Spent the weekend re-listening to Serial, which released almost 10 years ago. It’s wonderful storytelling and the sinister piano still makes my skin tingle. Captivating, but not as magically so, as I found it the first time around.
I don’t have too much to say on the case itself, since this essay answers all of my questions.
I also watched the first episode of the HBO piece. That mostly just left me wistful for an American teen experience that I didn’t actually have. Which takes us full circle, because this whole thing was brought on by a Guardian article about revisiting old teenage journals.
Speaking of which, I’m increasingly curious how moments I’ve experienced first-hand might get portrayed in media re-tellings, i.e. the Hollywood shorthand for things which aren’t really that dramatic. I think it’s watching too many of those tech company miniseries: WeCrashed 8, Super Pumped 6, The Playlist 5, and The Dropout 5?.
Discussion Summary: Star Wars
I’m pretty neutral towards Star Wars. The original films are fine, but I think the rest of them are pretty bad (admittedly, that’s very heavily influenced by the meta-content). But it always felt like something that I was supposed to like when I was growing up, even though it’s more of a Gen X thing.
That whole pre-internet merchandising / marketing pipeline is kind of amazing to me: everyone seems to have different entry points into the old extended universe which… might(?!) be interesting to explore.
I’m certain that a significant part of my brain is dedicated to repressing the ability to become a fan of anything for fear of appearing even a tiny bit cringe.
Been finding the One D&D playtest material rather interesting, if only in the same way it’s fun to follow patch notes for games I don’t play any more. A lot of the changes are pretty elegant and would probably improve my table’s games, though it doesn’t really do anything about the fundamental dice rolling part of the game†.
Anyway, for all of the mechanical changes and niceties, there’s also a sort of blandness to the new material. For me, it’s the generic spurt of energy/healing/holiness which spellcasters perform that makes magic seem mundane and overly egalitarian. It probably doesn’t help that the default subclasses are very plain and mostly nerfed from their current versions.
I guess the wackiness needs to come from somewhere else.
†: My current qualm is with saving throws, since I’ll probably need Lucky if I ever want to step out of the Paladin’s aura of protection. I also kind of resent having expertise and pass without trace (+10) on skill checks since it makes them pointless to roll. Degrees of success is one way to patch over this. Managing expectations is another.
Enjoyed, but didn’t totally understand this article. I think the general argument is that if “AI is a black box” becomes a valid defence, then AI has free rein to ignore laws, which leads to it becoming a proxy for breaking the law?
It should be noted, this is through the lens of someone filing(?) a class action lawsuit against Stable Diffusion.
(A tangential link within that post on the unproductiveness of tech was also fairly interesting to me.)
Discussion Summary: TikTok bans
I genuinely don’t understand the security threat that TikTok poses. It just seems really weirdly xenophobic and that’s becoming particularly bothersome lately.
I seem to recall something about clipboard data being sent over the network (prior to iOS 14), but that’s about all that I could find. Maybe I have too much faith in Apple’s sandboxing. I feel like some video preference information is a lot less valuable than social graphs (huge social engineering vector) or say, all of your passwords. Many other apps and websites suck up phone numbers, IP addresses and network identifiers - I feel that’s fairly benign.
There’s a psyops / propaganda angle, but I find that a pretty weak cause.
I just can’t get the idea out of my head that it’s a boomer issue, but I’ve gotten really shit at doing research these days.
(Personally, I stopped using it because it would suck hours from my evening. Whether it’s good for society and banning it for that reason is a totally different question.)
Better Call Saul: The highs are high, but I also found it really slow and a bit too self-indulgent. I kind of hate the way it makes Breaking Bad feel so different to watch, but I guess I appreciate that Better Call Saul (and El Camino) exist. Prequels are always kind of iffy.
Severance: Mostly enjoyed it at the time. But on reflection, I don’t think it’s “tight” enough with the rules, so there’s too much scope in the following seasons to do whatever and I’ve sort of lost all care for it. I can’t imagine the job is well paid enough to be worth having the operation, otherwise it would be tempting.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was pretty great. The Sandevistan scenes are particularly gorgeous.
House of the Dragon was a bit of a ride. I went in cynically after Game of Thrones, but it won me over (besides a couple of blips). It felt a bit small, but I guess that’s just the nature of the story it’s adapting.
I didn’t watch much other television (or it was crap).
