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In a healthy competitive community, you spend your time 1) putting yourself in direct competition against others, and 2) immediately afterwards discuss with your opponent about how the both of you can improve from there. That's because if you want to improve as a competitor, the best way is to surround yourself with other competitors who will constantly test the boundaries of what your playstyle is capable of doing, while improving their own.

Let's say you find a specific "trick" in the game, that few people have seen. Maybe it's novel enough that most players just don't know how to deal with it, so you end up relying hard on that one trick. But what happens when an opponent actually knows how to deal with it? If you're flying solo, it might take a while before you figure it out. You don't want to pay a lot of time and effort to travel to a tournament, and have your first exposure to opponents who know how to deal with the trick live, during your tournament match.

So you go to your local meetup, you think of a way someone can get out of the trick, and you straight-up teach them. You say "hey, you know that trick I always do? It works like ABC, maybe try doing XYZ to counter it?". And then you can see how you deal with opponents who actually know about your trick, and reach the next level.

I find it really strikingly similar to the platonic ideal of a debate, where after the two sides use arguments and test each other's positions and viewpoints, both sides come out closer to the truth. The point is that yes it's a confrontation, which can feel like an attack in the moment, but it's also ultimately constructive - both parties accept temporary incomfort to reach greater heights.

How tall is Defect? Well, in game Defect seems to one of if not the tallest, but according to card art, defect is shorter than Regent (Tiny in game) and also the Silent (middle of the pack in game). The Silent is maybe as tall or a little bit shorter than Ironclad. Necrobinder refuses to stand close enough to anyone for me to get a gauge. She's just sort of floating at all times.

Also!! The characters are now featured on curses in a way I find super interesting. It seems to be character relevant. Each seem to be featured on 2 (mostly), with the rest of the curses seeming more generic.

Ironclad is the most straight forward, he's featured on Folly (from Vakuu) and Regret. I think both of these are understandable, my guy made a bad deal that he's still not free of. Man regrets everything and can (currently) do nothing about it but keep rolling that boulder.

Necrobinder's the only character who might only be on one curse. The only one I'm sure is her is Poor Sleep, given that she recently lost her parents and then signed herself over to being a Lich, this does not surprise me. The interesting part here is the hand, my instinct was that this was a threat, but looking at it in detail, I actually think it's Osty reaching out to comfort her? Which is cute!

Regent's curses are Greed and Enthralled, given that his majesty seems to be the sort that can't be content with what his majesty has, these two add up. Nothing is enough. Of note is the Rose in Enthralled is also from Vakuu, and between that + the dialogue, we have some implication that Regent falls under Vakuu's sway. RIP.

Defect, I think, is maybe my favorite set. Defect has spore mind, Mushrooms literally growing out of its eye. It's body taken by something else. There's something potent in there of Defect harboring a fear of being subsumed. Of being broken down and taken over. It's second card is Shame, which specifically features the other characters (Ironclad + Silent for sure, mayyyybe necro as the third?) being the ones to shame Defect. This indicates the Defect values the other's opinions a lot! It honestly seems to be the most social out of all of our characters. Which is wild! The Defect Wants To Be Friends. Everyone else is here for murder though.

The Silent is the only one miiiight be featured on 3. She's for sure on 2, she may also be on Clumsy, but it's hard to make out. Putting Clumsy to the side, the Silent has Doubt and Decay for sure. Both are very fitting for her character. She's literally dying of the Blight currently, and she seems to have a lot of doubt/anxiety of what her sisters think of her. She got out. She fully escaped the Spire, unlike the Defect or Ironclad. But she comes back. Seeking a greater trophy, seeking familial approval despite the fact she's literally dying. Her body is failing her, and yet her energy is focused on seeking a prize that earns respect.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

I'm an early childhood educator. I work to keep ten two-year olds safe, healthy and psycho-emotionally enriched. I don't think only giving 70% of my effort to do that would be good for anyone.

My mom is recovering from a stroke at a rehabilitation center. I would really like the staff there to give their 100% caring for residents.

If you're in a cubicle, yeah sure. But if you're primary job responsibility is to keep vulnerable people alive and comfortable, then I don't think discount effort is a good idea.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Float_(project_management)

LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLLkWMDbC9ZNKbjDG/slack

Poor is the person without Slack. Lack of Slack compounds and traps.

Slack means margin for error. You can relax.

Slack allows pursuing opportunities. You can explore. You can trade.

Slack prevents desperation. You can avoid bad trades and wait for better spots. You can be efficient.

Slack permits planning for the long term. You can invest.

Slack enables doing things for your own amusement. You can play games. You can have fun.

Slack enables doing the right thing. Stand by your friends. Reward the worthy. Punish the wicked. You can have a code.

