• 92 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I really enjoy the flashback mechanic from Blades in the Dark. It’s a nice narrative mechanism that makes the player write a bit more of the story.

    Aside from that, I’ve been playing Cyberpunk RED. It’d be fun to see the Interlock system in fantasy. I enjoy the focus on skills rather than levels - I could see some fun crunch around skills in different schools of magic and combining them for spells.





  • It’s hard not to be jaded. In the past few decades it seemed like we might be able to make progress on climate change. But now we’ve fallen into a weird right wing rut, where people seem to vote squarely against their own best interests.

    I dunno. I think everyone was implicitly on board with neoliberalism for a couple of decades, and now they find themselves poorer and lower status than before. So they blame the trappings of big-L liberal parties, scream that they want woke to end, and shoot themselves in the foot.

    But yeah. I gotta hope!




  • The changes necessary to mitigate acid rain and the ozone hole didn’t threaten existing oligopolies.

    Acid rain was “easy” to solve by shipping production overseas (which benefits the rich, since production costs go down), slapping scrubbers onto emitters (whose costs could be passed on to consumers via fees or tax breaks), or changing the formulation of stuff getting burned. The rich stayed rich without changing their business model.

    AFAIU, CFCs (and other ozone depleting compounds) had analogs that were relatively easy to use without changing processes. Once again, no yachts were harmed in the making of that solution.

    Addressing climate change means we have to change how we do everything: transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing. Even band-aid solutions like EVs and renewable power require minor change and are getting a shit tonne of pushback. Doing the hard work necessary to keep our climate stable (and avoiding possible extinction) would invalidate a bunch of business models.

    Hence the resistance.



  • Holy fuck. I’d call this one of the largest issues of our time - society is further splitting into haves and have-nots. It drives a bunch of other problems, not least of which is the stark swing to the right of our youth.

    (And yeah, climate change is a huge fucking deal, but if we have a growing oligarch class, and an angry proletariat, we aren’t going to get real movement on it)

    Those in the bottom 20 per cent of the income distribution saw the weakest growth in disposable income in the first quarter at 3.2 per cent compared with a year ago as their average wages edged down 0.7 per cent.

    The lowest income households also saw the largest drop in net investment income as their investment earnings fell 35.3 per cent, while net transfers received, including increased government support measures, rose 31.2 per cent.

    The average disposable income for those in the top 20 per cent of the income distribution increased at the fastest pace of any income group in the first quarter of 2025 as they benefited from a 7.7 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.

    Statistics Canada said the wealth gap also increased as the top 20 per cent of the wealth distribution accounted for 64.7 per cent of Canada’s total net worth in the first quarter, averaging $3.3 million per household.

    The bottom 40 per cent of the wealth distribution accounted for 3.3 per cent of net worth, averaging $85,700 per household.


  • If I was an independently wealthy aristocrat doing a grand tour by myself, then I would be all over this.

    As a wage slave parent with limited time off, it is less attractive.

    I remember being trapped on Canada’s slow trains and buses as a kid - it was incredibly boring. Staring out the window works for a while, but without other kids, regular breaks, or any kind of fun entertainment it felt like a punishment. When I get a chance to travel with my kids, I’d prefer that they don’t have that experience.

    Having said that, a real transit network that got people around quickly, cheaply, and without producing too many GHGs would be vastly preferable to our shitty patchwork of trains and buses.