I agree with that. Looking through, I find understanding the basic rules to be kind of a burden. It took me a while to realize that “Operations” is the rules section.

I think it makes sense to show players the character sheet early, because that’s the nexus through which they really experience the game. I like the demo scene towards the beginning, but I think a quickstart guide to explain basic rules to the players very, VERY clearly is usually a good idea.

Still, I’m continuously impressed at how well this adapts Star Trek to an RPG. I was initially skeptical that an RPG could take all the nonsense we see in decades of different shows and create a cohesive basis for all of it, but this is really impressive. I’d have to play to see if the rules feel balanced and natural, but at a glance, they make far more sense than plenty of other RPGs I’ve seen. I think this looks like a really fun game.

I really try not to get into litigating each and every instance, but I feel compelled sometimes to point out a few things:

The claim that Abdallah Aljamal was holding hostages is not credible. This claim was made by the IDF without evidence, and they have a very long history of fabricating post-hoc justifications for killing people they weren’t targeting or supposed to target. Examples include the assassination of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and the killing of medic Rouzan al-Najjar in 2018. In both cases, the IDF was caught lying to justify their murders, and I don’t think the claims about Abdallah Aljamal hold up at all. From what I read, he lived in the building one of the hostages was recovered from, but he wasn’t known as a target before he was killed. He was characterized as one after he was dead.

Overall, the concept of “valid targets” is bullshit. It is used to assuage our innate understanding that killing people – particularly the young, the innocent, the defenseless, the elderly – is WRONG. Israel has, in this particular war, extended the concept in a way that is clearly genocidal. Their target selection, as covered by 972, was wildly more vicious than their own historical limits on collateral damage. An anonymous Israeli intelligence officer called it “a mass assassination factory”.

I’m glad we agree that all the responsible parties for atrocities deserve to be held accountable. I don’t intend the above as a provocation to fight, but I want to make sure anyone reading this comment section is aware of this context.

I spent a while reading through this, and I gotta say that this is a really good RPG book. It’s very thorough, it’s well written for suggesting ways to play, it’s attractively formatted. This is a cool book.

It’s nuts that this is barely even news. Like… another day another atrocity.

I’m trying not to be numb to it, but it’s hard to remain shocked. I’m still disgusted, though.

I’ll say this, too: I think we too often judge wars by the conduct of the participants as though there are good wars and bad ones. And my hunch is that it’s more like there are bad ones and terrible ones, and as awful as this sounds, this one is more notable because it’s being well documented and it involves a uniquely fucked up context (decades of occupation with the support of the US). I think the way the Israeli right wing discusses it is uniquely brazen, and the degree to which the IDF targets journalists and medics seems high, but I think that this kind of stuff happens so often and is undercovered. I wish Yemen got the kind of coverage this is getting.

In terms of the atrocities, I think most wars are basically just a bunch of atrocities in a trenchcoat. It doesn’t make these any better: I just want this to end, and then all the other wars. Fuck this shit.

AND I want the people who do this shit dragged in front of the Hague. I’m very glad that Netanyahu and Gallant have had arrest warrants requested, but you know what I call that? A good start.

Oh wow, thanks for the heads up!

I’m excited to check this out.

Oh fuck, that sucks.

I think maybe execs and investors might feel it’s all the same, but if you’re a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you’ve been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that anymore: a property manager that’s owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,’ some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn’t the role that they were pitched when they took this job.

I feel similarly, but I’m not that upset.

It’s not really reasonable to expect something to remain constantly great over and over.

Chances must be taken. Some stuff won’t work. I think marvel films in the future will excite me, and I’m not that upset in the present when they don’t.

Black panther 2 was pretty good, btw, and I’m hoping that Iron Heart might be the pivot we need.

A young, non-rich version of Iron Man sounds like a great recipe for getting back to basics.

I think this article omitted important further context by not describing the target selection approach the IDF was using: they had an AI tool make guesses as to who was part of Hamas, then suggest bombing runs of their homes when they were believed to be inside around meal times or sleeping. They reserved precision weapons for commanders, and used dumb bombs to kill low-ranking suspected combatants.

This approach is inherently designed to create a pretense to carpet bomb neighborhood full of families based on a process with little to know human oversight it discretion.

For details, look up “lavender” and “where’s Daddy”.

This is very sensible. Especially when people think of pollution as a local problem that harms their kids’ health.

Thanks. I hope you get some use from it!

Ultimately, I really hope this just clicks with some people. I feel like there is a huge well of potential here, and if some better game developer took this idea and ran with it, I’d be thrilled just to have these ideas seeing larger audiences. I really think this is a fantastically fun setting to play in.

Yeah, he’s got some dope stuff, and seemed nice. He made a fuse-triggered mechanical thumper from Dune. This was before the movie, so I don’t know how it compares, but it’s quite clever.

