People have a legal location of residence in the US.

In California, if you’re homeless, you typically have to set your mail up as “general delivery” to your nearest post office where you go to collect mail every few days. You probably don’t have any other address.

Not sure how this interfaces with this specific law otherwise, but using a post office isn’t a bad idea generally because it isn’t a totally unexpected thing. A homeless person would probably list that as an address.

There’s also a lot of mail services that will give you an address in that state and will open/scan received mail for you… not sure if California specifically has one, though. But yeah, this doesn’t establish legal residency at all, but many entities don’t look too closely either… might be worth a shot.

My bet on why people don’t identify with that anymore is shifting social expectations and economy leading to having kids way later than in their day.

Which… I love my kids, wouldn’t trade 'em for anything. But they can definitely make you feel old both by just watching them age and the extra responsibility reducing the freedom/spontaneity you might have had more of earlier in your youth. If you had kids in your early 20s, this starts earlier. If you don’t start until your 30s, you’re probably already starting to settle a bit anyway just from being more established in a career and such.

I’d also be curious to know rates of messing around with harder drugs and drinking and such. My sense is those have gone down, and that kind of thing can be hard on your body.

Just spit balling here.

I’ll literally change banks over that kind of thing now.

Just continuing a conversation you started. It does at this point sound to me like your behavior might have played more of a role in your ban than you might be crediting.

Categorically, as you claimed before? Why not? If we can prove intent of an individual action beyond reasonable doubt, why not an action by an organization of people?

Or are you now acknowledging intent can be proven beyond reasonable doubt but that it hasn’t been in the case you were banned for arguing it?

In science, there’s absolutely a value in tribalism, i.e. respecting consensus (being a woolly “centrist") when one does not have expertise.

This isn’t analogous, though; consensus is a category reached through reason and proof. Expert consensus is by definition a reasonable position (can still be wrong, of course, but it’s a reasoned consensus).

Centrism just means a relative position between two others. It is not definitionally reasonable, so your analogy of what I’m doing doesn’t hold any water.

Do you not think this is what a flat-earther (or climate denier) would say?

But just because they say it doesn’t make it a valid argument in their case.

My point here was just categorically being a centrist doesn’t necessarily make the position reasonable enough that it should be tolerated. If you’re a centrist between a reasonable position and an unreasonable one, you might still be being unreasonable. It really depends on the specific issue. That’s really all my point was.

That seems to be just hoping for no critical mass though. If it ever grows large enough, you’ll definitely get people willing to put the time in to disrupt things for their own entertainment.

I can’t respond to such a circumspect answer.

I can only answer generally that there still sometimes not room for reasonable disagreement where intent is involved. Courts absolutely do prove intent for some crimes beyond a reasonable doubt… someone could still disagree, but by definition it isn’t necessarily a reasonable disagreement.

Murder (vs manslaughter) in most jurisdictions is a question of intent. We prove it to the point of no reasonable disagreement all the time. That’s the very standard we use.

again: I’m a frigging centrist

I’m not saying this is the case in your case at all, but depending on the issue this isn’t always an ironclad defense. We certainly have historical examples of political centrists aligning with very extreme ideologies in an attempt to cling to power.

And just logically, some issues don’t have a valid centrist position. There’s no valid centrist position between a flat earther and one who believes the earth is a planet in space. For example, in a science community, I would expect people pushing flat earth to possibly get banned and could see the logic in someone trying to find a middle between those two positions getting the same treatment. Just because there are two sides to an issue doesn’t make a moderate position between them reasonable or defensible. Sometimes one side is just wrong.

I think the merits of the situation are more important than affiliation.

But what about the problem of trolls just continuing to create new instances to circumvent bans and defederation? Is there really a solution to this beyond hoping we don’t reach a critical mass where this becomes a real problem?

Again, I do not have a personal opinion on it and never expressed one beyond refusing to endorse the progressive party line, which seems to have taken on the quality of a religious purity test.

I think it would help to know in more detail what went down here. If we’re talking about justifying, perhaps even unintentionally, genocide in either the sense of mass killing or mass removal by other means… I think it’s pretty understandable that civility starts to go out the window a bit. Arguably the position itself is uncivil, whatever words are used to support it. When your start to talk about the right to exist or not, to not be killed or forcibly removed by a state… that’s a life or death question and people will react that way. There are some issues there’s no room for reasonable disagreement on.

That said, on wider issues, as someone firmly on the left, I do completely agree that the left can get kind of ridiculously emotionally invested and toxic over even minor disagreements from other leftists that absolutely don’t meet the above threshold, even on questions as banal as pure strategy vs actual ideological disagreement. But it’s hard to say if what you experienced was the latter and not you possibly being oblivious to your part in the former without more detail.

