It’s actually even more hilarious than that. Musk’s kids are all IVF. He pays for sex selection. He only wants male kids. So he spent a stupid amount of money trying to make her a boy, and she turned out a girl anyway.

Pity they’re putting robotaxis on the road soon. How well do you think this autopilot is going to work when there isn’t anyone to put their hands on the wheel?

I think the idea that Murderbot’s conception of its gender conflicts with its appearance of gender is actually a lot more real, and relatable. If Murderbot is simply genderless because it was designed to be genderless, that flies directly in the face of the story’s underlying themes of breaking your own programming and discovering an identity apart from the one you were assigned by society and your expected place in it. So the notion that this thing was designed to look like a very handsome guy, but thinks of itself as having no concept of gender at all seems to fit that much better to my mind. But I get how it’s difficult when you start with a book, form an image of a character, and then get met with something that runs completely counter to that image.

There is no such thing as an “unreviewable” decision. Even if the decision is backed by the law, it can still be reviewed, in order to confirm that it is indeed backed by the law.

Trump is not just arguing that he has the right to do this; he’s arguing that there should be no legal review process at all, which is an argument any kinds of checks and balances whatsoever. He’s demanding total autocracy.

“Boots, boots, boots, boots…”

Yeah, I’m gonna back you up on that one. Sometimes assembling the group in session 0 is what’s right for the story, and sometimes it really, really isn’t. Think about how many movies literally have “Assembling the team” as almost their entire plot. The Avengers hangs two hours of non-stop action on “We need to put a party together.” Every heist movie is basically required to have an “I’m putting a team together…” sequence.

Session 0 is where you lay out the expectations of the game, and your players think about either how their characters have already interacted, or how they will interact when they eventually meet. You give people an idea of what they’re getting into, you pitch the tone and the style of the game, and you help people shape characters around that.

As an example a friend of mine always pitches his games by describing who they would be directed by. I remember vividly his “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Halflings” game, a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay If It Was Directed By Guy Ritchie experience. Just setting that sense of tone up front meant that we all knew to make characters who would fit the vibe. I played “Blackhand Seth, The Scummiest Elf You’ve Ever Met,” one part Brad Pitt Pikey, one part Jack Sparrow, and I had a blast.

In my most recent campaign I’m running a Shadowrun game where the group would be assembled in session 1 by a down on his luck fixer. My pitch to the players was simple; make fuck-ups. I wanted characters who were at the end of their rope, lacking in options, either so green no one would trust them or so tainted by past failures that no one wanted them. The kind of people who would take a job from a fixer who had burned every other bridge. They rose to the assignment beautifully, and by four sessions in the group has already formed some absolutely fascinating relationship dynamics. A lot of that has been shaped by their first experiences together, figuring out how to work as a team, sometimes distrusting each other, and slowly discovering reasons to care about each other.

Obviously, I’m probably missing some context here, but reading the way you’ve described this, I don’t think you were at fault here. If the GM’s decision really was to fold that character into the group by just having them stroll up to a smuggler’s ship like “Yo, I’m the jedi, let me in,” that was an incredibly fucking stupid way to handle that character introduction.

If that happened in an actual Star Wars movie or TV show there would be a million youtube videos ripping on how stupid that scene was. Forget “Paranoid smuggler trying to evade the law”, basically anyone working against the empire should have been suspicious as fuck there. That’s not a jedi, that’s an imperial spy, or worse, a sith lord.

Yes, players owe to each other to try to move the story forward in a collaborative way, but the GM also owes it to the players to never demand that their characters act like complete and total morons for the sake of the story. There should have been some kind of framework there for why this group of people would trust this random-ass dude wandering into the docking bay. A message sent ahead by their contact in the resistance saying “This guy is gonna help you out, you can trust him,” something like that. Not just “Yo, I’m a party member, lemme in.” Real life doesn’t work like that, and when games try to work like that it just makes everything feel stupid and pointless, because it’s so obvious that none of it is real or meaningful.

I’m actually a big fan of that decision.

The idea that non-binary people have to visibly appear non-binary is a harmful stereotype. Murderbot’s physical appearance is a part of its design that it has no control over. Why should it look androgynous? Just because it perceives itself as genderless, doesn’t mean it’s creators did.

I hope the show will actually dig into that at some point. I think it’s really important for people to see an agender character who still has a strongly masc appearance.

They also point out that more than 50 percent of Helldivers’ revenue came from microtransactions now. Again, you’re all ruining it for the rest of us, please stop. They also confirm they will conitnue to milk that and “maximize revenue”.

The thing is, Helldivers is priced, delivered and supported in such a way that it’s worth spending that money on.

In Helldivers 2 it is possible to earn premium currency simply by playing the game, and at a fairly reasonable rate. You can basically grind out every bit of content in the game if you want. And even without any of that “premium” content, you get a huge library of weapons, cosmetics and strategems to play with, many of which are better than the premium stuff.

