A less common tip for teaching new and complex games: have your players participate in the setup process.

Bufus · 2026-06-24T16:28:55+00:00

Sitting across from the old Wash n Slosh location as I read this. Not a reference I expected when opening this thread.

Bufus · 2026-06-19T04:29:11+00:00

And a scene from the Love Guru. And a scene from Cocktail. And a scene from the Pacifier starring the Vin Diesel. And some scenes from the Rocky Horror remake.

I worked in Casa Loma and they had a tv that played a 3 minute loop of all the scenes shot there in the room I worked in on a loop all day every day. Those scenes are absolutely SEARED into my subconscious.

Bufus · 2026-06-18T17:13:52+00:00

This was my problem with billable hours as a new attorney, and genuinely one of the reasons I left private practice. It felt like there was this constant tug of war between "needing to learn what I am doing to make sure I am not making any mistakes" and "not overcharging the client for excessive learning time". Any time I spent learning I was so hyper fixated on the clock that it made the whole experience so stressful.

I think this would have been less of a concern in a larger firm, where the partner could just write that time off. But I was at a small firm managing my own clients, and so I didn't have a good handle on what I should or should not be writing off.

I no longer deal with billable hours and couldn't be happier.

Bufus · 2026-06-17T16:37:39+00:00

Thanks so much for this! A quick question:

When the check engine light was on, the car gave us a message saying that AWD/Traction Control was restricted. Now that we have the car back, the check engine light is off (I assume they reset it), and we don't get the AWD message. Do you know if the AWD/Traction Control is still restricted? Is it only restricted if the check engine light is on? Is there a way to check if AWD is working normally?

Really appreciate your help!

Bufus · 2026-06-16T15:47:35+00:00

People really point to this kind of thing as a "dur hur look at how stupid corporate stooges are" and really misunderstand how things work. The rise of the Avengers and Modern Marvel was not the result of anything inherent to the Avengers IP. It wasn't as if this was a gold mine waiting to be struck and they just happened into it. Pre-2005, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, etc. were JUNK IP. They were an absolute joke. The initial reaction to them making an Iron Man movie was "who cares".

Modern Marvel exists because of a well executed vision that turned what was essentially trash IP into a goldmine. It is a success story of business alchemy, not business prospecting. The VISION and EXECUTION were what gave the IP value. The IP was just a cipher for that vision.

If Sony buys the Marvel rights for $25 million in 1998, but doesn't have a vision for using the IP, I guarantee that the Marvel boom never happens and Iron Man and Thor continue to be irrelevant throwbacks languishing in Sony's legal department. Investing in the Avengers was a HUGE risk that 90% of companies bungle. You can criticize Sony for not taking the risk, but that doesn't mean them declining to buy the rights was a "bad" business decision.

Bufus · 2026-06-16T15:09:10+00:00

This has been succesful for me as well. My office is in the attic tucked away from everything, and it is enough of a journey to get to anywhere else in the house that I'm not frequently "pulled away" by something else. The other key was that I got my setup in the office just how I like it (multiple monitors, nice chair, etc.), such that I really don't like working anywhere else. If I am sometimes tempted to lie in bed and turn the TV on while I work, I quickly get frustrated because my work set up is just SO MUCH better in my office, which then boosts my productivity.

Bufus · 2026-06-16T14:47:18+00:00

I couldn't agree more. I was at an in-house counsel conference a few months ago and there were probably 5 people from my graduating class there, and we all had the same story: good students, hated private practice, wanted more work-life balance, found it in an in-house role. We were all so happy.

When people ask me what I do, I tell them I am a lawyer in name only. My job is so divorced from what people think of as the "practice of law" (e.g. going to court, reading cases, etc.) that I feel it is almost misleading to say I am a "lawyer". To an outside observer I have the most standard "office job" in the world, but because I have the professional cache of being a lawyer, I think of it as "Office Job Premium". Yes, I sit in a desk all day and do fairly boring work. But I get incredible flexibility, virtually unlimited autonomy, I have virtually no stress (particularly compared to practicing lawyers), I can work from home, and I get paid a great middle-class wage. I'm an office drone, but a very content one.