Slack presents things as they are without concern for how things look or what others think. You can be honest.

You can do some of these things, and choose not to do others. Because you don’t have to.

Only with slack can one be a righteous dude.

One of the things I remember the most clearly is the oldest person in the group. Her name was Steelsong. She was a 40-something Dom with a sub whose name we knew even though we knew nothing else. She ran her own fanfic archive because the web was still handmade HTML and navigated in webrings and I’m pretty sure Google didn’t exist or was only barely, barely launched and not well known. She was kind and patient and we loved her. She treated everyone on the group with the respect given any adult, even though most of the rest of the world was still treating us like we were children. Not teenagers even, but children. She never once condescended to any of us, never made our youth a barrier to her respect, never treated us like we were incapable of being full people or like we were less than her because we were young.

I remember that she hosted our fanfiction, as absolutely terrible as it was (and I still have some of it, I am WELL aware of how cringingly terrible it is, just absolute nonsense garbage), right there alongside of other fic that was soul-achingly beautiful. Not a separate section for her friends or for kids, just right there like we were good enough to feature alongside other authors. I never once received crit from her that I didn’t ask for, only support. Only love. I am still writing today partly because Steel was so kind about our fic, fanfic and original.

I remember that when I started doing clay sculpture, she commissioned a tiny pair of dragons from me, to support me doing artwork. She sent a check my mom cashed for me, and my mom helped me mail it when it was finished. It broke in transit, and Steel assured me that she mended it and that it was still beautiful. It was a small gold dragon curled up with a small silver dragon.

I remember that her patience knew no bounds. I remember that she was there for us, regardless of reason. When we wanted to know silly things like what to do with a single AA battery, she answered. When we had serious questions about sex, she answered.  When we had questions about writing, she taught us. When one of our group members, a young gay teen in Australia, ended up in the hospital and then stopped making posts, and we all knew what had happened, she let us talk to her about it because we couldn’t go to our own parents, even though we had just lost a friend.

She was not a replacement to my parents, but she was an extra parent, in some ways. A friend, certainly, but someone that had been through more life than we had and was willing to pass on knowledge if we asked for it. Someone older that we trusted with things that were too uncomfortable to go to our parents or teachers or whatever about, because we already knew she wasn’t going to judge us or something, and that we would get an honest answer.

I don’t know why I’m remembering this so hard tonight, and I’m not sure if there’s a point to sharing this, except that I know she’s gone now. She was ill the last time we spoke, and her site went down a long time ago, and I miss her. She was a huge influence on my life, then and now. She was hope, for me, that life as an adult didn’t have to be boring, it wouldn’t have to mean giving up the things I loved and Becoming Only Responsible With No Fun. Her presence meant I had hope I could still write and play with friends even when I wasn’t ‘a kid’ anymore. And she’s gone, and I miss her, and I wanted to share her from the perspective of youth, and the perspective over twenty years later has provided me.

And I think of her, when people go off about older folks being in fandom with younger folks. I’m an older folks now, or at least middle aged folks because there are certainly folks older than me still, but I wasn’t always. I’ve been here since i was a younger folks, and I know how much Steel’s presence and support meant to me, how much she helped not just me but everyone on that group. And I think of the people saying older folks don’t belong in fandom, and that they shouldn’t interact with younger folks at all, and I just think… I can’t agree. I needed that kind of solid presence in my life back then and even at the age I am now, I need the folks older than me to stay. I want them here.

Like, you start with a guy who views trans women as "forbidden" and "dangerous" for whichever dumb reason, and that just makes them hotter to him. To that guy, there's no contradiction in seeing trans women as both hot and (socially) dangerous. In fact keeping the "danger" alive in his mind is probably crucial to the fantasy.

I don't live in a walkable city.

I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.

People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!

I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.

Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.

Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.

I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.

A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.

Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.

It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.

And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.

It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.

They're just bike racks.

But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.

It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.

Technology will not save us.

Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention.  Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.

As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities.  This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.

When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.

Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace.  Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on.  In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.

For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you.  It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass.  All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.

*

“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”

“We’re getting to that.”  He waved.

The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed

The percentage of people who bet on sports is rising rapidly, but even so only 34% said they placed even one bet in 2023, and many of those will be limited to nominal wagers on things like the Super Bowl and March Madness. This survey has 39% sports betting participation, with about 35% of betters betting at least once a week.

Holy cow! These numbers are absolutely, brutally shocking to me. I honestly expected sports betting to be a small fraction of a percent of the general population, not t h i r t y - n i n e percent!! I don't think I've ever seen anyone I know IRL (Canada) even talk about sports betting, so this wasn't on my radar at all. I was thinking of sports betting as some niche hobby by a few dedicated superfans, and definitely not something that over a third of the general population did last year.