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For teenagers to hang out locally there need to be places they can go and have something to do and not spend money or be harassed by Daily Mail-reading bigots terrified the Youth are going to laugh loudly or have colourful hair.
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Shimmin Beg (he/him)
@shimminbeg@masto.ai
mastodon 4.7.2Brit, enjoys learning things. ESOL, academia, writing games, proofreading and editing.
Trans men are men, trans women are women.
Cymraeg/Deutsch/Gaelg OK, 中文 & 日本語 shaky.
'the gentleman who had the complicated Excel sheets'
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Joined December 18, 2022
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If you want people to go out and socialise in person there need to be things for people to actually do that are accessible, convenient, and free. That means youth centres and funded adult education.
Some places have societies but if you don't already share that niche interest there's little reason to join. Colleagues are generally scattered so you won't see the same people at work and around town to get casually introduced like back in the 1950s. They're all commuting 10 miles.
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The past was not flatly better.
I grew up in a village-slash-suburb with fuck all to do except the pub or walking around the street or the farms. Local teens were split between five schools so I didn't know anyone nearby to hang out with. Mine was ten miles away and the nearest schoolmates were two years younger and two miles away across busy roads.
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I occasionally hung out at a weekend but after school was implausible. There were some after school clubs which consisted of doing stuff (either sports or music) with minimal time to chat.
My social life in the week was my brother and whatever (nice, kind) pensioner my folks had over from church. I wasn't online for hours but it did not lead to a rich IRL social life, it led to being good at talking to elderly ladies and hours of reading silently.
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Since then I have had to move repeatedly to find work and have very rarely managed to develop any kind of social life in person. The friends (and family) I have are scattered across cities and continents and I can only keep in touch online. Even living in a city there just aren't many obvious ways to genuinely socialise and befriend strangers to the point where we might actually hang out. Simply doesn't happen.
Randomly-timed reminder for any GURPS fans that I made a supplement full of Earth magic and related stuff, which you can get entirely free here: https://archive.org/details/earth-spells-for-gurps-magic #GURPS
I am pretty proud of this one.
Come on Labour, you have one candidate talking about watering down the xenophobia, you can ditch the transphobia too. Just relax the death-grip on the Cass report and you'll feel so much better, also a single person I know might consider voting for you.
Chat is it good when the nurse removes your dressings and exclaims "Oh god"?
Managed to schedule podcast eps daily for the next three weeks in an attempt to break through some backlog. I mean we're still years from real-time but it's progress of a sort.
I don't think anyone's actually listening to this but that's, what, 30 hours of Pathfinder 1e. About 200 hours altogether so far, I think. I've tried to keep it at 2-2.5 hours per episode.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
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@HennaVirkkunen@ec.social-network.europa.eu Every single thing about this is is stupid and terrible, and if you don't understand that you should resign from your job immediately and never attempt to work in politics again. Everyone involved in this project should be fired.
I once again mysteriously find myself writing a scenario involving a physics department.
If you work in a physics department or have any effing idea what is in one, please do let me know. Bonus points if you have some kind of floorplan that indicates function (the ones I can find just have room numbers, with no info about whether Q748 is a server room, a nitrogen store or a portal to the netherworld).
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@rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf it's a lot less reassuring than I'd hoped. To be fair, so far what I've heard is Burnham saying he'll continue various policies that actively put off left-wing voters (so less change of Green voters coming back) and not announcing anything likely to attract Reform voters (though that rarely works for established reasons). So stopping the active decline is not bad going in that context.
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@MichaelWhelan@mastodon.art this is gorgeous. The walls look amazing and I want them for my garden
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@RogerBW @Taskerland @AndreasDavour Unfortunately with the versions I play, high-level PCs can trivially wipe out 75 low-level PCs, which makes "powerful local faction" not really a viable thing if the players choose to get involved. My players are still extremely hands-on.
I'm hoping they will hire some adventuring parties when it comes to Wrangling The N Macguffins if they choose to [one way of ending campaign].
If anyone uses the Arriva UK app, heads up that today the app is discontinued. You need to download a new one and log in again with the account details we all naturally have readily to have at the fucking bus stop.
No, of course they didn't tell us it was getting discontinued today (there was an email last week celebrating their new app existing and that's it, no "switch over now", no deadlines, no mention of discontinuing at all).
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@rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf Agreed. It feels like somebody respectable should step in; I know Labour are concerned about seeming to validate his shenanigans, but I agree about not abandoning Clacton. And there might *not* be that second by-election, in the end, likely as it seems. Getting him out is a net good regardless of how it happens.
