I’d like to read more physical books (rather than my current ebooks and audiobooks) and spend more time in libraries next year. Maybe make myself a nice comfy reading spot at home. My living situation has made it difficult - it’s not convenient to go to libraries, I have no where to store books I buy and I’m so desperate for space I only really have my bed for anywhere comfortable - but I’m hoping to move soon.
Don’t really care about the number of them.
There isn’t anything to “deal” with. If you want your players to only give predetermined solutions to problems, you really need to play a different game.
To be fair, I should have said our department got gutted instead of the company. We were pretty siloed off from everyone else so it was kind of hard to keep the bigger picture in mind.
My better ones are too legally dubious to post, but I do have one about fairly mundane office drama.
A coworker once dropped some particularly angry comments about a manager in the work chat instead of our private one. I panic post some inane shit to try and hide it before hurriedly tabbing over to the private chat to tell her to delete it. Too late. Along with a very clearly ‘upset but trying to be professional’ reply, there are some ominous words spoken about how this proves the existence of our private chat and action will be taken if this is the kind of thing being said in it. But it’s clock out time for our manager and on a Friday so it gets shelved until Monday with no action taken.
Our private chat wasn’t exactly secure so there was fair chance our bosses would access to it. I spend the rest of my work hours that day scrubbing it of the most damaging things I had said while trying to leave enough unflattering stuff that it looked somewhat natural. It wasn’t particularly spicy all told, it was mostly just “how to do x?” without sounding incompetent in front of people who dictate whether you get paid or not, but better safe than sorry. We’re still sure that our coworker who dropped the bomb is going to get shit canned though.
Monday comes around and we’re all waiting for the hammer to come down. Each moment that goes by we expect the retribution is going to be worse. Around midday I realize we’ve got a different manager than usual overseeing us, but the usual is still clocked in. I spot a bunch of higher ups have away messages saying they’re in a meeting and have been for hours. Then in our work chat comes a “x is typing” from one of them, who very rarely says anything there. I message one of my coworkers putting my bet that this was it and to brace for punishment.
The typing message from this person goes on for a good 20 minutes. It’s going to be a big one.
The message finally comes. Our coworker was fired.
…and so was everyone else except myself and one other person. They were getting laid off. The meeting I noticed wasn’t about our punishment, it was an emergency meeting because an important contract hadn’t gone through. Company got gutted.
Plenty of people do, it sucks. Nothing like having a bonus large enough to still pass even on a one but because someone likes more critical failures you fuck up at doing something that should be comically mundane to your supposed expert 5% of the time.
I just happened to be in the room when my recruiter got a call from someone looking to fill a vacancy. I have no experience in the industry or anything like it, let alone the qualifications, but have the really basic general skills required. They put me forward anyway. I got the job - it’s basically stress free, great people, decent pay, clear advancement track, extremely low employee turn over and the commute is really short.
Easily the most confused I’ve been getting a job.
In my experience, having a person who turns the game into a joke makes it less funny than if it was just played straight. The game is naturally funny and absurd in ways that are best highlighted when the narrative is taken somewhat seriously.
I once joined a random pick up game online. Had a session zero, vibe seem alright.
On the day we actually go to play it turns out the DM invited a bunch more people and the group was going to be 8 people. Two of these people show up late, don’t even have character sheets ready. Game was advertised as queer friendly, one of them I think makes their character a transphobic joke but the guy was so awkward it was hard to make out what he was doing. Vibe is now fucked. One person quits the group on the spot.
I spend like three hours of the least inspired, boring D&D of my life. There is no hint that’s it’s wrapping up anytime soon. All we’ve done is spin our wheels trying to grab on to the quest hook, being strung along to talk to the next random generic NPC to inch us closer to actually starting the adventure and had a single combat encounter with one creature where I’m not sure anyone even took any damage.
I have to stress, I think the DM was a nice guy even if he kind of sucked at it. I liked the original group of people.
But I break when he guides us to start shopping. We haven’t even started the adventure and it’s about to turn into a shopping episode. I panic, I have to leave this fucking moment because I can’t take it anymore. I’m desperate for an excuse to leave that wont hurt the DM’s self-esteem and ruin the game for anyone who was having fun. The best thing I can come up with?
I disconnect mid sentence and act as if the internet dropped out like a bad sit-com phone gag. This wasn’t even well acted, my brain died when I went to disconnect and I just trailed off awkwardly. It’s still so painfully embarrassing to remember. Yet I maintain it was worth it.
I’ve got no motivation to take over the world, nor am I sure it’s really possible in a life time. I don’t really have a non-boring answer to this hypothetical.
If the ticket is available anyway I’d happily take it, I’m single at the moment with no dependents and being younger and healthier would be huge. There are lots of ways to make money with the knowledge of future history, even if it’ll change when you start impacting it, and any one of them could make me wealthy enough to never have to work again in my life and do so wherever I please.
I’ve never really understood the need of the rich to continually amass wealth or how they spend it.
The dungeon layouts from malls and subways is just stupid. Just placing rooms is not a meaningful portion of the work in designing a dungeon. If you want to steal one, there are so, so many already designed for TTRPGs already and available freely.