They’re just different. Sometimes you want to play Lord of the Rings, with a reasonably clean beginning, middle, and end. There’ll be side quests and diversions, but a pretty clean narrative, as if running a published campaign. Other times you want something more open ended where they can chase down random rabbit holes and see where they go. I genuinely like both, or mixing the two, but everyone needs to be on the same page what the goal as players is or someone is gonna get upset.

I mean, even cohesive epics will usually have player driven deviation, and that’s cool, not implying it’s a pure one or the other… but there’s nothing wrong with a DM wanting to run a “tighter” campaign as long as players are buying into it and are still forging the path there (they’re going their own way to Mordor, but they’re still going there, in other words).

I really do like both. Sometimes I want Minecraft where I make my own story, other times I want to play out a choose your own adventure… we’re going to get to the same destination, but how we get there and what the ending will be is a big question mark.

I definitely agree that as a DM, whether epic or open ended, the paths you haven’t thought of that your players throw you is easily the most interesting part on that side of the screen.

I have a few hundred hours (481 between my wife and I… my guess is about 300-350 of that is me). That’s a lot of time. Remember, I said I tried to get through it multiple times, and each time I got bored with it near the end of Act 2, so that playtime adds up. I’m just past the point in my life where I’m willing to put up with much slog to get to good parts near the end, I’ll just watch a video with dinner and call it a day. I actually feel like I wasted too much time on it as it is, but I guess if you have lots of time on your hands some might not consider it much… I do, though.

Again, I’ve seen the rest of the game and don’t agree with the characterization that it’s just the halfway point. It might be in terms of actual time played, but again, turns tend to take quite a bit longer in 5e at higher levels.

Eh, I don’t buy that you need to play an entire game before deciding it’s overrated. There’s this game criticism catch-22 among gamers that is used to invalidate all criticism… if you don’t finish it or play X hours you’ll be told you didn’t play enough. If you do, you’ll be told by someone else it can’t be that bad because you finished it or played too many hours for it to be bad.

I watched the rest on YouTube and didn’t feel like I missed much. I really don’t feel like what I missed was half the game… actual hours don’t mean much here because 5e naturally takes a lot longer to play at higher levels.

In a tavern is a classic for a reason; it’s simple, it usually makes sense, and we can just get to playing quickly.

I also like using something like boarding a ship all players are on for their own reasons. Shipwreck is a great way to throw players into a very alien or remote region very quickly with very little setup.

My favorite was a Sigil-based setting that had all players walking through their own versions in their own worlds of a magic door leading to a Sigil office hiring adventurers, pretty shamelessly stolen from Howl’s Moving Castle as inspiration.

Which is the final thing. Steal, steal, steal. Anything you’ve seen that you thought was cool, steal it. I actually did so hoping people would get references at first, but honestly, I’ve stolen from stuff as vanilla as Skyrim quests and rarely if ever do people put it together while playing anyway.

This actually touches on a really important point. Make sure you and your players are on the same page about the kind of game you’re looking you run. Are they buying into an epic, cohesive campaign over a year or more? Or are they looking for a monster of the week build a story purely on the fly? It’s way easier if you establish this early on… then it’s up to them to bite on the plot hooks you throw them which they almost certainly will. They might throw you a curve ball and send you down different roads than you were planning, but you’ll still get to your destination.

In my experience it’s just when there’s a disconnect there that it becomes a problem.

Baldur’s Gate 3. Game falls apart after the first act imo. Voice acting was great, first act is very fun and I can still play it, but I just can’t manage to make myself even finish act 2. I do get why people like it, but maintain that as a game it was very much overrated. It’s made my wife swear they should only do GOTY selection for the previous year after the full game has been released and played through entirely. I get the sense their early testing allowed for lots of tweaking an adjustment in the first act but they ran out of time to give the rest the same treatment.

Not true. I’ve had my eye on a pair for awhile that has no camera, only microphone, but has a HUD. Having navigation, an irl minimap, without having to keep your phone out is nice and has some actual positive safety implications. Also, this might mean less to Americans, but as someone living in Europe, having in line translation is really, really cool. Could almost sell it on that alone. I’ve heard some deaf folks are also using it to help understand people by augmenting their lip reading (which usually doesn’t get all of the information across by itself) with summaries that the mic picked up.

I’ve only held off because the pair I was looking at seem like it isn’t quite there yet in reliability, but there are definitely some pretty big use cases I can think of. I would 100% get some of these without a camera.

I’m really interested in the non-cam models. There’s a set out there now that has a HUD with notifications, navigation, translation on the fly, notes for meetings, etc.

The recording audio surreptitiously could be… problematic, but I think somewhat less than video and the in-line translation is legitimately useful and cool feature.

I’ve also been saying for years that augmented reality games could have some real potential, especially for getting exercise while playing games… imagining like running through a field competing with other players collecting coins or a cycle path. Not sure some cool games is worth the tradeoff of having cameras everywhere though. I’d definitely support legislation that says a visible light needs to be on when recording anything.