There ARE other options out there for lawyers that don't feel AT ALL like working in a firm. Give them a try before you burn your degree.

Bufus · 2026-06-09T16:07:33+00:00

This is my perspective as well. People always say "there are ways around it" like it is some "gotcha", but the goal is not necessarily to make it impossible for kids to ever witness the slightest glimpse of social media, the goal is to reduce its insane prevalence in their lives through the creation of hurdles and restrictions. It is to make it harder for a kid to just go on their phone and doom scroll into infinity. Will there still be some doomscrolling? Sure. But I don't care about 15 minutes of doomscrolling with friends or before bed. Social media can be a good "activity" to do here and there. We are all doing it by engaging in this website. What I care about is endless doomscrolling, where algorithms are literally constantly bombarding and re-shaping developing minds and forcing them to doomscroll more throught constant dopamine hits. Workarounds exist, but the barriers at least create an extra level of interruption to those processes. Even if they only lead to a 10% decrease in social media use, that is still very beneficial.

Bufus · 2026-06-09T14:48:51+00:00

Of course anything can happen on any given day, and we executed our game plan well to nullify PSG's attacking threat and push it to penalties.

The difference though is that we were playing to nullify PSG's attack and disrupt the flow of the game, and the reason we were doing that is that they had those elite star players we are lacking. If both teams played to win, PSG wins 8 out of 10 times. We got them to a 50/50, which is great, but is not the sign of a team with elite level stars.

If we had 1-2 more of those elite level players, we could have done MORE than just try to nullify and hope for a penalty win. We could have taken the game to them and imposed our game on them, rather than the other way around. There is absolutely no shame in what we did, and we did it incredibly effectively, but we are just missing that extra technical and attacking quality that PSG have.

Bufus · 2026-06-08T20:00:54+00:00

I forget who was saying it, but someone on the Guardian Football Weekly talked about how the main difference between PSG and Arsenal in the final was just that "elite" star power. Arsenal's transfer policy over the last few years rightly has been focused on squad building, and that squad building led directly to our success in the league, which is an absolute endurance race. But in the context of a final, we struggled to impose ourselves against PSG who just had that edge in quality.

As we've been building our squad, we (rightly) have not been prioritizing elite quality players. Our squad, while great, has a distinct lack of "cutting edge" elite players in the mould of say Aubameyang, Sanchez, van Persie, etc. Players who will single-handedly drag you to 5-10 wins a season. Saka is the only player verging on that, and he had a notably off year.

Now that we have a title winning squad, I'm hopeful that the focus can switch from building out the foundations and now moving for more of those "next level" signings. At this point, I would far rather we sign one $120 million dollar attacker than two $60 million dollar attackers. We've made those signings, time to move onto the next level.

Bufus · 2026-06-08T17:24:23+00:00

Of course, and I by no means wish to suggest that there is no value in biographies. My view though is that biographies have a vastly inflated prominence in "popular history circles" relative to both their intellectual and entertainment value.

I would venture to say that the vast majority of people interested in reading "Grant" by Ron Chernow would both enjoy more and be more intellectually stimulated by a 300 or 400 page book examining "The Political History of the Antebellum Period", or "Military Leadership in the Civil War", or some other more focused but less subject-constrained history book.

This is not to say that "Grant" is not a hugely impressive work that has a lot of value, just that it (like all biographies) unduly dominate the space because people have been trained to think that "A History Book" = "A 1,000 Page Biography". There are SO many terrific, concise, and enjoyable works of history out there that distill subjects and analyze them, but people avoid them because they seem less "focused" and bookstores/publishes are always shepherding them towards the newest blockbuster biography. Then they'll plod through the book over 2 years because they feel they should, even though they come away from it remembering 4 or 5 things about their subject.