One thing that really bugged me at work was the senior leadership team forming around the idea of a flywheel and no-one being able to explain to me what it meant. I forget the details, but at its core was either users (which probably slow things down because they’re not contributing anything) or content (which is mostly ephemeral, so needs to be constantly fed to keep momentum).
Anyway, here’s one for TikTok and it’s so clear, that I’m convinced that ours was mispurposed business theory. (The objectives and metrics that were derived from the flywheel were sound, but the underlying analogy made no sense.)
I’m a little iffy about the new optimised Wizard in the party. Arcane Abeyance with spells that should take 10 minutes to cast is pretty bullshit, and it turned an interesting encounter into a totally non-threatening one. In the end, I’m probably more annoyed that she handed off the mote to me so I’m not only complicit, but I had to waste my action casting it!
Silvery Barbs
Totally fine with it if it didn’t work on saves as well. As is, it’s encounter disrupting, but doesn’t do anything that lucky rolls wouldn’t. My proposed balance is that you actually need to make a Vicious Mockery-style insult for it to work. I might take it myself in the future and only use it sparingly, but this creates a problem, too.
Principles
I’m still not able to define ‘bullshit’, but I think it’s along the lines of designer intention (potentially disregarding their later rulings) rather than anything about balance or fantasy-feeling. I dislike the aesthetic of hand crossbows and I’ve avoided them because I believe the intention for Crossbow Expert is to work in combination with a melee weapon rather than itself. (I don’t think it changed for One D&D, so maybe it’s time to give up that thought.)
The underlying ‘do what’s fun’ will probably always stay true, so I guess whatever goes as long as I’m making an median contribution to the party. And I guess I do see a world where Lifeberry makes someone’s game healthier.
Not sure how novel these insights are:
I think Lightning Arrow is underrated. It’s still not good, but it’s always been easy to justify having on my list as a pure damage option (a crappier ranged smite). It probably gets overlooked because of Conjure Animals or a simple bonus action attack.
Healing Spirit isn’t too bad, either. It’s not that far off Healing Word for rescuing downed allies. I see Aid recommended in its stead – losing your attacks to cast a spell feels really significant in those desperate situations, but I’m probably just too selfish of a player.
I don’t think I should have to justify Zephyr Strike, either. Advantage, bonus damage, dash and disengage, all at once. Along with Nature’s Veil, that’s plenty of on-demand advantage. I think using familiars for advantage is pretty lame. Maybe everyone is playing a Gloom Stalker and getting those benefits for free anyway?
So yeah, most of these stem from an insistence in avoiding certain parts of the game (hand crossbows, Conjure Animals, Summon Familiar).
It’s a similar thing with the Goodberry + Disciple of Life combo. I know this one’s bullshit, so it’s a good way to gauge whether I’m compatible with other people. Still, I’m the irrational one because the published documents are the only lens to view the rules.
At some point, I figured Fey Reinforcements would be the bulk of my damage. To maximise this, having a 6th level slot is ideal, which probably means 11-12 Ranger and 5-6 full caster levels. There’s a lot of decision paralysis since I rolled annoyingly good stats for multiclassing (13+ in all).
I think the best option is Wizard of War Magic: +5 to AC and +4 to saves as reactions seem like a decent way to survive big hits. But maybe I’m looking at survivability in the wrong way. (The game isn’t fun if you never get attacked, but I’m not sure how you’re meant to survive a dragon with +14 to hit either.)
There’s more synergy with Cleric or Druid. Maybe a single level is worth it for Bless/Faerie Fire and Healing Word. That’d mean taking a bunch more Ranger levels to reshuffle my spells, though! I’d rather play those as single class characters. (In the same way, as powerful as War Wizard gets, it seems really boring.)
I haven’t figured out the rest. Fighter multiclassing probably offers a little more, too.
I handed in my notice a few days later. I always thought I’d be able to slog it out until a better time to leave, but I realised that it wasn’t coming.
Was the concept doomed from the start? Maybe – it’s still hard for me to picture anything that will fundamentally change people’s news reading habits. We’d probably have been better off focussing on incremental updates: improved notifications, a better live service… things that capitalise more on the huge news stories no-one was expecting.
But after three years of re-engineering, it doesn’t seem like we have significantly more capability to move in an agile and experimental way.
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I’m kind of sad over it all.