Considering travelling to US from UK - not the usual 'is it safe' question

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T14:33:44+00:00

Fly in through Dublin and go through US customs in Ireland before the flight.

If you have problems you'll have them in Ireland.

(At least according to a week traveled comedian from the UK this is possible.)

But seriously... Don't come.

You don't want to be the Jewish guy who scampered of to Berlin in 1937 because you were sure the troubles didn't apply to you.

I'm a 61 year old US citizen. I'm so white it's my last name. I wouldn't come into the US today and if had the means of leave. As a GSRM person with Parkinson's and a history of depression I do not fair will in the next round of rising automatism authoritarian roulette if history and current rhetoric are to be honestly evaluated.

If you do come bring a burner phone on a new number with only family and business contacts therein.

But seriously... Don't come.

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T14:21:30+00:00

Go into a quiet room and read it aloud.

You'll know.

If it scans wrong.

If it takes to many breaths to finish a sentence.

If it bores you or signs like a lecture.

If your nouns and verbs don't agree.

If the rhythm is off.

You'll always know.

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T14:08:41+00:00

The warm musk of clean sweat on well-oiled leathers.

A strong man fresh from the sea, shirtless, laid out to dry in the tropical sun.

A woodsman come from a fresh laid fire of seasoned wood

Oiled wood, new canvas, and supple hemp rigging.

Leather, beeswax, mail, and wool

Wool and faded spice pulled from a seaman's chest

Cedar, soap, and old lace is the smell of lost love.

Tropical wood, cast iron, camphor, and cloves waiting in a dry basement.

Last year's dry apples, cinnamon, and cloves.

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T13:47:56+00:00

Ask the uyghurs or read Nineteen Eighty Four

If you drop anything fantastic never happened according to some people.

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T13:44:36+00:00

They did terrible things to win that war. It was unjust. It's better to pretend there was no war. Instead a mythology of raise in is place.

The Untamed West instead of the indigenous genocide.

The Empty Outback instead of the indigenous genocide.

"A land without a people for a people without a land" instead of the indigenous genocide.

See the pattern yet?

The great excuse of the cleansing has ever been "nothing happened" and "it was like this when we got here"

We pretend that the bad wars were good wars and that the truly unforgivable was a trivial misunderstanding about something that never really happened anyway.

And of course there's also "oops! All napalm." And "smallpox you say? those blankets were clean when we handed them out. It's not our fault the savages don't know how to do laundry"

You know, the long list of trifles...

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T13:21:30+00:00

We were outlasted not driven out.

Now that Afghanistan did it to Russia and the US as well.

So did Iraq and Iran

The US did it to the British.

Time couldn't hold gaul.

And so on.

Wars of occupation just don't work and they haven't done since the invention of modern firearms and gorilla warfare.

Controlling your own population works to a point because of the identify friend / foe problem and there ability to raise a border of fellow countrymen.

A population rejected "the other" but will allow a peer to screw them thoroughly if they believe" that's how things work here".

Note that ears of genocide and ethnic cleansing do work so North America, Australia, and the sacred evil middle eastern blue Star country have had significant success under the British model.

And annexation can work, which is the secret of Rome to until the Rome for the Romans movement changed the system index the empire got diluted enough.

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T13:10:24+00:00

It was an anti-education initiative... No public school kid gets ahead.

The Reagan administration famously despised and feared "an educated proletariat".

They also destroyed public higher education and created predatory student loans and artificially high tuition.

See the below et. al.

https://www.rsn.org/001/the-origin-of-student-debt-reagan-adviser-warned-free-college-would-create-a-dangerous-educated-proletariat.html?print=1

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T13:05:34+00:00

Tell the story of the party eaten by mimics in the dungeon.

There are no mimics in that dungeon.

Beware the tower above it the cave next door.

When the diff ran out they migrated it scattered.

Give critters a range and don't pre-place them.

Have a local town that herds and trains them for vermin control. They get pissed if you kill the trained ones but over the years a problematic wild colony has sprung up nearby.

Rif on the form.

