We’ve moved past mere tolerance. Lactose inclusion. Lactose pride. Lactose celebration.

Prepare to welcome back Dungeons and Dragons Dragonshard, an RTS and RPG hybrid, and Forgotten Realms Demon Stone, a third-person action game.

Saved you a click.

Rules and leaders don’t have to be harmful or coercive though. Even very egalitarian communities need norms. Hell even an anarchosyndicalist commune will have some shared set of expectations of its members.

Like you said, cults are about control. I have a hard time seeing much of a parallel between the necessary structure and norms of a community or club, and the coercive nature of a cult.

Support groups for sure, but I was more thinking of things like sporting clubs, dog parks, skate parks, artistic communities, soup kitchens, men’s sheds, book clubs. Third spaces.

Anything where participation is voluntary, hierarchy is absent or minimal, and people come together to share interests, resources, time, or company.

Community.

They’re all groups of people with some kind of shared purpose or values. Cults are harmful and power based. Communities are helpful and consent-based. Religions can fall either way, or somewhere in the middle.

And last just as long.

The engineering department at my uni had a tensile strength testing machine which says “Made in the GDR” on it, a country that hasn’t existed for 40+ years.

Have you tried SwiftKey? I find it to be a waaaay better keyboard than the stock one, and it does support having a number row.

You can tell it’s made up because it has “it’s said that” in it.

Looks like one of these babies

They have played us for absolute fools.

The exception is password managers. It’s a very rare tool that makes things more secure and easier.

Your OS probably comes with one, and if not there are cheap or even free ones available.

It’s ragebait. Ignore it. Even if it’s not, attention is what they want. Engagement feeds the algorithm. Ignore it.

My wife and I have a midpoint that works for us, which is asking those questions, but sincerely.

When ask how she is, or how her day was, I genuinely want to know. And her answer can include as much or as little detail as she feels like sharing. And the reverse is true too.

A player in our party recently got a magic item that can boost your athletics and double your move speed once per day. I didn’t get how useful it could be until I saw him grapple an evil priest and just fucking drag him from one side of the map to the other.

Turns out grapple + double move speed + dash action is super awesome for getting enemies out of position and screwing up their formation.

So my recommendation is to look for ways to boost move speed. This quora post lists some ways: https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-ways-to-increase-movement-speed-in-D-D-5e

I’m sure you can find more if you talk to your party members or DM though. Off the top of my head, Glamour Bards have an ability that lets the whole party move up to their movement speed as a reaction. Then there’s Haste obviously. Ask your party if they have any spells or features that can make you fast 😃

Honestly I think the vast majority of people on the left would agree with most of what you said. A lot of the corporate rainbow flag waving is pretty performative and cringe.

The whole pronoun thing is pretty simple really, just don’t say “he” to someone who says “I’m a she”. That’s really all there is to it. 99% of the the time you can tell whether someone is a he or a she. Sometimes it’s not obvious, or you might get it wrong. As long as the other person can say “hey I’m a he actually” and you respond with “Oh my bad bro”, then you are all good.

I know there are some people out there who try to make the pronoun thing into some huge deal but that’s really all it is. I know plenty of trans people and non-binary people and they’re all chill, they just don’t want to be called by the wrong thing. And honestly, neither do I!

Genuine question which I promise I am asking in good faith: what do you think “wokeness” is?