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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Iunnrais@lemm.eeto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    26 days ago

    Accept nothing they offer you without cause. But if you do them a kindness, without thought of recompense, and they offer a gift in return regardless, then it is generally safe and likely beneficial. Generally— exceptions do apply, particularly in the case of user error or suddenly getting really greedy with the gift.

    Errr… this applies to the fae, but not customers, I guess. Perhaps the analogy is not perfect then.




  • Narcissism is a spectrum. At the one end, you have people with low self esteem who look to getting reactions from others to feel better about themselves. At the other end, you have people with full on disassociation, that is, a lack of any sense of “self” at all, except from the reactions they get from others. It’s pretty clear Trump is pretty close to the pathological dissociative side of the spectrum.

    The reactions narcissists get from others is called “supply”, and each narcissist looks for a specific flavor of supply that fills the void in their life, whether that’s a mild feeling of inadequacy or full fledged lack of self. Some supply is being loved. Some supply is being seen as a villain. Some supply is just being the center of attention. For Trump? It’s pretty clear that his supply is being seen as “successful”.

    Narcissistic supply is an addictive drug to narcissists. It gives an instant high— a high of feeling “normal”— and also has instant lows. The moment supply is cut off, the narcissist’s mental dismay returns. Supply also has a problem of levels. A bigger dose of supply feels great, but it ALSO makes any additional supply that isn’t as strong as that one time feel like nothing.

    Narcissists are junkies. They need their hit of supply, and will do literally anything to get it. And to get it as big as they’ve ever had it before.

    While president, Trump got the biggest hit of supply the world has ever seen. Losing the presidency has lost him that supply… even the attention the news still gives him today isn’t anything like the supply of having the eyes of the entire world on him all the time.

    As a junkie, he will do anything to get supply back. He would literally kill to do so. It might yet come to that.




  • Iunnrais@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlNWBTCW
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    8 months ago

    Rich people have always had the freedom to be who they are. You think wealthy gay men were beaten up in back alleys? Maybe they couldn’t announce it to the world but they pretty much got to live their lives in peace. When you don’t have to work to survive and when the world bends to your will it’s amazing how culture doesn’t seem to effect you so harshly anymore.

    It’s not that culture isn’t important. It’s that the ability to live in peace for who you are tends to come automatically when you have your living taken care of.


  • Hey, I’m pretty darn leftist (democratic socialist, not tankie) and pretty opposed to the current state of affairs regarding CEOs, so I feel this is targeted at me… and yet totally misrepresents the position.

    CEOs are not useless. CEOs absolutely set the “tone at the top” and create the entire culture for a company. At the same time, CEOs do not work 400 times harder than the average worker, yet that is what they are paid. CEOs are also capable of doing great abuse to those beneath them, and have next to zero accountability for it. CEOs are kings in their little fiefdoms, and I say down with all monarchy. Note that “down with kings” does not mean “down with leaders”, nor does it say or even imply that kings aren’t leaders, or that leadership is useless to have.


  • Have you heard of Onsen Tamago (also known as Hot Springs Eggs)? They’re kinda like poached eggs… but not exactly, and they’re much easier. It makes a custard-like yolk with a jello-like white, and they’re delicious dropped into soups, put onto rice or pasta, or just eaten straight, maybe with a sauce.

    I’ve become quite attached to the things, and sous vide is actually the best way to make them. The link I used above says 65 degrees C, but I find 63 works a little better for my personal tastes (or maybe my sous vide thermometer is running a little hotter than it displays). Put the eggs, still in the shell, straight in the cold water (no bag needed), use the sous vide to bring the water (and egg) up to temperature, and you’re pretty much done. You can futz with the exact consistency of the end result by leaving it in at temperature a little longer, but you shouldn’t need much more.




  • If you want to make them think a little differently, try a blackjack-esq dc. Set a RANGE they have to hit with their collective skill checks (that add together). If they roll below the range, or above it, either way the control doesn’t quite work— maybe a different consequence for too low or too high. Let them also choose whether to increase the sum or decrease it with their skill check, in the case of overshooting.

    And make a variety of skills they can use to control the godling, so that they can strategically try to use the most appropriate bonus to get them where they need. Maybe using certain skills requires doing something on the battlefield too, like standing in a certain spot relative to the godling or some such. Or perhaps doing that sort of tactical movement can let you manipulate the roll or take 10.

    That’ll get them thinking different! But if you make it fiddly like this you’ll need to make the payoff for successful control powerful enough to make it worth it.


  • In the end, using your idea will only work if you really know your players. With an arbitrary random group, I figure the result would be either 100% success rate (they all agree with each other and coordinate perfectly) or a close to 0% success rate (they rarely cooperate). Neither situation is what you want.

    Luckily, when you want a certain percentage of success, that’s exactly what dice are for! Now, my group tends to be one of those “cooperators” so I’d tend to want to balance it assuming the party will always agree on what they want the godling to do. Then, maybe use a combination of religion, arcana, and diplomacy checks across the party to determine whether their characters are able to successfully pull off coordinating themselves to control the nigh-uncontrollable thing. I’d still use the “they have to agree on the action it will take” thing but then use the dice to add uncertainty.

    If, on the other hand, you expect a lot less agreement amongst your players, you can still use dice, but this time, make the skill check determine whose commands get followed, with close results or consistently low results across the whole party leading to no one’s commands being obeyed and it doing something random and chaotic instead.

    In the case of a cooperative party, we’re using dice to lower the success rate. In the bickering party, we’re using dice to increase the success rate. But in both cases, we have in mind a certain target success rate, and it is dice that will get us there.



  • Let’s say they were organizing using telephones instead. Would you want the telephone providers to proactively listen in on their conversations and cut them off based on content? No. You get the police or FBI to investigate and hunt down the people, possibly with warrants obtaining information from the telephone companies, and target the people doing the crimes.

    I feel it should be exactly the same with ISPs. The ISP shouldn’t be doing the policing, the police should be doing the policing. The ISP’s job should be passing bits from MAC address A to MAC address B, nothing more.





  • Nope, no rephrasing. That’s literally what the double jeopardy rule is about. The government gets a monopoly on violence, and we expect them to use that monopoly only within certain limits. Without those limits you get authoritarian dictatorships and really scary stuff such as found in the Catholic/Protestant wars in England’s history.

    An example of how rephrasing is not allowed:

    A number of years back, there was some outrage over a case where a rapist got off “on a technicality” that was headlined in various places as “the judge ruled it wasn’t rape because the severely mentally disabled victim could have objected”. The real issue was that the prosecutor decided, as a strategy to get more jail time for the guy, that they would charge him under a law against raping an unconscious person, but the truth was that the victim was not unconscious. The government is only allowed one shot at trying you for a crime though. If the prosecutor applies the wrong law, they don’t get a do over. The guy absolutely was a disgusting rapist, but he didn’t rape an unconscious person in this instance, and so he gets off scot free.

    It’s vitally important that a prosecutor applies exactly the right words, because they are only allowed one shot. If a not-guilty verdict comes back for any reason, including for technicalities, that’s it. Not guilty (for that crime) forever.