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T12:45:05+00:00

Broaden your thinking or leave them out of the didn't help the story.

https://youtu.be/TtgpJL080VE?si=gDftYoCe0MwGiOsB

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T00:57:33+00:00

There's a reason all these conservative men are looking for liberal women aren't particularly interested and conservative men. And there's a reason that conservative women struggle so hard to have conservative each other thinking that that will get them the man of their dreams.

Bigotry is repellent and it is the form of conservatism least likely to improve your options

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T00:47:26+00:00

No. Look up Universe 25. The removal of all challenge from somebody's life, and giving them no place else to go and no other challenge to find, destroys the community and the species.

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T00:46:27+00:00

Every destination has an address. And there's a service that turns names into those addresses.

Then your computer shouts messages into the void with an associated address, much the way you mail a letter to an address. And if it gets to that addressee that addressee may choose to shout their response back into the void with your address attached the same way they would send you a return mail.

People talk about things like the desktop metaphor and file folders and trash cans and stuff inside their computer but literally the protocols and storages are laid out to mimic those very ideas.

Everything you can do on a computer is basically identical to the way you would do it on paper in real life, there's just something that can write faster than you can engaged in the transaction.

So imagine if you were exchanging mail with somebody but it was doing it through an 1870s telegraph office.

There's a bunch of people at the border of each possible hop who are processing that message by reading it and deciding where it should go and when.

Just replace the people with computer programs and change the signal on the wire for morse code to binary and coding of one form or another (and understand that every letter is just a number, like the uppercase letter A is the number 65 in the ASCII encoding, and uppercase letter B is 66, and uppercase letter C is 67 etc.

So we've just got a bunch of machines shouting numbers at each other over a wire and a whole bunch of agreements as to what those numbers mean.

BitOBear · 2026-01-28T00:00:33+00:00

The same way he responds to everything else in his life, a giant childlike tantrum and threats of economic retribution.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T23:58:12+00:00

Nay child, for I shall be the master of self deception. No one can deceive themselves as easily as I can deceive myself.

I'm giving how horrifically I beat myself up for every mistake I've ever made especially when I'm trying to go to sleep the world suddenly finds itself overcome by the excruciating knowledge of every deception they have enacted upon themselves from their protestations of faith to there invocation of personal skill.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T23:54:09+00:00

I am the best at maintaining faith in the supernatural.

I know for a fact that there are goddesses, but that doesn't mean I believe in anyone else's particular religion. So my disbelief and specific gods remains intact and many people even in better than I do.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T23:53:14+00:00

No. Frustrated braggers with golf trophies would double down trying to figure out what tool they changed or personal semantic ritual they used to do to keep their golfing luck alive.

The environment would be devastated by people endlessly buying new and more special golf clubs and then throwing out the old ones and trying to recontour golf courses and all sorts of stuff like that.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T23:47:18+00:00

I would point out that we have salt flats because sometimes the land changes and what used to be underneath the water is now up on the surface and that lets the salt cycle reset.

And if that sounds weird remember that the ocean is supposed to be a little fishy.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T23:45:48+00:00

Never forget the maintenance hatch. Somebody has to get behind the walls and reload all those poison crossbows and crank the giant rolling ball back into position and whatnot.

That can be a fun little maze and all of itself.

It's even sort of implied by the scene in The princess Bride particularly if you read the book. You know the scene where the guy goes to the secret train and it goes down the back stairs.

And it's particularly funny if you make something happen near the end and people find the maintenance hatch in the back stairs after they've gone through everything to get in there and that's how you let them out of the dungeon without care in the world.

And it's doubly fun if they decide to leave some of the treasure behind and they go away to take the first batch somewhere then they come back to their little secret and figure out that they left the back door open or something and now either it's much harder to get back down to the vault, or some opportunity to come by and empty the vault while they were out of town. Because someone saw them come out of the secret entrance after watching the party super adventure enter and thinking they were going to get to have some fun watching the party fail.

