Start by your own privacy.

I boarded that train about twenty years ago. I tried the evangelizing route. I failed miserably. Which led me to care for myself first and foremost.

I started by abandoning Windows. Not of my own volition; I bought a computer that had no OS. Enter Linux. None of my family, friends or acquaintances understood. It was all about the convinience. When my machines started outperforming while outliving theirs, it caused a ripple.

Then came the usual slew of questions: where can I get a free anti-virus, office, media reader, whatever? That was when I introduced FOSS. After the initial resistance, things just settled into place. LibreOffice works. VLC works. PeaZip works. Thunderbird works. Etc.

When smartphones became a thing, I started moving as fast as I could towards FOSS. This made things a bit more laughable as “free” android applications are ubiquous. But they fill your phone with junk and ads. While my apps provided me ease of use, safety, security and privacy.

But when push came to shove, I just refused to join. First I left FBMessenger. I never boarded Whatsapp. I never entered Instagram or any major social networks. I discovered Signal and remained there.

It’s my way or no way.

In my country, the communist party (very watered down version of communism but still) is behind/aligned with most unions and they defend that companies should either be owned by the employees (co-ops) or employees should have a stake and saying on companies governance.

We have another left-wing party that even defends that failing companies should be returned to the employees, with government backed funding (loaned) if necessary to recapitalize the business and relaunch the company under employee governance.

Primary objective: fun.

I’d share my work for free. At best, I’d add a little “If you had fun, consider sponsoring me. If you can’t, share it with others and keep having fun and causing mayhem.”

I’d laugh my head off if someone told me they used a Fire Wave in a narrow alley to take down a group of mobs and in the process burned a hole in the city wall or torched half the town.

Yes, it was created with classes/professions in mind and each class has a unique skill tree and some even have subclasses or class specific skills.

As an example: a magic user would need to choose which college it would start with - healing, fire, water, etc - and as the character evolves it can access higher tiers with more complex spells and skills. I had an idea to also cross skills to unlock others, as in having a given skill in the college of water and by acquiring a skill under the college of life, it would unlock a mixed nature spell/skill.

There was a lot of thought thrown into it. I wanted some very complex under the hood yet easy to play and approach by any person and get gratification by getting into the game, in the moment.

CoC hit the playing scene of the place I used to go back then and made a success for how fast paced it could get but I failed to get enthralled by the system.

Don’t know that system.

I used that specific example because I had just read my notes on it but yes, your intuition is correct.

I’ll admit I got the short straw when it came to GMs.

The overall skill trees I was working on were huge and skills were tiered, linked to class/profession.

An easy example: a magic using character.

Magic requires mana and spells burn specific amounts of it to be cast. A player could invest their experience several ways: spend their experience to increase their mana pool, spend experience to improve the grasp of a spell (better understood spells would be easier to use, quicker, last longer, etc), acquire new spells within a college or access another magic college (a magical healer could access offensive magic, like fire/lightning based spells, as a quick example, or defensive, like barriers).

It was fun to think about it, then.

I’m abusing the notion of level, I think.

The intention was to make growth intentional and incentivize role playing, with the characters growing as the game progressed.

I made a promise to myself that no matter what, I would love my children. It’s not my life, it is their life to live and find happiness and fullfillement. And if my children are happy, I am happy. Nothing more, nothing less.

I’m missing your point.

I paid exactly for what I was looking for, which was an affordable rugged phone, with hardware adequate for my daily needs for a few years.

Until today, I haven’t had any issue with the phone.

So I’m having a hard time understanding your remark.

Blackview

I sometimes float the idea in my brain to learn how to code. If I ever come to it, I want to debate and discuss my work with another human. Not a machine.

Personal preference.

I won’t hold my breath on it.

Up until this minute, AI has produced plentiful examples of how it can produce anything but good code.

I’d rather have a developer writing software, slowly, because they have an intelectual itch and want to try and see the outcome of their idea than the proverbial army of monkeys furiously typing away.

Nothing really deserves that much attention from you.

Reading that comment, the words you chose to express how you view reality, pains me as a human being.

I can’t imagine what you have been through in order to be weighed down with such a bleak view of life and the world.

We are, actually. We didn’t ask to exist. It was forced onto us by a cruel god that thought it would be neat to make humans.

We aren’t owed nothing.

I’m going to take a hit and say I made a poor job at explaining myself and clarify that, for the creed I mentioned, the creator entity did not made humans. What the creator entity did was set off the unfolding of reality as we perceive it: the Universe. Humans contained within it are off shoots of causality.

There was never a direct nor directed intention to create humanity, thus, nothing is owed to it.

The premise is that anything to exist is better than nothing. If the Universe was to be populated with barren rocks and flaming balls of matter - which is, mostly - without humanity to perceive it that creation mythos was already fullfilled.

If we think back to the dumpster baby, god created a child and threw them in a dumpster. For fun. It doesn’t get to wash its hands and say “I don’t owe them anything, it’s up to them to survive.” It’s still responsible for creation and it is derelict in its duty.

That premise is the premise of the christian, islamic, jewish, and all other self appointed omnipotent creating entities. Those entities claim to have created humanity, in their image, to ocuppy a world they devised for that specific purpose. A world created in such a way that, nonetheless, humans make use of their own agency to tamper and distort.

I’m not a believer but that is the short and dirty version of those myths: the world was perfect, until humans decided they weren’t completely happy with it. Which leads us back to pointing fingers at the creator, for making a poor job.

This is a circular discussion.

Who is responsible for birth defects?

Biology, genetics and environmental causes. And poor judgment from the parents. So, it depends.

For natural disaster?

I guess… physics, primordially? Followed by stuborness, shortsightness and stupidity of humans?

For sickness?

Virus, bacteria, exposure, malnourishment, and others?

These things aren’t choices […]

A good part is outside our capability to act upon, I will gladly grant you that. But there are parts where we can in fact influence the outcome.

[…] and we aren’t responsible for them, […]

The moment any individual realizes something shoul not be in such a way, that individual can take responsibility to avoid or mitigate it.

[…] they happen because god created a cruel world for us to suffer and die in. God created the dumpster and threw us in.

At best, reality is indeferent to what happens to an individual, a species, a planet, a star system or even a galaxy.

We have been setting our course in reality from the moment we achieved sentience and consciousness. We find things cruel, unfair, whatever, because they do not favour us. We’re owed nothing for existing. We take a debt towards each other in helping exist in such reality.

There are no gods nor higher powers to shift blame here. We’re here, now, and we have to deal with it. We can choose to try to make this world better for others or allow it to follow its own devises or even actively make it worse.

Individual agency. The stage is set: write and enact your own play.

You got my atention. Explain your point of view, please.

If such happens it is entirely on the responsability and choice of who did. No cop out, no resorting to a scripture to excuse actions, no easy forgiveness.

Tell me you are a broken human being without saying it.

I’m honestly sad for knowing you take life to such regard but there is more to reality and life than our own small sliver of experience and understanding.