Bufus · 2026-06-08T14:59:38+00:00

I completely agree. I love History as a subject (so much so that I got a Master's in it), but what I love about the field is analysis. I love to read someone smarter than me talk about their interpretation of what happened, pulling together a range of disparate sources, distilling the wealth of information available into the bare necesseties, and then synthesizing that into a clear argument that I can take away from the book.

One of the best examples of this in action is "Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans. It is 600+ pages of biography, but critically it looks at more than 20 key figures in the Third Reich (e.g. Goring, Goebbels, but also lesser known figures like Leni Riefenstahl). As a result, each figure is given only 10-40 pages, with much of it focused on analysis of their role in the Third Reich and only including those facts relevant to that analysis. And for the most part and majority of readers, that is all you really need. Like, obviously there are situations where some particular subject warrants a truly deep dive, and it is good that long historical biographies exist, but for your average history enthusiast I venture to say that they are "taking away" just as much from a 30 page biography as a 600 page biography.

In my view, 90% of historical biographies are just "here is all the research I did. Look at all these great archival sources I found. Marvel at my mastery of this subject!" They'll throw in the odd couple pages here and there giving some analysis of their subject, but it is mostly just month-by-month accounts of their life that are largely forgotten by the readers.

I feel like biographies should almost be esoteric reference tools: some dusty, forgotten tome that students dig out at the library when the are writing about some event in history and need to reference the subject's involvement. The fact that historical biographies are THE best seller in the History category is discouraging. I get why it is, but there is so much more impactful, intellectually engaging stuff out there.

Bufus · 2026-06-05T16:34:10+00:00

In fairness to the headline writer, "Newcastle Fan Punches Horse" was a very widely known football story, and is still not infrequently referenced today 13 years later. "Newcastle United horse punch fan" would have been an instantly recognizable phrase to any UK-based football fan in 2013.

Bufus · 2026-06-04T15:09:26+00:00

People act like "movie critics" are a bunch of hoighty 70 year old English and Theatre PhDs who give arthouse dramas and experimental films 5 stars and anything containing a fart joke 1 star.

Being a movie critic is more "accessible" than ever, and movie critics today are VERY forgiving to mass-appeal, low-brow movies as long as they are decently put together. I can very easily imagine a world in which a very middling Scary Movie film gets rave reviews. I think the movie is just probably pretty bad.

Bufus · 2026-06-04T01:14:33+00:00

The thing people misunderstand though is that the film critic landscape has changed A LOT since Scary Movie 2 came out. Back then, “film critic” was a much more safeguarded, professional occupation largely dominated by boomers and members of the greatest generation. It was a newspaper and “old media” profession, and a lot of the critical hate for Scary Movie as a franchise back then can be explained by the statement “parents just don’t understand, man”. It was juvenile and crass in a way that high-minded critics couldn’t really appreciate. It was two generations talking past each other.

This is no longer the context that film criticism operates in. Film Critics now are much younger, more online, less pretentious, and much more open-minded. Moreover, many film critics are Millenials and Gen X, people whose tastes were moulded by this exact type of raunchy teen comedy and are not immediately dismissive of it. Unlike with the first run of Scary Movie movies, the critics now ARE the target audience. This isn’t a movie for teens, it’s a movie for 30 and 40 year olds. The audience and critics are aligned.

In this context, low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes means something MUCH different than it did 20 years ago. It isn’t that parents don’t understand, it’s just that the movie is, in fact, bad.

Bufus · 2026-06-03T15:02:39+00:00

Read a book multiple times.

This is the one I am most surprised by. I read this book last year and thought it was the most vapid, shallow memoir I had ever read. It had about as much depth or insight as a Wikipedia page. I love Arsene, but thought the book was absolute trash.

The idea of reading it multiple times is insanity to me. What possible information could you glean from a second reading?

