Different systems have different methods of doing surprise, but the implication here is you roll to see if you are surprised, and success means you are not surprised.

Yeah, people shouldn’t be allowed to be involved with things that they don’t care about enough to know all that came before. Whether it’s a movie, a book, a game, a tv series, it should always be done by people who genuinely care and are fans of it.

The difference is like night and day when everyone cares. The Lord of the Rings is probably one of the best examples. The vast majority of people on that knew the source material well, and that let them work towards the same vision, each contributing in their own way. The things that were changed were never because nobody gave a shit. I don’t agree with all of them, but I can’t say they did them without consideration.

When everyone cares, that’s when something amazing is made.

Well, I think games that have the greatest possibility between them make the best choices. So…

Stellaris. - I want a 4x and grand strategy and this one is a bit of both. Also considering how much it’s changed since 1.0, the various versions of it provide a lot of variety in themselves. Also it’s got great mod support. Its core systems have also been rebuilt a couple times, so I know it has a good deal of potential and isn’t locked too hard into certain mechanics.

Conan Exiles. - This is a really weird choice cause the game isn’t amazing in and of itself, or even all that good, and it’s pretty buggy, but it’s one of the most customizable, mod supported multiplayer games I know of. Maybe there’s a better choice and if I had time to research it I’d pick that one. I know there’s a multiplayer mod for Skyrim, for example, but I’m not technical enough to know if that has better possibilities than Conan. Hell, maybe Minecraft has potential here? I have never liked it much. It would be absolutely necessary to me that it can be updated to decent (not blocky) graphics though.

Elite: Dangerous. - This is another choice I’d like to research a better option for. The thing is I want a flight/space game, but I don’t know enough about the genre, and this is the only one that immediately comes to mind. Its kind of my one mostly unselfish pick cause I haven’t played this type of game in a long time.

Baldur’s Gate 3. - It’s not actually my favorite rpg or even my favorite Baldur’s Gate, but Larian designed it with good mod support and tools. Also it can support multiplayer very easily. Like the others on this list, it’s here for future adaptability; if we’re never getting new games, mods of these 5 have to be as much like new games as possible.

An MMO. - This is the toughest one to answer myself cause I don’t know enough about the back end of them. The trick is choosing the one with the most broadly applicable technical side. I want as much possibility in future development as I can get, and I’d really like one that isn’t inextricably linked to the target based gameplay we currently know from most of them. If required to pick without research, I would reluctantly choose Guild Wars 2, cause it at least isn’t tied to tab targeting, but I have no idea if it’s good with my other criteria.

Now, you’ll notice I didn’t pick any games without multiplayer, and that’s cause if these are going to be the only 5 games left until the end of time they should all support multiplayer. No single player only need apply.

Got a pauldron protecting the shoulder, gorget protecting the neck, helmet protecting head and ear. There’s no possible harm that might come to you holding the sword that way.

Epstein files are the only thing that’s maintained even a tiny bit of traction among his supporters and made some of them…well I’d say think twice, but that implies thinking a first time.

There’s a difference between ‘a person’ and ‘every person’. A person can definitely do things better than any chat bot. But not every person can. And depending on the situation, a person who can may not be available.

Even then, there is a place where the AI beats all persons and is better in one way: speed. If the task at hand does not require a better result than what the AI outputs, then the time savings is big, because there are no situations in which any human will work faster.

At 77 I think it’s gone past normal and into a completely different weird niche.

Should wait until at least 2.3, there’s always a pile of bugs in the major version updates cause they want to get the update released on a marketing schedule.

“Usually, but I always made sure your mom finished too. Make sure anyone you date will do the same for you, sweetie.”

Keeping in mind that action economy is king, and two of a worse class generally still produce better results than a single superior class (exceptions exist, but are rare)…

I’ll take Barbarian and Knight for 300, Rogue and Assassin for 225, Sorceress and Witch for 225, And Druid and Shaman for 225, for a total of 975.

You know what bothers me most about the whole thing with Musk? The Twitter thing.

He was fucking around, he wasn’t really going to buy it, and some jackasses in the government and courts made him go through with it. Congratulations assholes! Because of forcing him to buy Twitter, right wing misinformation went bigger and had no checks at all on it (I mean it wasn’t great before, but at least they didn’t allow outright Nazi propaganda) and that was probably the major tipping point for the election.

So forcing Musk to buy Twitter led straight to this situation we’re in.

Elon certainly talks a good line, but his actions don’t really follow. Like, I agree with this, eliminating intellectual property would be great. I am sure that whatever actions he tries in regards to this won’t actually follow through and will instead somehow be twisted to benefit him at the cost of others.

Ai can combine two things. It can train on completely normal pictures of children, and it can train on completely normal adult porn, and then it can put those together.

This is the same reason it can do something like Godzilla with Sailor Moon’s hair, not because it trained on images of Godzilla with Sailor Moon’s hair, but because it can combine those two separate things.

Too much light for it to be a grue, it has to be pitch black for that.

There certainly wouldn’t be any regrets (because you would not have time to do so before death).

Since at least the 1970s and probably much earlier, any and all non-heterosexual people have been painted as pedophiles by right wing / conservatives.

Indeed, a lot of the pedophile panic these days is driven by those people, because it is one of the few things they can get everyone to hate, and that hate often shuts down nuance and reason, and while real pedophiles are a problem, they want to expand that unthinking hate, that knee jerk ‘burn the heretic’ reaction to more people.

This is the reason we now see people attacking even completely fictional media, because they’re trying as hard as possible to slippery slope it.

So she’s a midget stripper wearing 2 and a half foot heels?

Now show me where they’re paying attention to what they can’t do.

Like, how nobody can just access secure government systems without proper clearance, which the President can’t actually just give without procedure.

Or even more simply, the fact that Trump is not in fact currently eligible to be President in the first place due to his part in the events of Jan. 6.

I do not have confidence that they will be stopped by the fact that something is not permitted, because they aren’t being stopped by things that are not permitted, and if this continues for 4 years…there will be nothing left of the system that is supposed stop them.

It would mean that whatever the US might hope to gain from invading Canada would be dwarfed by what the US would lose in the conflict.

The problem is this is already the case. Nuclear weapons may make it even more lopsided, but the country is already losing more than it stands to gain from an invasion purely on the economic results.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot lately is that democracy is a process. It is a means by which we attempt to ensure a just and fair government for all. It’s not an end in itself; we don’t want democracy because democracy, at least not once people really think about it.

Which leads me to a saying. “The ends do not justify the means.” This is a commonly held statement. However, it also works the other way:

The means do not justify the ends.

That means it doesn’t matter if something was done by the rules, using the process, it doesn’t matter if we voted for it, it doesn’t matter what process was used to achieve it. If the ends are wrong, going “well, it’s what was decided democratically” isn’t an excuse.