rentar42

Or at least honor the ancients by using Impact font with a black outline. There’s a reason why that was/is that is used heavily.

You know that you too are writing in a script, right?

The secret is to do everything as improvisation. If there is no preparation, then there’s no lost time!

…

Who am I kidding? I’ve not played in months and haven’t GMed in years …

So you’re saying that not even a D4 likes to use itself for a damage die?

Realistically most adventure parties leave many disabled people (and beasts) in their wake…

I always assumed that “lawful” is relative to the society one lives in/comes from. And if that’s the case then the Punisher is anything but. He’s living by some law, alright, but not law of others around him.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilLaugh

Have you heard of TV tropes? It’s a wiki of … well, tropes in story telling (warning: for some people following a single link to https://tvtropes.org/ means they find themselves half a day later with 32 tabs open and having read up on all kind of story tropes while having forgotten what time is).

On the one hand it will help you recognize the tropes and figure out how many of them are used in all story telling (yes, even the good ones), but on the other hand it can help appreciate that it’s not the tropes or the broad strokes that make up a story, but how well it’s told.

There’s a reason there are so many movies/stories/plays that are just re-tellings of some Shakespear play or another: it doesn’t matter that the outcome is known from the start. The journey and how well it’s told is what’s important.

So basically: “Oh yeah, that guy’s gonna betray me. I wonder how and why exactly!”

“Oh no! This situation would be almost trivial if it wasn’t for this one obscure handicap that we all acquired 5 sessions ago in that short in-between adventure. How will we manage to get out of this?”

You only need to follow this advice if you (the player) have an antagonistic relationship with your DM.

Your character might suffer from the ideas you give them, but the player should get enjoyment from the situations you got.

More often than not the best answer to “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if X happened?” is “Would it? Let’s see! …”

A cop out or a coping mechanism. Employers steal so much from employees: time, wages, sense of purpose, sometimes even health. And most of us don’t have good ways to stop them (because socienty). So stealing a bit back might actually help feeling less hopeless.

Most memes are reusing images or screen caps out of context.

This one is from a video on pretty much this same topic, though: https://youtu.be/gNGa-ydu7z4

Get out of here with your silly US-centric idea of “absolute free speech”. Pretty much every civilized country in the world has boundaries to what is considered acceptable.

And even the US does (though they are fewer than elsewhere, granted).

But for some reason the US has produced this myth that absolute freedom of speech (which it doesn’t have) somehow is the best possible choice (which it isn’t).

Except it does matter if it’s on Twitter or on a lesser-known platform. Propaganda works when it is widely publicized and doesn’t work as well when it isn’t.

Twitter still has a responsibility before the law to deal with this kind of stuff and it doesn’t follow that.

It’s a product that Atlassian is selling: https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage

Not to be confused with their statuspage for their services: https://status.atlassian.com/

Or the status page for their status page system (which apparently has an ongoing incident): https://metastatuspage.com/

Oh, but at the same time every single line of business logic logs nothing of value at all!

I really like it and it clearly passed the code review without any issues. But I find the diagnostic messages a bit lacking, it can be hard to debug.

Yes. Everyone can just release a tweaked Android version and Google can’t really stop them.

But if you plan to ship Google services (including the play store, which effectively makes a device an “Android device” in many users eyes) then you will have to be able to pass Googles verification suite.

That’s already the case today and adding new requirements to that in new Android versions happens all the time.

Even in very specific instances the smart contracts can only ever observe the Information they are given and have to assume that all that information is correct. What if the donation was done fraudulently or in error?

These systems have no way to undo these transactions (by design). They simply move all the “error handling” or “fraud prevention” to outside of the system.

And yes: if you can pretend that errorsor fraud don’t happen, then one can design much simpler sysfems
But those assumptions don’t make errors or fraud go away.

Edit: another aspect that the “traditional Systems” have at least some provision for is to prevent abusive or one sided contracts from being entered or at least enforced. For some the lack of those safeguards is a feature. For me it’s terrible. Tons of contracts happen between unequal parties so the law has to protect the weaker one more.

I promise this isn’t a generic anti-crypto rant, but rather a specific anti-crypto rant:

There are many projects in this space that try to replace what they perceive as flawed legal systems with perceived “perfect” (or at least better) digital, automated systems.

And I definitely understand that urge: there are many problems with various legal systems ranging from annoying (like being slow and very disparate around the world) to massive (biases, lack of access for those who need it most).

So aiming to improve that situation is understandable. And being pessimistic about the chances of fixing those systems with the “normal approaches” (i.e. politics) is equally understandable.

Where these projects usually break down though is that they generally lack an understanding of what makes legal systems so hard to get right: no one has found a reliable way to encode a non-trivial part of the law into something that a computer can decide reliably and without wrong decisions. (there are of course other difficulties, but this is the most lenient one for the current topic).

People with a technical background (which includes me) are often frustrated how laws and legal documents like licenses are at the same time both written in an arcane inaccessible language and also very much prone to interpretation. We assume, based on the languages we interact with, that a sufficiently complex language should allow a strict, formal interpretation of some truth value (“was this contract followed by both parties?”).

But the reality is that contracts (just like most laws) are intentionally written with some subjective language to both account for real world deviations and avoid loopholes.

It’s incredibly easy for a law to apply when it’s not meant to (or the opposite: to present a law as not being meant to apply to a certain situation when the authors were very aware of the implications) or to not apply due to some technicality.

And for all the wrong in legal systems that exists we have not yet found abetter way to solve this than (hopefully neutral) arbitrators that interpret the text and underlying intentions.

And all the crypto schemes categorically decline that: their stated goal is to not have a human in the loop anywhere. That would be fine if they also solved the above problems in some other way, but none that I know of even attempt to do that. They simply pretend that perfect, decideable contracts are possible (even easy!) and never unfair.

Whether that error is based on ignorance or on something more sinister is up to the reader to decide.