Wages are not up. I’m not going to spend that much money on a redundant toy. Pay me more then I’ll think about it.

I have discovered that a gentle nudge makes them stop snoring. This might not be universal but it has been working for me.

Otherwise, white noise can help. Like a fan or something

I had a really fun game of Vampire back in like 2016. I’d love to have another go at that, or Mage. The dice pool system always felt simple but exciting. Characters started out competent and being able to buy individual skills or powers was more satisfying than waiting for whole levels.

I’ve heard good things about Delta green, but never looked into it.

Alas, my college days where “hey you look nerdy you wanna play vampire?” are long gone.

For the first point, you could use a random generator and make it pick from a Gaussian or Poisson or other probability distribution depending on the situation.

Many RPGs that aren’t so closely related to DND use a dice pool. Instead of like 1d20, you might roll 3d6. Now you’re more likely to get an average result. Only one way to roll 3, but a bunch of ways to roll 10.

The nWoD games you roll d10s and count how many come up 8,9, 10. Very fast, and once you’re good at a task you know you’ll generally succeed. It’s more a question of how well you’ll succeed and how strong the opposition is.

I’m not mathy enough to talk beyond that, but I find it much more satisfying.

I hear pathfinder 2e is a big improvement, but still has some of the stuff I’m sick of.

• rolling a single die means flat probability. Equal odds of getting the worst or best possible outcome
• spells per day is anti-fun for me. I want to do cool stuff, not feel pressured to hold onto it “in case I need it later”
• class and level is very coarse, and makes some concepts impractical, impossible, or awkward to execute
• I’m not as interested in “numbers go up big” anymore, and that’s kind of the default.
• I’m not really in the mood for fantasy. I’d rather do modern day occult

Tabletop RPGs. I’m sick of DND. Hard to find good groups for other games. There’s a meetup I go to every once in a while but I want a regular group building a big story together

The whole venture capitalism thing is bullshit. It’s just vibes and rich man hubris.

Is this happening on android, too?

What I was trying to get at is something can be worthwhile even if you don’t personally enjoy it.

Conservatism, probably. The whole in-group supremacy thing is pretty bad.

I think a lot about how “good” and “fun” are two different things.

You can have a game that’s a fascinating exploration of a theme that really unifies mechanics and story, but is an absolute downer of misery to play.

You can also have a game that’s a glorified slot machine with bugs, no real player input, and abusive monetization, but people’s brains light up playing it.

There’s some subjectivity of course, but sometimes I see games that are good at what they’re trying to be, but I don’t have any fun with them. Some people seem to demand those overlap all the time.

Not in any way I can discern! She’s in the planning meetings but her entire role seems to be sharing her screen so people can tell her what to click on. (This is excruciating to witness. It is so slow.)

Sometimes she’ll say “remember to check your capacity!”, but two other people on the team say that too.

She seems to be entirely non-technical, too, so she doesn’t have much input on any of the discussion. The inter-team stuff is handled by two other people. (A lady of importance whose title I don’t know, and some sort of business analyst)

The place I work at I wouldn’t say is “over staffed” but it is maybe “wrong-staffed”.

They have a full time “scrum master” and from what I can tell all she does it share her screen so people can awkwardly tell her which tickets to click on, and she calls on people in order during the morning meeting. That’s a whole-ass job. Meanwhile, devops is like crying blood because there’s like 2 of them managing decades of systems, and no senior engineering roles have been backfilled after people left for years.

If fines scaled with wealth that might create an incentive for the police to harass rich people instead of poor people. It won’t, because the police serve the wealthy, but it’s a nice day fantasy.

I’m so tired of every job posting frothing at the mouth over AI. “We’re ai native” , “we want employees who are excited about ai tools”, “agenic workflows”

Just fuck off.

Even if all of this stuff was a real productivity increase, who is keeping that extra production? Not the workers!

I use nano for quick edits. I don’t know more than the basics of vim, and don’t do a lot of editing on the terminal so I haven’t needed to.

Fuck Spotify. I’ll buy albums (drm free, mostly from Bandcamp), pirate, or go without.

Today is bandcamp Friday, too. Bandcamp passes their cut on to the band.

It would take an incomprehensible set of changes for me to consider going back to Microsoft. They can fuck off.

People are lazy and don’t think very much. Spotify is right there.

Also enshittification: it was better to draw people in, and then they made it shittier and people stay

I buy music (mostly from Bandcamp). Now I have a big library and no subscription fee.