Immerhin hält Appa tapfer die Stellung

The work is mysterious and important.

Depends on how they behave. If they get right up in my face and immediately tell me their whole life story how they’re sick and hungry and have twenty children to feed, I’m usually skeptical. On the other hand, if someone is polite and especially if they ask for food instead of money, I’m more inclined to help.

Overall, I’m happy to help those who really need it but I’ve had too many bad experiences with people who were in it out of greed more than necessity. Prime example, some time last year I was on my way home from a vacation and had to wait at the train station for a couple of minutes when a guy came up to me and asked me for money because he was hungry. I told him I had no cash with me but I could get him a sandwich from a nearby vending machine where I can pay with my credit card. On the way to the vending machine, he asked me if something from the bakery at the other end of the station would also be okay. That was already a bit weird but okay. I left my partner and my luggage at the platform and took him to the bakery. On the way there, he pointed out that there was an ATM where I could get cash for him which I refused, then at the bakery he asked me for two of the most expensive snack they had plus something to drink, a total of over 20€. Quite the difference between that and the 4€ sandwich I had initially agreed to. The whole situation was so uncomfortable, I can’t even remember what I got him in the end. And from the way he acted, I wouldn’t be surprised if he just threw away the food once I was out of sight and asked the next person for money.

It’s sad. There are so many people who ask for what they need and are genuinely happy when they get help and then there are greedy assholes like that guy. And because I usually can’t tell the difference at a glance, I’m often overly careful and don’t help even though I feel I should.

Explore stories with lower stakes that focus on different aspects of Star Wars. Not everything needs to be an epic galaxy-wide conflict that somehow includes ten OT characters as fanservice.

There are millions of planets, trillions of sentient beings, all with their own motivations and philosophies.

As controversial as Acolyte was, I really liked that it showed us force users that were neither Jedi nor Sith and how incapable the Jedi were of accepting that.

Hire Kai Patterson who did an amazing job fan-editing some of the shows into movies. He is of course still limited by the source material but especially his version of Ahsoka was a lot more enjoyable than the show.

They have been released multiple times. I‘ve had them on DVD for 15 years now.

Oh yeah, big shoutout to @elyukai@mastodon.social and the whole team for creating the best ttrpg software I‘ve ever used.

Without saying anything negative about D&D 5e, let me tell you about two of my personal favorites:

The Dark Eye

Under the name “Das Schwarze Auge”, this is one of the most popular systems in Germany and has existed since the mid 80s and the latest edition has been available in English for about a decade now. There are dozens of source books and hundreds of official campaigns and standalone adventures, all set in the same world and a single ongoing canon (apart from a few early works that have been retconned). There are decades of detailed in-world history that you can use as a background for your own campaign if you want or selectively ignore if you want to focus on your own interpretation of what the world should look like.

Mechanics-wise it’s a lot less board-game-like than some 70s/80s/90s systems while not going the full “storytelling first” route that many more moderns systems seem to prefer. On top of the eight basic attributes, characters can select from a pool of skills and feats that cover everything from combat to magic to social interaction to crafts and hobbies. The system focuses a lot less on combat than other high fantasy systems and it’s absolutely viable to have a group of purely social-focused characters that never get into a single fight but still get to use a lot of the system’s mechanics.

Overall it’s relatively complex if you want to use absolutely every rule but at the same time very versatile and can be customized to your playstyle.

Opus Anima / Opus Anima Investigation

Sadly out of print and never officially translated to English so I’ll focus on the one thing that works without the official setting: it’s one of the simplest systems I’ve ever seen. It uses a pool of D2s (odd/even on D6, coins, red/black cards, whatever you have on hand) where the number of dice is determined by a basic attribute and a skill that can be combined however the situation requires. Dexterity + mechanics to build something, perception + mechanics to recognize a mechanism, knowledge + mechanics to understand the underlying principles or remember who invented something. To avoid experienced characters failing an easy check out of pure bad luck, everything over 10 dice is not rolled but gives half a success (rounded up) automatically. That’s it. That’s the whole system.

