How would it feel? What would it say about us? if we remain a nation that builds weapons of war, effective weapons, our best technology— and none of the people cared what purpose they served? they could defend a people violated by invading armies, they could be a tool to sweep a people away and not even our young people full of idealism think it worth questioning. Streets quiet, peaceful, another beautiful spring— and not one willing to listen, imagine the rumble of distant munitions.
@futurebird During Gulf War 1, I wrote a short poem about exactly this.
The war was sanitized and all we saw was silence, while bombs were dropped to level cities and soldiers were buried in sandy tombs by war dozers.
I think that's when warhawks realized media control meant there wouldn't ever be another Vietnam War, where the battle for domestic mindshare was much fiercer.
But we keep having huge backwards steps (like Twitter getting neutralized as a source for useful news and organizing by its purchase, almost certainly for that exact purpose).
(Animals are often quite dangerous when cornered, and powered entities are worse.)
You have a pool of x dice at your disposal, each one already rolled to a result. Every time you'd normally roll a die, you choose one die and use the result. A new die is rolled to replace it.
To prevent hanging on to good rolls for too long, or just never using the bad ones, dice slowly "heat" and if they remain in the pool for too long, explode and cause adverse effects.
@arzi The #ttrpg Castle Falkenstein has a similar system, except using cards instead of dice. Players like knowing what their luck will be, but you only ever have a hand of 4 cards, and the GM controls when they refresh. So it mostly works out.
The suits do different things, but that just encourages creativity. ("Guess I will have to seduce that law clerk instead of pickpocketing him!")
If, like me, you are a bit of a fiend for Christian Lore you will enjoy this tumblr thread about how some MAGA folk on twitter have accidentally started a whole new heresy.
(I think Christian Lore Fans are formed by learning a LOT about Christianity growing up, but never developing the idea that you know the one true way.)
#ICYMI (as I did), this is an excellent op-ed by @cstross on the politically & ideologically-loaded background of the cult of unfettered tech optimism & its billionaire bros.
As Charlie says, science fiction is fundamentally just entertainment & often highly derivative, not the philosophical blueprint for the future of humankind.
I have a very "shot in the dark" ask about my favorite Tarot card deck.
Have you heard of the Mage The Ascension Tarot?
I bought a deck in 1995 when it came out. I still have it and it is my favorite deck. It's been my deck of choice since I bought it. I even preferred it over my Rider-Waite-Smith deck and, when I went through my hyper-Christian blow-back phase, it's the one deck I couldn't bring myself to toss out.
Bad news: I damaged two of the cards while doing a reading. I dropped them and tried to catch them with my legs which creased them down the middle. They are now both unusable in readings because they stand out.
I am aware that you can order reprints from places like DriveThruRPG but those are slightly different cards on different cardstock. The original designs were lost in a fire, I think, so these are more like scanned reprints.
Does anyone, anywhere have the original deck or just the two cards I damaged and would be willing to sell them to me?
I only included a photo of the back of one of the cards since the crease is the same on both of them.
I know it's a bit silly to be so enamored of a novelty deck like this, but I played a lot of World of Darkness mostly Vampire and Mage with a bit of Werewolf. I had the book for Changeling and the supplement for Mummy, but we didn't play them much. A friend of mine had Wraith but we never got into that at all.
I still have all my books downstairs actually, mostly 1st editions save for Vampire which is 2nd edition now.
@TimWardCam Email to corporate accounts like those used by the bulk of people won't get to recipients unless sent from another approved corporate entity. Email from private servers is unreliably delivered and treated like it's 100% spam.
Meanwhile, actual spam is let in via the "you were on our website once" excuse.