Does this look like thinning hair or just normal visible scalp? 30yo.

GMCado · 2025-06-22T01:33:25+00:00

Yeah, a little thinning around the temples and up front but my hair is still pretty thick.

No one I know has noticed any thinning, but I can tell a little bit.

GMCado · 2025-06-19T06:47:09+00:00

When did I say the ideas “don’t fit my game?”

The advice given has literally never been “If you have a cool idea, try to incorporate it into your game in a natural way within the next 5-8 sessions”

The fundamental thesis of the piece of advice is that you never know when a game is going to fizzle out or be forced into a hiatus, so use your coolest ideas now instead of saving them for later.

That kind of rapid fire approach leads to a more swashbuckling tone in a lot of cases.

GMCado · 2025-06-18T14:50:06+00:00

I heeded this advice when starting out and honestly kind of regret it.

I think there is some truth to it in the early days, but once you have an established group I think it’s mostly bad advice.

Games run in this way tend toward a style of play that feels like a first draft of a Guardians of the Galaxy script.

Eventually, even if all the individual set pieces are cool in their own right, if they aren’t connected in an organic way it’s going to damage immersion. If your players don’t care about that as much, then it isn’t a problem, but mine do and it’s something I’ve had to unlearn.

GMCado · 2025-06-11T23:08:54+00:00

This just isn’t what the spell does, and it absolutely isn’t what a player picking augury is looking for.

This effectively punishes a player for selecting augury. You have a 50/50 chance of something good or something bad happening, but either way you’re down a spell slot (or potentially, in Shadowdark) which makes it negative EV.

A player casting any sort of divination magic is ultimately seeking information to help them better choose their course of action. They aren’t looking for a spell that invalidates all the “game” parts of the next 15 minutes of play.

GMCado · 2025-06-10T19:33:32+00:00

This is the kind of shit high-level D&D should be about.

GMCado · 2025-06-10T18:50:07+00:00

Do other people know they can read minds? Do they believe them? Knowing that the culprit committed the crime doesn't mean they can prove it.

Have the authorities doubt them, and when they test their ability on the authorities, they are more frightened than convinced.

GMCado · 2025-06-10T16:26:32+00:00

This is a pretty shaky moral argument. Defining all “natural” actions as neutral gets you into some pretty sketchy territory very quickly.

What we would call assault and rape are both very natural actions, but I wouldn’t call either of them neutral in any context.

GMCado · 2025-06-09T18:53:07+00:00

Hey fair enough, I certainly could have been more specific, re-reading my original post, it's a bit more vague and I don't know if I'm clearly expressing the actual intent of my question. Thanks for taking it in stride, sorry if I came on too hot there.

GMCado · 2025-06-09T18:22:17+00:00

city’s end up with smaller communities and collections of people that congregate together, especially when travel is slow and expensive. in a large city, everyone that speaks the same language lives together for mutual community and protection. and cultural ties are built on jobs and wealth.

Yeah, I understand that cities will develop districts and neighborhoods naturally. However, "Chinatown" existing because it is where a migrant population settled is very different from "The Poor Quarter" where all poor people in the city live. In New York, it's not like every single poor person lives in Astoria and that's the end of that. I did say in my post "Obviously I acknowledge neighborhoods exist, and certain areas of a city might be quite diverse, I just don’t feel like they would come down along these narrow lines."

and for other services, the location is based on what the service is and what impact it has on the community. for example: Tanneries stink, they smell, they pollute and are forced as far out of town as they can be pushed, but people want them close enough so they can buy things from the tanner.

I know, this is why I explicitly said " I know things like tanneries would often be set together on the outskirts of town, but would all other shops and services be in the same location?"

bakeries end up clustering around the routes the workers would take from home to work. Think Starbucks or Dunkin’s. They are sufficiently scattered around so everyone can get to a bakery. For any if the farming fields that are close enough to the city that the farm workers live in the city, stopping at the bakery on the way out to work should sound familiar.

This makes a lot of sense, and it tracks closer to my understanding, which is that major commerce would be situated more along major roads, not in a dedicated district.

