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big downside of interacting with TTRPG people is exhausting pronoun games

If you tell me to guess your pronouns, I'll say no, and won't change my mind and guess anyway. If it isn't obviously typeable in ASCII format I'm going to ask you for a typeable version. If you want people in the conversation to all rotate between multiple pronouns sometimes two people are going to use the same one in a row - and you have to accept that tracking both one's own rotation and the group's rotation is extremely difficult. And if it's a very obvious slur that I can't claim and you accept no substitutes then I'm not going to interact with you anymore. In my experience these all only ever happen with indie TTRPG developers as a funny little intellectual game - and you just know they're going back to their Big Tech jobs on Monday with standard binary pronouns.

jakke

Learned some stuff about the person that insisted on pronouns with the historical Nordic character ð that in hindsight we could all guess with 100% accuracy based just on knowing that this person insisted on pronouns with the historical Nordic character ð.

#resetting that 'days since' counter for neopagans back to zero

The prediction market has launched some ads featuring soccer players, as well as formed a partnership to display its brand in more places du

I love how whenever you're reading an article from a serious sober journalistic institution about how Wow Everyone Is On This One Specific Sports Betting App Now You Should Check It Out you can scroll down to the bottom for the magic words:

Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.

So not only is Kalshi advertising on CNBC but CNBC is a partial owner of Kalshi. And as a treat they're dispatching journalists to write about it. One of the wonders of the modern era of private markets is that it's easier than ever for journalistic outlets to scoop up big chunky stakes in buzzy pre-IPO companies and then write glowing articles about them to drive up the value of those stakes. Over the long run this of course erodes any kind of credibility the outlet might have, because it so smoothly conflates "this is an important thing happening" with "this is a statement that will enhance the value of our investments". But fortunately we're so close to the end of the line on the whole concept of journalism that the long run doesn't matter anymore.

#the wonders of capitalism

my last wisdom tooth is coming in

I have enough room for it, but the gum tenderness is suboptimal. Not sure what to think of all the dentists who told me this wasn't going to happen. Have they just been tooth chiropractors this whole time?

Fascinated by Google's decision to give me a Spanish language AI preview for an English language search. It's kind of remarkable how unhelpful Google Search has gotten. Also I need to go charge my phone.

Falling down a rabbit hole because שׁחק means both "to laugh" and "to pound down" and I can't figure out whether what Rav Abba and his wife are doing here is meant to be a double entendre.

big downside of interacting with TTRPG people is exhausting pronoun games

If you tell me to guess your pronouns, I'll say no, and won't change my mind and guess anyway. If it isn't obviously typeable in ASCII format I'm going to ask you for a typeable version. If you want people in the conversation to all rotate between multiple pronouns sometimes two people are going to use the same one in a row - and you have to accept that tracking both one's own rotation and the group's rotation is extremely difficult. And if it's a very obvious slur that I can't claim and you accept no substitutes then I'm not going to interact with you anymore. In my experience these all only ever happen with indie TTRPG developers as a funny little intellectual game - and you just know they're going back to their Big Tech jobs on Monday with standard binary pronouns.

wrote a very niche furry porn story and it's been a big hit with local they/thems with septum piercings so that's cool

But also some friends have read it and been like "this isn't horny to me at all personally but you do capture the vibe of a really unpleasant WFH tech worker" and I'm even more psyched about that.

finally got the chance to read Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

It's won a bunch of awards, and of course I'd recommend it, even though it feels a little overstuffed in a way that kind of hurts the pacing. (There's enough ideas in there for a trilogy at least.)

Legitimately surprising to read a book about a militarized insular state that actually feels awful in ways that match the worst regimes of the twentieth century - overt fascist ideology, misogyny, racism. I feel like a lot of recently published Evil Regimes are written the way steampunk authors wrote the British Empire, where anyone could rise to the top just by embracing the norms of the dominant culture, including women of sufficient affluence. I think part of this is about the editors urging the authors to go in a marketable direction. But to give the authors credit, part of it is a genuine interest in exploring modern liberal capitalist systems that colonize via soft power (e.g. A Memory Called Empire) or require the people from the periphery to sacrifice their health and family to make a living (e.g. The Tainted Cup). And those are interesting! And those books won a lot of awards too! But Some Desperate Glory is about a type of system that's a lot harder to write about, I think.

Araghchi then appeared to haggle with Trump: "20% is of course too much. We will be fair," he wrote.

Nothing makes this war look quite as much like a performance by a bunch of wannabe despots trapped in ossified political systems and leaning heavily on military spectacle as a source of legitimacy like rival Twitter posting about the fees they'd charge if they somehow ~*~won the war~*~ and could charge a toll on every ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz. It is in the interest of the US government and the Iranian government (and for that matter the Israeli government and all the Gulf allies of the US) to keep the spectacle of this low-intensity war flaring up to have a convenient external enemy indefinitely. It would seem pathetic if they weren't killing so many people.

