Honestly, people are rightfully concerned about Microsoft locking down machines, and hackers, and rightfully so, but I think the real insanity is that I do really think LLMs is a tech bubble that I fully expect to burst, and attempting to redesign our lives around it will feel as silly as web3 in 2025.
Thats almost the same thing. Or like, youtube will play anything as an ad, and people let it run for their kids (and more notably the elderly let it run, and have no idea).
I played D&D 4e with a group of childhood friends for a few years in college. One of them was bipolar. Anyways we had been playing 4e for two years. New campaign. We were using character builder, which spat out our damage damage for us in the following notation:
X[w] + Stat
For those who don't know, 4e made use of "Powers" which are basically spells as you might think of how those function in 5e. Martial classes bought a weapon, which was a series of properties that carried over through out all your powers. That notates as [w], so the longsword has [w]= 1d8. Powers vary in how powerful they were. Each class has At-will, encounter, and Dailys... similar in function to short and long rest recharging abilities. My point is that encounters or dailys might do 2[w] or 3[w] or 4[w]. Use a longsword with Villain's Menace and its 3d8. Then add your strength.
He saw 1[d8] + 5
My friend rolled his damage. He saw the +5 noted for his strength, and then he forgot it was for that and added 5 again.
So he rolled 1d8 +5 +5
I told him he only added 5 once. This blossomed into an argument which carried on for an hour. He went home. And then the next day he sent me over 2000 words on facebooks in threats and death messages.
A week later, he messaged me again, and noted that I was right. He apologized. And then he told me I could have been less of an asshole.
Like, people used rely Rolodex's and calendars to remember phone numbers and birthdays, respectively. In other words, we used to write things down. When I left Facebook, I did literally go through their calendar and write down all my friends birthdays.
Navigation is a skill you have to learn. When I was an EMT, my FTO drilled the basics in to me. I can find my way to a city Ive never been, but I still use a GPS to find a specific place off the major cross streets. People used to give more advice with the destination, now they just say, "oh, come to this XXXX address place" because they assume youll be using a GPS, and the skill to describe "its off of this road" is both becoming lost, and a generational disconnect.
In general, I hire caregivers for disabled people, and I'll give a job to anyone who will do it for what we pay (about 20/ hour). However, the people get a say in who gets hired, and a few times, they have chosen to hire beautiful women. They never last, mostly because its such an intimate position, (you're spending hours of your time one on one), and some of these people being cognitively impaired, they couldn't help but make it weird.
I know this is dodging your point, but WotC has already divested themselves of MODO and a third party now runs it. I know what you mean, a central server going down destroys access to the game you pay for. And indeed we see that happening with plenty of live service games, to the point that its starting to weigh down the entire industry, or at least that sector of it.
But I ask, is it really that different? Various NFT projects have come and gone, and most of the NFTs people have paid for have succumbed to link rot already my guy. The average life span for a live service game is like, what? 2 years? And even the successful ones, what? Like 7? I haven't played God's Unchained, but I can't imagine being a blockchain game will make any difference, especially because the games that do survive and are remembered have the following factors:
Can easily be modded/ hacked
Can be easily emulated
Were cherished and beloved
Deus Ex can be downloaded for free. Pokemon red and Sim Tower and Oregon Trail can be run in a browser. Breakout can be run in a search engine. As far as the comparison to MODO, those cards were fungible. When you completed a whole set, you could contact WotC to take them out of your account, and they would send you a copy of the whole set in paper. It's why MTGOexchange was called that; before bitcoin, you could trade magic cards for drugs.
Fuck (and I cannot emphasize this enough) fuck Timothy Chalamet. He is always so wooden. He can't act for shit. Hes just a very pretty nepo baby.
Also, can we count film makers? I hate Christopher Nolan. Every movie he makes is such a torturous slog. They are all metaphors for their own creation, and everyone of them is too concerned with the machinery, like hes pretentiously drawing attention to it. "GET IT? IM MAKING A MOVIE? IM A FUCKING GENIUS!"
eh, woke cops is a liberal fantasy, to be sure. Brooklyn 99 was put in an awkward spot in 2020 and did its best to try and talk about them. I do think it was made with the best of intentions, and the cop stuff is mostly like, a parody of cop stuff tropes, rather than a fetishization of the cops themselves (like, say, Law and Order.) Maybe it doesn't excuse it totally, but it is really worse than say, Parks and Rec's cheery depiction of depiction of politics (especially when it goes national)?
Part of what convinces me of it's earnestness is how focused it was on representation. Theres a story about how when Stefanie Beatriz found out Melissa Fumero got the part of Amy, she was convinced well, that was it, they cast the Latina woman. I forget if they made the part of Rosa for her or they liked her so much they just cast her as it, but like, the cast being so diverse stands out compared to some of the more whiter casts on this very list. (and Im not knocking any show on this list, honestly. I liked them all except for The Office, which I never watched, and whatever LN is)
Birch bark torn into strips and layers makes good kindling. Sticks with little strips cut out and frayed to the side makes good tinder. Cotton balls covered in vaseline are my firestarters of choice. Drier lint is also good. If you're using charcoal, the bag is great for that as well.
Wool socks. And for the love of all that is holy bring some seasonings. Salt and Pepper are great, but they even sell little seasoning bottles for backpacking that screw together. Trust me.
I generally trust America's test kitchen for reccomendations for these kinds of things.