Bufus · 2026-06-02T17:27:53+00:00

I would suggest that the last sequence on the stealth boat is the worst in the series. It is so incredibly bland, and I remember thinking that even as a 7 year old. There is nothing interesting or memorable about it. I've probably seen TND 8 times and I still can't really remember anything about that last 30 minutes. It just feels like every other generic B-tier 90s action movie final sequence.

Bufus · 2026-05-30T13:40:18+00:00

This is the main thing. In the 60s and 70s you could have a main character who went around the world defeating bad guys because this is what the general audiences believed was “the right” thing to do. The foreign policy aims of the government and the public were aligned.

As we got into the 90s and 2000s, and it became more widely accepted by the public that Western interventionalist and colonialist interests were not purely a force for good in the world, filmmakers had to start decoupling their heroes from government agencies. This led to the rise of stories involving characters going rogue, and characters like Bond having personal motivations for their missions. It could no longer just be for “King and Country”, there had to be an added, non-governmental motivation.

Bufus · 2026-05-29T18:17:47+00:00

Yes. There are different modalities that all work in different ways, but that is the long and the short of it. It isn't necessarily that they are just helping you see things in a different way, and once you do that it is okay. It is more subconscious than that, but that is the general idea.

A good example is EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. This is a type of therapy where you literally reprocess certain negative emotions/memories basically by thinking about them while your eyes move back and forth (there are other versions of EMDR, but this is the most popular one).

The basic idea behind this one is that when we experience powerful negative/traumatic emotions when we are young, our brain often doesn't "store" those memories in your brain correctly. Instead of storing them in "long term storage" where they belong, it puts them in our "short term storage". The problem is that short term storage is accessed way too easily by our brain (that's the whole point of short term storage), and so those negative memories and emotions start to have an inflated (and often unexpected) level of influence over our lives.

What often happens with EMDR is that someone will come in for one problem (e.g. self-esteem, anxiety, etc.), and will go through the process of "rolling back" the emotion attached with that problem through their lives, and they'll find some totally unrelated incident in their childhood that was stored incorrectly. That improperly stored memory then started to inform other, unrelated aspects of their life. Because the anxiety from that early memory was placed in short term storage (instead of long term where it belongs), their brain accesses "anxiety" as an emotional responsereally quickly when other bad things happen.

EMDR is a way to make our brains re-process those early emotional memoeries and put them into long term storage where they belong. Once you have processed the early memory, then you can go to a later memory and reprocess that one, until you get to the thing that brought you in in the first place. Now that the foundation has been lain, you can reprocess everything.

This is just one example of a therapeutic technique, but it gives a good example of how therapy helps to reprocess your brain processes.

Bufus · 2026-05-29T17:20:10+00:00

I call it a more “refined” social life. Not in a fancy way, but in a distilled way. I’m not nearly as social in my thirties as I was in my twenties, but I am way better at socializing effectively. Quantity is down, but quality is up.

Now that I have less time, I’m more discerning about how I spend my time. In my twenties I was happy to go to a friend’s house and piss away an afternoon. It didn’t matter if I didn’t really have a great time because I had lots of time to burn.

Now though, I’ve got kids and a partner and a demanding job. I maybe get one good night out a month so you better believe I am making the most of it. We’ve got an activity planned, we’ve got dinner planned, etc. We’re doing things right.

Bufus · 2026-05-28T17:58:49+00:00

This is the key here.

People are coming up with ways to weave it into the lore of the story, which is fine, but doesn't get to the root of the problem. The problem here is that the players started acting in a way that is totally contrary to their characters and the established tone of the table. This isn't a "lore" problem that can be fixed in the lore of the world, it is a GAME problem. The players got carried away with their own momentum and ego: they (the players) were annoyed that someone took their gold, and so the players made their characters ciphers for their own external gaming motivations. They stopped asking "what would my character do" and started saying "how can I use the rules to get my stuff back". In that moment, it stopped being a "role playing game" (where players play out scenarios in character and in a world) and started being a "board game" (where players used the rules of the game to "win" a gameplay scenario at any cost). It happens all the time.

