She’s a very selfish person who doesn’t care about other people. She only cares about what benefits her. So when someone says “there’s no material benefit to me” they sound like that kind of asshole.

Also it was a critically acclaimed show, not some obscure media.

That doesn’t logically follow. No more than saying “Building more highways is bad for the environment, ergo the highway administrators benefit from having more cars on the road.” You’re looking at a problem of induced demand and concluding the problem is on the demand-side of the equation.

What? Yes it does. Facebook needs users to generate revenue. With no users, they can’t sell ads or user data. How else do you think they make money? Do you not think making money is a benefit for the owners of facebook?

It’s one node in a massive web. And it’s easy to say “Well, you have to do your part because <insert consumerist morality here>”. But mostly it’s just some random asshole on the internet telling me not to use my telephone because AT&T is run by a richer set of random assholes. There’s no material benefit to me and no collective coordinated action that I’m seriously participating in.

You’re reminding me of Eleanor from the good place. Do you also litter? Refuse to return shopping carts?

I haven’t seen any real evidence to that effect.

Do you accept that facebook is harmful to the world, or would I need to try to prove that? There’s the time they tried to see if they could make people sad by adjusting the feed. (They could)

If you accept that, it’s a small step to “They benefit from having more users on their platform”. More users means more engagement, which means more ads, and advertisers pay more money for those ads. No one’s going to pay big bucks to advertise their stuff to an empty platform. Facebook’s going to have a harder time selling user data and metadata if users aren’t on there.

Now, getting one family to stop using facebook is a drop in the bucket. But every family that leaves makes it easier for the next family to leave.

I think there was an illustration in one of the Vampire books that had a malk kissing a fish.

I’d known the term, and then forgotten it, but recently was reminded of it. I was complaining about how some players just always want to be zany and wacky, instead of just playing to the premise. Like, you pitch a gritty game about hunting vampires in 1980s new york city, and they want to play a talking horse. or three kids in a trenchcoat. or a dead man’s seeing eye dog. Just stuff that could kind of work, maybe, but is going to take a lot of work and take a lot of spotlight constantly. Instead of playing, I don’t know… An investigative journalist who’s been looking into mysterious deaths, a nurse at the hospital who’s seen some shit, a business man who just can’t get promoted (maybe because the owners are vampires).

Some of this is subjective, I guess, but I feel like some players are just not on my wavelength about what fits into a theme.

I’ve heard of Bleed, but maybe in the context of a horror story. A player’s character was cursed so they couldn’t play music anymore without some unknown bad stuff happening. They were going to play anyway, since music was everything to them. The other player characters intervened, and took away their instruments. The cursed player had their character sneak back, break into the cleric’s chest, and steal their instruments back.

We were all like “Wow this is such good drama and tension!” But then the cursed player got really mad and upset at us in real life, and was like “Of course I’m upset! You wouldn’t let me play music and stole my instruments!” We were all like, “…in the game, right?”

They were like, “No! I’m really upset at you all! Don’t you feel bad when you watch a movie and bad things happen to the characters?”

We were like, “Well, sometimes, yeah, but it’s not like… the same as it happening for real.”

They calmed down eventually, but left a few sessions later in a similar blow up.

So whenever I think of bleed, i think of that player just yelling at us in real life for stuff that was happening to their character.

Those aren’t the only email providers, and using email is less harmful than using Facebook.

email exists and isn’t run by the worst people on earth

Yeah I don’t know about the down votes. I tried to be clear I was talking about a preference and personal experience, but I guess some people took offense.

The last non fiction book I read that was really interesting was “The Ghost Map”. It’s about when people figured out Cholera. That’s kind of technology adjacent.

Yeah, but YouTube isn’t as credible. And if it was, I’d still rather read something than spend twice as long watching half the information. Tastes differ

To me YouTube is an untrustworthy platform owned by one of the worse mega corps. But also I just don’t enjoy video as a medium

I dare say books still exist

The people who make decisions at Youtube clearly do not even use their own website or app and there is no way to give feedback either.

Ed Zitron, famously verbose web blog guy, wrote a post about how he thinks most of these big businesses are run by idiots that are out of touch with both the product and the users.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It’s simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.

This is only me describing my personal taste, but:

Almost all video essays and podcasts I would rather just read. It takes half the time. Include pictures, diagrams, and animations if needed. But I can read much faster and retain much better reading than listening to someone talk. Listening at double speed is faster, but can be uncomfortable.

I can imagine some value in some other niches, like you’re saying, but the amount of slop and trash out there is too high for me, and the companies selling it are the worst.

Every time I see some parasocial YouTuber making That Face I just get irritated.

Sometimes I forget people watch YouTube on purpose. Other than music videos and the rare “how do I do this thing in this game?” I just don’t use it

I feel like an alien sometimes. Reading books like some sort of lost time traveler.

Some people just aren’t a good fit. That doesn’t mean they’re a bad person, nor you’re a bad person, but sometimes you just don’t get on with someone in a particular context and that’s okay. You can still be friends or do other things together. You don’t have to do everything together to be friends.

It’s okay to let people have fun even if it seems stupid to you, or they’d have more fun doing something else. So long as they’re not hurting anyone, let it be. It’s tempting to be like “you know, there’s a whole game series about playing modern day vampires doing politics while holding onto their fading humanity” when some folks are doing that in D&D 5e, but it’s almost certainly not worth it. Many people don’t care about what you care about.

People learn in different ways. Some people really struggle with things that seem easy to you. That person who asks every week “what do I roll to attack?” or “Can I roll my armor against their sneak attack?” probably isn’t doing it to be annoying. They’re probably trying their best, even if their best is pretty bad by objective measurements like "getting the rules right’. Don’t be a jerk about it. You can gently ask them about what they think would help them keep the rules straight (one player liked little notecards, another player benefited from watching games on youtube), but you can’t just make someone learn.

Yeah I don’t like ai stuff. And I certainly don’t need AI to group my tabs. I can do that myself just fine.

I’m very much “old man yells at cloud” so I don’t really watch actual plays or consume podcasts, but the fate site has a list: https://fate-srd.com/actual-play

I can’t speak to their quality, but there’s a bunch on that list.

The game should feel different than DND. Players have a lot more control, and that kind of affects every aspect of the game. DND tends to put everything on the DM, and players can only do stuff in character. a fate player can be like “I want to spend a fate point to say the king is in fact looking for a witch to hire” or “I wanna declare a story detail: the farm is run by a family of loyalists, so I’m a loyalist they will hopefully see me as a friend”. That plus the ways to change rolls and outcomes makes for a different game. And the lack of focus on minutia like distance and spells per day.

Happy to go on about fate if you have questions!

Even when it gets it right, you have to then check it carefully. It feels like a net loss of speed most of the time. Reading and checking someone else’s code is harder than writing your own

The police are not effective at dealing with school shootings.

A note, if you pursue this: There’s fate core and fate condensed that are very similar, but have a few minor changes. Stress (similar to HP) is handled slightly differently between them. I prefer core’s method, but some people like condensed.

There’s also fate accelerated which is even lighter weight.

They’re all free on the website linked above - https://fate-srd.com/ - rules drop down has all the options