Fuck, I might be terminally online.

I’ve got a nice thin one under my office chairs, and I could see that. A little thick for my taste, though.

Although I can see drawing the grid directly onto one, and then playing on the other side. Then you could even put illustrated maps underneath projecting the grid onto anything.

That’s definitely a whole project though. Onto the pile it goes.

Which is only so bad because the purpose of the word itself is to provide context. It literally means “this is not a euphemism”, and the only reason to use it in the first place is if the existing context would lead one to assume it was.

When you need to give extra context and additional words to clarify an ambiguous “literally”, you’ve robbed the word of its original meaning. It can no longer fulfill that purpose. It would literally be more efficient to just not use it at all, and just skip straight to whatever you were going to say to clarify the context. The meaning has been stolen.

I assume you replied to a notification, that doesn’t reply to the comment, it puts it on the main post. I’ve made that mistake a few times.

I’ve been looking for a good one, but I’m having a hard time finding any coating or film that presents itself as the obvious best choice. Most of the options I’ve found have mixed reviews.

If it was literally a hill I would, but semantic integrity isn’t actually a geological protuberance.

Is this the “Don’t be such a silly little boy” green text?

Really, it’s fine. Context makes it clear when we literally mean “literally” literally.

It literally doesn’t. The whole point of “literally” is to establish that context.

Disagree. When a word means what it actually means, but also means the opposite inverse¹, then it doesn’t mean anything. The whole point of using “literally” is to establish context, to distinguish an actual literal situation when the language used would otherwise be interpreted as figurative.

I’m generally not a prescriptivist, but I’ll figuratively die on this hill. “Literally can mean figuratively” literally robs “literally” of its meaning.

¹ Edit: I should’ve been more precise, it was bugging me.

What do you mean by “appealing”?

By where some bugs had made it red

I’m more of an Inexplicable guy

She had that Camarillo Brillo

Yup, all boils down to faith in the currency. For something like the dollar, it’s backed by faith in the US government. For something like Bitcoin, it’s backed by faith in the resilience of the blockchain and the value buyers place on it. Emperor Norton minted his own currency which was accepted all around San Francisco based purely on the fact that people accepted it.

I made a hex map with Sharpie on a 3’x3’ piece of white hardboard. Took forever since you have to draw every edge individually, can’t just do entire rows like a square grid. I enjoyed it though, and I was able to add some details to help my players adjust to hex distances.

I’d say average about -5. Verbal, physical, and emotional abuse was the norm. My mom was fine, but due to the age gap she was functionally more like a big sister. My dad must’ve been going for the high score on the Dark Triad.

School was a fun one; I was regularly held out of school to the point I was nearly kept back multiple times for truancy alone, at one point my grandmother had to threaten to call CPS because I wasn’t even enrolled in school at all. Every day I’d have so many chores that homework was impossible, and that lack of structure kicked my ass in college. Bit of a mindfuck to constantly be told that school is for stupid conformists, and still get punished for bad grades. It’s a good thing I’ve got a great memory and phenomenal test-taking skills, or I never would have passed a single class.

Socialization was fun too. Between frequent moves and the pile of chores on my list, I didn’t have the opportunity to make many friends. Tried to get into Boy Scouts and sports to get some kind of social life, but those were for stupid conformists too. Combine that isolation with my dad’s attempts to turn me into his shadow, I grew up real weird and isolated. People think I’m sociable now, but that required years of focused work. And I’m still pretty weird.

Character and values, ho boy. I wasn’t exaggerating with “Dark Triad high score”. He literally tried to become a Latin American island dictator, it was a lifelong project for him. I was taught the values of doing anything you can get away with, exploiting rules, lying all the time to get what you want, emotional manipulation, and countless other Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic behaviors. Fortunately, my grandparents were much more moral and ethical, so it was a bit easier to deprogram myself on that front.

I won’t even get into all the other little things, but I think anyone from an abusive household can tell you that all the little things can often have a more serious long term effect than the big ones. Daily whoopings suck, but they go away when you move out. Not so much a lifetime of being trained to treat every conversation like a competition.

On the bright side, I’m very resilient now. I joke to people that i never get stressed because my brain doesn’t produce the stress chemical, but really I just coped with so much stress growing up that none of the minor daily stresses register at all.

So yeah, others have definitely had it worse, -5 feels about right.

*Yor

I’m stuck at chapter IX, where flipping forward a bit I know I’m going to have to dedicate a serious reading session to, and I just cannot find the time.

This is an area where terminology gets real fuzzy. “Spiritual” is inherently vague and individualistic. I’m referring more to personal faith in a particular sect: read specific texts, pray in a particular way, organize your metaphysical model in line with an established religious tradition.

Generally I don’t like to reference specific religious texts, my beliefs are much too syncretic for that, but I was raised Christian, and for all the faults of the various Christian institutions, Jesus himself seems pretty based:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

If someone practices Christian dogma that way, I’d be hesitant to call them oppressed or an oppressor. It’s still definitely a specific religion, but it’s engagement with the emergent power structure that causes the oppression.

“Which is accurate. It’s the infection or cancer that kills you.” That’s you. That’s what you said.

Yes. I said that AIDS itself doesn’t kill you. In fact these days it’s much more manageable with modern treatment. I never said it didn’t raise your risk of dying from something else, obviously, that’s the main thing it does.

It’s like you’d disagree that being a tight rope walker could lead to a higher risk of plumeting to ones’ death

I’d say that tight rope walking doesn’t kill you. I used to go to the rock climbing gym all the time, and there was a slack line there constantly being used and I never saw anyone die on it. Tight rope walking isn’t all that dangerous, any more than any other moderate athletic act. Tight rope walking 50 feet above the ground is dangerous, but I’d also argue that being on a tight rope 50 feet above the ground is drastically safer than being in the exact same point in space minus the tight rope.

Because that’s exactly what this AIDS analogy is ignoring. Yeah, it can easily make an easily oppressed person more materially oppressed if it leads them into the influence of religious oppressors. But it can also be a source of fortitude and resilience against those very oppressors. Martin Luther is a fantastic example, his devotion gave him the resolve to call out the Catholic Church for its oppressive bullshit.

Rubes are gonna be rubes. If it’s not a religious institution, it’ll be an MLM or an NFT grift or a political party or something. Religion, the faith, isn’t oppressing anyone any more than franchise owners or cyber security nerds or political activists. That is the reality of the situation.