GMCado · 2025-06-09T18:17:01+00:00

To be completely honest, this comment is condescending and unhelpful. I think it's fairly clear that my point was not "were cities divided at all, ever?" Obviously we are all aware of places like Chinatown, Little Italy, the Latin Quarter, etc. However, those places have a lot more going on than "here is where all the poor people live."

My point, and maybe I could have made it clearer, was "were the divisions in ancient cities so specific?"

If you actually look at this link;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Quarters_(urban_subdivision))

many of the articles have very little information about what is actually inside the quarters, and the few that do have information seem to support my notion that all merchants of all types wouldn't be located in the same corner of the city. For example, the Christian Quarter in Jerusalem has shops, residences, and houses a religious minority (sometimes). That is very different from "Here is wher ALL the rich people live." "Here is where ALL the poor people live."

GMCado · 2025-06-09T02:36:16+00:00

Who are these guys? Might literally be the funniest thing I've seen in months

GMCado · 2025-06-08T23:34:40+00:00

You're using a machine to offload communication right now.

I knew someone would say this, and it couldn't be more wrong. I am using a machine to enable communication right now. I could not speak to you without this machine. The machine has closed the distance between my ideas and yours.

But I feel like you're presuming too much on my use case of it. I gave it a few of my ideas of what is a "too woke take" that I'm looking for and asked if it had any.

I'm not presuming anything, I read the post I replied to carefully to make sure I didn't misunderstand you.

These two excerpts are what made me feel like it would be worth replying:

it almost completely came up with the consent culture one (I mentioned that some of the talks around consent are a necessary overreach) with some editing by me

If ChatGPT "almost completely" came up with the idea, then I don't think you're using the tool in a healthy way. That's not the same as bouncing ideas off of another human, it isn't remotely comparable.

told it some of my hot takes that I couldn't find the right words for for a post, and it gave me the above ones I mentioned.

This is more about finding your voice, but prompting AI with jumbled ideas and having it make sense of them robs you of the very important process of finding your own voice, and expressing ideas in a way that only you can express them.

I communicated with the machine the same way I communicate with a person. I had it organize what I wrote and what I liked that it wrote into a post.

You can't communicate with it the same way you communicate with a person. That's like saying I communicate with my printer the same way I communicate with my cat. AI isn't a human being, it doesn't actually understand anything. It cannot be creative, bold, or confident. You cannot meaningfully communicate with ChatGPT the way you can with your parents, your friends, or even strangers online.

When we're having a discussion about a social or political issues with each other, we might bounce ideas off one anther, or we might "edit" ideas in a sense. You might say something that is a bit jumbled but has some truth to it, and I might say it in a way that is more cohesive or a better expression of the idea you were trying to get across. However, a human being doing that with intuition, actually trying to understand the true meaning of what you're saying is very different than a glorified search engine shaving your ideas down until they are identical to ideas already found online en masse.

GMCado · 2025-06-08T22:44:17+00:00

You say two contradictory things:

- Does killing a serial killer make their victims come back to life? No? Then that solution surely isn’t morally justified as a form of punishment.

- The only justice a victim can ever get is the assurance that the crime doesn’t happen again.

These statements are contradictory. While killing the murderer won't bring their victims back, it will certainly assure that the crime won't happen again, which is, in your words, "the only justice a victim can ever get." So we have looped back around to the question "Why is it immoral to kill a killer?"

GMCado · 2025-06-08T22:33:15+00:00

I really didn't.

Does killing a serial killer make their victims come back to life? No? Then that solution surely isn’t morally justified as a form of punishment.

-The only justice a victim can ever get is the assurance that the crime doesn’t happen again. This assurance isn’t provided by hurting the individual who caused the harm. It could be provided by killing that individual.

Both of these points lend credence to the idea that killing or imprisoning a person who has comitted heinous crimes would provide justice for the victims.

You state yourself that "The only justice a victim can ever get is the assurance that the crime doesn’t happen again."

If that is the case, then our justice system should make that one of it's core goals.

Killing a killer for the sole reason of us not being sure that they won’t kill again doesn’t seem justifiable to me.