#abortions for some miniature american flags for others

Trump said he will make a "Speech to the Nation on Thursday evening, at 9 P.M. Eastern," without providing further details.

Wild to read headlines like this because it could be absolutely nothing or it could be a declaration of martial law. Actually seizing and wielding power is so tied up with symbolically satisfying the demands of allies in the media that it's impossible to tell what's what. But most likely this means more attempts at made-for-TV persecutions of poll workers who were really just doing their jobs.

#abortions for some miniature american flags for others

Initially, the administrators discussed removing some of the pieces from the show. But then the provost texted that he wanted to take down the entire exhibition instead. McPherson wrote, "I think it'll be easier to manage any barking from our friends in Austin."

It's not surprising in the modern era that a public university would take down any mildly provocative art critiquing ICE, because the modern university has become a machine that ingests donations from the elite and excretes entry tickets to the middle class at the lowest possible cost, and any kind of headlines about any kind of performance that generates any embarrassment might disrupt the fine inner workings of this machine. But it's fascinating to see the actual text, and the way the provost talks like a sinister provost in a movie. Of course they would, because university administration is the kind of job where you're making it all up as you go, and you do everything you can to prevent artists like this from ever getting accepted into any exhibits again.

The rocket primary for Democrats' Maine Senate pick is on – and the candidates are shaping their strategies in real time.

Wow look it's wild how you can run a nomination contest with a bunch of candidates who already have public lives and have been subjected to media scrutiny and they all just kind of compete over who can organize effectively and convince people to support them. It doesn't even take very long for them all to get ready to go, because they're all motivated to win, and they're supported by people who want to see them win. I know this isn't a process the Democratic Party would ever consider except in the most dire of emergencies, but possibly it's something they should experiment with gradually scaling up to other elected positions, even in situations where their usual backrooms coronation process didn't saddle them with an uncharismatic sexual predator with a Nazi tattoo?

#abortions for some miniature american flags for others

ChatGPT Atlas didn’t even last a year.

Yeah look OpenAI needs to be literally making $100 billion a year in the next two years just to keep the lights on. Right now they're making large negative numbers, but in a couple years they need to be larger than Salesforce. The only use case they've found that makes money is code generation, for a few different reasons:

Decades of building linters and precompilers and compilers and precommit checks and interpreters have really eased up the burden of detecting errors in code, so making a bunch of mistakes is basically okay in a way it wouldn't be in e.g. law or engineering.

Junior software engineers are paid extraordinarily highly to do a lot of cognitive routine tasks that other industries pay way less for, so there's a lot more willingness to pay for automating their jobs away.

Software companies are gigantic enterprises with very strict top-down control, so securing a vendor relationship with one of them is fairly reliable long-term recurring revenue unless you massively fuck up.

So that's exactly one use case that makes sense, and literally they need to build one of the biggest SaaS businesses ever targeted at exactly one thing. The age of whimsy and experimentation is over, and the age of careful optimizing for enterprise-quality TypeScript generation and bespoke pricing plans for large customers is upon us. I still don't think this can ever pay for the massive data centre buildout, but it's probably the only way these companies can ever become cash flow positive, and that means killing experimental projects like the ChatGPT browser.

#the wonders of capitalism

they gotta invent a kind of convert zeal that doesn't make people behave like pod people

Two formerly queer-identified people I know have Found Religion so far this year (two different aggressively proselytizing religions) and we've all had to cut them off because they've gotten really overtly anti-trans and anti-gay and now I've found out that they've both been approaching friends who seem ethnically likely to have grown up in their respective religions and pestering them to attend services. Sucks how we have to tiptoe around this shit. This weird new Völkisch "your ethnicity is inherently part of my religion" thing is rubbing me the wrong way even more so than their previous standard-issue bigotry, even though I'm obviously not the one they're pestering.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he would make a long-shot bid to get the Supreme Court to rehear the case in which it ruled against his executive order that sought to sharply restrict birthright citizenship.

Genuinely didn't know that was an option? He sure is set on making this happen. And the party just needs to convince or bribe or blackmail or threaten or coerce a couple appointed-for-life superlegislators to swap their decision from their last pronouncement.

jakke

Feels weird to cross the streams between this tumblr and furry stuff but I put a whole lot of work into a very dumb pun so go watch this video on furry inflation based on a panel I did at some local conventions.

The White House launched gas stations, it announced on July 7, but the prices aren't much lower than the national average. See where they're

Oh damn we're getting gas price caps back for the first time since the 70s! The legacy of Tricky Dick is strong. This failed spectacularly then, and it'll fail even worse now because cheaper easier communication means that people can more quickly switch from queueing at one gas station to queuing at another - but the war with Iran is grinding on, and the midterms are coming, and so we can all expect more theatrical interventions to create the illusion of affordable gas prices for a while.

#the wonders of capitalism #abortions for some miniature american flags for others

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