Ten pounds of personality in a five-pound bag
This Bluesky thread was really excellent.
I wear a lot of Actually Rather Expensive clothing, that I bought ten years ago, because I do try to buy and wear American…when I can.
But again: it’s expensive.
We can’t “just” move manufacturing here. There is no “just.”
This week I saw a good take on scheduling for D&D.
https://www.polygon.com/tabletop-games/543536/dnd-dungeons-dragons-scheduling-handbook-patch
After I shared it, someone else sent me this Hank Green video about combinatorics, which explains the issue really well.
Ultimately, I think that people have trouble with D&D scheduling in part because of two of the Geek Social Fallacies: #5, “Friends Do Everything Together” and #1,ย “Ostracizers Are Evil.”
But you don’t have to do everything together. Like I talk about in Nuclear Event Planning, it is okay to prioritize “I want to host this event” over “I want these specific people there.” (It’s also okay to do the reverse, but then you have to accept the high likelihood that “hosting the event” won’t happen.)
Is the Purpose Of a System What It Does?
Or is the purpose of a system what the people who designed it said they wanted it to be?
Yesterday, I went to a local board game store’s big yard sale event, and had some random conversations with people. After mistakenly trying to pick up one guy’s Mystic Vale because I thought it was still unclaimed (he was just resting his arms ๐ that box was big!), he pointed me to a game with similar mechanics, but a space theme instead of a fantasy theme.
I said “Thanks, I appreciate it, but I usually go for vibes over mechanics” and he nodded like he understood exactly what I meant.
Because here’s the thing: I do enjoy different types of game mechanics! Some more than others. In my board game group, I’m infamous for disliking trick takers, for example.
But the thing that makes me LOVE a game isn’t the mechanics. I enjoy Arcs, and will willingly play it with my friends, but I actively seek out Root games (when I have a spare full afternoon, which is, granted, not that often).
But sci fi games aren’t what fill my shelves. Cozy fantasy or nature theming is more my jam.
This feels similar to how my friend group somehow settled on only ever playing Century Golem, even though Century Spice Road is an identical game. There’s just something cooler about mining magical gemstones to power ancient guardians than there is about becoming a really good merchant. (Although I’ll always play a game or two of Jaipur!)
So. Vibes vs Mechanics. Which one are you?
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/vitamin-a-and-measles-what-the-data
This post, by Your Local Epidemiologist, makes a good point about people gravitating to nutrition and other solutions to infectious disease, rather than vaccination, because they want to feel a sense of control over their environment. It’s very difficult and scary for humans to accept the randomness inherent in the natural world; we’d rather have a way to say “I am controlling what happens to me,” and controlling what food goes into your body is a natural extension of that.
Vaccines are abstract (and still a numbers game; even 99% efficacy is still not 100% efficacy), and they don’t provide the soothing effect that “actively choosing your food every day” would provide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy
The Just World Hypothesis is comforting for that same reason of control. We want to feel like good things happen to us because we made good decisions; bad things happen to others because they made bad decisions; and bad things happen to us for reasons we could not control. Nobody wants to confront the harsh reality that sometimes, bad things can happen even to people who made all the right decisions.
Anyway, go read the YLE essay. It’s very good.
This Instagram reel highlighted a difference I haven’t been able to put into words before: Internal vs External Processing.
I know I process things by talking them out. I used to joke that I have an “external dialogue” rather than an internal monologue. But not everyone works that way.
Like the commenter said: this is one of those Differences that should be brought up in couples therapy and premarital counseling. Figuring this kind of thing out first can make solving the other problems exponentially easier.
I’ve been thinking about the Geek Social Fallacies again, and about Ostracizers Are Evil (fallacy #1).
This Reddit post summarizes it pretty well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AbuseInterrupted/s/syogLYSwkV
It’s not wrong or evil or Just As Bad As The Bullies to ask someone to leave when they are being obnoxious.
People can, and do, learn and change and grow. But they’ve gotta DO those things.
And neurodivergence isn’t really an excuse; sometimes it’s barely even an explanation. Like they say about trauma: trauma isn’t your fault, but healing is your responsibility .
I’ve had a couple young people side-eye my use of “skeet” for micro blogs posted on BlueSky.
To them I say: this feeling you have right now? I spent decades feeling that about the word “cyber.”
And now I wonder what the next unintentionally horrible word will be?
Lately, I’ve felt very weird asking people how they are doing. Everything is terrible and my. County is one failed court injunction away from breadlines.
So instead of “How are you doing,” I’ve started asking people if they’ve drunk water recently, as a way of expressing that I care about them and want to make sure they’re taking care of themselves too.
And I suddenly realized that I just reinvented the Chinese greeting ๅ้ฅญไบๅ๏ผ”have you eaten (rice)?” (Chi fan le ma, pronounced roughly as “chur FAHN luh muh”.)
So. ๅๆฐดไบๅ๏ผ Have you drunk water? (“Heuh shway luh muh”.)
Not even gonna try to translate “don’t shrimp,” though.
I heard this quote from E.L Doctorow for the first time this week:
โYou can only see as far as your headlights shine, but you can make the whole trip that way.โ
Emilybook 