Ooh, since this is a safe space for dorks, I would like to be pedantic myself. Thank you for the opportunity. The oxygen catastrophe was caused by cyanobacteria-like organisms, which are photosynthetic, but are not plants. But it’s true, all bio-mass matters!

The Azolla Event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event. I mean it is cool and the major climate shift it helped create certainly caused some extinctions. But plants can change the world, never forget!

Keep sharing the tapes.

I meditate as part of a dedicated yoga practice. When I am doing a group practice, i arrive early and perform a physical warm up and then spend ten minutes in a seated meditation before the class begins. It makes a huge difference in the quality of my workout to get my mind firmly rooted in the immediate experience.

Back when Perl was the language of choice for bioinformatics, I found a huge performance boost pre-processing large (~1Tb) text files using built in unix tools like sed and awk with regex. So while it might take me a full hour to peck out the correct incantation, the task would then run in an hour, compared to four hours or more for the same task using Perl.

So many pipes…

They need a fifth man. Let me check my calendar…

Maybe not. You will have the same number of tax preparers chasing less work. Through the magic of the Free Market™️, shouldn’t that mean pressure to reduce prices? We can only hope.

It’s like, their whole thing!

By any chance are you a fan of Strong Towns? If not they are very active in trying to kill Stroads

You sound like you mean well, but this is not helpful advice. You are essentially telling someone who is obviously a conscientious person and struggling that they have a character flaw.

Gwynne Shotwell deserves quite a lot more credit for SpaceX than Musk. Someone has to keep the place running until the ketamine clears his system.

Move over bacon. Now there’s something meatier!

You are correct. People these days are idjits.

‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.

That’s exactly right, you have to know enough about the subject to smell a bullshit answer.

It’s great as a mental prosthetic. When I am tackling a new complex topic like say a new cloud platform I’m learning, i can test my understanding of the implications of a change to the console settings. I tell it what i think and ask it to check my understanding. Really speeds up my learning, but I don’t rely on it exclusively. I will write my own dang emails, thank you.

We do need to give them the Ma Bell treatment.

Nationalize Amazon.

I’m going to try to revive a dead post by commenting on my own experiences playing. Based on the upvotes, others seem interested too. Let’s see if it works

I had a good crew of friends while in grad school in the 00’s. This was a super smart crew of bio-nerds so when I heard about this game on Slashdot (or maybe Memepool, can’t be sure) I knew I had the right crowd to try it.

It was a successful session and we developed a lot of those inside jokes that tight social groups do.

I tried again years later with another set of friends and it fell flat. Not a disaster but it was quickly abandoned for lack of general interest. This was also a crowd of high-wattage personalities so i still wonder what the difference was.

That’s what prompted my question. Just seeking scene setting tips that might increase the chance the game goes well again.

This guy 👆🏻