Maybe the design is bad, then.

Javascript could throw an error to alert you that the input is supposed to be a string, like most languages would do.

Javascript is like Dungeons and dragons. It’s a mess, weighed down by legacy decisions, too heavy in some places and too light in others, and used in far more places than it should be. It also has some diehard fans, and some diehard fans who have never used anything else.

Living somewhere where you need to drive is a whole other set of problems.

I’ve enjoyed seeing movies at alamo drafthouse and similar. It’s okay if you don’t. But I stand by my original claim that more people would go if they had more money.

I did say “more people” not “all people”.

Also, go to better theaters. Alamo Drafthouse (I think they settled their union busting problem) for example will kick people out for being disruptive, and has pretty good food delivered to you at your seat.

Also there’s a pretty big gulf between “Let’s spend $60 for dinner and a movie” and “let’s spend $1600 for a home theater setup”

People are social creatures, and many people enjoy watching something with a crowd.

Me, I prefer watching at home so I can be comfortable and piss at my leisure. But every so often as a change of pace I’d go see it in a theater.

I’m confident more people would see films in theater if they had jobs that paid better and worked them fewer hours. My friend with a full time office job and bartending gig at night trying to make rent isn’t spending a lot of time and money on theaters.

It’s like that meme with the dog saying “no take ball, only throw”. The rich don’t want to pay us any money, but they want us to spend a lot of money.

I do believe that DND is a poor first RPG, and creates a weird survivor bias in the hobby. Because it’s so popular most people try it as their first RPG, and then some of them hate it. Some of them then think the whole hobby is like that, and then leave.

So the bulk of the people left in the hobby are people who like dnd, or at least tolerate it enough to stick around.

One of my friends has no real interest in fantasy, tactical combat (as much as DND is that), or resource management. They had no interest in DND. But they really liked Vampire.

I keep trying to get people to play fate, but all of these games struggle with finding people who will show up. Everyone seems to be just barely holding it together, and asking them to be creative and present once a week seems like a big request

I love Fate and think it’s much more intuitive. DND tends to crush player creativity with a lot of “sorry that’s just flavor”, and guides players towards “just move and attack”.

I’m not sure I agree about splitting hit and damage feeling weird,

It feels weird to me when you roll a really big number to hit their AC, and then roll the minimum for damage. Or the other way, where you just barely roll their AC and then roll max damage. There are narrative ways you could justify it, but I don’t see why you would want to. It’s not adding anything worth having to the experience, imo. The game doesn’t care if you beat the check by 0 or 20. It’s just an extra step and the information is discarded.

I think pf2e fixes this.

Forgot in my original: DND 5e barely has a concept of degree of success

DND is not a good universal game system. It’s pretty good at being DND, but that’s a particular beast that’s mostly about resource management.

You can definitely use it for a game about social intrigue, or horror, or modern day anything, but it’s not really good at any of that. Like using a hammer to put screws in, you’ll probably get something done, and if you’re hanging with your friends you’ll probably have a good time. But it’s a weird tool to reach for.

Personally, I don’t think the core of the rules system is very good at all. Flat probability feels weird. Armor as all-or-nothing is weird. Hit and damage being split into two rolls is slow and weird. In the latest edition, making very few choices about your character often feels bad. Levels are a very coarse unit of growth. The magic system somehow manages to make magic not feel like magic- no wonder, no mystery, it’s just safe and standardized. I could go on.

But it’s mega popular and people are emotionally invested, so there’s not much to be done about it. There are dozens of people playing the thousands of other games out there.

Also a lot of people have never played anything else, so their analysis and defense of it is often lacking. Like if I’ve only ever played baseball, and never even watched any other sports, I wouldn’t feel qualified to talk about bowling. But you get people saying like “no you need to wear cleats that’s a universal property of sports” when bowling comes up. Like, not every game has six stats. Not every game has attributes like that at all.

And again, if you’re having fun with dnd then that’s the primary goal achieved. We don’t need to maximize fun and efficiency in all things all times. I just think that it would be a good experience to branch out more, even if it’s scary, because that will lead to a richer experience overall.

Yeah this feels like another thing that’s downstream from low wages.

Movies are a luxury. If most people are struggling to get by in debt, they’re less likely to splurge.

People are making these decisions. Shitty people. And engineers are implementing it.

Can’t we stop them? Why can’t we stop them? I’m so tired of people going out of their way to make things worse. I just want to backhand someone

At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.

You’re probably not telling the total truth, but maybe consider that one person being unpleasant 30 years ago isn’t a good reason to abandon an entire form of media for your entire life. Let it go. The librarian is probably dead by now, and they don’t have to matter to you anymore.

I say this all the time! I use it to try to discredit conservatives when they make up reasons why we can’t have good things. Like, look, you love the library, and you know conservatives would make up all sorts of reasons why it couldn’t ever work. When they’re going on about how free buses (or whatever) couldn’t work, it’s the same

That’s so cheap for such a big impact. Any asshole millionaire could just pay for that.

Meanwhile, the US is trying to go to 60 hour workweeks and 6-day workweeks.

Labor needs to organize, and the rich need to be broken.

I think a lot of people are struggling economically, and movie theaters are kind of expensive. If labor had a bigger slice of the pie, more of them would probably spend it on movies.

I used to go to a theater that served food and drink right to your seat, and enforced silence from the crowd. It was pretty good. But that’s also like $50 a go.

If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

If those Internet duds that get mad about black people in video games spent like half that energy being mad about, like, wage theft, we’d be so much better off.