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Cake day: August 6th, 2024

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  • Fairly interesting read, but I think it has missed potential. It fails to consider the effects magic would have on the laws of a society, and also the impact that monsters abound would have over the common folk. In a world where monsters do exist, the likely scenario would be one where small villages or settlements wouldn’t exist, and people would flock together to bigger towns or cities, behind the protection of walls. With crowds, comes business, and then the need to travel through dangerous wilderness, and with it, the job of a sword-for-hire, and, the ubiquitous presence of fortune-seekers, adventurers, lacking a place of presence or belonging. And then it would all depend on how the population of a certain place sees these adventurers, trust or distrust built upon decades of dealings and the actions of such people (adventurers).

    Another point to consider, is how magic could develop to aid in judicial matters, maybe spells specifically crafted to tell lies from truth, or to trace the scents left on a dead person to their killer…

    And I guess this is why most editions of D&D do not really concern themselves with this topic, it’s a bit too hard to point out exactly what would be the laws and such. However, I do like the thought exercise, and you can take it a step further, and write down a small set of simple laws and societal taboos for each region that could be relevant and meaningful for your game.







  • China is a brand new type of socialism, one that Marx couldn’t ever hope to write about, as that would have needed him to go through many important moments of world history (great wars, nuclear development, age of information…) that he could never have predicted. China in the 50s was an agrarian/third world nation, after the CCP took over their plan was simple: “Muster the strength of the entire population to push China into a new age through carefully planned country-wise economic strategies”. It’s a different perspective when compared to western capitalist societies that value individual freedom above the well-being of the nation, their idea was to value the nation above everything and everyone. To sacrifice generations in favor of economic development, to turn weakness, a poor country with more people than it could feed, into strength, a country where labor was so cheap it became the perfect trap to steal the advantages the first-world had developed: industries. Now, the western world has lost all of its advantages, they no longer have manufacturing capabilities that are enough even to supply their own demand, and its final advantage, technological supremacy slowly slips away from their hands. All that they have left is a class of uber-billionaires more than willing to sacrifice entire nations just so they can buy another yacht. Meanwhile, western media points their finger and exclaims: “Inhuman! The Chinese are using their own people to steal our western jobs with cheap labor!!!”, and Liberals left and right look down from their “moral superiority” seat of ignorance and agree, calling the chinese the evil masterminds of the century for daring to not (EDIT: word order) have their same views that valuing individual freedom as a divine natural right, as said Locke, is the only correct moral path, and anything else is Evil wrought upon this world. Thus, they fail to see that, although indeed Machiavellian-looking, valuing the community, the society, above the individual is exactly where the true left had always resided. What good is personal freedom when a man can buy another? And do not mistake me, I do not claim their methods to be flawlessly, they are indeed ruthless, but the Chinese Government can most certainly be conferred the title of “efficient”, in a few decades they took a country from the throngs of poverty and the past and pushed it forward, with sacrifices indeed, to the forefront of modern development. Are they truly wrong? Would you prefer they’d stuck to being slaves of first-world countries? As someone who does live in a third world, developing country, as they say, I’d be very very glad to see the same mentality of my own government, I’d sacrifice myself gladly to hope for a better future for the next generations. Instead, all I get is the proverbial choice of working my whole life to not starve to death while making a garbage human billionaire hiding in a mansion somewhere richer and richer at the cost of the people, all while my country not only barely inches forward in quality of life, but is constantly shoved back down the mud by the actions of western interests, that easily stoop to all the tricks of the CIA handbook just to keep us too busy too see that the evil wears not red, but blue and stars.



  • Most people don’t understand art, as most people also don’t understand chess. It’s important to accept that art is not something you can understand just because you like it or not, that’s not the same thing; in the same way that’s important to accept that a move made by a grandmaster chess player cannot be judged by someone who doesn’t understand chess at a deep enough level. Science follows a similar conundrum, people don’t understand even the most fundamental level of a certain field beyond their high-school knowledge and they still believe themselves capable of judging what science is.

    We, as humans, and as a society, must learn to accept our own shortcomings and take pride in not having an opinion about something that we do not understand enough. It’s fine to listen and like some tunes, but that does not give you the qualifications and knowledge to judge the quality of music and art. For that, you’d have to go deeper, and then you would also become a “snob”.