My favorite was death panels.
"The government is going to decide who lives and dies by gatekeeping access to healthcare!" Motherfucker, that's what insurance does now. The potential failures of a collectivized system are treated with more scrutiny than capitalism working as intended.
For those wondering if Gygax grew beyond this kind of thinking, no, he didn't. There's an infamous forum post of his from 2005 where he calls himself a "biological determinist," and says that "females" are generally incapable of enjoying RPGs as much as men "because of a difference in brain function." Could it be that, for some reason, the women he played with just didn't enjoy the games he ran? No! It must be that RPGs are simply beyond their female brains!
Also, anyone have links to a copy of the issue of Europa cited in the article? I'd love a primary document to cite in the future.
Sometimes I think about how much art was never created because of capitalism. It either never got funded, or a potential artist never got the chance to make it, because just to scrape by, they had to spend too much time toiling to make some business owners money. It's depressing.
And, just to cut off one potential counterargument: I don't give half of a shit how "good" that art would be. I'm confident there are spectacular works of art that never came to be, but even putting it aside, it's all subjective. Some folks would have loved it, and the artists would have found value in making it. That's more than enough, and a hell of a lot more meaningful than breaking your back working for a living so that other people can own stuff for a living.
Sokka, Scanlan, John Snow, Walter White - except “more based” or “less of a cuck”.
The two that stick out most to me are Sokka and Walter White.
A major part of Sokka's character arc is outgrowing his misogyny. I mean, Christ, the Kyoshi Warriors episode had him humble himself, ask to learn, and crossdress.
As for Walter White, his arc is becoming "more based" and "less of a cuck." It's also about him becoming a total monster.
There's been a lot of discourse about "media literacy," and it's frustrating that the people who most lack it, often in destructive ways, end up just dismissing the criticism out of hand, as though it's not dead-on.
Time to take a meme on the internet too seriously! :D
There are two things that bug me about the weirdly frequent discourse on Batman.
Firstly, there's no one version of Batman. You can find bastard fascist Batman, and you can find actual justice Batman. Hell, you can find both by Frank Miller, depending on the point in his career. My favorite version is from The Animated Series, and you'll find tons of examples of Batman using kindness and compassion to affect meaningful change, instead of reveling in violence as though it solves anything. Heck, he's nicer to working-class folks, even sympathetic criminals, than to his fellow rich people.
Secondly, I think it's a talking point with bad optics. Batman rules. Why let the fascists have him? If there are loads of ways to look at and interpret the character, I'd rather focus on the one that makes him the good kind of class traitor, anti-fascist, anti-cop, and fighting for economic and social justice.
My potentially controversial take is that metagaming is neither good nor bad. A metagaming problem is really just some other problem that rears its head through metagaming.
You can metagame and be a good player. It's like doing improv with dramatic irony. If you're prioritizing the gameplay and everyone's enjoyment, it's a useful tool.
If you're using it for the personal advantage of your character, though... that can also be fine. Some old-school games, especially dungeon crawls, are like strategy games testing the players as well as their characters.
It's when there's a disconnect between how people are playing the game that you get problems. If someone wants to play a strategy game while others want to play improv, and they're not thinking about what kind of approach is appropriate and when, that you get issues.
I have to admit I was kind of impressed seeing the way two scams worked together: the Hyperloop, and the Loop. People genuinely thought they were related projects because of the name and, I guess, the tunnels. So the Hyperloop made the Loop sound more exciting than it really was, and the Loop made it seem like there was progress towards the Hyperloop.
Of course, in reality, the Loop is just a shitty cab tunnel designed to financially and physically block local mass transit projects, while the Hyperloop is just bullshit vaporware designed to financially and politically block intercity mass transit projects.
Hoo boy. Against my better judgment, I'll wade into this pool.
If voting for either party gets you the same result, fascists wouldn't be so focused on elections and trying so hard to take the vote away.
Withholding your vote doesn't do anything. When has losing an election pushed either party left?
Voting doesn't prevent you from engaging in other forms of direct action.
Both parties suck. People will needlessly suffer and die no matter who wins. But there are also people who will suffer and die under one party but not the other, and the same can't be said the other way around. Our democracy is fundamentally flawed, but voting is a tool at our disposal, and we're in no position to turn anything down.
New national parking platform
...if that means what I think it means, it's probably the worst of the lot.
Take it from an American: mandatory minimum parking will absolutely ruin your towns and cities.
That might be surprising for developers that released a Unity game back in, say, 2015, when Unity CEO John Riccitiello was publicly touting Unity's "no royalties, no fucking around" subscription plans. Now, even developers who paid $1,500 for a "perpetual license" to Unity back then could theoretically be subject to additional per-install fees starting next year (provided their game is still generating sufficient revenue and installs).
This reminds me of a story from earlier this year from Wizards of the Coast, publishers of Dungeons & Dragons (and subsidiary of Hasbro). It hinged on exactly the same semantics.
The short version is that, in 2000, Wizards of the Coast released D&D under the "Open Gaming License (OGL)," which gave third parties explicit approval to make and sell their own material using most of the D&D content, under a perpetual license. Cut forward 23 years, and lots of major publishers got their start making D&D supplements, and continue to use the OGL because (a) it's a cover-your-ass license in case they tread into a legal gray area, and (b) allows them to open up their own content to third parties. Plans for an update OGL leaked, with predictably dogshit terms that I won't get into right now, but essentially killed the license as anything anyone would want to use. The malicious part was that they would be "de-authorizing" the OGL 1.0a, because while it was a perpetual license, that didn't make it irrevocable.
(IIRC, it's also a legal argument based on case law established after the OGL was written. Not a lawyer, though.)
Predictably, there was a huge backlash. WotC backtracked, and even gave up ground by releasing a bunch of stuff under the Creative Commons. However, the OGL is still dead, because third parties can no longer trust that WotC (or Hasbro) won't try this ratfuckery again. (Sound familiar?) Lots of products were subtly rewritten to no longer need the OGL, and several publishers worked on an industry license amusingly called the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC.
The thing is, D&D's going to survive this a lot better than Unity. The business model was to sell D&D and D&D supplements, they only indirectly benefited from third-party material, and people are still going to make D&D stuff because it's D&D. Unity's entire business model relies on licensing, so if people stop using it... that's it.
Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb.
It sounds to me like the reasonable conclusion to draw from this would be to modify the design of the car. I'd also assume you don't need tolerances to be the same for literally all parts inside and out. I'd also think that, if the car looks that bad if things are 10 or more microns out of place, these cars are going to age terribly after regular use.
But what do I know? If I were smart, I'd be rich, right? And Elon is so rich, he must be a genius!
If the players are demanding wild results, especially if they're the kind to roll unprompted, then sure.
But in my experience, it's usually just a little flourish or a small bonus, which I think is fine.
And if the issue is that a nat 20 doesn't guarantee success, technically, sure, but I'd be more annoyed being asked to make a pointless roll. I know there are reasons, like a hidden target number, or other characters being able to do it, but in general, I'd rather just hear "no" than go through a pointless check.