Its called a bumblebee because its got three left feet.

I am just personally uninterested in the direction the game is going with the OneD&D, and I think the source of this muddling path is do to the failure of the original business maneuver with the OGL revision.

I absolutely agree. Although, I think the consequences of that decision has been something of a “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!” D&D-knock-off renaissance. And I’m pretty happy with that, given how a lot of my old favorites from Palladium and Rollmaster and GURPS seem to have found some new life.

I don’t really see things getting better under Hasbro, so any major shakeup might be a good thing overall.

I would love to see the Onyx Path (ie, old White Wolf) folks find their legs again. Miss myself some old school Vampire: The Masquerade.

they might have been more hands-off than Hasbro went it comes to mucking with the business model,

Hasbro was extremely hands off for a long while. But then their toy lines fell apart and their board game revenue just became “How many times can we sell you the same box of Monopoly pieces?”

Suddenly WotC was their revenue stream, and the head managers decided they needed to apply their magic touch to the franchise.

I don’t really care, because D&D is more a style of playing than a product for sale. Sucks to see Faerun or Eberon cannibalized by these ghouls, but there’s just so much fucking material out there that’s never going away.

It’s just not a game you can ruin (and 4e fucking tried, let me tell you). Too much of it is bound up in what you and your friends bring to the table.

Looks like they… crossed the line.

How do we not have a Stavi emoji? God damn.

Well, anyway, I will see your Apolitical Stavros Dick Jokes With Celebrities show and raise you Bring Back Virgil.

They should have given it to Adam Friedland.

TrashFuture has hit on a few new attempts at Killer App firms, but it’s all Mindfulness this and AI that.

I think the last app I downloaded was an AI art app, which I used maybe twice.

Pointing at an Automat vending machine from the 1970s that’s got a big “AI” sticker slapped on it, and claiming it’s going to take everyone’s jobs.

Its curious to see the Chinese government called out for being insufficiently dedicated to anti-corruption measures while doggedly insisting that the myriad prosecutions of corrupt officials within both the Chinese public and private sector are these horrible infringements on civil rights. We’ve got Chinese ex-pats who fled to the US and went right back to committing crimes as soon as they arrived. Billions of dollars defrauded from Americans because the US was intent on protecting known malicious actors that the Chinese government had planned to prosecute.

Like, Russia? Fine, sure. Whatever. That place has been a dumpster fire since at least Yeltsin. But at some point, western media isn’t denouncing fraud. It is implicitly covering for these crooks under the “China Bad” banner head.

Red Hot Chili Peppers and their consequences.

Oh man, what do Boeing and Astrobotics have in common?

Can’t seem to keep all their lids shut.

given the age of the Universe and the relatively short time it would take for an advanced civilization to spread across the Milky Way Galaxy (650,000 years, by Hart’s estimate), Earth should have been visited by an extraterrestrial civilization (ETC) by now.

It took humans 30,000 years to cross the Atlantic. Using modem propolsion systems, it takes us two years to get to Mars and 40 to reach the edge of the solar system. This seems like an extremely generous estimate considering the Milky Way has a 50,000 light year radius.

I’m as bullish about extraterrestrial life as anyone, and I think a fuller survey of even just the current Solar System has potential. But I have no idea how you get a full galactic survey in so short a time, given what we know about the soft limits on speed of travel and communication.

By Tipler’s refined estimate, an ETC would be able to explore the entire galaxy in “less than 300 million years.”

That definitely feels like it’s more in the ballpark. But, again, it presumes a certain amount of steady cartography by the hypothetical fleet of Von Neuman probes.

There’s a Sci-fi series called The Bobverse that explores the idea of a sentiment fleet of Von Neumans exploring the galaxy, and the various trial and tribulations involved. One point it discusses is that even with a saturation of probes, you don’t get real time communication. So even in a hypothetical universe where alien life did exist and survey earth, what are they odds they’d be watching us at the moment of our development. What would an alien AI be looking for and what would it do when it was discovered?

We could still be too primitive to bare noticing. Or we could be living in between blinks of an alien camera that only reports back every 1000 years.

As we look out at the cosmos, we could be looking at things we don’t understand. After all, what does a star surrounded by a Dyson Sphere look like to a telescope that is searching for glimmers of light, heat, and gravity? SETI is operating purely on conjecture. That’s assuming alien civilizations are even capable of creating these hypothetical superstructures. Or that the structures would function as we intuit.

At some level, I have to question if we know what we’re looking for. Because so much of this feels like we’re searching for humans deep in space. Perhaps the reason we can’t find aliens is that they are simply… too alien.

Picard was already bordering on elder abuse.

Certainly possible that elements were AI generated. However, this image feels like it had someone putting polish on it. The symmetry - both in the setting and in the focal point of the image - plus the sharper color contrast particularly between the red of Mt. Doom and the blue of the mountains and the way that you get a real sense of light coming directly from the volcano and radiating out into the rest of the image. Someone definitely had their hands on this in a material way, even if it was just moving clip-art onto a canvas and tweaking the colors a bit.

Weird how the size of your nose changes with your facial expression.

Wouldn’t be the first time SquareEnix pissed away years of development time refusing to admit they made a mistake.

Paul Erdos is in many obscure books.

John Nash will forever be known as the guy who looked at a gaggle of cute girls and invented a mathematical model for getting the most guys laid.

This is the eugenicist’s dilemma. You very rarely meet one who would advocate euthanizing themselves.

This Kind Of Smart, Walkable, Mixed-use Urbanism Is Illegal To Build In Most American Cities

Doing another Slay and Say.