How about another person standing next to you singing along? Boom, louder, and no electronics involved at the campfire.

The most exciting thing in my life right now is the spreadsheet I just made to track chores.

What kind of epistemology are you using to declare that meditation “elevates consciousness”? Also, what visions have you had?

I heard it snarl before I saw it. It was chasing a deer, noticed me, stopped and just sat there staring at me about 50 yds away across a little valley, not menacing towards me, more curious. I put my hands on my head to try to “look big”. After a while of us staring at each other, I lost my nerve and backed away and then sprinted away towards a nearby street. It didn’t chase. Based on the ease with which it leaped up that hill after the deer, it obviously could have caught me if it wanted to. Funnily enough I met someone else on the trail just afterwards, told him there was a mountain lion, and he was like "where?"and ran towards where I saw it… This was in southern California.

Pillars of Eternity was moddable only because it was written in C# (Unity iirc), making it possible (though not straightforward) to more or less modify the code however you want. So a mod was essentially a bunch of overwritten classes.

A game that you could literally just fork on GitHub and change things would certainly be moddable in a sense… Handling multiple mods without conflicts, however, is another thing. For that you need a proper modding interface, like the original Baldur’s Gate or Skyrim.

I’m the same way. I play music solely for fun, by myself. I love playing with others as well, but even in the times in my life when I was lucky enough to be able to do that I still would play music by myself. Common attitudes about music are really toxic imo. Music is at its best when it is free, live, amateur, and enjoyed alone or with close friends, not for an audience with outsized expectations based on the ubiquity of recorded professional music.

Fresh bamboo shoots.

A certain wotc module has a level 2 party fight a suicidal enemy with Fireball in a small room. Also the fireball does necrotic damage just to make sure no one can resist it. Went exactly as you’d expect. I haven’t read the module myself so not sure if the DM messed something up or what. I thought it was hilarious but the other players all rage quit so that campaign ended there.

Most humans believe in magic in some form (gods, spirits, miracles, astrology, etc) so we don’t have to guess how people would respond if they believed reality was irrational. They rationalize it endlessly and try desperately not to look at the parts that make no sense.

Also do not mix bleach and vinegar.

I wish I could go back and experience myself experiencing it, so I could see what aspects of my current self were there all along, what parts I picked up along the way, and exactly how those ideas were planted and grew.

All I remember from that game is some character named Xai or something like that. Xain? That and the world map was cool.

Whom are you parodying? Who says something like that?

If you have any preference at all between the two party nominees then you are not throwing away your vote. You are voting for that preference and your vote counts. If you think cheese pizza is bland and boring but you are allergic to orange spray tanned pepperoni then being the only person voting for pineapple is objectively a worse choice than voting for cheese, because by voting for pineapple you are increasing the chance of having disgusting orange spray tanned pepperoni shoved in your face.

Never-trump republicans, new-age anti-science liberals, and yeah low information voters who just recognize his last name. But I too would guess he would siphon more from trump voters.

Not only do we essentially throw away your vote if you vote for a third party, but states just straight up flip every vote for president that doesn’t align with the majority. It boggles my mind that people are seemingly ok with this. I understand that there’s a coordination problem where if one party moves to proportional allocation of electoral votes before the other they are giving up power, so it would need to be a coordinated fix.

Overworld theme and Dead Sea tracks are phenomenal.

Are any of these monster books actually good? The fact they don’t seem to have sample monsters makes me doubt it.

Life evolved on Earth. The idea that it has never done that elsewhere is ridiculous.

I was going to question this, just because I think people often jump to conclusions based on the universe being very large, but as I did just a bit of research it does seem like nothing too unlikely happened to create Earth. You seem to need liquid water. Maybe that water is generated on the planet or maybe it’s delivered by impacts with icy meteorites or asteroids. We have yet to find another planet with liquid oceans, but it’s hard to imagine why it would be so unlikely for enough Earth-like planets to have sprung up to have a good chance of fostering life. The fact we haven’t found an ocean world would seem to speak more to the massive limitations of our knowledge of other planets. You need other things for life as well, but the same argument seems to follow, in that none of the requirements seem like they have a reason to be that rare. But as limited as our science is, and as limited as my understanding of the science is, I have to admit I really do not know what to think. I don’t think our statistical intuitions are useful when thinking about probabilities of planetary or astronomical phenomena.