Nah, the Seffians treat Discworld with the same reverence that we treat Shakespeare. There’s a famous musician on Seffi who calls ximself Wind the Rince.

Around the time of the SimCity games, Maxis released a game called SimAnt. It’s pretty much this.

Plot twist: the Seffian’s name is Rickas’Tley

Some people are being a bit pedantic about not technically needing the internet for email, and that’s true, but the pedantry is hiding the fact that actually email is really cool in how it exists in whatever form we want it to be in! It can be transmitted over internet, or over bare TCP/IP, or even peer-to-peer. Most applications don’t take advantage of how versatile email really is.

Of course, Micro$oft makes it rely on an always-on internet connection because it’s better for their bottom line.

It is the year 2,002,026.

Humanity has conquered capitalism and moved off of Earth. Disease and accidental death have been eradicated. We’ve invented marvelous and miraculous technologies and used them to catapult ourselves to distant worlds.

It’s an open question whether or not our descendants can rightly call themselves “human” anymore, and indeed some on far-flung planets do not.

On the planet Seffi, which we call Kepler-725c, one of those human descendants watches the end of a two-dimensional audiovisual narrative, a recent fad on the planet. They aren’t watching it on a computer, per se, but on a holographic mesh device operating across a distributed cluster of nanomachines. The human descendant telepathically interfaced with it to launch the application and the narrative, and now xe marvels at how immersive and compelling the narrative was, despite being contained as it was within a two-dimensional non-interactive form.

A list of people who contributed to the construction of the narrative concludes its display, and the holomesh reverts to a waiting state, displaying a simple black panel within a white frame. And within that black panel, a small, orange-and-white triangle sits, perfectly centered. The human descendant doesn’t know what it originally represented, and muses briefly about it before deactivating the holomesh and walking out of xeir home to enjoy the sunset beneath the purple-blue trees.

There is no Dana progress only Zuul doom

You might just do it now. You can probably be ok for a few weeks.

It’s more about intention. You went there, you did some stuff, and you came home. It’s not like they’re going somewhere else and just happened to end up by the moon, the point of the trip is a lunar flyby and they made it. Hence, moon mission.

I haven’t played Runequest. It’s been on the list for ages, though.

I’m actually not even that big a fan of D&D specifically; most of my recent games have been PF2e, which has a lot more of a LEGO set feel with how you build characters and I think can avoid some of the issues you’re talking about. But I’m always up for trying new systems when I get the chance. In fairness, that’s rare.

With you 100% on that last line.

If you went through a Taco Bell drive through, you’d still be “driving to Taco Bell” even though you just drove around the building and never went inside.

I’m not trying to sell you on class-based RPGs if that’s not your thing. I’m just saying that I think your particular problem as stated is more about the style of the specific table than of the specific system (though in fairness I agree that the system isn’t helping you much). Do you like classless games better, or are you more in the “just write a book” camp?

That’s honestly…way more conscious of the reality of AI than I would’ve expected from Wizard of Id.

That’s a character in the PF2e game I’ve played every week for the past year. I know he’s a gnome because he and the other gnome in the party are total buddies and talk about gnome life all the time. And he’s very sneaky and stealthy, but he also does some magic stuff and is very loud and opinionated. So maybe he’s a rogue, but honestly I couldn’t tell you.

That’s all up to how you play the game, then. I’ve been in games that are both; ones where I played a “human wizard” and ones where I didn’t know what the other characters’ classes were because they were just, like…Zaraaraasnaan, dude. You know, Z?

Edit: And some games that turned from one to the other, honestly.

I honestly feel like I’m doing Linux wrong, because with one exception it’s been seamless. No driver issues, no framerate problems, no game compatibility problems for anything I play. I thought I was having issues with Bluetooth dropping randomly, but I’ve tracked that down to a hardware issue with the antenna.

The exception is that my Wi-Fi chipset has a bad driver that I think causes it to sleep after every packet, meaning that my Wi-Fi speeds are so slow that a speed test times out. This isn’t an issue for me because I was planning to be hardwired anyway, but if you’re going to put it on a mobile device you should check your Wi-Fi hardware; I think a fix is coming soon, though.

In fairness, I’m not a cutting edge guy (I mostly play stuff a few years after it’s released, patient gamers style) and I don’t play many games that have any kind of anti-cheat. But I regularly get three-digit framerates on highest graphics settings.

I don’t think airplanes ever will be there. It’s just too expensive to fly a plane, there’s too much risk, it’s never going to be boring to the level of a bus or train.

It could definitely be way closer than it is, though.

You have to abstract something for a game, though. So are you saying you want it less abstract in that you want less of it to rely on dice (and thus more role playing), or do you want it less abstract in that you want more crunch and mechanics for, like, pooping?

I’m not interested in getting into a distro war. I think we should encourage people to get into the ecosystem via whatever user-friendly means possible. Once they’re in, then they’ll be a lot more likely to try out another distro.

When I bought a new gaming PC a few weeks ago (where I live the pre-builts that were assembled before rampocalypse are still at a reasonable price until the stock runs out), I asked if I could get it cheaper without the Windows 11 license. The sales guy said, “well, it’s already installed.” I told him, “I’m literally going to take it home and wipe it for Bazzite.” He said, “good call, but seriously, they’re practically giving these licenses away, so even if we could it would only take like $20 off the purchase price.”

Kind of a bummer to waste that $20, but honestly the satisfaction of hitting “reformat” on a brand new, slop-infused, bloatware-infested, data-harvesting-ready SSD and watching it all vanish before I even used it was almost worth the money.

EDIT: Not to mention, I got back a significant amount of space. 15+ GB.

Partially, yeah. Crewed spacecraft by necessity weigh significantly more than uncrewed, because life support is very heavy. But they also want to take that very heavy spacecraft further away from Earth than any crewed spacecraft has ever been before, which means they need to take a lot of fuel; yes, it’s a gravity-assisted free-return trajectory, but it still needs fuel for course corrections and other orbital dynamics. Plus, it’s a two-stage spacecraft, while the Saturn V was three-stage, so it’s got to carry a lot more dead weight a lot further than before.

All of that together means they needed the most powerful rocket ever. The lander mission will almost certainly be even more powerful than that, because while it won’t need to go as far, it’ll be carrying another spacecraft.

EDIT: Actually, to correct my last statement, potentially not! Turns out the current plan for Artemis IV is to send the lander on ahead and have it waiting in lunar orbit for the astronauts to get there. So potentially all of the Artemis missions could be launched on this same configuration of rocket.