I enjoyed reading through that, thanks!

I think I more or less agree with where you’re coming from. Part of the fun of roleplaying is getting to explore darkness in a safe way. Not everyone is looking for that and that’s fine, but I definitely find it weird to have the core setting lean into a more “disney-fied” setting. Seems like it should offer options.

It’s probably a symptom of DND becoming so much more mainstream. You can’t please everyone, so the best they can do is minimally bother everyone which can end up pretty… OK. Not great, not terrible, and mostly uninspiring.

Those are my thoughts based just on what you said. I haven’t heard about any of this before now so those are just off the cuff.

Alright I’ll bite. What did they do to it?

The biggest responses I’ve ever gotten by far have all been asking for alternatives to popular tech. 😏

Racecar is racecar backwards.

Thanks for the reply.

It feels to me like tech has been trying to remove humanity from every part of daily life it can. I don’t think technology is bad but I do think that goal is bad. It’s often done with good intentions, too, like making things more convenient. We lose a lot of opportunities for connection because of it.

It’s a quirk of human nature though, clearly. We need socialization but we don’t like to instigate it (at least many don’t). If you look at old photos of trains or busses everyone was reading the paper or a book. Phones aren’t that different, except the content never runs out. You can look at it forever and you’ll never see it all.

I heard someone describe looking at social media as a state of engaged distraction, and that really fits I think. A book is something you have to engage with and process in your mind in order to follow it. Social feeds are sort of the opposite. They take your attention, but it’s a constantly changing thing you’re looking at, often trying to get an intense emotional response. Your brain is just jumping all over the place (I’m using the general you in all this, so not trying to speak for you specifically). You can spend hours on a social feed and barely remember anything.

I think hearing takes like yours is a good thing for older people like me cause there’s way too much rhetoric about how the youth are phone addicted. You’re not the first person I’ve heard have this negative or mixed response to it, and your feelings about it are totally valid. I honestly feel really similarly. I don’t hate all of it, but I definitely think there are some major problems with what we currently have.

I hope eventually we create some apps that encourage human connection off the phone. There’s clearly a very human need for distraction and entertainment, so I don’t think abstaining from that is the answer. Pokemon go is probably one of the most successful examples of an app doing something like that. I never used it, but I’ve heard lots of people made friends that way.

I’ve wondered this too. I’ve seen more and more places where you’re supposed to use your phone with seemingly no other option. For instance restaurants that only have digital menus, or I’ve seen things like promotions or giveaways that require a phone as well. I know I’ve seen some other spots that seemed more critical too, like a public service kind of thing, but I’m forgetting now what they were.

I have a phone, so it doesn’t affect me, but I still always wonder what they do if someone doesn’t have one. It feels like another vector for wealth inequality. Not to mention the fact that if cell service and internet went down anything that’s phone/computer only will instantly stop working entirely. It just seems like a problem waiting to happen to me.

So I’m a millennial, and it’s interesting to hear what you said about every dull moment being phone time. I was just talking with some friends yesterday about that and trying to remember what we used to do instead. To be honest there were plenty of times where we were really bored, and I don’t know if that’s better or not. I do feel like there is so much stimulation now that my brain never gets a chance to rest and decompress without making a very conscious effort to take moments like that. Can’t say I’m very good at that either. So maybe the boredom was a good thing in a way? I’d be curious to hear your younger perspective on that if you read this.

You rang?

I really liked this game, but I used all my unlock points on the wrong squads and couldn’t progress any further to get new ones. I wish they hadn’t bound the unlock currency to getting achievements with each squad. It made it so if I bought one I ended up hating there was no shot of getting any money back. Otherwise it’s a great game though.

I don’t like this definition of echo chamber as any group with similar opinions. If those opinions are based on facts and expert advice I don’t think it applies anymore. To me an echo chamber in the dangerous sense is when people have a dangerous or uninformed consensus because they don’t let facts or advice from outside reach them. That’s very different than people with similar opinions finding each other. The latter is just how humans are.

Until you lose the device with the 2fa app and can’t ever get into those accounts again. I’ve heard that horror story before and I avoid those apps because of it.