Plus the warbonds are very fair compared to how most games price extra content. In a world where you can easily spend twenty dollars or more on a skin, here’s what a typical warbond - priced at $10 - includes;

• Two or three full cosmetic sets
• An emote or victory animation
• Three primary weapons
• A secondary weapon
• A grenade
• A booster (special power for the squad, not an XP booster; Helldivers does not have any form of XP booster, everyone grinds at the same rate)
• Enough premium currency to cover 30% of your next warbond

(Newer warbonds have gotten a little slimmer in terms of weapons and skins, but now tend to include new strategems as well; it’s a slight downgrade in terms of bang for your buck, but still very good compared to the industry averages)

On top of that, the game itself is very reasonably priced, incredibly fun, and constantly getting exciting new story content. Which means you buy this thing, enjoy the hell out of it, and end up thinking “Man, I’ve still got this money left over that I would have spent on a full price game, why not spend it on some cool shit? Look at all the cool stuff I could get for just ten dollars and I’m still coming in at way less than the price of a new Battlefield game.”

That’s how it should be. That kind of behaviour from a developer should be rewarded. Arrowhead are doing pretty much everything right when it comes to crafting a brilliant product and treating the fans of that product with respect. We can’t stop Sony learning the wrong lessons from that, but if good games don’t succeed they certainly won’t ever learn the right ones.

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I don’t like prescribing a characters actions to that degree, but I would certainly work with the player to try to help them come up with an alternate path.

If a player ultimately chooses to commit to a path that puts them at odds with the party, I’ll respect that, but I’ll make it clear to them that this is where that character’s story ends.

My rule on this is very simple; if your character isn’t a part of the group, they’re not part of the story. That goes for lone wolves, people who betray the party, “evil” characters who work against the party’s interests, etc. You make the choices you want to make, you do what seems right for your character, but the moment that means you’re not a part of the group, you either figure out a good story for how we’re going to fix that, or you hand me your character sheet. It’s really that easy.

“But thats just what my character would do!”

OK, let’s unpack that. If that’s truly, genuinely the case, if there’s no way your character could no work against the group or leave them at this point, then this is how your characters story ends. If that comes twenty sessions into a game, well, waking away rather than betray your morals is a pretty good story if you ask me. If it comes two sessions in then we need to figure out why you’re not on the same page as everyone else.

But more often, the player simply thinks its the only possible way their character can act in this situation because they’re not thinking creatively. People are complicated. Consistency is actually the bane of interesting characters. A good character is inconsistent for interesting reasons. “My character would never trust someone in this situation!” OK, but what if they did? Now we’re left with the question of why, and figuring that out is surely going to be interesting.

There’s also the other side of this coin, which is the responsibility on the GM’s shoulders. Yes, your players owe it to each other to try to keep the story moving forward, but you also owe it to them to respect the reality their story takes place in. Don’t run a gritty crime game and then expect your players to just automatically trust some NPC that turns up with no bona fides. You actually have to put the work into crafting scenarios where the players can have their characters react naturally and still drive the story. It’s a bad GM who pisses their pants and cries because they created something that looks like an obvious trap (whether it is or not) and their players refused to walk into it.

My wife falls in step beside me without even realizing she’s doing it. You learn this day one of basic up here. By the time you get out of BMQ it’s instinct. And it doesn’t eat up any training time, because your practice is just walking in time with your unit every time you go anywhere.

It is genuinely, such a hilariously piss-poor excuse.

My wife is in the Canadian Forces. She is ridiculously good at her job, and everyone in the CAF is trained to a ridiculously high standard. By the time she exited occupational training she was already qualified on more weapon systems than most US soldiers ever touch in their entire careers. Her unit shoots sub-MOA groupings for fun. They meet and often exceed the physical standards for Ranger school. And this is just reg-force infantry.

And despite all that, she is also so completely capable of keeping a tight march that she actually has to stop herself from automatically falling in perfect step next to me when we’re walking down the street. And no, the excuse of “Oh, you can’t march to Fortunate Son” doesn’t count for shit. My wife can mark perfect time with no music at all. Christ, one time in training her MCpl made her unit all put on their gas masks and mark time while singing Oh Canada, and they didn’t get to stop until it was perfect. And no, they did not have a fucking drum or backing music. She’s not on a drill team; Canada doesn’t have drill teams. This is just something they do because it’s part of the basic standard of being a soldier.

It’s what you learn on your very first day of basic training in Canada. You’re expected to march in time everywhere you go throughout your training. You only get to stop once you reach your unit. Even clerks have to do this, it’s just basic discipline.

Yeah, you literally just keep the beat in your head. Anyone can do it.

But therein also lies the difference. And I say this not to deride your absolutely necessary call for action, but to offer a measure of hope; Nazi Germany was smart enough to maintain good relationships with the rest of the world until they were ready to start pressing ahead with their plans full speed. Trump’s government has the same goals, but fails to even clear the disastrously low bar of competence set by the Nazis. Where the Nazis built international relations, Trump is tearing them down. Where the Nazis used borrowed money and borrowed time to build up their economy, Trump is destroying what little domestic production America had in his hamfisted attempts to make more.

The Nazis got away with it for so long because, ultimately, they were popular, and they were - seemingly - making Germany better. Trump has entirely failed to replicate their success in this regard. Nothing on the scale of the No Kings protests ever happened in Nazi Germany.

The American people can win this. It is not too late to reclaim your country.

Sadly proper estimates seem to be lacking, but looking at crowd images, it can’t be more than a few thousand. Maybe 10k-20k if you’re being really generous. As one commenter put it, “It’s not a big crowd if you’ve got room to throw a football without annoying anyone.”

The difference, you have to remember, is that the worse stuff is all hurting the people they want him to hurt. But betraying his made in America promises hurts the people who voted for him. That’s when they suddenly start to care.

Sorry, I meant “that and made in the US”, but I get that that’s not what I said.