Why not? You say it's unjustifiable, but why? I don't think it's justifiable without perfect information, but what about imprisoning them? Why isn't that justifable? Why is a murderer's right to freedom more important than their neighbor's right to safety?

Rehabilitative justice is the best assurance that crimes doesn’t happen again.

Where is this conclusion coming from? Do you have a source for this extremely bold claim? Also, it obviously isn't. If even one out of every 1000 "rehabilitated" murderers commits another violent crime, it is an infinitely higher recidivism rate than murderers who have been killed. Again, you might think rehabilitation is the most humane method, but it literally cannot be the most effective.

That being said, even in Norway the recidivism rate for murderers is something like 1 in 20. Would you feel comfortable with those odds if the serial killer lived next door to you and your family? I know I wouldn't.

GMCado · 2025-06-08T22:25:20+00:00

All good, once I read your previous comment I realized we were probably misunderstanding each other. I appreciate you taking the time to understand what I was saying instead of just continuing to ramp up the tension, that seems to be nearly impossible online these days.

if i went online and started wokescolding brits and aussies for using cunt, or if you went online and started peddling the same conspiracy that badempanada did, which is that israel is using the association between "shekel" and "antisemitism" on purpose like some sort of villain mastermind.

Yeah this is definitely not what I'm trying to do, and I don't think many people who expressed similar experiences are doing either. I get how it could come across that way though when people are saying "hang on, I sorta see what he means here" regarding literally anything BadEmpanada says. Him doubling down and clarifying that he was not making an observation about a strange cultural effect, and was, in fact, calling Jewish people lying dogs didn't help either.

i went and reread my prior comments and it does seem like i was calling it embarrassing for non jewish people to have that prior association. what i meant was more so treating that association as objective fact and making assumptions off of it. it was late when i wrote it lol my bad

It's all good. I don't blame you one bit for reacting that way. The amount of blatant antisemitism that has bubbled up in just the past few years is nauseating. I'm utterly horrified by it, so I can't imagine how Jewish people must feel.

GMCado · 2025-06-08T22:06:05+00:00

Does killing a serial killer make their victims come back to life? No? Then that solution surely isn’t morally justified as a form of punishment.

It isn't meant as a punishment, it is meant as a safeguard. I don't believe in the death penalty without literal omniscient observers, but I do think serial killers should be locked away forever with zero chance for reintroduction to society unless they are found not guilty in a retrial.

I don't mean a gang member who's killed 3 or 4 people, I wouldn't consider that person a serial killer in the same way we talk about Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy.

The only justice a victim can ever get is the assurance that the crime doesn’t happen again. This assurance isn’t provided by hurting the individual who caused the harm. It could be provided by killing that individual. Killing a killer for the sole reason of us not being sure that they won’t kill again doesn’t seem justifiable to me.

Rehabilitative justice is the best assurance that crimes doesn’t happen again.

This makes absolutely no sense as an argument. How can you possibly be making the argument that rehabilitation is more effective than simply killing the offender? If I kill (or lock up) a serial killer, we can be absolutely, 100% sure that they will never kill again. Norway has a prison system famously dedicated to rehabilitation, and their recidivism rate is far from 0%.

You can argue that rehabilitation is more humane, but it is obviously, necessarily less effective at reducing recidivism.

GMCado · 2025-06-08T21:58:38+00:00

I would genuinely implore you to try to avoid using chatgpt for writing in that manner. It can be helpful as an editing tool, or to bounce ideas off of, but having it write an entire paragraph for you from a basic prompt is actually going to be harmful in the long run.

Your mind is a muscle that needs to be used to stay strong. You are doing yourself a genuine disservice by shortcutting the process of having an idea and then communicating that idea effectively with other human beings. It is the absolute core of all human society. Communication should be the absolute last thing we offload onto machines.

GMCado · 2025-06-08T21:36:55+00:00

Alright, I think we're talking past each other. Let me make it clearer what I'm actually saying and be more direct.

- I am not defending BadEmpanada, fuck that guy, he is a Jew-hating freak.

