You’ll notice that the 4s are all hugging the exits – it’s the most lucrative spot. Yes, you have to squeeze in when the doors open to let people in and out, but you also get to gtfo first. You’re not subject to the Showtime kids doing flips, when the Mariachi band walks in you can run out to another car at the next stop, and you aren’t in the urination/defecation areas. Sitting is a trap.

Do you happen to read Brust? This reads very Brust.

What is a ‘banna’? I thought you might have meant ‘banana’, but you tripled down so now I’m not sure. The internet only tells me of the Banna Strand, a beach in Ireland

Your disdain for these manuals of style is blatantly visible in your omission of the serial comma, which all three recommend using ಠ_ಠ

Spelljammer campaign at level 11. We were hired to get a MacGuffin necklace off of a pirate, by his rival. We waltz into his stronghold, get an audience, and then Nat 20 a Persuasion check to convince him for a 1on1 with my bard, b/c for a pirate so tough, what threat could my bard pose? His guards and my party members leave the room.

Land a Suggestion to have him hand me the necklace, and then land a Modify Memory to have him think it was his idea: we would claim he was dead, use the necklace to get an audience with his rival to show her “proof,” and then double cross her and kill her. Then he’d swoop in, reclaim the necklace, and pay us handsomely.

Poor dummy. Hoodwinked!

Maybe. There are many ways to move files and directories around without using Finder, at which point all indexed data about those files and directories will be stale. Forcing something as core as mv to update Spotlight would be significantly worse, I think. By keeping the .DS_Store files co-located with the directory they index, moving a directory does not invalidate the index data (though moving a file without using Finder still does). Whether retaining indexing on directory moves is a compelling enough reason to force the files everywhere is probably dependent on whether that’s a common enough pattern among workflows of users, and whether spotlight performance would suffer drastically if it were reliant on a central store not resilient against such moves.

So, it’s probably a shaky reason at best.

I introduced a “small one story structure, its walls no wider than the span of a single door” next to the farmhouse my players were investigating. They didn’t believe the owners who told them what it was for, and went to check it out for themselves, hackles up and weapons drawn.

It’s an outhouse.

Just an outhouse.

Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.

A question to anyone who has the book: how adaptable are the narrator-focused sections to systems that are not A5e? As a 5e DM, am I getting cool stuff, or wasting my money?

If dropping a database scares you, you are either unaware of the disaster recovery process, or there isn’t one. Edumacate yourself, or the org, as appropriate, so as to increase your confidence when dropping databases.

Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning–mental health isn’t cheap, do the workers’ resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don’t trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation–preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.

Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.