Hi folks, my name is Kevin Veale. I'm a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies and fiction author.

https://wheretofind.me/@krveale

"He/Him." Tangata Tiriti. Pakeha.

I'm into a wide variety of popular culture stuff in lots of different media forms, some of which I write about academically. I reshare stuff that amuses me, post random thoughts or resources, and generally hang out.


JuniperTheory
@JuniperTheory

Hi! I'm doing a series of STREAMS on TWITCH where I play as MANY STEAM NEXT FEST DEMOS AS POSSIBLE to find the ones that are the most interesting, fun or just kinda weird! You can watch that on my twitch channel if you want (Link here, i'll be playing more today)[https://www.twitch.tv/junipertheory], but if you don't have time to explore yourself, I'm also doing a short review of EVERY DEMO I PLAYED on cohost each day!

I'll be talking about what the demo is, if it's interesting, and what sort of person might want to check it out, so read through and see if any appeal to you specifically! Note that I don't know much context for a lot of these; some i've heard of, but most are just random demos that seemed interesting.

Yesterday's games were Rabbit and Steel, Another Crab's Treasure, Sentry, Turnip Boy Robs A Bank, Mosa Lina, Exhausted Man, Cursorblade, Wizordum, Cobalt Core, Yolk Hero: A Long Tomago, Duelists of Eden, Asura the Striker, and Snap the Sentinel.

So without further ado, lets get started with the NO CONTEST BEST GAME I PLAYED:

Rabbit and Steel



garak
@garak

One of the most important lessons of the field of Trolley Problems is judging morality against alternatives rather than in an absolute sense. In a vacuum, consigning someone to die is Bad, Actually. But the point is not to work in a vacuum, with its spherical frictionless simplicity, but to consider that I as a human being have limited means and my arms only reach so far and there are options for what I can do in this world but those options are limited.

One way of conceiving of "There Is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism" is that it means that every choice under capitalism is a convoluted multi-layer Troller Problem. I think this is true. My choice of what I'm having for lunch today will decide, in some indirect and fractional way, the amount and forms of suffering enacted on different groups of actual human beings. I'm contributing to one lettuce farmer's labor exploitation by empowering their employer; I'm contributing to another's starvation by depriving them of wages. Every action leads to exploitation (even going hungry: some workers will lose wages, eventually I'll enter the medical system, etc).

My point is that the phrase "There Is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism" cautions us against absolutist ethics inside a capitalist system.

Every choice examined in isolation will show that someone is Bad, Actually because every railway track in this whole goddamn interconnected mess has bodies tied to it. Real ones. Actual human beings. No one is without sin, because sinlessness is eradicated from this system. It makes no goddamn sense to say "this person is problematic because they chose to send a trolley to run over people," that analysis is fundamentally incomplete until it compares what other tracks were available.

But. Nevertheless.

To build on Decay's earlier point, the Trolley Problem still has an ethical decision with a better choice and a worse choice. Rejecting absolutist ethics most emphatically does not mean rejecting ethics wholesale. Flipping a switch to send a trolley at five people instead of one is still a choice, and the absence of an objective-good option in no way absolves the responsibility of picking the better option over the worse one.

My choice of lunch today is between indirectly empowering labor exploitation, or directly funding hate legislation. This ain't a hard fucking choice.

What one should conclude from "There Is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism" is to focus on doing better, without trying to achieve perfection. It counsels us that the latter is impossible, and therefore that we should decouple those two goals.



FreyjaKatra
@FreyjaKatra

Why do you hate Advantage in WFRP 4e?

I don't get it. It rules.

it's just a win more!

yes, it ends fights faster when the conclusion seems foregone. That's a good thing.

it can be stripped so easily!

I submit that if a goblin can't stab a knight after distracting him with a pocket rock with mushrooms growing on it in a warhammer game it's probably not warhammer.

there's this specific problem with big monsters using advantage for stuff that doesn't get to come up enough and makes those a problem to run

Agreed, fair. Seems like an edge case you could fix with a rule for the big ones, though.

it makes you seem heroic!

I submit that if an ordinary human can't stand up to a daemonic entity from beyond the star-gates using nothing but a buckler, a spear and a prayer, it's not warhammer.

it's so much tracking!

It's an incremental number that goes away when something goes wrong for you, it really is not. Use poker chips.

I want to just keep attacking but this makes that a bad idea!

It's a fight. I'm sorry to say that if you're a Scissors For Life person in rock-paper-scissors, you can't complain when someone picks rock. To throw at you.

Those are the common ones, which I thoroughly disagree with, obviously. Is there some big thing I'm missing, or am I doomed to love a mechanic everyone else hates?