I have a memory of it being the tip of the middle finger circled in front of the crotch in a motion similar to clitoral masturbation, but there are also a whole pile of variants/dialects of sign.

It would reduce it, at least. Part of what makes those deals appealing to devs is the idea that the umbrella corporation will handle the business so the devs can do the dev work they love. Many of them would be much more reluctant to sell off ownership of their concepts and work entirely, and the ubrella corps would find it harder to milk nostalgia when they’ve only bought the name and not any of the creative team that made it real. Not impossible, but harder.

Say hello to snuggles and goodbye to shirts without holes in them!

Imagine a giant tower in Vatican city so every country that wants one could have an embassy.

Sign language can be fun. There’s a great Adam Hills special with a sign interpreter where he says, ‘there will be a lot of moments tonight where there will be a laugh as I deliver a punchline, and then there will be a second laugh a moment later as everyone sees the sign for clitoris.’

How about Casablanca? It’s black and white.

This is a phenomenon I have observed and talked about so often but never heard a name for. Marketing is malign bullshit and they’re using it in a kind of ‘washing’ technique to try to cover up how obviously shitty the thing is so… ‘shitwashing?’ ‘Diarrhoeawashing?’

Vote with your wallet is mostly a scam. You can’t buy what isn’t there. Devs are too reliant on the business freaks to turn their art into money. I don’t have a good solution. All I can think of is maybe something like a registered not-for-profit version of steam/GOG/itch. No investors expecting a return allowed. No for-profit company that owns the not-for-profit as a bypass. Just a system devs can use to turn art into money with no BS about ensuring profits for someone else. I don’t have the devops/software engineering knowledge to make that happen, but I hope someone does.

For Bioware, no. It’s too late for them. For the future, it’d prevent companies like EA buying up every half-successful dev company and feeding their IP into the machine to milk our nostalgia for profit.

The only problem is how unprepared we are for it and how it’s not the 20% most pointless crap that will be left to rot. Many people would like to lose weight, but famine is a bad way to go about it.

Coinage enables trade with people who you don’t trust to even be there a month later, much less to come back to repay a debt, regardless of an adherence to capitalism or no. If you like, take away any capitalist hierarchies and imagine everyone involved as artisans and subsistence workers who make their way in the world by the produce of their own hands, no wages or exploitative bourgeoise. It’s still useful to have a way to engage in exchange with someone who you don’t have reason to trust.

Trust has to exist somewhere. In state-regulated currency, it is trust in the willingness of the state’s enforcers to enact violence on those who try to mess about with the currency and trust in most people’s desire not to have state violence enacted upon them. In a stateless society, the trust has to be maintained or there will be no exchange. No exchange means lower quality of life. Most people are quite happy to live with a little state violence if it means they get to live an easier life, or even just live to see tomorrow. Moralizing doesn’t stop the would-be king from cutting off heads until the survivors shut up and pay their taxes, and sarcasm undermines your ability to make a point.

Mostly because you can discourage a certain amount of bastardry by making it illegal to do one of the steps, while making everyone carry around scales to do business kind of defeats the purpose of coinage, which is to enable people to make transactions quickly and with very clear ideas of what they are exchanging. Assuming you trust the coin system to certify the coin which is supposed to be one ounce of silver actually is one ounce of silver, it’s very fast and easy to say ‘give me one silver and I will give you two hens.’ The whole process is done almost as fast as you can say it. If you don’t trust the coinage, you have to get a set of weights, which both sides of the transaction have to trust are accurate, a scale, which both sides have to trust is accurate, and then carefully weigh the coins, doing math to find the correct total weight, possibly a way to measure volume so you can check density as a stand-in for metal content, and doing this whole process every time you transact. There’s a whole other element around taxes as motivation to use currency but that’s a whole layer unto itself. People will tolerate a certain amount of authoritarianism if it makes their day-to-day feel easier/safer.

Oops, nope. There’s already something plugged in there.

I thought that came from much further back, when the metal was the value and the face stamped on it was to certify the metal content at the promise of the stamper. Taking a sliver of silver off of 50 coins could be melted down and made into a 51st coin so defacing was just part of the counterfeiting process that devalued the original coins if anyone bothered to weigh them, or something like that.

DM: *snaps fingers* Done. Calm down, Tom. I’m not going to punish you for being creative. You can get creative as much as you like. Hell, thats the point. …BUT, just remember, you will never, and I mean NEVER, win. There is no magic combo that lets you ‘win’ an RPG. You keep going or you don’t. There is no ‘win’ state. For now, they fire the test shot and demolish the tree at which they fired it, plus some others in the ricochet path. They both get an adrenaline rush as they realise how dangerous this could be. Now, what do the rest of the group do with their day?

Not quite. Party leadership wants him to prove himself for another few years before they’ll give him access to campaign funds.

Ban corporate ownership of other companies. It has no positive effects on the economy or the world.

Almost like the ‘generations’ are clusters as imaginary as races and we should all stop pretending they’re real.

I don’t think you could. Fight Club is about a few different things but it rests on a societal shape that doesn’t really exist anymore. No one looks at modern society as stable on any level unless they are older and living the memory of the society of their childhood. The inability to afford the stuff from the pottery barn catalog means many people can’t afford identifying with their stuff. The young people born this century have so little they can rely on epistemically they can end up latching onto really weird things. ‘I want to join the military because it seems like it pays okay, I can meet the requirements if I live at the gym, it’ll make my dad like me despite his toxic masculinity, but I don’t like the idea of murdering people, so I’m going to become a medical spec ops guy so I only have to kill defensively and will be dedicating my life to saving lives.’ - paraphrased from a real conversation

I could see a Halloween for the unchilded where you get dressed up and go from spot to spot to get random adult goodies: wine, cheeses, THC treats in some places, spirits in others, petit fours, tapas, charcuterie, vibrating cock rings, some sort of gambling station, a piercing station, dark chocolate truffles, and whatever else.