Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?


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In one adventure module, I think it was "The Bane of Llywelyn", the party wasted an hour trying to figure out a spiral inlay on the floor in the castle. As a throw-away I had it so no matter where they started walking the spiral never reach the centre, and it just ran them back to the outer edge for some reason.
Definitely using that for the next wizard lair ruin. (Our Shadowdark sandbox is the site of an ancient wizard war, so magical ruins all over the place, even when -- like this week -- you track bandits back to their hideout.)
 

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Always nice to see a Whit Stillman movie reference in the wild. :) This movie is so fun. Very dry. Such a time capsule of NY prep schoolers in the 80s, but more generally of smart kids who had no idea how ignorant they actually were, despite reading a lot. Which is part of the time capsule; nowadays kids read less but have a much wider view of the world in many ways due to social media. The acting isn't the best, but IIRC these were pretty low budget, and the cast being pretty amateur is kind of charming.
God, even though I knew the line was coming it was still enough to make me roll my eyes hard enough to make my head hurt! I found it a few years ago going through Academy Award nominees, and while I enjoyed it, I have known far too many people who never got over being told they were smart in high school to watch it without taking a little psychic damage.
 

find myself putting in a lot of effort and restraint to try and contribute to a good-faith and well meaning argument or discussion, and I stop and ask myself

"What are the odds of this person responding with equal effort and good-faith?"
Sometimes, that’s where I stop, then consider deleting my prospective post. Or actually do.

However, I occasionally also think about other participants in the thread- current and future. If what I have to say is potentially very important to the discussion, I usually decide to continue with my post.

Sure, odds are good that someone else could make the same contribution- I’m smart, but I’m not The Keeper of All Esoteric Knowledge. But- if those others are even participating in the discussion- they’re probably making the same calculations about whether or not to post. So instead of leaving it to a theoretical other, I post.
 
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I find myself doing that more and more these days. Often times I find myself going

"What's the point?"

I find myself putting in a lot of effort and restraint to try and contribute to a good-faith and well meaning argument or discussion, and I stop and ask myself

"What are the odds of this person responding with equal effort and good-faith?"

Those odds are usually pretty low, so I try to save myself the time and brain-power.

(EDIT: I wasn't really referring to here, though it has happened. But this is more so for the internet, and social media in general.)
It applies equally to anywhere humans share opinions.

Unfortunately, most people care more about being right and somehow proving their rightness to others than anything remotely resembling a conversation. There are a few pockets here and there, of course. But not for lack of trying by the screeching masses.

A recent vlogbrothers video about Wikipedia comes to mind, but it's mostly about politics so I won't link it.
 

God, even though I knew the line was coming it was still enough to make me roll my eyes hard enough to make my head hurt! I found it a few years ago going through Academy Award nominees, and while I enjoyed it, I have known far too many people who never got over being told they were smart in high school to watch it without taking a little psychic damage.
Yes, the cringe is real. Either thinking about young people we've known, or ourselves as clueless youngsters.

I appreciate that by the end of the movie Tom's actually tried out Jane Austen and found he likes her.

I was just thinking about how formal and kind of unnatural the dialogue in the movie is, especially for folks of that age, but I can absolutely suspend my disbelief given my recollection of how I (and others) wanted to show off my vocabulary and knowledge whenever I could. I suspect part of my enjoyment of the dialogue springs from the same place as my enjoyment of Jack Vance's dialogue. Stillman isn't quite as funny as Vance can be, but he's pretty great.
 




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