As I said at the root of this thread, my ire is mostly reserved for rich people who refuse to tip. If you’re struggling, you have to make your own decisions and compromises to get by. But the guy who makes more money from interest than the bartender makes all night, when they don’t tip they’re an asshole.

The problem you’re describing, that people aren’t paid enough and CEOs are too rich, is a very real problem.

No one should rely on tips, but they do. Refusing to tip now just hurts people , real people, immediately. You have to live in the world as it is while trying to improve it.

The bartender can’t eat your idealism nor find shelter from the elements in it.

Your experiences are different. My friends who work for tips tell me they rely on that money. Losing those tips would have an immediate and real adverse impact on their health and safety.

Have you ever worked for tips or been a close friend of someone who did?

People who make more in daily interest than the worker does from the shift , I don’t think have the moral high ground on tipping.

Guy taking home $250k salary with health care griping about $10 extra. Really.

Sure, income and the economy should be different. The worker can’t pay for housing with idealism.

I accidentally made a rom-com subplot in one of my games… Twice… And the players loved it both times.

The first time there was a divorced smith lady who sort of had a death wish, and the timid tavern owner who had a massive crush on her. Of course the players wanted to set them up.

The second time, the players had to infiltrate a masquerade ball. Sadly I’m starting to forget the details. I think there was tension around meeting them while masked and, like a rom com, trying to figure out what they thought about the PC. And then they tried to get the NPC involved in their heist, because they just happened to have a skill they needed. And of course it wasn’t a clean heist, and the NPC had some trauma.

Mergers and acquisitions should be a lot harder than they are. Maybe even prohibited in nearly all cases.

Those people aren’t a good match for you (or maybe anyone).

Meanwhile Canada is removing bike lanes for more car support, and the US elected a deeply anti-environment party.

My work uses python and it hasn’t been bad for new code that has tests and types. Old code we inherited from contractors and “yolo startup” types is less good, but we’ve generally be improving that as we touch it.

Their first pathfinder game was so excruciatingly guide dang it I never finished it, and never even considered this game. I kind of assumed it was the same way, where there’s stuff like “Ah, you didn’t return to this unmarked forest on day 7, so now you never get a wizard”

Oh, now I remember having an argument on here with some asshole who insisted I just have “fomo” over this. Sign posting and foreshadowing are only to appease fomo, I guess.

A warrant was issued for Brackin’s arrest on Tuesday and he was charged with seven counts of aggravated cruelty to animals and eight counts of reckless endangerment. He turned himself in and has since been released on bond.

Maybe he’ll actually be punished.

This is like a monkey’s paw wish of “We shouldn’t send people with drug problems to jail”

Sometimes I feel like I want to play a game that I’d run, but then I realize that’s the cliche “Go write a book”

…what? The idea of federation, as I understand it, is there’s not a single person or org in charge. The different instances talk to each other, and I can leave or block one server without leaving the whole thing. On Reddit or Twitter or bluesky, you play by their rules or you get nothing.

I don’t want to use another privately owned social media platform. There’s no reason to believe it won’t enshittify.

Some people probably know them in real life. Like, you might have a friend who’s like “Yeah this [slur] wouldn’t update her mod so i posted [hateful thing] on her insta”. You could talk to them. People listen to their in-group more than randoms online.

But then again, the worst sort of people probably mostly have the worst sort of friends, and reinforce their bad behavior.

My favorite is “I knew a poly couple and they broke up (but nevermind all the monogamous people who broke up)”

Monogamy vs non-monogamy is another axis of this, where people often find their unexamined assumptions challenged.

Video Games are a broad medium, akin to reading. Asking “should I get into books?” would be similarly difficult to answer.

Also, be mindful of sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. For every “Taylor Swift” that was widely popular and successful, there’s 9 meh bands no one remembers.

All of that said, it’s a wide and deep medium with a lot of experiences.

If you like card games, there’re related genres. Deck builders are popular. Slay the Spire is popular. Cobalt Core is fun and not as hard. Monster Train is pretty good.

Those are all also “rogue lites”, so you could make the leap from there to something like FTL.

Lots of options.

Probably don’t spend a lot of money up front. Stuff goes on sale on Steam pretty often.

Probably avoid “gacha” games that are free to play or have “loot box” stuff. Those tend to be exploitive and bad.