I was thinking about epub support, but apparently they do now but dropped mobi support. I haven’t used a Kindle in awhile so no idea if there are any caveats. Here’s the full list for anyone interested:
Send to Kindle for Web
Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
RTF (.RTF)
Text (.TXT)
JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
GIF (.GIF)
PNG (.PNG)
BMP (.BMP)
PDF (.PDF)
EPUB (.EPUB)
Send to Kindle from the Kindle App for iOS and Android Devices
PDF (.PDF)
Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
RTF (.RTF)
Text (.TXT)
Images (.JPG, .JPEG, .GIF, .PNG, .BMP)
EPUB (.EPUB)
Kindle Personal Documents Service
Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
RTF (.RTF)
Text (.TXT)
JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
GIF (.GIF)
PNG (.PNG)
BMP (.BMP)
PDF (.PDF)
EPUB (.EPUB)
Send to Kindle Desktop Applications
Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
PDF (.PDF)
Text (.TXT)
Images (.JPG, .JPEG, .PNG, .BMP, .GIF)
RTF (.RTF)
HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
EPUB (.EPUB)
Yeah, you can sideload pirate ebooks onto a Kindle. There are some restrictions with file formats, most people use Calibre if they run into issues with them. For ebooks I just grab mine from libgen most of the time.
Lemmygrad I can’t comment on. As far as I can tell they basically just talk politics and I’m not interested in microwaving my brain by obsessing about politics online. Haven’t seen them out in any of the threads I’ve been on.
Hexbear I’ve enjoyed honestly. They’ve got nice hobby communities and it’s all I’m here for. Quality of discussion is usually pretty good. My take on people hating Hexbear is people have made their personality getting mad about politics and Hexbear don’t share their views. People screaming “tankie!” just seemed deranged to me, literally who cares what a handful of nerds in the US think of China. Neither of you have any influence on what China does at all.
I think technically it’s just my key ring. It’s loop is just from a charm thing my grandmother gave to me like 20 years ago. The charm was lost a long time ago. Kind of boring though.
My favorite pair of jeans and my favorite jacket are both about 15 years old at this point, heavily worn and patched together many times. Not daily use though obviously. My most comfortable pair of boots are about 10 years old which are closer to daily use.
One of the hard drives in my computer is more than 10 years old but I rarely read/write anything to it anymore. For a long time a lot of bits from it were very old, but I think everything older has been ship of theseus’d now. My mother still uses my handy down 15+ year old MX518 mouse daily though.
Baldur’s Gate 3. I loved it as a cRPG fan who grew up on them. It’s ambitious, innovative and I’m really happy it’s brought the genre to a whole new audience. I hope we see something of a genre revival. But if you’ve been online at all you’ve seen all the praise I could give it already anyway, so lets talk about the bad.
It’s shockingly buggy and it’s weird that it’s always just a footnote in the discourse. I’m not sure I’ve ever finished a game this broken before. I was constantly encountering issues that would cause me to reload a save. There are plenty of posts about the bugs - pretty much every single quest in the game will have dozens of threads about various issues - but when it comes down to reviews people are really forgiving of it in a way I haven’t really seen before.
It’s also made some fundamentally terrible design decisions that wont be fixed by patches. Long resting to progress the story triggers is particularly awful. It absolute kills the pacing, despite the narrative suggesting a heavy time pressure (that isn’t actually there), and encourages you to just nova everything. I found myself just spamming long rests after every narrative beat until the cutscenes stopped triggering just to make sure which was very tedious.
Meh, this probably would have been a terrible remake anyway.
Given every single system in Starfield is already explored and built on, I think they should have just given up on the jump system and gone with a gate system like Freelancer or the X series. You get to fly to every point without menus while still being time efficient. The reason they didn’t go with this is presumably because of the supposed “exploring the unknown” angle, but you never explore anywhere new in Starfield anyway.
I almost always start digital, either ebook or audiobook then buy a physical copy later if I liked it. It’s just a lot less friction for starting something new, no needing to go out of my way to a library/bookstore or wait for something to be delivered. Sometimes I’ll just take a gamble on something physical if I’m looking for a new travel book or I’m killing time in a library/bookstore though.
Slow cooker stuff if I’m lazy but thinking ahead a bit. Just throw shit in a pot and turn it on. I tend to get big lumps of meat rather than steaks or whatever, so the slow cooker has the added benefit of me not needing to do much cutting. I just do a few big chunks and it’ll be so tender by the time it’s ready it’ll fall apart. Takes longer to put it away in containers than to prep it, then I’m done cooking for a week lol
Spaghetti bolognese is a regular if I need something soon. Little more work, but it’s extremely quick and doesn’t require being in the kitchen for the whole thing. Still makes a ton of meals that keep and reheat nicely.
Roasts are nice if I’m sort of having to impress someone but I’m lazy. You just throw shit in the oven and wait. Occasionally come back to throw in something that has a shorter cook time than the meat. Might be heresy but I’ve never really been keen on the leftovers of a roast though, so one cook is usually only one meal and maybe a sandwich the next day instead of several.