One time I saw NK Jemisen , author of the broken earth trilogy give a talk. Someone asked about climate change and she said something like “there’s only a small number of people responsible for most of this problem, and we know where they live”
The audience cheered and clapped. The guy moderating the talk got real flustered.
Not the building super, nor my friend when she came by with a drain snake that one time.
Or, to use an example that’s not trying so hard to be a pun: you go down to the local rec center to find a pickup game of basketball or whatever. No one’s paying anyone. You go, find a game, have a good time, and leave. Maybe see each other again. Maybe not. Is that sociopathy?
There’s a wide range of options between utterly repulsive and loved. That’s a huge excluded middle. Do you think people don’t fuck on the first date?
You deleted your other reply I already replied to, so I’m pasting what I wrote here:
You’re shifting the topic. You said,
No, I’m pretty sure that people who use each other for solely selfish purposes is a primary symptom of sociopathy
Note this claim isn’t about sex. It’s a broad claim that any circumstances where one party uses another for selfish purpose is sociopathy.
Since getting someone to fix a clogged toilet is using someone for selfish purposes, your claim would make that sociopathy. I think that’s absurd, and thus your claim is false.
I hate to break it to you but people who like to have sex with each other on a regular basis without exchanging money or other favors, they probably love each other but they’re so scared of the word love because for some reason in recent decades the word love has been become taboo.
Citations needed. You just made this up and I see no reason to take your word for it that people are scared of the word love, nor that love has become taboo. Furthermore, many people have regular sex without feeling love.
You’re taking your world view and beliefs and claiming they’re far more universal than they are.
You’re shifting the topic. You said,
No, I’m pretty sure that people who use each other for solely selfish purposes is a primary symptom of sociopathy
Note this claim isn’t about sex. It’s a broad claim that any circumstances where one party uses another for selfish purpose is sociopathy.
Since getting someone to fix a clogged toilet is using someone for selfish purposes, your claim would make that sociopathy. I think that’s absurd, and thus your claim is false.
Edit: person I replied to deleted their message, so I reposted this where they reposted.
I don’t let the problem get that bad in the first place.
On my computer, I close the browser end of day and all the tabs go away. On my phone, it auto archives tabs I haven’t looked at in a week. I close those periodically, but a few I use as off brand bookmarks (eg: a recipe I like)
Thus hiring someone to fix your plumbing or do your yard work is sociopathy?
Also two people can have mutually enjoyable sex without “love”.
You’ve got a weird take.
Api thing was the final straw. But also privately owned for private mega media is bad, so fuck them.
I’ve thought about switching. I do like the password saving and syncing between Android and desktop that Firefox does, and I’m not sure if the forks do that.
No regrets on switching to Linux here. Almost all of the time I just use the GUI to launch steam or Firefox. No AI nagging me (aside from whatever nonsense Firefox is up to)
To many “smart” people have stood up and taken the credit for hundreds of others and generations of work.
Like CEOs taking credit for all the work their engineers did.
That’s an interesting point you make and I partly agree. There are certain undertones and sometimes you can create a better story by engaging these undertones and creating a monster in noble clothing and a metaphor for the societal corset women are forced ro wear.
Well, I’m glad we’re approaching some common ground.
No one here is making the argument that you’re seriously “encouraging mindless slaughter of people based on some regular dungeon crawling”. No one’s saying you’re, like, recommending people go out and do that in real life. The argument is there is a message, even if it’s unintentional.
But other times I just want to enjoy a trash movie or 15$ airport library book.
There’s little wrong with enjoying a trash movie, but
And the undertones there are purely accidental and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Why? What authority says subtext shouldn’t be taken seriously?
There’s a lot of rich material for analysis, for talking about what our society values among other things, by looking at the messages in pop culture. Imagine two societies. In one, all their pop culture and trashy airport novels are about murder and plunder. In the other, they’re about cooperation and building a better world together. Do you think that would mean anything? Do you think you could infer anything at all from that? It says something that we’re cool with “then I killed him and took his stuff! Rock on!”. We’ve all played that kind of game, but if you think about it that’s a horrible story.
Surely there are stories that would be on the far side of the line for you. “I killed the men and enslaved the women! Look at all these points the game gave me!” would probably make most people uncomfortable. Why is the line there, but murder is fine? Does the placement of that line mean anything?
And again, this doesn’t mean you can’t play a beer-and-pretzels half-brained game about tactics, strategy, and extermination. But to wave your hands in the air and say it doesn’t mean anything is absurd.
I dunno man, you’re the one that said the players can’t talk focus on gay rights now. there’s a demon invasion. Which, again, maps pretty cleanly to that kind of attitude. But I think you might be the kind of person who doesn’t understand subtext, or maybe text.
you choose to lead a gay rights movement while the world is being overrun by the demon king’s hordes.
This maps kind of easily onto “We can’t fight for gay rights right now. They just blew up the twin towers!” or similar “wait your turn for justice” arguments.
I get the impression that you don’t see that kind of thing, and furthermore don’t care. You run whatever kind of game you want, but I would be surprised if your settings weren’t full of unexamined biases and defaults.
Have you taken any literature or maybe other media classes at the 200 level?
Sometimes people say really weird things and I wonder if they just don’t know any better. Maybe they’re a teenager.
But like “fact from fiction” is irrelevant here. No one’s saying Dracula is non-fiction, but you can still read it and take meaning from the text. Furthermore, it’s not just a story about a guy who bites people. The read on how women are expected to behave is pretty obvious, for example.
You don’t have to care about the subtext of “kill all the goblins and take their stuff”, but saying there is no subtext or “no one cares” is absurd and self-centered.
I feel like online spaces like lemmy over represent some behaviors.
People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.
If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.
For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.
You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.
A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)
People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.
It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.
If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.
Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.
Well, thankfully I included examples other than magic.
However, I do think trying too hard on “martials should be like real life” easily leads to harsher limitations for them. It’s not always intentional. But when someone says “I want to leap 15 feet over the chasm” some people get all “you can’t do that! I can barely jump five feet and I’m athletic (they’re not)” and you have a whole digression where someone looks up human records and then argues about if 16 strength is really Olympic class and what about all your equipment and blah blah blah.
It’s much rarer for that kind of argument to come up with wizard types, in my experience.
Clearer rules up front help, though I feel like half of DND players have never read the rules.
I guess I’m lucky almost no one I know is trying to side hustle slop their way into money. I don’t think I would put up with that happily.
I bought a couple things on epic early on because I thought competition would be good. But epic kind of sucks and has no Linux support, so I stopped.