terrapintastic.bsky.social
bsky, you've got a good heart but you're exhausting. I'm dm-able here but not synchronously.
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The other album I bought at the same time was Whitney Houston, which I heard a track from last night at Diversions. (And tangentially, if you haven't been to Diversions, may I recommend it? It's a very nice space, physically and otherwise.)
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(I could do without the Coming Around Again/Itsy Bitsy Spider medley, in the same way that I would rather have dental work than hear Jay-Z's "Anything" again, but the rest of the album is pretty solid.)
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for some reason one of the first cassette albums I bought with my own money was Coming Around Again. And I think you're spot on about her not being wistful, in a good way.
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re: rulebooking: that's also my personal preference, but it's a heuristic at best -- far from universal. some people legitimately enjoy more rigorously simulationist or formalized rulesets, which often end up with more edge cases, so there's more rulebooking for those.
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hm. I agree with this for the most part, but would argue that a game badly matched with an audience can *impede* fun, and some games will tend to do that for more audiences over time than others.
(that opens a new discussion, how people
choose which games to play -- a v different rabbithole)
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"no, it's fine, we'll only ever need the mechanism to go down as far as yellow"
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assuming you mean "reining" (I'm not being pedantic, both are possible readings), are you actually saying you think Harris is more of a war hawk than Mr Military Birthday Parade? Sorry, but I'm not seeing it.
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this is such a face-eating leopard moment in the making
"I'm 34 and divorced with X kids, I have no education or employment prospects and no retirement savings and the only 'job' I can find is actually an LLM, I just don't get what happened"
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oh, fmlllll
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I'm not convinced this was months of work, given what I've learned about the semiotics of marching in the last 20 minutes or so.
I am thoroughly convinced Trump had never actually realized he'd have to sit through the military parade, though.
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it's completely plausible to me that a primarily oral tradition could make it from the US to Japan -- or vice versa, or from somewhere else to both places -- in 50-70 years. but did it?
yes, this is how I'm spending my Friday night. no regrets. beats the hell outta doomscrolling.
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timing note: I first heard about the skit in the early 2000s, from people who's been performing it since the early 1990s, and there are definitely people on the internet dating it back to the 1960s, all in the US. Love letter was developed ca 2010, published in Japan and the US in 2012.
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but the level of research I've now done is "fell down this very specific rabbit hole a few times now", not "subject of my lifelong passion", and I'm tired of watching videos. so I put it to you, Bluesky gamers. is this real or am I off in "English major during finals" free-associative territory?
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I am, I hasten to add, NOT throwing shade upon the originality of Love Letter the game. but what struck me about it when I first played it is that the turn structure of the game seems to artfully echo the "handoff" structure of the skit/story.
and I can't find this pointed out anywhere. at all.
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that grammatical parallelism more sense in my head, but still.
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like so many things in the last year: it's not that I didn't know exactly, so much as I've never had a reason to consider the question before, and now that I do, I'm angry about needing to.
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if one's mainly concerned about particulates/projectiles tho, direct vent > nothing!
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check if/how your lab goggles are vented first. a lot of the basic ones have little direct vent holes on the sides, and are meant to protect vs splashes, not gases/fumes. (there are also "indirectly vented" ones with filters, but not sure how common)
alt option: swim goggles carried/on hand
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(the last is admittedly not as prevalent/pervasive now as it maybe once was -- there are more gamers, and more emphasis on not accommodating shitty behavior. but it's relevant to my formative experiences running organized play convention games, where you can't always control who you play with.)
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oh, and out-of-game conflict negotiation/circumvention/avoidance. in a "traditional" RPG, I may want dice to make some decisions because I don't always want it to be me (or a person at all) who decides who kills the dragon, if a player's beloved character dies, etc.) not always a thing, but can be.
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also: cognitive load reduction. game-runners (for games with them) often manage the possibility space, which requires extensive decision/choice-making. which takes energy.
letting random make some decisions alters cognitive load just as prewritten adventures or planning/notes or rules aids can.
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why dice: as others have said, history/familiarity/preexistence of systems. also, choices of hobbies. many people who play games don't want to develop games, so they play ones that exist. or they like some things about existing games but prefer to innovate not create wholesale.
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I saw a writing about McDonalds characters recently that referred to the non-chief police character as something like "a being whose head I crawled inside as a child" and went "holy fuckballs that's creepy"
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we moved out of the city into the county in Iowa, and I didn't find out a township was a thing til a year later when I was looking over a sample ballot. (they're not the same as Wisconsin towns -- I believe their main responsibilities are paying for fire protection and maintaining rural cemeteries.)
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(I'm seeing conflicting reports re: whether this affects already-scheduled interviews, or just scheduling new ones. Either way is bad, but the former would be INCREDIBLY damaging to many universities' teaching missions.
I mean assuming you want undergrads to have TAs, especially in STEM.)
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but on the list of real shitty shit I've had to tell international students before, "hey the shitty people running my country's government are determined to make your life even shittier and more uncertain because haha they were just kidding about that free speech thing" is way up there.
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seriously there is no uniquely shitty day like a student telling you they can't apply to a PhD program their country *doesn't have* because you're out of $100 fee waivers and that's twice their monthly income. or that they've made it, but owe $1000 for fees and insurance from their first paycheck.
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