Musk seems like the kind of D&D player who would

• Build a horrible character (frankly impressive in 5e, which is pretty simple in terms of choices to make at the start). Like, a bard with 8 charisma, or a rogue with no dex
• Or, pay someone else to build their character, and then not know how to play it.
• And/or induce the other players to murder him (in the game)

Then you’re a fool, but I hope if it came down to it you wouldn’t go peacefully to a death camp. Maybe it’s too much to hope that you’d step up for your neighbors.

It was a hypothetical scenario to demonstrate cases where violence is appropriate.

You wrote:

Advocating for violence, regardless of reason, is sick.

In other words, there is no reason whatsoever, in your mind, where violence is appropriate. I gave an argument where violence would be appropriate. Do you disagree? Stay on topic.

Clearly false.

A man is threatening to shoot everyone inside a school. Are you not going to advocate force be used to stop him?

A far right group has risen to power in a nation. They are moving people into extermination camps. Are you not okay with fighting back?

Ten people are stranded on an island. One man has all the food and water, enough so everyone can survive until help arrives. He won’t share. Should the other 9 die of starvation, or take the supplies by force to share them more equally?

Defending the violent is also advocating for violence. It’s just against many powerless people, and more indirect.

There are people who are responsible for rendering our only world uninhabitable. By refusing to even entertain the idea that they could be stopped by force, you are advocating for continued, global violence. It’s less personal than a CEO being shot in the street, but it is violence nonetheless.

It was kind of wild going from D&D to games that don’t have tons of HP.

Players make different choices when they have a maximum of 7 health, and a random mook with a baseball bat hits for minimum 2, maximum “well if the dice keep exploding…”

Among other problems, people knowingly spread falsehoods because they feel truthy.

The problem is people. We’re all emotional but some people are just full on fact free gut feel almost all of the time.

Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

You can do transactions.

There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.

I use pycharm at work for most things. Work paid for it. It has some nice stuff i like. I’m sure other editors do all of this, too, but nothing’s been causing me enough pain to switch

• Database integration. Little side panel shows me the tables, and I can do queries, view table structure, etc, right here
• Find usages/declaration is pretty good. Goes into library code, too.
• The autocomplete is pretty good. I think they have newfangled AI options now, but the traditional introspection autocomplete has been doing it for me.
• Can use the python interpreter inside the docker container
• The refactor functions are pretty good. Rename, move, etc
• Naive search is pretty good. Can limit it to folders, do regex, filter by file name, etc

It does have multiple cursors but I’ve rarely needed that.

I use sublime for quick note taking. Mostly I like that it has syntax highlighting, and it doesn’t require me to explicitly save a tab for it to stay open

There are some people who want to be wealthy to the tune of flaunting it, making other people figuratively or literally bow down to them. Those people should not be allowed to have power.

If I was somehow a billionaire, I like to think I’d be spending my money on socially useful stuff. More libraries. More infrastructure. Housing. Can an ultra rich person essentially run public housing and transit, at least on a city-wide scale? Probably. but the kind of person who gets to be ultra rich is probably an asshole.

I kinda like this idea that the players will be so responsible and active over their own entertainment that they’ll pick something to actively do to make something happen

This is the dream.

Sometimes I get players that have ideas, but then they’re like “oh that sounds too dangerous, nevermind”, and I’m like “it’s not going to be much of a game if we don’t take any risks”

It’s probably partly my fault for making the dangers clear to the players. I wanted them to have an understanding of the risks and factors!

Like one time, the players were told another faction would only help them with their problem if they dealt with a vampire that was in the local cemetery, and his little cult. This was a game of Mage, where even starting tier characters have a lot of strong options. One of the players just was like “you’re asking us to punch Cthulhu in the face! I don’t understand what you want us to do!”

I was like … there are so many options. Your character can literally control flame, a major weakness of vampires. You also have a strong alliance with a paramilitary group. You can go during the day. You have 3 other party members. One of them can open portals. Like, to places where it’s daytime. Trust me, you can win a 4 v 1 fight. Maybe deal with his cult first if you don’t want civilian casualties. Or maybe talk to him and see if you can negotiate.

But she just wanted to spin her wheels and complain. Worst player I’ve ever had, honestly.

It’s really frustrating how many things are bad because some assholes are making money off of it. Saint Luigi, please bless up in these trying times.

This is a revelation I think more people are going to need to realize. There’s no referee coming. The rules aren’t magic. Ultimately, the only things that matter are physics and might. If enough people just decided fuck it, all the multimillonaires gotta die, no cosmic force is going to call a timeout.

I usually just kept a list of what the various factions are up to. If the players were like “ok let’s go see if we can convince Priscilla to smuggle the uranium with her drug stuff” I have a rough idea of what she’s up to and if she’d help, or help at what cost.

I want to play again with a group that comes up with reasonable plans that play to their competencies.

I think a lot about how in a modern day magic game, the players wanted to contact another (NPC) group. They learned the NPCs were like double warded against magic, but spent a lot of time trying to punch through the wards to teleport to them. After two expensive, failed, attempts I was like “do you want a clue?”. They were like yes. I was like “if you just want to talk to them, why don’t you try calling them on the phone?”

I want to play again with a group that comes up with reasonable plans that play to their competencies.

I think a lot about how in a modern day magic game, the players wanted to contact another (NPC) group. They learned the NPCs were like double warded against magic, but spent a lot of time trying to punch through the wards to teleport to them. After two expensive, failed, attempts I was like “do you want a clue?”. They were like yes. I was like “if you just want to talk to them, why don’t you try calling them on the phone?”

The original Diablo I remember being more thoughtful and slower paced. I liked it. Diablo3 turned into just a brainless light show without much tactics. Less rewarding.

…what? With the exception of mage hand legerdemain, you’re typically very close to locks you’re picking. If it made an anti-magic field like 6" from the ring, that would be perfectly fine for picking the lock. Ring is on hand, lockpicks are in hand, magic lock is disabled.

if the ring permanently ends magical effects that enter its area of effect, that’s unusual and probably has a bunch of unexpected uses.

It it merely suppresses magical effects in its area, I guess the projectiles would briefly return to full size when in the anti-magic field, and return to small size afterwards? Doesn’t seem very effective unless you like point blank someone.

The first one had a mode that made it just a turn based game, if I recall. Only way I could actually beat it