At the risk of being extremely Old Basic Roleplaying Guy,
Mage: The Ascension still feels like a high water mark to me in terms of allowing players to invent an entire metaphysics to justify their personal power fantasy.

Putting their time and energy into hurting people for no better reason than they're unable to find happiness some other way.

In 2013 a trans woman was persecuted by British press, hounded until she took her own life, and rather than affect change in how press covered trans people, they have since used it as a blueprint to try and hurt as many people as possible. This is what's being done: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_o...

The aim of the organised transphobic movement is to mandate trans people out of existence, they won't be happy until their targets are dead, it's a movement motivated by genocidal mania, and the cruel, vindictive, hateful bigotry extends from there.

I've always wished the rumours about The Wire's "lost season" about the state level corruption had been true, all the same. It would have ruined what they accomplished, but at the same time it would have been so interesting to see what they'd have dug up.

Something that's starting to crystallize for me, at least as far as the next question I want to answer, is whether the line that's constantly put forward about the "productivity gap" between Canada and the USA is largely tied to this same effort.

Me my whole life: Nothing is black and white. You have to consider nuance

Now: We face a heinous, remorseless evil

Sorry that happened to you. I truly hate that that is the vibe at so many shops. My high school crush sent me her teenage comic collection a while back and I thought the about how rare it was in the 90s to know a cool girl who was into the medium. No mystery why.

I feel like some folks have never thought about an idea for longer than it takes to write down the words. If I let myself ponder a WIP when I'm lying in my bed, I'm going to be hours late getting to sleep that night.

I was for many years in the habit of visiting my LCBS once every month or two and grabbing issues of every interesting indie I saw. That's become prohibitive as I've gotten older and poorer, but I did find a lot of good work that way.

Yeah, I guess the natural consequence is migrating out of the orbit of those companies towards independent creators. Which is fine! Good, even! It's just a shame that so much of the money still orbits those two behemoths rather than the good work elsewhere.

I guess if I were EIC for one of these companies I'd be thinking really strongly about a living world in which people disappear into a normal life and new people appear in their stead rather than just bringing back the same ol same ol.

Probably a good way to lose all the money in the world?

I agree, in principle. But I think the end state of that is the endless rebooting of the same stories and characters, which, while fertile ground for some creators, ultimately puts hard limits on how long you can keep doing what you're doing.

Once they gave Spiderman a kid and then noped out of that storyline, I think I realized that I didn't want to be reading things that are actively afraid of maturing along with the reader.

Still thinking about this absolutely stunning piece of fiction. It's amazing how it can open with such a hard, cold Alpha Male type of setup and end up with just the most emotionally devastating human sympathy.

Had this happen with Amazon Prime not long ago. I had to cancel something like 3 separate times before it "took". Maddening. A class action in the making.

My theory is that they want us all to go back and realize that the old movies were never actually all that good. Then we don't give them quite as much guff when the new movies aren't either.

At least, that's been my arc with it all.

Yepppp. The big two in particular have destroyed themselves in service to continually reiterating the same stories and characters. If you have to stay still, you're never going to get anywhere.

This makes me wonder if there's any money in manufacturing dragon towers.

There's a part of me that thinks Americans should hypertax the rich specifically so they will leave. So many of the USA's ills seem self-evidently linked to too many rich people using their money in ways that harm most of their fellow citizens.

So smart. So handsome. So terribly awful.

And yet they all had their moments in history. So, again: Are LLMs as they currently exist, in your mind, highly useful and valuable technologies that will be replaced eventually? I did not believe that was the point being made by the person I was responding to, and I still don't.

Sorry, I wasn't continuing the thought I started with. I was noting that even if it did work out, it would probably get stopped at some point by electoral pressure.

I mean, $12 to pay for #D2D for the year doesn't sound like much, right?

But many authors only sell books during promos when they price their book at $.99. Thus they get ~$0.35 cents a sale.

Thus they have to sell ~34 books to get up to 0. Many authors won't sell 34 #books all year.

💙📚 #indie

The point is that these materials are awesome but they also suck? Is that how you feel about AI? I would be very surprised if the OP felt that way about it, but feel free to correct me on that.

Timeline and mindset cleanse:

My Hunting Billionaires for Sport novel WIP continues to evolve, and I'm exploring a fantasy-inflected version of the concept. New version: Immortal elves discover the secret to using magic without losing their immortality, and people are not super-fond of the idea.

I actually made it a point not to ask for it, bud. You gave it in the most dickish way possible anyway. Be better.

The resume re-optimization minigame is a doozy.

I think Europe in general has done better on this? But I'm acutely aware of how delicate progress is in this case.

Also, not to be too doomerist about it, but Canada's experience with this kind of thing is that people just vote out the folks who are enacting the heavy taxation. Carbon taxes were the economic policy of choice for decades, until they actually came into conflict with people's lives.