Barely.

We can’t choose who we’re related to but we can absolutely choose not to talk to them ever again.

I trusted a family member.

They promised to let me rent the house I had grown up in until I have the money to buy it. At the beginning, I was still a university student with a part-time job so this quickly ate up my savings but I figured it was worth it. Then, about a year after I had finally finished university and had started working full time, they suddenly decided to set an ultimatum of about six months for me to buy the house or leave, even threatening to hire a gardener at my cost to make the property more attractive to buyers.

I pleaded, fought, tried to get a loan but of course without any savings as security, nobody would give me one. I had to move into an apartment, that’s smaller, older and more expensive than the house that had been my home for 23 years. While I’m not in debt, I still struggle to build up enough savings to get a loan for a home, even after eight years on a software engineer’s salary.

I’ve completely cut ties with that side of the family and I still occasionally have nightmares about the whole situation.

DB: “At least we’re not National Rail.”

National Rail: “At least we’re not Amtrak.”

But of course, the one time, the band does something special (like play a cover of a song they’ve never done before), there is no chance of finding a video afterwards.

The emirate of Dubai a state (not a country)inside the UAE similar to how California is a state inside the USA.

Not really but we have Springer which isn’t much better

Sadly, many wifi-enabled devices only work with some proprietary cloud-service and even if not, they’re only one configuration error (or intentional backdoor) away from talking to the outside. Better have something that isn’t physically able to talk to the internet no matter how badly I fuck up its configuration and my firewall.

The solution is not more but different connected devices so I can decide for myself what needs to be connected and by which protocol. Get the dumbest device on the market, no wifi, no internal clock, maybe not even a humidity sensor and then, if and only if I need to remote control it, for example to put it on a schedule, I can use the cheapest “smart” device on the market to connect it to an in-house machine that can turn it on and off.

I run home automation with lights, switches, outlets, heaters and some more and not a single device has internet access. They all use Zigbee (a simple radio protocol) to talk to homeassistant which is open source and hosted on a machine that lives under my desk.

Separating tasks between the dehumidifier and outlet has the advantage that each individual device can be a lot simpler, leaving less attack surface. My power outlet can’t read the humidity sensor, it doesn’t need to talk to an external server, it doesn’t even need to know that the thing connected to it is a dehumidifier. It’s just a chip that receives a radio signal and toggles a relay on or off. That’s it.

Separating the two concerns also lets me replace the devices separately if one breaks or my requirements change. If I suddenly need wifi or bluetooth instead of Zigbee or if it’s for some reason no longer supported by homeassistant, I can just replace a 9€ outlet instead of the whole dehumidifier that could get bricked by the proprietary app losing support.

This can be done with something like Zigbee. Or even simpler: you hook a non-connected device up to a “smart” power socket. No need for the device itself to talk to the outside world.

Deal with the real problem. Be honest about why people are upset. Let them actually speak their minds without judgement. Then, analyse it. Find solutions.

Exactly. The solution to people saying “Foreigners are taking our jobs” is not to outlaw saying “Foreigners are taking our jobs” (though the AfD has done enough other things that warrant a ban), it’s not to get rid of foreigners, it’s not even to create more jobs. It’s to make sure that people have at least their most important needs (housing, food, transport, access to information, basic entertainment) covered even with a part-time job or no job at all. Instead the CDU/CSU tries to brand everyone who doesn’t work 60 hours per week until they’re 70 as lazy. Guess what? There are way more people out there who would like to work but can’t (for whatever reason) than ones who actively try to cheat the system. And no increase of weekly working time, no mandatory Excel training for unemployed people and no right-shift of politics will solve that.

Show people that the left and center are able to provide what they need and they will have no reason to blame minorities for their problems.

Yeah, guess what? We should have banned them long before they became the “strongest opposition force in parliament”. Now that they poll over 20%, of course its tricky. Who would have thought?