I like Chris Hayes' take as clipped in this video 43 minutes in:

The way that so many prominent voices have focused so exclusively on colleges feels honestly a bit decadent to me. Like we're doing a paper doll version of conflict because the actual reality of what's happening in Gaza is so horrific, unceasing, and high-stakes, it's more enjoyable to argue about what college kids are doing than to confront the human misery and destruction that's happening in the actual conflict that is, of course, the source of these protests. What seems to be most worth debating isn't campus speech but whether the US government should contine to fund and support an Israeli war in Gaza that has pushed more than a million people to the brink of famine. A war that has damaged half of the buildings in Gaza. A war that has failed to bring home most of the hostages held by Hamas, that has in fact lead to the death of some those hostages.

This is a good video, thanks.
I'm not all onboard with the conclusions: "YouTube & TikTok good" (I believe they're overall bad. Fund Peertube.) and "Socialist sentiment is growing" (I believe the overton window has been slipping & skipping to the right for decades now.)

Climate change has the same "going through it in real life" trait as Pandemic has.

@boardgames

Now that the concept has caught on so widely, I've often wished @pluralistic@mamot.fr had gone with a less scatological term. But maybe that is part of the reason it caught on 🤷🏻‍♀️

@technology@lemmy.world

That's rich when the Google Play store is full of malware while F-Droid is full of gems.

@technology

Even outside of home if someone is curious I sometimes just say a scene and ask what they'd do or where they'd go 🤷🏻‍♀️

You're at the edge of a misty, dewey forest at the break of dawn. In front of you is a castle, and there's the forest behind you all glittering from dewdrops on the cobwebs. The nearest village is six miles away; you could get there in two hours or so. There's a well outside the castle a couple of hundred feet to the left of the entrance, which is right in front of you. Whaddayado?

It wouldn't be as blorby as I prefer but it'd be an intro to the main gameplay loop.

Give everyone a paper list of the games on offer.

Everyone anonymously scores each game from zero to five stars, zero means don't wanna play today and five means really wanna play today.

It's OK to mark a bunch of zeroes and just one five, it's OK to give all kinds of scores, it's OK to have several fives or several threes or whatever. It works anyway.

Then gather up these ballots. For each game, count up the stars. For the two games with most total stars, look at all the ballots again but now instead of looking at the number of stars, count the amount of ballots where one of the two games has strictly more stars than the other.

For example let's say Ticket to Ride has 30 stars, Carcassonne has 25, Uno has 24, Caylus has 18, and Dixit has 5. The two finalists are Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. And then let's say there are three ballots where Carcassone has more stars than TtR, one ballot where TtR has more stars than Carcassonne, and four where they are tied. Carcassonne won.

We used a similar program for Windows 3.11, "doublestack" or something. It did work. It did make it a lot slower. We used it on one of the drives.

One stereotype to avoid (or lean into, lampshade, or subvert) is that villainous women are manipulative, seductive, using guile, deception, charm, enchantment and so on. Your basic Poison Ivy template. Even Catwoman is sometimes depicted that way (like in @neilhimself's "Whatever happened to the Caped Crusader", albeit in a reference to "The Death of Robin Hood").

I'm personally kinda a fan of the trope and Ivy is my fave Batman-verse character but speaking to a lot of other women I know it's something many are sick to death of. Especially when that seems to be the only kind of villainous woman. (Just like how chainmail bikinis became less of a problem when it was just one of many styles and not the only option.)

I see that a lot of other examples in the thread immediately went for that trope and I don't blame 'em—only goes to show how pervasive it is and how refreshing some other approaches would be.

"Trump world" legal representation is a problem. They'll pressure you into lying for them.

That red one squeezed into the misc row looks painful 🤕

Yes, I used to have the same problem. It used to feel like it was full of invisible and unwritten rules that all contradicted each other. Getting bullied if cards are too strong or too weak.

Casual EDH, that is: as you point out, competitive EDH doesn't have the same problem.

What I finally realized was that I shouldn't approach it as a game. I should approach EDH deckbuilding like a crossword maker approaches making a crossword:

To try to create something that is a challenge but beatable.

It's easy to create an unsolvable crossword. Just a bunch of white noise in a grid. But that's just no fun to anyone. A good crossbow maker wants the crossword solver to have fun and to enjoy the puzzle, to tease them a bit but keep it realistic and grounded.

Now, a game of EDH isn't a puzzle, but it's an experience.

I started out making my first EDH deck super weak (it's built around Tolarian Serpent) and have gradually been adding powerful cards or interactive cards or cards where I just like the art or the experience or the memory of when I first opened the card. I have a foil Rethink even though there are a lot better stack interaction cards, but it was just the first foil I ever opened so playing it makes me happy. The deck is still weaker than many of precons are out of the box so I still have a ways to go with it but that can be a gradual process of tweaking and modding.

I hope this helps.

The copyright argument is a bad argument against AI art. But there are also good arguments against it.