Coded and Union X were both mobile games. They were later adapted for other systems, but they were only originally intended to be available on mobile.

And then there’s Kingdom Hearts, which hides critical “you’ll have no idea what’s going on in later games if you skip this” plot behind two different mobile games.

Reminds me of when I ended up playing a changeling. Five players plus the DM; two players were transgender, and one was non-binary. We were going around the table introducing our characters. They had all finished, and I was last. Notably, when I introduced my character, I didn’t bother saying their pronouns. One of the other players asked, and I just deadpanned “Changeling…”

The collective lightbulb moment was like that one scene in 22 Jump Street. All three of them took a beat, then immediately crashed out when they realized the straight cis dude was the one playing a changeling, and that they hadn’t thought of it first.

Yeah, Warehouse 13 falls squarely in the peak of SyFy Channel’s “this is super campy but it’s fun” era when they were trying to rebrand. Super low budget special effects, bad CGI, etc… If you end up liking it, you may also enjoy Sanctuary, which is a sort of spin on the X-Men concept. It’s from that same era. Warehouse 13 is basically “magic item of the week” while Sanctuary is more “monster of the week”.

I’ve run a game like that, and it worked well. The in-game lore was that everyone was part of a startup mercenary guild, and the adventure of the week was basically whichever characters had accepted that particular job posting. Nine players total, but we never had more than five at the table at the same time. It helped hand-wave away a lot of the “why is only half of the party here” stuff, because we could just say they were on other jobs, working on administrative stuff for the guild, or doing their own personal stuff.

Then the larger plot was largely focused on the intra-city politics that go into starting a new guild. All of the “you need to curry favor with a local powerful figure, because your guild needs something from them” type of stuff. The guild had taken out a rather large loan to get off the ground, so there was always some “enforcers will start breaking things if you stop making money” threat to keep the players focused.

And the individual players didn’t feel a ton of pressure to show up every week, which meant they were actually there because they wanted to be there.

Similarly, sapphires and rubies are the same mineral, just with different impurities that change the color of the gem.

Yeah, there’s a lot of snake oil in the audio world.

You’re spending five thousand dollars on solid gold cables that were soldered by blind monks then braided by trained gerbils, in an attempt to get the highest fidelity possible. Meanwhile, the album was recorded using the cheapest 10¢ per ft star-quad cable the studio could find, and $4.50 Neutrik connectors that were soldered by the studio’s unpaid intern.

There have been multiple instances where I have seen someone asking for advice on trying to track down an intermittent buzz in their system. They had people saying they needed to totally rethink their entire system, they had to buy thousands of dollars of new gear, completely change how they had everything routed… When all they needed was a 5¢ ferrite bead.

Having it exposed is certainly noteworthy, if only because it removes the plausible deniability. Fascists thrive on doublespeak and dog whistles. The former allows them to attract new followers who may not be radicalized yet, but agree with parts of the language being used. And the latter allows them to publicly signal support to other fascists, without being openly accused of being fascist. Both are important tools in a fascist’s toolbox. Having the mask pulled off removes any doubt about what they’ve been hinting at, and removes the plausible deniability that they always hide behind.

Demand employers pay a living wage

The start of this would be raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation. When inflation is at 4%, minimum wage also rises 4%. The problem isn’t that minimum wage has always been too low; When it was introduced, a single person could afford to live modestly while supporting a spouse. The problem is that it takes a literal act of congress to change. Instead of requiring congress to act again every few years, just tie it directly to the average of several different inflation calculations, (so a single one can’t be gamed by a future administration to keep wages low). Make it so that the adjustment is automatic.

Also, while we’re at it, make it free to file your taxes online. Have the IRS send a “here’s what we think you owe, and how we calculated it. Let us know of any corrections” letter to every single person. They’ve already done the calculation, and know how much you owe. And that’s what many other countries to. The US tax system is only complicated because the tax filing software companies lobby congress to keep it convoluted. They want to force people into using the software.

There is American-made coffee, but it’s primarily made in Hawaii, where land and import/export costs are already exorbitant. And if Americans are increasingly looking to buy American-made coffee, it makes sense that those Hawaiian growers would increase their costs to make up for the sudden surge in demand.

Crops are one of those things with a relatively inelastic supply, because it takes so long to grow. Crops being three months away from harvest doesn’t help when people are hungry now. You can’t just have the army corps of engineers spin up a coffee factory in a week, and expect it to immediately start producing. Because the coffee beans’ harvest is the limiting factor, and that’s not something that can be built overnight. There’s a reason governments keep strategic reserves of things like wheat, rice, cheese, etc… All things where demand can suddenly spike, or where supply can be suddenly wrecked and take a long time to recover.

It’s needed, to show in photos where the protests are happening. Don’t let them handwave the photos away as some third-world country.

Yup, it’s basically the same character arc as Walt in Breaking Bad. Dude causes his own downfall due to pride and ego. If he had just kept his head down and focused on his goal, he would have gotten away with it. But he couldn’t leave well enough alone, and had to keep dropping hints like the zodiac killer.

I mean, it could be. You can’t really tell one apart from the other unless you see the progression over time. Leucistic would be born this way, while vitiligo would slowly lose pigment over time.

Yeah, this is an important point. If the penalty is too small, AI companies will just consider it a cost of doing business. Flat-rate fines only being penalties for the poor, and all that.

This post was literally directly below in my feed:

If you can’t see it, you’re either not looking hard enough, or have fully drunk the kool-aid.

Men can technically get breast cancer even if they haven’t taken estrogen. Estrogen causes more breast tissue to form, but men have a small amount of breast tissue to begin with. It’s statistically unlikely to happen, since there’s less tissue. But it does happen occasionally. It’s all just a numbers game; More breast tissue means more potential cancer cells.

Yeah, the actual comic was only mildly entertaining. But it was during the early internet days when everything still felt novel. Back when Something Awful and Fark were still the go-to sites.

He’s actually older than her by like a decade. He’s just a vampire who never ages, so he looks much younger than he is. He’s in his early 60’s, and she’s only like 52 or 53.

If it exists, it is better than American public transit. Here is my daily commute to work, as estimated by Google Maps:

Even Google goes “lmao use a fucking car, peasant.”

It’s technically possible for me to take public transit, but it would be about the same as walking. Here is a quick sketch of the route I’d need to take, compared to my drive:

That route is because there are no east/west lines between me and my job. It starts by walking/riding my bike the wrong direction to get to the nearest bus stop. Then it takes me south-west through two cities, then north-west through two more cities. Then I’d have a ~20 minute walk to transfer rail lines, because my job is serviced by a different rail system than the one that my bus service touches. After that walk (and waiting for the next train) I take it north and then have to walk another 10-15 minutes to finally get to work.

Not counting wait times, it would take me nearly 2.5 hours to use public transit. When you consider the fact that some busses and trains only run once every 20-45 minutes, it actually stretches closer to 3-4 hours, if the schedules don’t line up. Or I could just fucking drive 10 minutes. Yeah, it’s no wonder Americans use cars for everything.