Toxoplasmosis in action!

There may well be much healthier stuff in their dumpster than peanut butter and jelly. Why not offer to make an arrangement with the person in question to let them take stuff that’s about to expire? Or, like, separate food that’s being marked out into its own bag and maybe even put it in a cooler or something?

There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of this myself and I was mostly getting like prepared foods that had been marked out the same day I was getting them. Peanut butter and jelly would have been a downgrade from pulling a couple of days worth of meals with like meat and cheese and veggies and stuff rather than just sugar and nuts and bread.

Not to say that this isn’t nice, but it may well be a less viable option on its own in the long term. I suppose they could always do both.

I do think there’s a sizeable difference between having deeply buried shame about what they’re doing and actually having doubts that make their way to the surface where they could actually change the behavior.

It’s crazy to look at these people and just see the layers of the onion. Here is a person who knows she’s doing wrong. It’s written on her face. And yet, she puts on a defensive layer and keeps right on trudging forward with tears in her eyes as she digs deeper and deeper into her hole.

Mike Johnson is another one of these. You can look at him and know that his smug little grin is a thin veneer trying to keep the outside world from realizing that he knows how wrong he is and somewhere in there absolutely hates himself. Even with Trump and Vance, it’s written all over their faces. They spend every day fighting it, denying it, trying not to let themselves look, but you can see in their eyes that they can’t help it. They know, and they keep on anyway despite themselves.

It would be so easy for any of them to just let go of all that and start trying to help people. To listen to that part of themselves they desperately try to shut up day in and day out. To stop feigning ignorance and try to make things better. They could pick any second to just stop poisoning themselves for a sake of a sunken cost cult mentality held up by people who feel just as sick about their own decisions.

Carlin had some good material, but this is an absolutely stupid mindset. We can cause an extreme level of ecological damage. Will the planet eventually recover? Quite possibly. But that’s not a certainty, and in the mean time we’re triggering a mass extinction precisely because irresponsible humans figure there’s no way we can hurt the Earth and it’s self-important hubris to think that we can.

But the time we’re living through and the time we’re heading into are all the proof we should need that it’s actually hubris to assume our actions have no meaningful impact.

The system itself is done but the setting-specific stuff is still in the works. It’s designed to be modular, so there are different systems for different settings. The sort of cyberpunky shadowrunny system is close to ready to release a doc aside from like needing more feat-like upgrades and equipment lists. There’s also a kind of Eldritch apocalyptic setting that overlaps with most of the same modules and is nearly ready.

I’ve been putting it on hold lately and focusing on a game I’m making in Godot because I sort of ran out of steam for playtesting it. It is a huge pain in the ass to be both designing a system and planning a weekly campaign to test the system with at the same time.

I’ll probably swap back to working on it for a while once the game is done, because I plan on using the system in my next game.

Two of these stats are in my TTRPG (gumption and moxie).

It also features things like pep, knacks, savvy, and nerve.

Are you really fully unaware of incels, the manosphere, and the alt-right pipeline? This shit is all over social media.

There’s a strong encouragement for men to fall into this “redpill” philosophy that casts everyone who doesn’t look like them, especially anyone who ends up on the less-privileged end of any measure of intersectional privilege, as an aggressor attempting to steal their place in society and “replace” them.

Have you heard anyone complaining about how you can’t make jokes anymore or can’t compliment women anymore? They’re echoing a hallucination of white male oppression by queer feminist socialists. In response they elected Trump and spend their days rumbling around in their massive coal-rolling pickup trucks that have never seen a speck of dirt or a heavier load than a few groceries or maybe a couch.

AI is great for learning a language, partly because it’s the right combination of useful and stupid.

It’s familiar with the language in a way that would take some serious time to attain, but it also hallucinates things that don’t exist and its solution to debugging something often ends up being literally just changing variable names or doing the same wrong things in different ways. But seeing what works and what doesn’t and catching it when it’s spiraling is a pretty good learning experience. You can get a project rolling while you’re learning how to implement what you want to do without spending weeks or months wondering how. It’s great for filling gaps and giving enough context to start understanding how a language works by sheer immersion, especially if the application of that language comes robust debugging built in.

I’ve been using it to help me learn and implement GDscript while I’m working on my game and it’s been incredibly helpful. Stuff that would have taken weeks of wading through YouTube tutorials and banging my head against complex concepts and math that I just don’t have I can instead work my way through in days or even hours.

Gradually I’m getting more and more familiar with how the language works by doing the thing, and when it screws up and doesn’t know what it’s talking about I can see that in Godot’s debugging and in the actual execution of the code in-game. For a solo indie dev who’s doing all the art, writing, and music myself, having a tool to help me move my codebase forward while I learn has been pretty great. It also means that I can put systems in place that are relevant to the project so my modding partner who doesn’t know GDScript yet has something relevant to look at and learn from by looking through the project’s git.

But if I knew nothing about programming? If I wasn’t learning enough to fix its mistakes and sometimes abandon it entirely to find solutions to things it can’t figure out? I’d be making no progress or completely changing the scope of the game to make it a cookie cutter copy of the tutorials the AI is trained on.

Vibe coding is complete nonsense. You still need a competent designer who’s at least in the process of learning the context of the language they’re working with or your output is going to be complete garbage. And if you’re working in a medium that doesn’t have robust built-in debugging? Good luck even identifying what it’s doing wrong if you’re not familiar with the language yourself. Hell, good luck getting it to make anything complex if you have multiple systems to consider and can’t bridge the gaps yourself.

Corpo idiots going all in on “vibe coding” are literally just going to do indies a favor by churning out unworkable garbage that anyone who puts the effort in will be able to easily shine in comparison to.

It’s a good teacher, though, and a decent assistant.