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.
I 100% agree on consistency, but I actually suspect LLMs would be pretty decent at translating linguistic concepts. Their grasp of contextual language is always surprisingly good, as seen in how well they rewrite tone to very specific parameters.
I don’t use ChatGPT loads, but I do use it a little, often alongside a method of project that can’t hallucinate. The other week I was talking in one chat about the vocal tone of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, that has this laconic, worn down dialogue with old testament feeling prose. In another chat, I was prompting ‘sage advice’ for a matcha scone recipe I wanted to make where I was marbling strawberry directly into the dough. I got which chat I was responding in wrong and accidentally had it give me a the scone recipe in Cormac McCarthy’s writing style.
MARBLED SCONES
He measured two cups of flour into a bowl and cut in the baking powder with the side of his hand. Salt followed. It hung in the flour like stone dust. He stirred it with a fork and the dry mix turned over itself and fell still. He cut the butter into cubes and dropped them in and pressed them through with his fingers until the flour took the texture of packed soil. He added a spoon of matcha. The green of river weed. The taste of old things left out in the rain.
He poured in buttermilk and cream. A little at a time. He stirred it slow with a blunt knife and the dough pulled together like it didn’t want to be one thing.
In another bowl he took a handful of flour and mixed it with strawberry powder. A drop of red dye like blood in water. He stirred in cream until it held. He pressed the green dough flat on the counter and laid the red over it and folded. Folded again. The colors turned but did not blend. Like veins of ore in a dark stone.
He shaped the dough into a slab and cut thick rounds with a glass. Each one imperfect. Some leaning. Some split. He set them on a tray lined with paper. The oven was already hot. He did not preheat it. It was always hot. Four twenty five. He watched the scones rise through the glass. They broke along the seams. Green and red and gold. They looked like they’d been dug up.
He split one open while it was still warm. He spread pistachio butter across the inside. It melted into the crumb. Then clotted cream. Then jam. The weight of it brought the top half down slow.
He took it outside and sat in the dirt to eat. There was no sound but the breeze. The sky was wide and empty. The scone was good. The scone was all right.
Now this is actually super easy to critique as a recipe, because it fucking sucks. In adaptation, it’s lost a lot of critical instruction. This is effectively a translation that must adhere to narrow and specific tone to achieve a meaning that cannot be translated without grasping a meaning to language that exists beyond the words.
Obviously this is English to English, but a big difference is that there is far more Japanese out there than Cormac McCarthy.
That being said, nothing cements what you’re saying about consistency more than how badly butchered the underlying instructions to this recipe are.
Although I think it’s worth saying how much dubs have improved in the last decade, I’ve always been reasonably lightly into anime, but always had the odd niche recommendation on the go. Most anime I watch is still casual in tone, so I like to have it on while doing art or something, so I’m a big dub supporter.
A decade ago, you could probably have a rule that unless you’d see someone wearing merch of the anime in public, the dub would be shit, but I think because streaming services are paying so much for dunning themselves, it’s lightened the burden across the scene.
Also if over 50% of users watch dubs, I wonder what percentage of their users solely watch high budget, mainstream anime which has perfectly fine dubs.
Purple: Magic??
Green: Life/death??
Red: Life/fire??
Blue: Magic/cold??
Honestly the only colour I don’t feel uncertain about is orange, that’s always bad.
Also on the topic of health potions, a great piece of advice I once heard was that if your players are in a foreign land, remove health potions. Give them health biscuits and watch them reconcile with God.
Microsoft has absolutely been preparing for the end of traditional consoles more or less since the flop of the Xbox One. Their entire push a few years back to make “Everything Xbox” was a bit mistimed and disloyal to their console war cultists but they’re right that it’s the natural end point.
I think we’ll probably see streaming games from their servers reoccur in popularity pretty soon, as much as I’m not a fan of it, because it’s the total end point for non tech savvy consumers, they just pay a subscription, get a controller which can connect to the TV or phone and download an app, no hardware required. Meanwhile every consumer who is resisting the death of tech literacy (everyone else), is going in this direction. The physical console will reduce in popularity year by year as it fills a niche that nobody needs anymore.
That being said, the popularity of the switch and steam deck interests me, because it’s a third direction away from traditional consoles that I’d not have predicted.
I mean as a first language speaker, it is.