Meanwhile, one of the 3 guys at work is working nights and weekends for free. He’s salary. I keep telling him to go outside and live life. Stop giving everything away to the owners. He doesn’t listen. He thinks he’s going to save the company. I’m like buddy if those extra hours are all that’s between success and failure, the company’s fucked. That’s flu away from disaster. He doesn’t listen.

Unknown Armies is a tabletop RPG that has a school of magic predicated on a. Being drunk all the time and b. Drinking out of really cool cups.

Post reminded me of that. Good game (though I only know 2nd edition)

New Jersey is fine. A lot of north jersey is overshadowed by NYC being right there. One of my friends moved here from florida, and one of her friends was like “Why don’t you move to jersey city? it’s cheaper” and she went “I didn’t move to new york to live in new jersey”. But even if you do live just outside the city and none of your friends want to visit, you’re still a short train ride away from it.

I don’t know as much about south jersey, but, like, it’s fine. And unlike, I don’t know, Iowa, you can usually get on a train to a world class city.

That’s true for this specific thing, but won’t solve the underlying problem of “things I’m comfortable with are good, and abstract things like facts and fairness don’t matter”

Unfortunately, most people are emotional creatures first. Sometimes only. So facts don’t really matter because they’re engaging on the emotional level of “christian stuff feels good and safe, but other stuff feels dangerous and foreign”. We all do this to some extent. There’s no solution.

People mostly change their mind because stuff coming from their in-group, or horrible trauma.

I also cannot recommend her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

I hope you meant you can recommend them. They’re both very good.

I liked the dispossessed a lot

I don’t think you can eat deep dish pizza with one hand while riding the subway quite so easily.

I imagine it’s because the Republican party is “absolutely evil turds” and the Democratic party is “everyone else”. Unfortunately, “everyone else” includes some farts and sharts, too.

Low density places are always going to kind of suck on a lot of metrics. You just don’t have the people to support a lot of stuff. I’m sorry that small towns are dying but like there’s not really a reason they’d thrive.

Cities have been important since like the dawn of history. At least farms grow food. Suburban sprawl is the worst.

Cost of living needs to go down and wages up, but no one should be vying for low density.

I have very little patience for people who can’t or won’t do the hard thing. Like, yeah withdrawal is going to suck but sometimes you have to do something unpleasant to get something better.

I mostly keep it to myself though. A lot of people have this problem. Not just about smoking.

Conversations like

“I’m so tired I don’t know why.”

“When did you go to sleep and get up?”

“Uh sleep at like 3am and up at 7am.”

“Well that explains it. Why up so late?”

“… YouTube videos.”

“You should probably stop staying up so late watching videos so you’re not exhausted all day.”

“No.”

But I mostly keep it to myself because there’s not really anything I can do to make someone listen.

Most smokers I’ve talked to get really defensive about it. “it’s not that bad! Sugar is worse for you! It’s not like you exercise or anything! I don’t smoke as much as so-and-so!”

It’s pathetic, really. I’d respect them more if they could just own “this is bad for me and everyone around me.”

You might enjoy this 1964 essay “the paranoid style in American politics” : https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

Guy I know worked for a pretty big video game studio or two. (You’ve definitely heard of some games he worked on). Then he realized it sucked. Took a job in FinTech, made like double the money for half the work.

I like to sometimes remind people that being numb doesn’t mean you aren’t being hurt. If your arm is numb and someone is stabbing it with a knife, that’s probably still a problem.

Many people are bad at delayed gratification and long term thinking.

That’s just how people work. Belief is social. We all value input from people we see as members of our in-group more than outsiders.

Supposed to go to a party this weekend. Last time I went to one with this crowd, it was pretty okay and I made a new guy-i-text-sometimes-friend.

Though the time before that was really dull, so who knows.

Yeah that’s all fine but it’s blocked by one of two major political parties in the US doesn’t believe government should exist. At best they’d support a privatized version of the that siphoned money out and didn’t help people that need help.

We’re going to struggle to get anything done as long as conservatives are treated as if they have any merit.

My policy is I only buy something if I’m going to play it that day. No more rapidly expanding backlog.

Fingers crossed for total conversions. Give me some non-5e rule systems. (Unlikely, I know. Double unlikely to get anything other than maybe Pathfinder, but I can hope)