In the past day I've been thinking about what I would "do with my life" if I didn't have to worry about money or other existential concerns... not like how I would live it up if I were a gentlewoman of leisure (that's a different question), but what my primary pursuit would be.
And the answer I've come up with is: game design and creation. Most specifically tabletop roleplaying games. Writing them and putting them out in the world is the thing I would most like to be doing with my life, if I didn't have any worries.
Now, I do have worries... health stuff, money stuff, house stuff, political stuff... and the stuff I want to do has to be worked in around these concerns.
And thinking about what I would do if I didn't have those concerns seems like a good step in setting priorities.
If you've followed me long enough you've probably seen me noodling around with game design theory stuff on here, or even seen drafts of tabletop projects I shared on a blog. So this isn't new to me.
And I basically *always* have some game design thing simmering on a backburner, as a thing I can pick up when I'm running out of steam on something else and need a palate cleanser or whatever.
And I really like the way my current ideas on tabletop RPG stuff have been coming together. So maybe I'll work on shaping up my random design notes and turning them into something.
I'm not making solid, definite plans right now so much as thinking out loud here.
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I keep seeing people expressing things about how hard it is to have empathy for unvaccinated adults in the US, and we as a society really need to learn that for a species of highly specialized social animals (which we are), taking care of each other is in our own self-interest.
If half the adults in this country were to die over the course of a year, we'd be screwed. You'd be screwed. Even if it was nobody you knew. Even if it was "the worst half" in every measure you care about. However self-sufficient you think you are, you'd find out how you're not.
"It's hard to have empathy when it's survival of the fittest."
Yeah, Darwin? Where do you think empathy came from? Is that like some flaw that crept in to the human species as we got better at surviving? No. It's a useful trait for the survival of a social species.
I've now seen more panels of 9 Chickweed Lane than I care to (@damnyouwillis has never been a more apt Twitter handle) and it feels like the artist has a fondness for drawing everybody way too big and up close, then trying to cram them into dynamic and interesting poses.
Like every panel starts with a composition that maybe would have been cool to see but then most of it gets cut out of the panel and what fits in is being distorted and contorted to make it fit.
It's just really uncomfortably tight compositions, like a 45 year old man spontaneously deciding to go to Rocky Horror for the first time in decades and not quite stuffing himself into the tight fetish pants he wore then using an unhallowed mixture of baby powder and vaseline.
Cop School 1: What if we made Animal House but it's, like, at a cop school?
2: We made money but our cops already graduated school? I guess it's just a frat house comedy about actual cops? Still called Cop School for some reason.
3: That was weird. Just back to cop school now.
4: You know how the first three were either about cops or cop school? This one's just about like regular people. Except, everybody's a cop now. It's cop world. Look, our leading man is starting to get a bit Hollywood Weird in the face so we can do whatever and he's going NOWHERE.
5: ...well. Dang. He kinda went everywhere. I guess we do, like, Baywatch? Or Miami Vice? Like Baywatch in Miami. And... international jewel thieves?
6: The international jewel thieves part were cheaper than the Florida part so we're just doing that part again.
It's kind of amazing, the range of utterly fake body language stuff that supposed "alpha men" will make up in their quest to invent an objective way of measuring personal winning-ness in a way that demands no actual accomplishments, achievements, charisma, or skills of them.
"You can tell from the way this man stands that he's a winner. You can tell from the way the woman stands that she loves him. My experience is that when you're an alpha, like I am, no woman ever tells you that she loves you, out of fear and respect. You have to read her stance."
I mis-swiped on a Twitter thread and wound up on one of those accounts and he was analyzing a picture of a celebrity couple holding hands to determine who had "thumb control". What a weird little dweeb.
"Anti-sex beds" reminds me of when I was very young and had worked out that "sleeping together" meant "sex" but didn't fully understand that it was a euphemism.
Maybe they were designed by someone who had been given the task to "prevent athletes from sleeping together" and they simply did exactly as they had been asked.
I sympathize because Jack once asked me to help him divide some food up "without cutting any of them in half" and I started cutting one up into thirds (because there were three of us), not understanding that the cutting was the problem, rather than the specific fraction.
A really great thing to do with political ads that strike you as deeply wrong is not retweet them, reply to them, send them to your friends, post them to the group chat, or otherwise extend their reach.
"But Alexandra," you might be thinking, "nobody in my group chat would vote for or donate to a bigoted Republican jerk, so what's wrong with sharing this ad to laugh at him?"
Let me grant that you're right about that.
Also let me explain you a thing called legs.
Before we said things went viral, we'd say they have legs. This story's got legs. This product's got legs. This is an idea with legs.
What are legs? They're one of the things (besides money) it takes to get along. Things with legs go places.