Lemmy is absolutely inundated with bad faith actors who seem suspiciously intent on sewing as much division as possible, getting the left to be as politically ineffectual as possible, and never offering anything as a viable solution. There’s no meaningful barrier for entry so it’s pretty trivial to make a bunch of accounts and push an agenda.

That’s by no means limited to Lemmy, but Lemmy is absolutely littered with them. It’s been like this for quite a while.

I mean personally, it’s not something I expect to be reminded of in the top of the feed for what is otherwise a pretty light webcomic community.

It’s nice to have a few hooks and characters and things that a DM can use if the player wants them, but player interest is the key part. A character’s background is there to allow for opportunities to tie the character into the world and vice versa, but you can also achieve the same thing by just giving weight to interactions and having them reverberate through the campaign.

Like, in the campaign I’m running now my players came across an ancient shrine to an axolotl-folk storm deity that was built as a sensory stone playing a ritual, with a hallowed ground spell creating a tongues area of effect. Some spiders had made a nest around it and were communing with it, but rather than talking to the spiders, they immediately shot them and lit the forest on fire. So I added a spider-folk cleric of said deity, gave them some ettercap followers, and had the surviving spiders that ran from the fight go fetch them to get their revenge. Now they’ve got someone extremely formidable that they have to deal with who is only there because they burned the forest around the shrine.

They weren’t initially intended to be in the campaign at all, and even the shrine was initially mostly a throw-away set piece to make a bit of forest more interesting. But because there was a significant interaction there that ought to have consequences, it made sense to add more context around that location.

Letting the players determine which bits get fleshed out on the basis of which bits they show interest in or interact with gives weight and substance whether they go in with a backstory or not. Some players are going to want to load up on backstory and give the DM plenty to work with straight from the beginning, some won’t. As long as you’re responsive to what your players do show you they’re interested in, it’ll benefit your campaign when you lean into it.

I lost two people to cancer this year. Sucks.

I’m not sure this comic is the heartwarming post you think it is.

Is this fun for you?

For some people, possessing any empathy at all qualifies as “virtue signaling”.

Personally, I left Reddit a long time before because of control freaks with no lives who feel the need to dictate their personal preferences to others as though it were a dire moral emergency.

Totally reasonable to avoid uploading to imgur if you’re worried about third party advertisers collecting your metadata, but that’s hardly unique to them. I block ads and also don’t have any illusions about countless websites sharing metadata with advertisers. I’m not really aware of a reliable image host that doesn’t do this.

Imgur blocking the UK over OSA is a pretty reasonable move, though. Demanding that companies collect ID verification data from users is to me a much bigger liability than their advertisers seeing my IP or browser or whatever. Personally, I fully support companies deciding not to participate in the hoarding of personal information that could be compromised by entirely too common data breaches.

I didn’t even know sweat bees could sting. When I drove a cab I used to sit in a field with my feet sticking out the window and they’d inevitably come land on me and suck on my toes. I suppose it wouldn’t make much sense to sting your food source if you don’t have to, though.

Okay boomer.

What movie is that?

This is such a weird trend in general in the past few decades. We went from typifying things by decade to typifying them by generation, which makes no sense whatsoever because these generations are still alive. It’s not like everything from 2000-2010 was made for millennials specifically and no one else is allowed to watch them. Shows might have general target age ranges that are taken into consideration in marketing, but amazingly people don’t stay the same age their entire lives and targeting has very little to do with who might actually enjoy a show.

The concept that a specific piece of entertainment, terminology, fashion, or idea belongs to one specific generation and only that generation is extremely silly. Each generation doesn’t just wither up and die once the next generation hits their 20s or whatever. Likewise, there’s nothing stopping a teenager from sitting down and watching Farscape and deciding they love it.

Building more housing only reduces the cost of housing if you don’t allow all of it to be turned into air bnbs. We need to modernize zoning laws.

Do people who make these memes actually play at tables like this, or is this hyperbole for the sake of clicks? Do they play at all?

It’s an environment that’s mechanically centered around dunking on people. It’s all upvotes, downvotes, and arguing. The design of the platform itself encourages it, because that’s what it’s built to do. Lemmy isn’t really any different, it just hasn’t had as long to develop the same level of toxicity. The same mentality is here too, though, and is growing pretty consistently.

A year ago Lemmy felt like a relative breath of fresh air in comparison to what it’s quickly become. These threads are half arguments and the feeds are half people spamming 6 threads in five minutes to build up some sort of visibility.

Honestly I feel like Lemmy sort of tricked me into wandering into Reddit 2 after having mostly left Reddit.

Meaningless hair splitting. I still have my entire collection of SNES cartridges. They’re still playable, and no one can take them short of robbing me. If my ownership of those games was limited to a license that could be revoked, that might not be the case.

That’s not the story Billet told.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3byz3txpso

That’s not how you spell “steals”.

That is absolutely untrue. Games used to be sold as a physical object containing the game files. No serial numbers to redeem, no servers, no downloads or updates. Sometimes you’d get a booklet with the game that had some codes in it that the game would ask for on startup to make making copies a little more difficult, but that was it.

You’d literally have everything you need just on the CD, disk, or cartridge. We 100% owned the game and the system it was played on, and the only way to revoke that would have been to physically break into your house and steal it.

This whole games as services thing is about 20 years old tops, and it wasn’t even remotely approaching the standard for quite a while after that.

I can’t tell if this is an actual confusion about the difference between the American health care and social services systems or just like petty malicious internet one-upmanship.

Assuming it’s the former, disability payments aren’t actually part of the health care system in the United States. Like, you don’t get a payout from any organization that actually handles healthcare, it’s a separate bureaucracy that just serves to gatekeep disability income.

Imagine how much better the economy would be if people weren’t forced to prop up absolutely shitty companies they don’t believe in just to pay their bills. Like, we might actually have improving products and experiences instead of a constantly diminishing race to the bottom.