Because they don’t know what i put in there.

Cursed ring of acrobatics.

Gives the player great acrobatic skill, but sticks to their finger when they wear it. And they can’t stop getting around acrobatically. Any action attempted fails, unless it is done acrobatically. Player has normal or only slightly improved stamina.

Player: i’ll get my rope and grappleing hook and scale the wall.

DM: lifts eyebrow you think so, do you?

Player: sigh I throw my pack into the air and leap after it. At the peak of its arc, I flip over it, grabbing my grappling hook and flinging it over the wall as I do.

DM: ok, sounds like difficulty of 15…

Blursed. Not that I disagree.

Snaps bad because shoving updates down throats.

This is a solid take.

Personally, I took snap out of my computer and burned it over a fire, but i toasted my marshmallows first, because I didn’t want snap on my marshmallows.

Yes. It’s a scalable hobby, and can run from virtually no cost to why-are-you-burning-money. But you can do a lot in gaming with little monetary investment.

There are lots of budget indie games that are lots of fun, and if you find out you like gaming and want to try more fancy titles, you can always upgrade hardware.

Minimal entry: your current pc. Install steam, and buy/try what you like, returning it if it’s too slow/doesn’t work.

Light entry: get familiar with your pc’s ram size, hd/ssd size, cpu speed/type, and graphics card. Use that to ensure your pc can handle the game by looking at the game’s minimum requirements.

Medium-heavy entry: Upgrade things.

• ssd if you don’t have one. The difference between that and spinning disks is night and day. If you wished things loaded faster, get this.
• 8 gb graphics card in the $150 range, amd or nvidia-based. Get this if you want a smoother experience / if you can notice individual frames happening. You don’t need the most expensive tech to play most games that are out there.
• Genuine XBox or PS4/5 controller. These standard controllers are generally pretty solid and durable. $60ish
• new cpu ($$$, and may not even be an option): most games won’t be processor-bound. But some are cpu-heavy. Get this if you really want to upgrade overall, or have a particular title in mind that needs it. Or…
• Low-mid range gaming computer ($900 ($600-$1500)): wait until you want to do a pc upgrade, and get a low-end gaming computer. I recommend Lenovo LOQ or Legion. Lenovo in general has provided laptops that don’t fall apart on me, and that’s not something I can say about most computer manufacturers. That said, keep them long enough and you’ll have to replace the keyboard - but that’s every laptop out there that I’ve run across.
• or: go crazy and buy everything all the time at the moment it his the market because it is a game or has “game” written on, near, or associated with it (not recommended)

True, but your post did kinda read like this:

Auto-updates are a hell-no for me.

There was a perfectly good user interface for updates. Then Ubuntu decides “wait… What if we made updates compulsory and effectively random and skipped the UI. The user can do system updates whenever they want, because those don’t matter for security or something, but these apps must be updated whenever snap determines they must.”

Oh, snap!

Late stage capitalism.

The issue is that capitalism fundamentally requires forward thinkers and enlightened (or at least rational) perspective to function sustainably.

But capitalism rewards short term thinking, everywhere from corporate leadership, to the workforce, to the consumers caught by ads designed to catch and hold their ever-shortening attention spans.

Fundamentally, it needs regulation to thrive. The true cost of a purchase, including environmental and decommissioning/disposal costs must be tied to the initial purchase value. Through this, we might get a functional capitalism.

Nice.

Well said.

Absolutely.

All fair.

But responding with ridicule is weak, too. That shit needs direct force. If someone tries to apply that to you, you apply it right back, with a gun.

All that piracy, all those years, and the memories the captain and crew were building together is the real treasure.

No trust needed.

I’ve seen an arthritic goat hobbling around in agony.

With nature, you don’t generally peacefully breathe out your dying breath, even if there are no predators. You live until life as it is is torturous enough that you no longer live.

There is no alternative to life, and death is compulsory and often painful. We, as humans, are lucky enough to be capable to, at times, make that process quick, and, at times, painless.

Predation is not wrong. The quality of life is what matters - and because of that, death is necessary.

Life offers joy, but can dish out misery just as deeply. If life gives you joy, it lasts as long as it can. If life gives you misery, the depth of it is limited by death.

There will always be something to pick at, and with the number of trolls on here to inflame and manipulate any legitimate concerns, i highly suspect the troll farms and related pawns would find something to bitch about.

The fact is, not everyone has the EQ to state the issue perfectly clearly in terms everyone can accept.

“No, do you really expect me to look past what Russia is doing? Absolutely fucking no,” is basically reasonable.

I mean, do you? This is a violation by Russia of another sovereign state. Thus, everyone in Russia is affected by the consequences of that action.

The Russian kernel coders, no matter their innocence, are subjects of a nation that can compel them to misbehave.

Now, if they were leaving Russia and defecting, that’s another matter, where they are pulling their individual sovereignty away from the Russian state.

He followed legal advice from lawyers and removed some russians from being kernel maintainers to comply with sanctions.