This shit with Mauer is fishy. Why do all this work without contracts when you know it leads to your work being misused? Why would you not make every single bit of work you do contingent on the presence of contracts from that point forward? I almost feel like Mauer’s trying to set companies up for this shit by getting…

It’s important to remember that low voter turnout isn’t simply a response to neoliberalism. It’s a result of the electoral college and increasing regional sorting. Telling someone from the minority party to waste their time voting a state that heavily favors the other party is just not a solution. There are only a…

It’s not about leading voters to the Democratic side - the Republican nominee for President has won the popular vote only once in the last quarter century (Bush in 2004).

This is the thing I can’t stand about the “tiny house” thing: whenever you see examples on TV or whatever, it’s always those stupid trailer houses that look like tiny replicas of the house on Mama’s Family or whatever. This sort of cheeseball thing with folksy, country charm. I think that people are right to…

Yes, she is. Unless we want to start saying that white South Africans are black just because they’re from Africa or something. Her parents are both of German extraction. She is a white Brazilian (there are a lot of them, and yes, the ramifications in terms of social status in many ways mirror those we can see in the…

Alimony is shit, but it’s kind of odd how few people seem to care about it until the laws in question lead to the counterintuitive result of women earners having to make payments to their estranged/soon-to-be-divorced husbands. This is, like, normal shit for so many male breadwinners in the same situation. And…

But, at the end of the day, I would prefer to have a Chinese-American play a Filipino instead of casting, say, Emma Stone.

I don’t understand why Indian somehow works here, if we’re trying to cast an actor of the proper ethnicity? Like are they saying that it’s basically good enough just to be a brown Asian?

God, you are a horrible writer.

When it comes to harassment in online gaming, silence is complicity.

But “murder hobos” specifically are characters who will kill anything that gets in their way, and are not particularly thoughtful or disciplined about it. So yeah, they usually should be deemed chaotic-evil. Either way, I was just trying to point out a case where a player needs a bit of DM intervention so that their…

This is an excellent point. If lawful-good characters are turning out kind of boring, it may well be on the DM to introduce more interesting stakes in the game’s events. If it’s always possible to be the valiant Paladin, that’s of course going to wear thin over time. The DM needs to press on that a bit, and make it…

Yeah, I think it’s important to have an alignment, if only as a sort of loose contract that prevents a player from taking a schizoid approach to drama. Alignment is a reminder that you are indeed roleplaying, that what your character would do and what you would do are two different things. But there are certainly more…

Keep in mind that most of the people that you meet in your day-to-day life will be Lawful Good.

Instead of coming up with a complex character with its own desires and personal motivations, they start by saying “well I’m lawful good so I guess that means I want XYZ”. I think this problem has led to a LOT of terrible lawful good characters over the decades.

God, who fucking cares? Seriously, I hate this guy, but I hate this post even more.

Well, no. Speculation is not absurd. I’m saying what I feel is likely the case. Should we never do this unless backed by evidence that already proves it with absolute certainty? What I’m saying is that these types of complaints are a dime a dozen, and they usually take the same small array of endings (either the…

There are countless cases like this one (where an artist objects to use of a song on moral grounds, and there’s a general license agreement at play), and we can see how they almost always turn out. That’s what I’m going from here. There is nothing so novel about this that one need to see the arguments in order to…

There are no grounds for making an argument of likelihood over a pretty boilerplate industry convention? Last time I checked, “likely” didn’t mean “100% surefire certain.”

And let me be clear: I’m not coming down on Zenimax’s side because I have any special affinity for them as a company. When the same thing happens to politicians during election seasons, I usually am not predisposed to defend the politician, either (because they are usually assholes, and I sympathize with the artists).…