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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I understand from your comment that you’ve read too many sci-fi books to understand what a massive resource sink that would be with negligible benefit. It’s pretty basic physics.

    We’ve already got cheap transportation, look how that’s turning out for the planet. But I’m sure burning God knows how much energy to launch more junk into space will save the world.

    We’re already approaching a critical mass of private equity space trash in orbit, what’s a few more lowest-bidder megastructures? At least the ultra rich will get their life rafts while we burn.


  • Because the world has actual things in it like people, wildlife, culture and history. Space has none of those things. Unless you’re there working as a scientist to study things that can’t be studied on earth, it’s pointless.

    As of now it’s a glorified roller coaster. At its best private space travel could be Disneyland in space. At worst it’s just rich people paying to be carried up mount everest for clout but with exponentially more resources wasted.




  • My skim of the srd gave the impression of a crunchy exterior with a gooey center (which definitely is good for some tables). Hell, the first page has a header for “rulings over rules”! That phrase was a common GM pejorative for 5e; used as justification to offload balance from the system to the players. The core systems seem strong but with lots of asterisks to keep them backseat to player agency.

    Loose turn structure, PC death only with player consent, GMs generally don’t get to make a move unless it’s explicitly available, spending meta-currencies to legally fudge dice rolls, etc… It seems like most of it was designed for players to have a strong control over narrative with lots of pressure valves to reduce the impact of unlucky dice. I like the Hope/Stress system, but Fear seems like it only exists to give the GM permission to do normal GM things.

    At any rate I’ll be interested to see it in practice. It seems like the system Critical Role always needed, they’ll probably be able to do some cooler narratives without sanding down 5e’s rough edges.



  • As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life?

    Off the top of my head: basic biology so I’m not dumb enough to be antivax. History subjects that require more than elementary maturity so maybe we can avoid another Holocaust. Enough physics, ecology and chemistry that I can comprehend how climate change is happening. How basic statistics work so I’m not completely lost when someone throws around misleading data.

    None of that is automatic from a 4th grade education and is crucial to be a functioning citizen. Learning to take unquestioned GPT answers is not a substitute for actually learning any of those.

    You either went to a painfully bad pipeline of schools or were too dumb to recognize the important parts.



  • The problem is offloading critical thinking to a blackbox of questionably motivated design. Did you use it to solve problems or did you use it to find a sufficient approximation of a solution? If you can’t deduce why the given solution works then it is literally unknowable if your problem is solved, you’re just putting faith in an algorithm.

    There are also political reasons we’ll never get luxury gay space communism from it. General Ai is the wet dream of every authoritarian: an unverifiable, omnipresent, first line source of truth that will shift the narrative to whatever you need.

    The brain is a muscle and critical thinking is trained through practice; not thinking will never be a shortcut for thinking.