Frog core anyone? https://froglord.bandcamp.com/album/save-the-frogs

You think there’s no culture in rural areas?

There is less cultural output because there are fewer people. There’s probably a thousand new bands that started in Brooklyn this month. You just can’t have those numbers out in the sticks because you don’t have the people. There literally aren’t enough singers.

Culture matters. People interacting and inspiring each other matters. It’s not that there’s nothing happening out in Wisconsin or wherever, but there’s less. There are fewer people to be doing stuff!

I almost wrote a preemptive response about “where does your food come from”. I don’t think most of the people living outside of cities are farmers.

A quick search says

The Midwest rounds out the top five states with the most farmers:

    Missouri (162,345, or 5% of the labor force)
    Iowa (145,432 or 9% of the labor force)
    Ohio (130,439 or 2% of the labor force)
    Oklahoma (130,434 or 7% of the labor force)

I don’t know if https://usafacts.org/articles/farmer-demographics/ is a real site but it would be awkward for someone to make up these numbers.

That’s a lot of people in the sense of like “I couldn’t have that many people at my birthday party” but not a lot of people compared to like, who lives in major cities. Bushwick, Brooklyn is one neighborhood and has like 130k people.

Food is important but probably not a justification for holding everyone else hostage. Especially when most people living in those areas aren’t even growing food. (Some are second order involved, like the guy who works the Laundromat helps the farmer or whatever). Also especially when the efforts being stymied would help people, like student loan forgiveness or federally funded school meals.

The urban liberal doesn’t consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?

The rural conservative POV is utterly poisoned by decades of racial violence and regressive policies. There’s like a mass shooting every day. Climate change is going to fuck us. Conservatism is not an okay world view.

That said, the answer is probably local government for things that are actually local. Environmental issues cannot be local. You can’t have this town dumping mercury into the water and pretending that’s just fine. But for something like “we want a bike lane here” or “we want a library that’s open weekends” that’s doesn’t need to be federal. But if “local” means “no queers allowed to get married here” then the locals can fuck themselves.

Guns are a whole separate wedge issue. I think they should at least be treated the same as cars- license, registration, insurance, mechanisms to remove the license like DUI. I don’t know how close to reality that is.

I wrote this on my phone so it’s not my best work.

Cities matter more. Sorry, but that’s the reality.

Cities are where people live. People matter.

Cities are where culture happens. Culture matters. You’re not going to have a big art/music/anything scene in bumbleweed, NE because there aren’t enough people there to constitute a scene.

Cities are where economy happens. Money moving around matters. There are more transactions per day in the corner shop by me than a whole week in some country town with 700 residents.

Rural people still have the Senate and local government. Their rep in the house (which should be expanded) also should speak up for their region.

Everyone deserves some minimum respect, but the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane. A minority holding the majority garbage is not good. Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.

Don’t forget about the halo effect. Someone on stage doing a killer set is going to seem hotter. When someone is good at one thing, we start to think they’re good at everything (where being hot is a thing).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

It’s a little hard to square “steam is over charging for games” with “look at all these games I bought for 80% off ($5) off”, but I guess there’s more to it.

I understand fear of retaliation. No one wants to lose their home or go hungry, and it’s not like landlords will give a shit. But I also want management to fear the workers rolling up to their house and hour before dawn. They only have power because we let them.

Well, at least until they have fully autonomous kill drones or something.

But it’s easy to say that from my comfortable home. It’s another to actually get in a truck with your friends and actually shoot a VP in the back of the head.

Still seems like this could just be a setting book for Fate.

HR is not likely to side with the worker over the company.

There’s also a certain kind of “hr energy” that makes my skin crawl. Like if you worked at a company called AB Tech they’d be up front in the meeting going “I SAY A, YOU SAY B! A!” and I’m just like no, please stop, I’m not that excited to make charts for assholes.

The hr person where I work now seems nice, at least. My old job the main hr person gave me the creeps.