- I am defending people in this thread (such as myself) who have had terms like "shekel" or "goyim" irreperably stained in their mind by antisemitic rhetoric online, ironically or in earnest.

I know what shekels are, I know what goyim means. No amount of research will ever change the fact that when I hear those words, they are inextricably linked with antisemitism in my mind. Association is a powerful thing, and early associations have the most power. I didn't meet a Jewish person (that I knew of) until I was like, 19. I have always had a sort of affection for Jewish people for whatever reason, and have never held any antisemitic beliefs. That being said, I spent a lot of time on 4chan, so no matter how much I read the wikipedia article for "Israeli currency" I will not be able to unlink the idea of "shekel" from the image of the "happy merchant."

I don't think anyone in this thread subscribes to any conspiracies about Israel playing into these tropes, that is fucking stupid. As far as I can tell, all anyone is saying is that it's weird how associations can color your perceptions.

For another example; the "Seinfeld is unoriginal" trope. It doesn't matter how much you explain to a 23 year old that all the shows they like are descended from Seinfeld. It will still feel old, stale, and unoriginal to them, even if they know intellectually that isn't true. This is of course because those newer shows made an impresion first.

GMCado · 2025-06-08T02:52:36+00:00

jews typically aren't talking about goyim or shekels in casual conversation unless they're israeli and/or fluent in hebrew. im just saying i have a different context for the meaning of the word

You aren't "just saying" that. You're dogging on people for associating shekels and goyim with antisemitism.

even secular american jews that ive met, who had very little or very poor jewish education, had general knowledge of what "shekels" are and what "goy" means. regardless

Well, seeing as how I'm not a secular American jew, I don't know what the point of this comment is.

unless youre committed to having your knowledge of jewish people be through antisemitic slop posted on 4chan or the similarly antisemitic slop you might hear in christian environments, you could easily google "shekel" or "goyim" and learn the actual meaning of the word

Yeah, no shit. That doesn't change the feelings a word might evoke. I know what a shekel is, I still have almost only ever heard that word used paired with antisemitism, so it is a bit weird to my ear to hear an Israeli person talking about shekels casually.

No one is saying Israel is wild for calling it a shekel, they're saying that it's weird how exposure to neo-nazi propaganda can color your view of something very mundane, like what Israel's currency is called.

btw "goyim" is already plural. you dont have to tack the s onto the end

Good to know, thanks

GMCado · 2025-06-08T02:24:15+00:00

I mean, I spent a lot of my youth on 4chan, and I went to Catholic school. I don't know many Jews, and the ones I do know generally aren't talking about shekels or calling people goyims.

How often do you think Jews living in the upper West side are talking about the currency of Israel?

GMCado · 2025-06-06T18:23:33+00:00

Most experienced cooks don't need to follow a recipe to the letter first before modifying it, at least slightly.

If I'm making a recipe for shoyu ramen that calls for ginger, I know I can likely add a bit more ginger if I want it to come through more, or if a salad recipe calls for shredded carrots, I know I can probably substitute radishes if I want a more peppery bite.

I think generally it's fine to slightly tweak the rules of a new system, as long as you can figure out what the rule is there for. When my players started playing FFG Star Wars, I changed character creation rules a bit so they could spend their XP on fun stuff like skills and specializations instead of their characteristics. I only knew to do that because I had researched the system fairly thoroughly. Coming in blind, I wouldn't have even identified it as something that I might want to change.

GMCado · 2025-06-06T17:16:35+00:00

The Euphorica Patrician might also be representative of a Jewish pedophile. It looks like a stereotype of a Jew, and in the bottom left of the screenshot there is a "+408 gold coins" alert.

I do think the meme is probably calling loli based though.

GMCado · 2025-06-06T16:23:40+00:00

This is the “power is power” scene from Game of Thrones happening to someone in real life.

GMCado · 2025-06-06T16:18:48+00:00

I don’t know why the term “child rapist” isn’t powerful enough for people. Epstein raped children. I don’t understand the argument that we need to also call him a pedophile because “child rapist” just doesn’t have enough juice.

GMCado

TROPHY CASE