Pan’s Labyrinth is a rare modern fairytale, in the old sense of the word, not the Disney sense.

Yet again, censors are afraid of gambling motifs more than actual gambling… loot boxes get a pass as long as the loot box isn’t decorated in a shape similar to a standard playing card (sports trading cards are apparently fine), or of a slot machine.

I will genuinely never understand racism against tribal members or descendants thereof. I know, I know, racism in general is not rational. But this particular form of it still baffles me.

Narcissism is a spectrum. At the one end, you have people with low self esteem who look to getting reactions from others to feel better about themselves. At the other end, you have people with full on disassociation, that is, a lack of any sense of “self” at all, except from the reactions they get from others. It’s pretty clear Trump is pretty close to the pathological dissociative side of the spectrum.

The reactions narcissists get from others is called “supply”, and each narcissist looks for a specific flavor of supply that fills the void in their life, whether that’s a mild feeling of inadequacy or full fledged lack of self. Some supply is being loved. Some supply is being seen as a villain. Some supply is just being the center of attention. For Trump? It’s pretty clear that his supply is being seen as “successful”.

Narcissistic supply is an addictive drug to narcissists. It gives an instant high— a high of feeling “normal”— and also has instant lows. The moment supply is cut off, the narcissist’s mental dismay returns. Supply also has a problem of levels. A bigger dose of supply feels great, but it ALSO makes any additional supply that isn’t as strong as that one time feel like nothing.

Narcissists are junkies. They need their hit of supply, and will do literally anything to get it. And to get it as big as they’ve ever had it before.

While president, Trump got the biggest hit of supply the world has ever seen. Losing the presidency has lost him that supply… even the attention the news still gives him today isn’t anything like the supply of having the eyes of the entire world on him all the time.

As a junkie, he will do anything to get supply back. He would literally kill to do so. It might yet come to that.

It is superglue. That was what superglue was invented for. The only difference between it and what people use for making plastic model kits is quality control for cleanliness.

I actually got my players to remember the name of the evil dragon, and the name is by no means easy! “Ildrephu”

It helped that the dragon itself became VERY memorable, having developed a philosophy around how to best torture people based on Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw’s Chzo mythos. And then instead of fighting the party when they came to storm his lair, it invited them in, fed them, gave them nice accommodations, and made a binding magical contract with them for favorable terms… that tricked them into unleashing the Tarrasque back into the world from its divine prison. And then Ildrephu reneged on its half of the contract anyway, trusting he was strong enough to simply tank the magical backlash breaking the contract would do to him. Escaping the tarrasque and returning to Ildrephu to now be able to fight him at all due to being magically weakened was a highlight of the campaign.

They still talk about him, IRL years later. One of my finest quests I’ve given, and the fact that they remember his name when it’s such a non-English name really hammers in how much of an impression I left with him. It makes me so happy!

More of this kind of thing, please.

Hey, I’m pretty darn leftist (democratic socialist, not tankie) and pretty opposed to the current state of affairs regarding CEOs, so I feel this is targeted at me… and yet totally misrepresents the position.

CEOs are not useless. CEOs absolutely set the “tone at the top” and create the entire culture for a company. At the same time, CEOs do not work 400 times harder than the average worker, yet that is what they are paid. CEOs are also capable of doing great abuse to those beneath them, and have next to zero accountability for it. CEOs are kings in their little fiefdoms, and I say down with all monarchy. Note that “down with kings” does not mean “down with leaders”, nor does it say or even imply that kings aren’t leaders, or that leadership is useless to have.

His is less gambling. In starfox, it’s purely random. In his game, you strategically select the symbols that can appear on the machine to make combos more or less likely.

Living outside my home country.

Nope, no rephrasing. That’s literally what the double jeopardy rule is about. The government gets a monopoly on violence, and we expect them to use that monopoly only within certain limits. Without those limits you get authoritarian dictatorships and really scary stuff such as found in the Catholic/Protestant wars in England’s history.

An example of how rephrasing is not allowed:

A number of years back, there was some outrage over a case where a rapist got off “on a technicality” that was headlined in various places as “the judge ruled it wasn’t rape because the severely mentally disabled victim could have objected”. The real issue was that the prosecutor decided, as a strategy to get more jail time for the guy, that they would charge him under a law against raping an unconscious person, but the truth was that the victim was not unconscious. The government is only allowed one shot at trying you for a crime though. If the prosecutor applies the wrong law, they don’t get a do over. The guy absolutely was a disgusting rapist, but he didn’t rape an unconscious person in this instance, and so he gets off scot free.

It’s vitally important that a prosecutor applies exactly the right words, because they are only allowed one shot. If a not-guilty verdict comes back for any reason, including for technicalities, that’s it. Not guilty (for that crime) forever.

That’s totally fair. As I said, there’s no real way to get into destiny now and understand what’s going on. No way for old players to return, or new players to come in and get caught up. By no means am I saying that’s a good thing.