Just guillotine the rich already

I’m not as informed as I’d like to be. Rock paper shotgun did an article recently about unions in video game development, which was interesting and might be somewhat broadly applicable: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/from-blizzard-to-bethesda-game-unions-are-sweeping-the-industry-heres-how-the-cwa-helps-make-them-happen

D&D kind of sucks, and especially sucks for what you want to do.

• It’s not good for 1:1 games. It makes many assumptions about there being a full party
• It doesn’t offer much advice for DMing, and has a lot of ways to fuck it up.
• It has like no rules for roleplay. It has very vague “If you roll a high number maybe they’ll do you a favor” suggestions, but for something like “I want to stand up straight, look him in the eye, and tell him he should yield or suffer the wrath of my patron” it leaves it entirely up to the DM how to resolve. Other games provide a lot more guidance
• It is entirely combat focused. It is crunchy in annoying ways.

Chronicles of Darkness is modern day occult. it’s not very light, but it’s closer to what you want. I’m fond of Mage: The Awakening.

Fate is a good general purpose system that’s more in line with how I think people imagine RPGs are. It’s also free. It cares a lot more about the narrative than D&D. D&D puts most narrative detail squarely in “unimportant flavor”. So if your character’s story is they were a pirate, that doesn’t do anything in the game unless you have the pirate background, and those tend to be very limited. Contrast with Fate that is much more explicit about “Aspects give you permission. If your character has ‘Former Pirate’ on their sheet, they definitely know some sea shanties and how to move around on a boat”. D&D leaves that up to the DM. And then a lot of people are like, if it’s leaving so much up to the DM why am I even buying this book.

Powered by the Apocalypse games are also popular. I don’t personally like them that much, but I see why people do.

No, it’s not awful all the time. Cruising down a highway or familiar streets can be kind of zen. I say this as someone who despises car-culture and believes most transit should be mass, public, transit options like buses and trains. But I have fond memories of cruising down the highway at night by myself singing along with my favorite music.

I live somewhere that’s walkable and has a subway system now, and it’s much better. Don’t have to worry about parking, insurance, fuel, drinking too much. So if you really hate driving, you could look into living somewhere that doesn’t require it.

Folks should unionize, and then use that collective power to tell “back to office” mandates to fuck themselves to death.

Shut down AWS and let the world burn until management capitulates. It’s not like the soulless husks calling the shots can run the show themselves.

There’s a pizza place I don’t go to anymore because it has a “joke” sign up that does some bad math to prove no one works enough thus no one deserves days off. Reminds me of this.

ll take a very extreme example. Our culture’s racism would be inherently better with better transit. There’s reasons why more urbanized cores are more open to other people and cultu

I’ve also thought about this. Being on the subway with other people humanizes them in a way being stuck in traffic doesn’t. When you have the shared experience of everyone groaning over the “being held in the station by the dispatcher”, that makes a difference. It’s a lot easier to hate people you never see.

I use it to open the start menu a lot. Especially if I’m in a full screen application.

I live in NYC. It’s one of the few large places in the US that’s dense and not completely car focused.

Convenience store: 5 minute walk to several

Supermarket: several within 10 minute walk

Pharmacy: several within 10 minutes on foot

Library: I think there’s two within 10-15 minutes walking

Restaurants: several within 10 minutes on foot

Subway: about 5 minute walk. There’s also a bus stop there.

Very large park: 15 minutes or so

I never want to live somewhere where I need a car again. Someone I was talking to at a party the other day was like “I love having my car it’s so much freedom” and I’m like aside from needing to fuel, maintain, insure, and store it I guess.

In addition to the flying Nazgûl and what not, the ring could corrupt the proud eagle. They’d just fly off with it and then you have another problem.

Switched to Mint for desktop. Been mostly fine. Getting it installed was surprisingly harrowing. Annoyed that most mod tools for games are targeting windows. I guess I have to figure out wine and its whole prefix system.

I get a small amount of joy from clicking the “request changes” button and blocking some doofus from merging lazy untested code.