Unknown Armies is a tabletop RPG that has a school of magic predicated on a. Being drunk all the time and b. Drinking out of really cool cups.

Post reminded me of that. Good game (though I only know 2nd edition)

New Jersey is fine. A lot of north jersey is overshadowed by NYC being right there. One of my friends moved here from florida, and one of her friends was like “Why don’t you move to jersey city? it’s cheaper” and she went “I didn’t move to new york to live in new jersey”. But even if you do live just outside the city and none of your friends want to visit, you’re still a short train ride away from it.

I don’t know as much about south jersey, but, like, it’s fine. And unlike, I don’t know, Iowa, you can usually get on a train to a world class city.

I also cannot recommend her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

I hope you meant you can recommend them. They’re both very good.

I liked the dispossessed a lot

I don’t think you can eat deep dish pizza with one hand while riding the subway quite so easily.

You might enjoy this 1964 essay “the paranoid style in American politics” : https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

Many people are bad at delayed gratification and long term thinking.

Supposed to go to a party this weekend. Last time I went to one with this crowd, it was pretty okay and I made a new guy-i-text-sometimes-friend.

Though the time before that was really dull, so who knows.

But those bots don’t have any intersection with my network, so their trust score is low.

If they do connect via one of my idiot friends, that friend loses credit, too, and the system can trust his connections less.

The trust level is from my perspective, not global.

Sometimes people’s priorities, needs, and desires are bad.

The way I imagine it working is if I notice a bot in my web, I flag it, and then everyone involved in approving the bot loses some credibility. So a bad actor will get flushed out. And so will your idiot friend that keeps trusting bots, so their recommendations are then mostly ignored.

I send people links to posts on Lemmy, and tell people I can’t see Instagram/Twitter/etc.

Is it working? No, not really, but it feels like it should.

Yeah if I take photo/video I put the camera in front of my face or chest so no one behind me can see it.

If you use mint and it won’t boot from the live USB stick a second time, you may have to rename a file on the USB drive.

If it hangs on the last step of the installer, I don’t know how to fix that but the previous LTS version of mint worked fine.

Those were the two biggest hurdles I faced. Good luck.

I switched to Linux (mint). It kind of sucked getting it set up but at least I don’t have to deal with Microsoft much anymore.

People get weird about food combos. i’m like, just let people enjoy shit. Especially if you’ve never tried it.

rpg.net is pretty good, but I don’t post there anymore. I may have eaten a large ban in a stupid argument about accessibility. I still don’t think being able to unilaterally change the rules of the game in your favor in a multiplayer game falls under accessibility, but apparently some people do!

Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. So.

A lot of people are really quite stupid. On top of that, they’re in social groups (ie: tribes) that have shitty values.

Long term investing in education would help. So would things like removing lead from the environment, and fixing healthcare and labor laws so people aren’t so stressed all the time trying to survive.

Something like half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level (Snopes says this is basically true but there are complexities https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/ )

Yeah I think it’s impossible to treat people with dignity and respect indefinitely while also hoarding wealth like a dragon.

I remember seeing memes about this. I think it was the “boss throws guy out the window” template.

• “How can we keep our guards loyal? Drug them? Bomb collars?”
• “Maybe you could pay them and treat them with dignity and respect”

Personally I think we should start a campaign of jury nullification and “if you’re an EMT, and they’re a billionaire, let them die”, but I’m just one guy.