This is so, so fucked up.

It’s hard to grieve effectively in the face of so many tragedies. Here is another one.

That is very true. Joey Ayoub of The Fire These Times coined a phrase months ago for describing the mainstreaming of genocidal ideation among the public, which I keep returning to: “The Smotrich-ization of the Israeli public”. It’s real, and it’s terrifying.

Still, my impression is that Israelis are in a weird, weird, weird place:

• They are largely supportive of the war, but most want a ceasefire deal that would bring home the hostages.
• They are largely furious at Netanyahu, though his support has recently started to go back up.
• There has been enormous pro-democracy anti-government protests before the war, then there were demonstrations demanding negotiations for a hostage release that were supposed to be explicitly distinct from anti-government demonstrators, and there are also pro-ceasefire, pro-hostage demonstrations that are explicitly NOT distinct from the pro-democracy anti-government demonstrations.
• Most Israelis don’t believe the war has “gone too far”, but also many Israelis feel that the war has been mishandled (largely due to the cost on Israeli troops, the economy, and international standing).
• There is support for the IDF, but also fury and blame at the IDF for failing so catastrophically during Oct. 7.
• There is also widespread anger at the far right for insisting on exempting the ultraorthodox from conscription, while troop shortages force middle-age reservists back into service, but there’s no clear indication that anyone has any leverage to impose on the far and ULTRA FAR right, who have been essentially governing Israel with smug impunity for months now.
• And, overall, Israelis seem to like Biden a lot.

I apologize that i don’t have sources for each of these, these are just a collection of insights I recall reading in the last few months.

Ultimately, I think they’re largely out of answers AND being herded aggressively by a well-tuned state propaganda machine, which means that I think their attitudes are in flux. I think they could be led in many directions, and many futures are possible. Right now though, the most successful shepherds are Smotrich and Ben-Givir.

Lastly, there are a few very small Palestinian-Jewish unity groups. These may look irrelevant considering their numbers are so few, but when people ask where we could find leaders capable of negotiating peace (considering most of the Palestinian ones have been killed to prevent any peace process), I think this would be where we’d find them. Despite their numbers, they terrify the far right. They face extreme threats of violence, and I think that reaction belies the threat they pose to Jewish Supremacy.

Yeah, and more importantly, Biden needs to learn the public component of diplomacy.

I read his interview in Time, and it’s weird, because it at least gave me some aspect into what he’s thinking.

He’s old as fuck. He has learned decades of procedures and standard practice in diplomacy, and he does NOT understand that a lot of it happens in the open now. Biden thinks he’s playing chess with all the diplomatic messages he sends along backchannels, and he has no idea that this is just an arm wrestling match now. People judge you by what you say and do transparently.

Biden legit thinks he and Bibi are like cousins who grew up together who are having a tough fight, and Bibi is all fucking politics. He’d slit any throat he has to get what he wants, and he will bury Biden in a heartbeat.

Biden should go to Israel, and in a public address announce that the country is turning a corner: it will be safer than ever, and America is going to assist with a long term peace process, which they won’t lead but will provide security guarantees for. And don’t tell Bibi any of this in advance. And when Bibi reacts, say that Bibi has lost his trust and that of the elected public, and they need to hold new elections before getting any new weapons. Get some 'nads, man!

I wouldn’t mind a complete cut-off in weapons, but I also wouldn’t mind if they continue to supply rocket defenses or something if its part of a pressure campaign to send Netanyahu packing. I want Israeli prosecutors and the Hague to argue over who gets to lock his ass up first.

The game’s core manual is on Itch (https://fully-automated-rpg.itch.io/fully-automated-solarpunk-rpg). I haven’t uploaded the playable adventures yet, though they’re available on our website, where you can download them for free without an account.

I’ll add them to itch eventually.

Also, we just released the third adventure of the four-part starter campaign: https://slrpnk.net/post/10660226

I’ll cross post it here, but I need to wait until Wednesday to keep it under 1 per week.

Anyone watch attoparsec on YouTube?

I saw him at open sauce last year, and got to type out a tweet using his typesetter’s keyboard:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vdP_sTMOWYo&t=7s

Absolutely. Analog is retro. That’s low tech for sure.

Oh, I see. Thank you for the clarification.

I think you could argue this before the passage of the Nation State Law of 2018. But now it’s enshrined in law that the state exists to privilege Jews specifically and selectively. That’s really putting it all in black and white.

Also I get asked about why I didn’t criticize China or Russia or Iran etc, and the reasons are simple:

1. I do
2. my tax dollars didn’t support their misdeeds and
3. I’m Jewish, so I have a huge investment in Israel’s actions. They insist that I be judged by their actions, so now I have to get involved. Also, I actually like Israel. I’d like it to be a liberal, multi ethnic democracy and not just another Middle Eastern martial theocracy with a Jewish twist.