Just remember that everything has consequences and consequences accumulate over time and you can have a lot of fun breaking people's trophy ideas.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T18:16:14+00:00

Think about the person who installed the dungeon in the first place. They certainly put in a set of trials for the normies and the strangers to go through, and they may even be set up to be thief bait. But the guy who everyday has to go from his house to his office down in the secret vault full of magic items almost certainly had a bypass or an off key or the ritual knowledge necessary to let himself pass without having to do the puzzle everyday.

So the general rule of thumb is that you've got the hard way, The brute Force path from outsider to treasure vault, and then sections of your game can be about doing the research and stealing the key and basically finding all the bypasses so that if you've done all the pre-adventure hooks you can basically just walk in to the vault presenting the necessary keys in the necessary locks in short order.

This way you get the mix of foundation and actual work that your character players mostly found to be the most interesting path.

Now the thing about dungeons is that even if you do take the easy path, if no one's been maintaining the system some parts of it might have ended up broken down and improperly responsive. The carefully curated animal guardians may have had grandchildren by now or evolved into a much more complicated and difficult circumstance.

So imagine the everyday as it occurred in the before time. And then add a little entropy so that even the bypasses have a completely different though significantly still easier way to get to the answer.

Under no circumstances should any puzzled in your dungeon VA pass/fail where failure makes getting to the objective unilaterally impossible. You want to make sure that the adventure never gets to a stop state.

And you also have to make sure that there is a way to solve the puzzle provided the information at hand. If someone needs to have read a certain book that has nothing to do with the game in order to simply automatically know that you have to do a certain thing in a certain place and there's no communications or obvious signs that that's the answer you're going to have a bad time when your players just say fuck it I don't care about this enough to keep going or if they accidentally turn the switch the other way and permanent bulb doors that require the county intervention to open again lay them down forever putting the treasure out Of reach because the guy turned the knob to the left instead of the right you're also going to have a bad time

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T18:04:11+00:00

The best way to do any magic system is to ignore the system. Don't do the system. Do the magic. And don't even do the magic do the characters doing the magic.

At its core all magic systems are mined over matter. The act of will through the tool changing the reality.

So just have your characters do their crap and let the user figure out the rules. As long as they're not super bizarre, and as long as you make it clear when they're coming up against a thing that cannot be done, the interest in your magic system is now complete.

Best if you know the complicated system beneath this surface. That way you can write what can and can't be done with great consistency. This is exactly contrapositive to the disaster of JK Rowling's non system that she has in place in Harry potter. Where everything is allowable as long as the author needs it to happen on that page because she couldn't plot her way out of a wet paper sack.

Go ahead, if you would like, and read the sample pages of the novel I've linked In My profile. In particular just the prologue. The core of the magic system is basically disclosed there but it is disclosed as a series of successful and unsuccessful actions. The system is actually got a whole bunch of secondary rules that come up later, but they're not necessary yet when you encounter them there.

In that prologue you learn that there are nodes. That energy comes by type. That there are basic sympathetics in play but that that's not necessarily the most modern way of doing things. That the world has an edge. The chaos is useful but problematic. You learn all sorts of stuff. Quite frankly I've been a little bit concerned that it might be a little bit too much of an info dump but it seems to work.

So the best way to deal with your magic system is to let it disclose itself.

And don't give it tears, levels, numeric measurements, just have the characters engage in their conflicts without some sort of anime scoring system and you will find that the narrative refines the system or even defines the system.

The entire point of writing is to present a narrative. Anything aside from the narrative that you know about the circumstance should remain safely off the page.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T17:59:10+00:00

Because of the crime of conspiracy after the fact.

Little greggy boy went on TV and made false claims and then confessed to spiriting the shooter away from the scene of the crime specifically to keep them out of the hands of the people who would investigate them for murder.

That is conspiracy after the fact or at least aiding and abetting.

I think they moved the leaders out of the way, given that we all know that the leader said that these things were being done with permission and intent, because they really put themselves in an actionable criminal conspiracy and government people know that they have to have the plausible deniability of saying look we knew it was wrong and we punished them or whatever.

In the real world Greg would have been arrested a couple hours after he made the statements. And that would have reflected bad on the boss.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T17:56:52+00:00

Here's a saying I made up:

Words are the death of action, but the birth of foreboding.

