For me, as a DM, real shit always happens on session 1, you swim together or fucking die.

Wow, what the fuck

Can you share what exactly your concerns are so that folks could suggest a mitigation strategy?

Agreed. I think a lot of people in light red and purple areas probably had my same experience of being really surprised at the amount of support there was. The occupy protest in my city was like three dudes in two tents. The No Kings protests stretched for three city blocks and we got a ton of enthusiastic responses (and only, like, three counter protests that I saw) from people driving through. I never ever would have imagined that kind of turnout and support in this town, and I found myself feeling really encouraged that there’s a lot more local support for resisting this bullshit than I estimated.

So, I attended my local protest. 9/10 experience, had a blast and also realized that being anti-Trump and keeping our republic is a waaaaaaaay more popular position (even in my light red area) than I thought it was. The local police department has its priorities straight and they didn’t show up to the protest at all, so there were zero problems with law enforcement. The only thing keeping it from being a 10/10 was what I didn’t see:

1. Clear demands. This was what happened with Occupy. It generated a lot of buzz and got tons of attention, and when they finally asked the protestors “what are your demands?”, the answer was basically “idk, everything sucks. Make it stop sucking”. We need some clear, hard, attainable demands or we’re just going to repeat Occupy.

2. Organizing. There was almost no organizing happening, no outreach or recruiting for or between political, advocacy, or support groups. People showed up and left with no additional contacts, commitments, or follow ups. That is a wasted opportunity.

I mean, if you can reasonably bridge the gulf between stars, scientific advancement is basically all that’s left, unless it’s just your culture to be slaving, warmongering dickheads. Your home solar system probably has all the raw materials and energy you could ever ask for.

For me, it’s more like it just gets wrecked by a new hyperfixation until they both plateau just in time for a new one to come charging in. I’ve got at least seven topics that I can basically turn into a human Wikipedia page on.

The criticality of any given service is inversely proportional to how recently released was the technology that it runs on.

This, if you see some ancient machine sitting there humming, don’t even make eye contact with that mf, don’t even think about it. In fact, try to minimize your time in the same room so when it eventually goes tits up, you don’t get blamed.

I would watch the absolute fuck out of this to the point that my family would be so fucking sick of it.

IIRC, you can get into public games on roll20. I also know Lemmy has an instance dedicated to TTRPGs; do they have any kind of game matchup community?

I’ve never met a public-facing tabletop group that wasn’t enthusiastic to introduce new people to it. I think honestly my worst experience was when some dude brought his insanely broken D&D 3.5 character to play in a level one 5E game. The DM handled it very well; much better than I would have, I think.

Your nearest, biggest city’s library is a good place to look. Libraries almost always have something going on in a spare public room or have public event flyers hung up. If you’re interested in politics, going and yelling at city council is a great way to meet local activists.

I’m a white dude, apparently one of the relatively few left ones. It’s probably because of AuDHD, I grew up knowing what it was like to be in the out group. I lived full time in Honduras for a few years, and not with the military, so I kinda know what it’s like to be an immigrant. I had to deal with their visa/immigration system there. It’s not the same, I’m not saying that it is, but I’ve lived the experience of making community and friends and being reminded by the government that you don’t belong here. I also got to see the immigration issue from the perspective of the people that are subject to it. A lot of these Trump fucks have enjoyed the luxury of never questioning anything, just cruise, watch your hunting shows, live in your bubble and recite your fox news/ tim pool bullshit. I know the type, and it is utterly inconceivable to them that the could ever end up in the out group, and it’s a fucking interesting ride to be along for when they do end up there. Unfortunately, too few of them realize that they weren’t just being singled out by the deep state or Satan because life is a show about them, and that that’s just life for people in the out group.

Tried it; it doesn’t matter, in my experience. Conformity is way more important to these folks than they pretend, and once something like this starts getting traction, it gets labelled a thought crime and sealed away.

You could be right about that. I was going to say that they caused the problem with subprime lending, but I think that subprime lending would probably never have been attractive enough to not laugh the guy out of the room what proposed it if most people weren’t already in a bad financial position with low economic mobility.

Yeah, in a lot of ways, it feels like the great recession never truly ended in the sense that people had recovered from it; it feels more like people just got used to it. In the oughts, a lot of the pretenses of cold war capitalism got dropped in favor of a whole hearted embrace of the shallowest (ostensibly; I’m going against my nature and giving Friedman the benefit of the doubt here) possible reading of the Friedman doctrine. Everything turned to “how much cash can we scrape out of this for the investors?” Play places? Cool aesthetics? Fuck you, we need to maximize the resale value of our real estate, shut up, you’ll eat our bullshit anyway. Minimum wage hikes? No way! Your burgers will cost $20! Oh, well, I mean, that’s going to happen anyway, but at least you guys didn’t get raises lmao. You want a truck that just works? Eat shit, idiot, pay us $100,000 for a lifted mini-van in a masculinity-protecting trenchcoat. Need somewhere to stay? Great news, we’re going to do nothing to improve the apartment and increase your rent $200/year. Or you could just choose to afford a half million dollar home; the free market is all about choice, after all. Want health insurance? Cool, that’ll be half of your income, your boss gets to the carrier for you because it’s a free market system all about the freedom of choice, and we’re going to personally throw sand in your eyes if you ever actually try to use it. At least you can go swim in the public pool or go enjoy your city’s fine taxpayer funded services nope those all got cut permanently in the recession, and now that money’s going to paying out for cops fucking up instead.

The IRL answer here is that it doesn’t matter if it actually makes money / creates value in the long run, it only matters if the investors think it will, or if the c-suite think the investors think it will, or if the current investors (looking to sell) think that future investors (looking to buy) think it will.

I mean, there’s all these pictures of Trump, but not a single good shot.

Go drink some water, pal. I thought it was a very well worded statement, and stripping it down like so really robbed it of a lot of its potency, imo. It’s fine to disagree with me, that’s your business, but to extrapolate that I consider this narrow quoting to be the injustice of injustices in this world is a little goddamn silly.

Hello, can I suggest the package code for LXML? I once wondered why the fuck etree.tostring() returned a bytes object instead of a fucking string and made the mistake of diving into the function. Never again. That library is cursed script condensed from the haunted cries of forgotten pharaohs and inscribed in the blood of a newborn foal onto an ancient ash tree under Venus’ vexatious gaze.