They are not, Benj. They are entirely serious.

Oh fuck I forgot my minimum of four job applications!

Added bonus: getting a new job doesn't give me the full complement of job points for the month.

The bad news is, of course, Centrelink.

"YOU MUST TELL US WHEN YOU HAVE A NEW JOB!"

Sure, that's fair and reasonable.

"START DATE CAN'T BE A FUTURE DATE!"

Oh for the sake of fucking fucks...

The good news, I have a new job, starting next week. Community sector.

Pretty great.

Happenstance and laziness led to today being a games/pizza/Greek mythology day with the junior offspring.

Pretty good day.

I played my first run as a high-wis, kindness-paralysed fuck-up; my second will be the demented god-king route.

My third, the blunt nationalist. Then, the freemarket missionary.

All seem viable options, but the first one seemed most "canon".

The meditations on democracy throughout are done with a light, comic but deft, thoughtful hand.

And the finale was perfect.

It is definitely a game where failed dice rolls are interesting, which a lot of games claim but few deliver.

...which is good, because I failed like my first twenty rolls.

The politics doesn't have the depth or weirdness of DE, but I attribute that to the broader brush of the fantasy setting. Not a bug, as such.

EE is a more comic game, pairing the absurdity of D&D with the absurdity of real world politics.

Really enjoyed Esoteric Ebb - "What if Disco Elysium but D&D?" is weird but gosh they've pulled it off.

Turns out what I really want from my games is a stat that goes up when I advocate socialism.

Che sera sera.

"...was just a little girl I asked my mother, what would I be?"

I assume.

I haven't seen the films* but this seems like valuable data.

*I like meta storytelling a whole lot but am not a fan of the horror genre.

Might have been "Pasta of Muppets" but to be fair I didn't check.

"What's the band called?"
"'Pastor of muppets.'"

#rpgquotes

Australia’s teen social media ban is a flop. But there’s no joy in ‘I told you so’ | Samantha Floreani Around seven in 10 children remain on major platforms. Who could possibly have predicted that this wasn’t going to work? Well, lots of people

The lack of process here was genuinely baffling. Like, if everyone who knows *anything* about the subject says this is dumb, what are you proving by doing it anyway?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

<3

Nope.

Struggling to see where the mutuality is, though.

The people who made it the way it is. I'd wish it on them.

Centrelink's feedback page has the most optimistic link I've ever seen: "Submit a compliment."

Talking about it is one of the ways I cope - but I also think people need to see and understand my experience.

I want to work. And I think this is an expression of that.

I'm a professional with decades of useful experience. But I'm also disabled, fatigued and massively stressed. Without social supports - my friends - I have no doubt this would kill me, or at least break me and prevent me from ever doing useful work again.

Such a waste. I want to work.

But the "support" systems are purpose-built to amplify those difficulties without providing any real assistance to finding work. The baseline assumption is that you're not trying hard enough - you're out of work because you're lazy and useless.

I want to work. I really want to work.

I'm talking about my unemployment experience because it's thoroughly weird and isolating, and utterly invisible if you're not going through it.

Unemployment is hard, and it's hard for a whole bunch of social and psychological and systemic reasons.

I want to work. I really want to work.

I tell a lie: I received the letter today, for being cut off on Monday, for a missed report a fortnight ago.

Also, the compliance systems between Centrelink and Workforce Australia are not linked, despite using identical language, shared data and a shared login.

Yesterday, I learned that Centrelink will cut your benefit without telling you why, for real or imagined "failure to comply".

And that fixing it earns you a stern lecture about meeting your mutual obligations.

Today I have that classic mygov experience: "You have an urgent message in your mygov inbox" plus "You cannot log on due to technical difficulties."

I've lost several hours this week to the systems that are supposed to support me.