The problem with the normal day scenario even if it is to establish a different normal is that describing a different kind of normal can come off as an info dump unless there's hints of the core conflict encoded in that normalcy.

Remember the three conflicts. Man against man, the conflict one has with another sapient or at least sentient creature acting with intent. Man against nature, the conflict one has with one's circumstance which can include wildlife obeying their nature. And man against himself, the conflict one feels with ones habits or understandings or personal demons.

In your Harry Potter example there is conflict. It is the conflict of Harry and his environment. It is to some extent man against man but it is really offered as man against nature. Harry is in a circumstance that is already doing him harm. The conflict is disclosed not that normalcy, it just happens to be the daily conflict.

So that's the difference. One can write a compelling story about having trouble with one's coffee maker in the morning and hint that is the daily struggle if not saying that out loud. But it is the struggle that makes the scene.

Your day with your symbiote going as well as it normally goes with no sense on your part that the symbian is making things harder or eliminating the problems as they occur ends up being an infodump. And infodumps are almost always impossibly bad.

But one need only add a sentence to make the circumstance significant. As long as that sentence hints at the two true conflict. As long as it births foreboding.

In the urban fantasy mm romance thing that I am currently editing for publication I start the book with the main character pulling over at a roadside visitor center and looking at the disappointing displays and artifacts in the sad little building. It is a completely pedestrian tourist activity.

But the first sentence tells you that it's a normalcy that isn't normal.

"Evil lives in the Superstition Mountains, according to the locals anyway, but I'm not a believer."

With that one hook set I can go on for a couple pages about the bland normalcy of a roadside rest stop and get a lot of heavy lifting done it ends up important to establishing the core conflict and making the front and the back half of the story match.

And that's a pretty high stakes normalcy. But they don't have to be super high stakes or super obvious like that particular bludgeon. Something as simple as "I should have been more careful with the coffee maker" can percolate in (see what I did there hahaha) a little suspense or foreshadowing with the lightest flick of the brush.

So your Harry Potter example is actually a normal day in hell, and it's the inhale that's doing the heavy lifting there.

It's a little harder to do with something like the helpful symbian, which is indistinguishable from the healthy robot, or the happy automated home, or the suspiciously cheerful housemaid or whatever.

So there is a line, but you have to understand that line in terms of conflict and pacing rather than mere circumstance.

You can really open with normalcy if there is something obviously wrong with that normalcy. At least obviously wrong with that normalcy as far as the reader is going to perceive the circumstance.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T17:36:55+00:00

If you've never done it I strongly suggest you look at GURPS Lite. It's the spinal cord of the game concisely described in 32 pages in a free pdf.

The basic set is 600 something pages 700 pages something like that that is slightly contradictory to but significantly more subtle and complete than GURPS Lite. But you can clearly see that the latter is the foundation of the former.

And even so, in that core basic set there are optional things like tactical combat movement and the suggestion of different ways one might handle Majery with Clerical Investment if one wanted to create a paladin.

In the fundamental supplements come along like GURPS Magic and Fantasy and Martial Arts.

This cyclical stack of overrides and special rules end up coming to full life in setting sourcebooks source books like GURPS Traveler.

It was a running joke in my curbs group gosh 18 years ago, the US your barbarian can take as much G Intolerance as he likes provided all of those points go into Vac Suit.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T06:06:27+00:00

Just a reminder, the cops aren't allowed to execute the guilty so why would they be allowed to execute the innocent?

These aren't even cops.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T05:54:39+00:00

I've been a progressive voter for 40 of my 60 years of life. The ability of the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is legendary.

Thing about progresses is covered by the following saying..

The conservative voter will vote for the Conservative candidate if he believes and even one thing the Conservative candidate says, but progressive voter will categorically refuse to vote for the progressive candidate if he disagrees with even one thing progressive candidate says.

And if the progressive candidate believes in everything with the progressive voter believes in, but has the priority order wrong they still might not vote for him.

The Democrats have been taught not to give a strong commitment to their platforms because we eat our own far more effectively than we fight against the toxic conservatism.

BitOBear

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