BalderSion

joined 1 month ago
[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Without a purity test how can I tell which members of the tribe are loyal and which might betray me?

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 2 points 2 days ago

For me this changes all the time as I invest in developing something, and inevitably something catches my attention. I'm pretty invested in the Open D6 system, so I'm always riffing on this system.

Lately I've been penciling out a game where a party is rewarded with the Charter to the king's casino. I started with the idea of inverting Ocean's 11, since every party ever wants to rob a casino as soon as they learn there is a casino. So, the idea is the party has control of a casino and now they have to deal with organized crime, card counters and sharps, rivals, labor disputes, royal demands, and the occasional party that thinks they've got a surefire plan for an epic heist.

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

From age 6 until 18, and age 33 to 45 I've line dried clothes, three seasons a year. I can recall one time a bird pooped on a bed sheet.

Do you live below a pigeon roost or something?

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I grew up line drying my clothes, and when I bought I house the first improvement we made was installing a clothes line.

If you find clothes and towels stiff after line drying, but there are options to address that issue.

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 1 points 4 days ago

The reason is apparent in history. Party leadership lived through Nixon and Reagan's punishing wins over a liberal leaning Democratic party. Labor support went lukewarm, and their funding stream dwindled. The left absolutely utterly to fill the gap. Clinton ran and won as a centrist, and just as important his cohort had a plan to fund the party. The ranks of party leadership were filled with this cohort, and the left hasn't done the work to take back party control.

I quite like Sanders, but his vision of a groundswell of public support fails to account for the importance of campaign spending in election outcomes. It's not enough for a few charismatic candidates to win, a party needs to win to effect change, particularly in a federal system. That reality, in my opinion, is why the left is still shut out of party control.

All this too say, the party should stand as an anti-oligarchy party, but the party needs a cohesive vision of what what that means.

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 4 points 5 days ago

I'm reminded of the story of Garg and Moonslicer, and I wish more publishers would lean in to this approach to good and evil. A purely lore approach would be enough to frame the conflict around, some races are naturally social creatures, and some races are naturally antisocial. Both have hierarches, but not all races have the same natural concepts of fairness and justice. Any individual can embrace either world view or a mix, but one comes more naturally to each race. Even if humanity is naturally a good race (debatable, but whatever), members can obviously deviate significantly.

Ultimately it doesn't mater what race the slavers are, I'm not going to worry about the ethics of self-defensing a party of slavers to death as PC or GM.

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 1 points 6 days ago

Gilbert himself didn't seem sure he had a complete definition, just a critical piece of it. As a psychologist he would have understood sociopathy well, among other psychological maladies. He seems to be making a distinction here, but that is my reading of him. If he could have provided a diagnosis that underpinned becoming a Nazi it would have been a bombshell, but they all seemed rather normal under a battery of tests. Instead of a specific diagnosis, the Banality of Evil became the commonly cited mechanism behind the Nazi's abhorrent acts. Weak men following vile leaders.

After thinking about Gilbert's quote I have come to conclude a lack of empathy is a necessary, if not sufficient condition for evil. There may be more to it, but this piece is already enough to oppose evil, and challenging on its own.

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 55 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

Captain G.M. Gilbert

The army psychologist assigned to interview the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A list of options has been previously catalogued.

I'll grant you it's easier to daydream about violence.

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Latvia is very excited about Flow's success. It's all over Latvians social media. Even the military official accounts are posting their congratulations.

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor's yards. I'm the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.

A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.

[–] BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan 5 points 1 week ago

I realized part way through the title works on a few levels. It was refreshing to realize this wasn't remotely following the 3-act narrative structure and I had no idea what was happening next.

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