🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

No, I meant real RPGs, not the computerized abominations. Pencil, paper, optionally a randomizer, and imagination.

“I’ve got new socks on.”

Pick up a new language. A whole language in the course of a normal hospital stage is not really plausible, so narrow the goals. Like only learn how to swear in another language, say. Or learn how to say all the sexual acts you can think of in another language fluently.

Pick up a solo RPG and start playing when you get bored.

Edit Thanks for the report @lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone I tried not to frame this in a controversial manner.

Dude! If anything were to show that this post was done in bad faith, doing what you just did was beyond the pale in proving it!

A friend has an eastern European neighbor move in. He says he’s glad they are that instead of American white.

Have you ever been in a gathering with just plain, white-as-in-bread Americans (especially the middle class on up, but not exclusively so)? They are boring as all fuck! They eat boring food, have boring conversations and are in general just tedious to be around when that’s all that’s present. (Part of this is, naturally, contempt for the familiar, but the other part is that yes they really are that boring!).

I’d much rather live in a neighbourhood that has a dozen different cultures (note: I’m not saying “races” here because “races” are nonsense) than a bunch of middle-class, white-as-in-bread Americans. So if I’m living in a neighbourhood that is mostly just plain-as-pancakes (minus the syrup) white folk, I’ll celebrate an Eastern European family moving in too!

Feeling they are individually responsible for what their ancestors and/or rich and politically affluent white people did in the past.

If they genuinely feel individually responsible, that’s just idiocy. The kind of idiocy that the privileged can express because there’s no real cost to them, in fact.

If they are, however, just acknowledging that they have privilege based on their artificial elevation over others (c.f. “redlining”) through systematic racism, and you’re interpreting this as feeling individually responsible, you likely need to have an awareness adjustment.

Acting as if white people anything is bad.

This is just stupid with no qualifiers like the previous one.

Making jokes at their own expense but won’t dare say the same thing to another ethnicity.

Well fucking duh! Self-aware, self-directed humour is the high road. Punching down on someone else for their differences is the low road. (Punching up is the middle road.) I’ll take it from my angle:

• German jokes: I’m half-German ethnically, and spent some of the most important formative years of my life living in Germany. When I’m making jokes about Germans, it comes from an informed position with at least a degree of sympathy for the targets of my jokes. When some American dude from the middle of Montana does the same, they come at it from a position of ignorance and stereotype that is usually a) ignorant, and b) hostile, rather than sympathetic.

• Chinese jokes: Where Americans (not of German descent, and even many who are) make German jokes have at least some cultural warrants in common, there are almost zero cultural warrants in common with Chinese people. White Americans are so incredibly ignorant of Chinese culture, society, behaviour, and beliefs that they think “Ching Chong” sounds like Chinese (protip: not even fucking close!) and they think “Confucius say” jokes¹ are a) plausibly real, and b) funny (protip: neither is true). Use either of these in my presence and you’re going to get the stink-eye and a confrontation you will not enjoy. Yet … I can tell jokes about Chinese people because, again, I’m ethnically half-Chinese, I’ve lived in China for almost a quarter of a century now, and my jokes will actually a) be based on knowledge, and b) be based on sympathetic sharing of values while poking fun at idiosyncrasies.

• Jokes about white folk: Here’s where you’re going to probably find it “unfair”, but the fact is that white folk are the dominant folk in Europe and North America. All y’all’s culture is everywhere, overriding everybody else’s. And all y’all’re the culture with the greatest proportion of money. And here’s the thing: minorities punching up is fine. Indeed laudable. Every king needs his jester to prick his ego and make fun of his excesses. The jester making fun of the king is laudable and brave. The king beating down the jester is not. So like it or not, not only is it bad for white folk to be making fun of minorities, it’s cowardly. And the reverse, however, is fine (and brave). I already know from the nature of your question that you’re absolutely going to hate that I said that, but it’s true nonetheless. Punching down is mean-spirited. Punching up is not.

¹ Consider how typical Americans would react to someone making “Yeshua ben Yusuf” jokes about Christ’s purported sayings that are as offensive as these “Confucius say” jokes are. Now flip the script. Yeah. That.

For me it would be Das Boot.

The Ringworld one is brilliant.

Don’t care much about either. My phone does the job for me and I have enough clothing to last me to the end of my life. (You know, about six weeks.) (I jest.)

If I were the kind who’d want children, I’d likely wish to raise them using a scissor lift.

Yeah, small businesses were already suffering at the hands of big box stores, stagnant wages, and online purchasing.

And now there’s a downturn.

Anything made in the USA (though that is not primarily because of cost of living, only partially). I used to stop off at various street food vendors for a snack on the way home every second day or so, but now I maybe do that once a month. And that is cost of living related entirely.

I think you’re missing the point. An American will see the “impact” of the “US President” “globally” while someone in Nigeria will have completely different concerns for what the Big Thing™ will be, and it will be Nigerian-centric, while someone having this same “itch” in Finland will have something Finnish-centric (say, Russia invading again) as their version and so on and so forth.

And yet, historically, when a Big Thing™ strikes it strikes from an unexpected direction from an unexpected place with unexpected outcomes for the overwhelming majority of humanity.

They also tend to think the Big Event™ will be in their geographical area and will think it’s based on their cultural concerns.

Or, alternatively, this is word salad and you’re falling for the oldest trick of the book: “it uses loads of big words and I don’t understand it so it must be profound”.

I know which direction I’m betting on.

In the summer, beer. Ideally an import (unless there’s a good microbrewery outlet nearby) because most commercial Chinese beers are terrible. For special events, baijiu. For winter, heated rice liquor.

Uh … what?

Before my eyes glazed over and I scrolled to the bottom it seems like this is baby’s first steps into Buddhism with a side of Daoism as written by someone who understands neither. But as the word salad kept getting tossed and tossed and tossed it just blended together into a word soup.

Is there a coherent description of this concept somewhere, or is word salad all we have?

It’s started.

I’ve got new socks on.

Anybody on the outside would think I live in the midst of utter chaos. Yet if they ask me where something of mine is, I can unerringly go to it.

So the only answer I can have for your question is either “无” or ☯.