My Dearest Sinophobes:
Your knee-jerk downvoting of anything that features any hint of Chinese content doesn’t hurt my feelings. It just makes me point an laugh, Nelson Muntz style as you demonstrate time and again just how weak American snowflake culture really is.
Hugs & Kisses, 张殿李
A literal Space Nazi writes a book in which the ruler of Mars (albeit democratically elected) is called “Elon”, after whom Errol Musk’s next loin turd is named, and said loin turd is obsessed with Mars. And being a Nazi.
What. A. Coincidence.
Way back in prehistory I played Car Wars when it first came out. (You know, before it became an unwieldy, badly-organized mess that rivalled even Star Fleet Battles for being impossible for normal folk to play.)
We missed one very key rule. The “damage” rating for weapons was a number of d6 to roll for damage. We played it as individual points.
Needless to say even the shortest auto duels were horrifically and painfully long to play out.
The Apartheid Manchild has this weird obsession with Mars.
There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next decade. (I frankly doubt that there will even have been human footprints on Mars in the next decade!) There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next century. There will likely be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next millennium. And I’m saying that last one not because I don’t think we’d have the technology in a thousand years, but rather because there is no point in living on Mars.
Mars has nothing we need that’s worth maintaining a settlement in the face of conditions harsher than the absolute worst the Earth has to offer. If people want to live in a permanently cold shithole with nothing usefully accessible they can just build a house on Antarctica. It’s a far cheaper way to fuck around and find otu.
Read George Polti’s The 36 Dramatic Situations. It’s a list of plot elements that have a snappy title, a list of participants in the plot element, a brief discussion of how it works, and then (unfortunately dated) references to dramas that used them.
Using this when building a world, or a campaign, or a local setting, lets you quickly set up a bunch of conflicts (ideally with interlaced participants so that single NPCs (or PCs) can be in different roles in different dramatic situations. Then you just let the events flow logically, and as the dramatic situations get resolved you get a plot. PCs can interfere with these dramatic situations and thus have an impact on resulting plots even if the overall setting is far larger than they are.
For depth in world-building I use a rule I call “Y-cubed”. (I got it from somewhere else but can’t recall the source anymore.)
For every detail you make, you ask the question “Why” three times.
So a village the characters have reached stop all work every 77 days for a festival. Why? It celebrates an ascended local hero who saved the village from a magical blight. Why 77 days? It took 77 days for effort for the blight to be defeated. … And so on.
This is a rapid way to both build depth in your setting quickly, as well as inspire possible mysteries and intrigue for investigation later.
A slight modification works also for giving NPCs depth.
Anybody who thinks that the Apartheid Manchild was ever intending on reducing spending needs to be given a dunce hat and forced to sit in the corner.
Robert’s cynicism is cracking these days soon. His laughter is increasingly forced and joyless.
These are shit times.
I am not sure what you mean by saying the CPC isn’t Communist anymore.
The CPC has never been communist.
It’s socialist.
The number drops a bit when the polls are done in secrecy. Still far higher than any western government, mind.
To clarify for any pseudo intellectual who happens to be reading:
“<X> is true for <reason> you utter idiot” is not an example of the ad hominem fallacy.
“<X> is true because you’re an utter idiot” is an example of the ad hominem fallacy.
Glad to be of service.
Have you considered taking a communications course so you don’t sound like a pretentious, obfuscating jackass?
Eschew gratuitous obfuscation. (See what I mean?)
In AI alone, we lead the world.
*Deep Seek has entered the chat.*
Would this be the military that could only reach a standstill in Korea? That lost in Vietnam? That lost in Afghanistan? That ran away scared from Mogadishu? That “won” in Iraq by generating the world’s largest collection of terrorists until the blowback lost you two large towers and a smaller one?
That military?
At work? My go-to activity is to get the Hell out of the toilet as quickly as possible.
I hate squat toilets, see.
You’ll find that happens a lot when Americans comment on things abroad. Victims if their own educational system that they are, they really don’t know anything about the world outside of their borders so they just make vague pronouncements and nod as if they’ve said something wise instead of having just shit their own pants for all to see.
From above:
A large portion of Americans only have 2 brain cells and they’re both busy fighting for 3rd place.
And here we have a case in point: an American who can’t read history.
I’ve been listening to Tanya Tagaq’s Retribution album this morning. She’s by far the best Inuk-punk performer in the world, no exceptions. (I say this with confidence because she’s the only Inuk-punk performer in the world. 🤭)
Simon Whistler is a presenter and it often shows. He’s pretty entertaining, and he has the look of a scholar which gives him some gravitas and credibility when he talks, but he isn’t particularly knowledgeable of anything (including topics he’s already covered in one channel when presenting the same topic on another).
So of course he thinks ChatGPT is smart.
Today started as a Heilung day and ended with Burning Witches. I’ll probably fall asleep to the former.