based, and is necessarily a superset of what we can consciously evaluate.

    In effect, some less-complex system that is a subset of your larger mind is saying ‘you have limits, and they are this.’ But your larger mind disagrees, because that more rule-based subset of rights is incapable of knowing the limits of its superset. Though, we just feel like it’s ‘off’.

    If it feels like it’s off, there’s a good chance that the overall way you’re thinking of it isn’t right, even if the literal thing you’re focused on has some degree of truth.

    In short, it’s possible to know something that is technically true, but that isn’t interpreted correctly internally.

    If you accept the model that you have no free will without processing the larger feelings it evokes, then whether or not your internal sense of free will is rule-based, you’ll artificially limit the way you think to filter out the internal process you think of as free will. …and that can have massive consequences for your happiness and viability as an organism, because you’ve swapped away that which you actually are for labels and concepts of what you are - but your concept is fundamentally less complex and led capable than you are as a whole.

    Fortunately, rule-based systems break when faced with reality. It’s just that it can be very painful to go through that process with what you identify with.





  • Telling me I’d like to watch it all burn, and then calling me a political pacifist in the next breath? Come on, now, you can do better.

    The debt isn’t an abstract thing that can be unilaterally printed away. It has real-world consequences, real-world resources that can’t be ignored, and that the US isn’t even in a position to come out on top of once it comes calling.

    I’m glad you’re fighting that political fight. It keeps you occupied, and keeps them occupied. Like a pair of dysfunctional lovers, you deserve each other. I’m watching, and I’m learning. I know how to take advantage of the mistakes you make, and ones they make, and use them to my own personal advantage, as well as to the advantage of other moderate folks that I’m perfectly willing to give business preference to, and reach out for, and go the extra mile for.

    …just… …keep fighting, bud. It’ll end soon enough. …and certainly, you will win. Perhaps not like you think, though.