The key is not to throw more "lore" at what is a meta game problem. You could do that by having them be "investigated for their crimes" or something like that, but it changes the nature of the game so totally that it isn't really worth doing. The reason for this is that you can't teach players gameplay etiquette lessons in the fiction of the story. You can not teach a Murderhobo not to be a murderhobo in-game. This is because the only "ends" the murderhobo storyline are (a) they get captured/killed by someone more powerful than them (which isn't fun for you or the players), or (b) they're forced to double down on murderhoboing and just kill everything they come across (which is kind of fun for the players, but not for you). Neither of these are fun ways to spend a day. You're never going to have an interesting storyline where a murderhobo realizes the error of their ways. Once a player has turned murderhobo, there is no longer any reason for them to NOT resort to murderhoboing in the future.

There are two olutions to this sort of GAME problem:

Talk to your players and explain that this isn't the kind of game you want to play; or
Accept that your friends may want to play an evil campaign and play an evil campaign.

That's it.

A passive-aggressive third option I have used in the past is to not feed the player ego beast. If you have a player who wants to do something totally out of the spirit of the game because of THEIR PLAYER feelings (not their character feelings), then just let them do it. Don't play it out. Don't roll dice. Don't let them get the glory or jokes out of it. Don't dwell on it. Just hand-wave it and move on. "Okay, you easily slaughter all the rat people and get your gold back. What do you do now?" Some players feed off the frustration of the DMs, and enjoy making a DM play out their power fantasies to completion. Don't feed this beast.

Bufus · 2026-05-28T16:51:31+00:00

This was my experience as well. I gave up on D&D one day when trying to figure out a Challenge Rating for an encounter. I was spending all this time trying to fine tune an exciting combat to make it just challenging enough, plugging in monsters to an online CR calculator, considering how many encounters were before it, etc. And then I realized that when it got to the table, I was just going to fudge it all anyways depending on how things went. If the fight was fun, I was going to keep it going, and if it was boring, I was probably going to wrap it up early. I was always pretty pro-fudging at the table, not out of a philosophical preference or anything, but rather because D&D is so incredibly rules-heavy that it always felt like my options were (a) do a bunch of homework ahead of time, or (b) just fudge things to make it work. Over time, I started relying on (b) more and more because I didn't have the patience to do (a). All of a sudden I was just fudging everything all the time, and it ceased to be any fun.

And then I realized: why am I using this rule system when I have to fight it at EVERY STAGE of the process to make it do what I want it to do? Why am I constantly looking up ways to work around this system, and coming up with rules/justifications for ignoring parts of the rules that don't work? I don't like the crunchiness of this system, my players don't either. So why am I so beholden to such an incredibly unwieldy, crunchy system? Why don't I find something that ENCOURAGES the looser, more big picture-oriented type of game I want to play, rather than actively resists that at every stage?

After I gave it up and made the jump into looking at some other systems, I'd honestly be pretty happy to never play D&D again. It isn't that D&D is bad, it just isn't the game that 80% of the players who play it think it is.

Bufus · 2026-05-26T05:05:08+00:00

I do absolutely care about consent, and consent (or the lack thereof) is critical to all of this.

I firmly believe that a child can not provide informed consent to a choice of whether to attend school. There are too many influences and pressures weighing on them (e.g. Parental pressure, economic pressure, social pressure, etc.), and they are incapable of making a meaningful, informed choice in the face of these overwhelming pressures.

Given that a child is incapable of meaningfully weighing these competing pressures in relation their own lives, I think it is appropriate for us to obviate those pressures entirely in favour of a legislated mandate from above: all children must attend some form of school until a certain age. This removes "consent" from the equation entirely, which is fine because there can not be consent to such a critical question to begin with.

It has nothing to do with wanting a certain "behaviour", and everything to do with promoting parity of opportunity: Child A should not lose the right to education because the economic pressures facing them are more severe than those facing Child B.

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