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@rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf My general feeling is that being defeated by Count Binface would be the optimal outcome in terms of squashing Reform, because it's the most humiliating and the hardest to spin as anything else.
A hazard of preparing NPC notes for in-character discussions in that it's relatively easy for me to end up deeply moved by my own emotional thinking and sniffling gently, tears rolling down my cheeks, as I imagine some entirely fictional person arguing with another fictional person played by my mate.
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@BigJackBrass @Printdevil @vortiwife @Taskerland this says a great deal about me as a person, none of it edifying
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@Printdevil @Taskerland @satsuma @RogerBW oh yes, I just mean in the sense of having a simple realistic interaction to deal with ("I unlock the door with the key, I open the door") as a starting point for interacting with the fictional world. And one it's hard to get a TPK out of. It could easily be your own room in the tavern with a perfectly clear memory.
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@Taskerland @satsuma @RogerBW @Printdevil this is a plus point for adventures that start off with, say, waking up in a room with a locked door and a key on the table.
After a fortnight's stick leave, returning to having to prepare five hours of lesson material about nothing in particular with no learning objectives is A Lot.
That is a lot of time to fill at the best of times!
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@Printdevil @RogerBW @satsuma @BigJackBrass @Taskerland I feel quite strongly that actually you don't have to do horrible things and it's almost certainly going to make everything worse.
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@Taskerland @Printdevil @RogerBW @satsuma loved this post, thanks! It reminds me of conversions I've had with folks who simply do not know (and may well not care) about fantastical things but are doing their best to socialise. I do still know some people in that bracket.
Probably ought to work out a way to remove all these unnecessary localization files from my Debian install.
I suspect I also still have an older version of LibreOffice knocking around somewhere, despite my efforts to remove it...
Here's that bit about how the retrial of Palestine Action activists was secretly a terrorism trial, information the jurors were not allowed to know, and they can now be sentenced as terrorists despite the jury not having convicted them on that basis.
The people responsible for this policy should absolutely spend time behind bars for this. It is an outrage against the concept of justice.
In a reasonable world, it would be possible to confiscate food from Israel to compensate, but alas.
Anyone want to have a look at the GURPS mini-location I wrote up while I was in the hospital? Spoilers: it's an A&E waiting room. Probs needs more info on a couple of things.
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@quadrivial@beige.party thank you! It is definitely useful. I haven't been in one since high school…
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@quadrivial@beige.party Thanks, that's a useful description for a lab!
A big question mark is the less glamorous rooms that don't show up on department websites.
- There are going to be storage rooms: what's in those, besides printer paper?
- Where are the power and ventilation controls?
- Is there going to be a room with maintenance supplies? A storage area for liquid nitrogen, or acids for making circuits? A departmental server room? A shrine to Anubis?
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Very noticeable thing about DrivethruRPG: there is a dedicated video url field where you can link a video promo, introduction, or playthrough of your product.
There is no way that I can see to link an audio, so if you demo'd your game in one or more podcasts there is no way to share those. You are specifically banned from putting links in the general text except to a restricted range of domains.
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@rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf it's bewildering. Somebody did something incredibly stupid for no obvious reason, even *aside* from the way anyone could have told them that Mandelson was a massive liability
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@quadrivial@beige.party Thanks!
Basically, if my PCs go wandering around opening doors, what will they find? I can predict some things from the departments I *have* worked in (tiny academic offices, the odd meeting room, admin support offices). Things like labs and utility/maintenance spaces are where I'm less confident, because I never got to nose around those. Department websites don't show off their storage or plant rooms or server racks...
Mildly curious whether this stinking cold is a result of spending many hours on repeated visits to hospitals etc. over the last fortnight (I was the only person to wear a mask at all), a side-effect of the post-surgical infection, or entirely unrelated.
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@rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf (obviously biased sample, but not a single person I know has mentioned changing their attitude based on Burnham, and several have been vocal that his backing of transphobic policies, North Sea drilling, and the immigration regime are deal-breakers)
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@rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf I've not seen any indication that there's a credible challenger, let alone a credible challenge. Streeting clearly wants it but it's hard to see who would view him as an improvement other than purely as a change.
Starmer seems like a lead weight on the party and on any possibility of changing tack, given how strongly he's backed all the unpopular policies and how vehemently he attacks the left and the Greens, but who else is there?
Have been donating to https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip for a while, and they've just lost their Twitter and TikTok accounts, so circulating this in hopes of partly compensating.
Started a forum topic for bouncing around incomplete adventure ideas to try and get them unstuck.
https://discussion.tekeli.li/t/adventure-brewing/6823
@DarkestKale@mastodon.social @worthlessbums@mastodon.social go on, you know you want to...