I’ve been buying stuff from Bandcamp. They sold recently so their future is uncertain, but as it stands right now it seems like a pretty good deal. Artists get a good cut, and you get streaming + drm free copies of the music to download.

I don’t really like subscriptions for music. It’s like renting. I’d rather pay $10/mo buying an album and have a big library after ten years than have nothing.

Emotions aren’t good (or bad). They’re often like a heuristic. Fast but inaccurate. This is great when it’s like “a bear wandered into the house” and emotions say “RUN” and cold logic would be like “what? Why? How?” until you get mauled. It’s not good when it’s like “climate change makes me feel bad so I don’t believe in it”

It’s fine. Could be better. Could be a lot worse.

I mean if you want to keep running bleed against a boss immune to bleed go ahead, but I’ll probably switch to an occult infusion.

And yet when someone’s like “the GOP is an existential threat and we should treat them accordingly” it’s all “you’re being alarmist” and “murder is a crime”

I hope every member of the GOP chokes to death alone and removed from everything they ever loved.

I’m thinking trump and the Republican party are really bad, like cruel and stupid bad, and maybe we shouldn’t let them give orders anymore.

Some of this behavior seems self destructive.

I knew a woman who would be like “I have too many matches it’s overwhelming”. I’d be like “ok well stop swiping and clear out what you have.” She’d be like “no, swiping is fun.” Well, ok, but you’re not making progress towards your stated goal, and you’re wasting the other people’s time.

I just don’t think spending 2 weeks texting without meeting is going to give useful, accurate, information. The chemistry you’re measuring there isn’t what you’ll have in real life.

A couple dinners before you find out they’re not what you thought? The same is achieved with just talking for a couple weeks

Strong disagreement here. The same is not achieved by texting and fundamentally cannot be achieved. There is too much stuff in body language, voice, and such that you’re just not going to reveal over text. Plus other stuff like seeing how they interact with other people. Are they rude to the bartender? Do they road rage? There are whole worlds of information you can’t get without spending time with someone in person.

We have different takes about “pen pals”. I don’t want to message someone for weeks before meeting up. I do like

• initial tailored message (eg: “Your profile says you love Kelly Link! Did you read her new novel? I really enjoyed it”)
• if they respond badly, exit (eg: “no”)
• one or two responses (eg: if they say “No! I’ve only read her short stories! Was it good?” then we can have a brief conversation about it)
• clear any dealbreakers (eg: if i had a kid, i’d ask something like “Just wanted to make sure you saw the thing on my blurb about my kid. Are you cool with dating a single parent?”)
• If that all goes well, ask something like “Do you want to have a date and see if we get along in person?”

That’s it. All done. Meeting up for a drink is low cost and low risk, but very information dense. I can get a better feel for if I want to invest in them after an hour in person than I can with a week of texting.

This is written from the perspective of a man who doesn’t date men. I can’t speak authoritatively about other experiences, but second hand none of my women friends have enjoyed prolonged texting without meeting.

Maybe sometimes. Most modern apps you can only message if you’ve both signaled interest, so if you’re getting messages from people you’re not attracted to I’d ask why you swiped on them in the first place.

Secondly, if you get a message and aren’t interested, it’s better to just unmatch. If you don’t have time to respond fully now, then just don’t say anything. If you send a half-ass response, you look kind of bad and the other person might bail. Who wants to talk to someone who, based on all available evidence in this scenario, can’t hold a conversation? The main thing on these app is trying to make yourself look good. Making yourself look like someone who can’t compose a sentence isn’t doing yourself any favors.

Match group 100% should be broken up.

I think a lot of people, of all genders, are surprisingly bad at the skills needed to use a dating app successfully. People dead end conversations and then are like “why aren’t I having fun conversations?”

Like, a profile says “I love SomeBand”. You write “hey! SomeBand is my favorite. Did you see their new music video? I don’t know how they got those cats to act!” And then respond with “no”, end of message. I’m just like my friend, that is not how you use this tool. What do you think is going to happen next?

But yeah, women refusing to take initiative probably isn’t helping. But the roots of that are pretty deep in our sexist society, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

I think the dating app model that’s currently popular kind of can’t work well for users. They’re all set up so they benefit from users paying a subscription for a long time, but users want to find a match and get out. Those are contradictory.

I think a match making model would be better. Pay a single fee and they try to set you up with someone. They already got your money so their incentive would be to set you up happily so they don’t have to work on you anymore. But users don’t want to pay for anything, so we’ll continue having garbage and garbage incentives.

I think feeld recently was revealed to have all of their information and apis public. Like anyone could find any message and photos, and do CRUD operations on them.

https://fortbridge.co.uk/research/feeld-dating-app-nudes-data-publicly-available/

Also the app kind of sucks, at least as a free user. It does the same bullshit as all the others where it doesn’t actually connect you with people. And some classes of users (eg: women) get bombarded with low quality content while others get nothing.

Hinge also kind of sucks for the same capitalism reasons, but it’s better than the others I tried.

Return to office mandates are some combination of management failure, class warfare, and maybe some real estate valuation nonsense. There’s no good reason for it.

I’d really like people to unionize so they can say “no” as a unified group.

teenager who acts like a dick all the time would be equally annoying.

Was Morrigan popular when da:o was new? She’s an extremely edgy teenager.

This topic would be great for a dontnod game that could appropriatly handle that topic - not an RPG.

I really don’t think queer stuff needs to be banished from the realm of RPGs.

Several times I’ve set the max warnings to whatever the current warning count is, and then decreased that over time.

This can’t be real, can it?

Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.

Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!

I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.

Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.

Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.

My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.

If the players want to do something I don’t feel ready to do (either because it’s not prepped or I don’t feel up to winging it), I’ll tell them.

“That’s cool you want to go to so-and-so, but I haven’t given it any thought. We can end early, or I can try to improv it with no quality guarantee”

There are some kinds of planning I don’t do, like making specific maps and stat blocks, so some kinds of “going off script” don’t hinder me much.

Sometimes I’ll ask the players for input. “Ok, what sort of rites happen at this midnight ritual [that we just made up] that you decided to crash?”. I don’t really like the player mode where they just want to sit back and be told a story, nor do I much like the mode where they’re super zoomed in on their character without engaging with any other level. I’ve had players like that, where they want to really immerse in their character and feel like answering setting details takes them out of it, but that’s not really how I like it.

The great(est) club in dark souls 3. Simple. Effective. Surprisingly effective at catching dodge rolls. It’s not bad in the other games, but it really was my jam in ds3

In Elden Ring, the antspur rapier is stupid basic and fun. Poke, poke, poke, bleed, poke, rot.