Realities on the ground outside of the USA say otherwise. Here, for example, after a huge push toward ownership of individual vehicles, an ever-increasing proportion of those vehicles are permanently parked. Outside my window, for example, there’s a square that is filled with cars parked bumper to bumper that haven’t moved in the past year or two. Technically they’re owned and would certainly be counted in ownership statistics, but it is physically impossible for any but the four cars at the end of the square to even be taken out of the lot.

Why?

Because the advantage of private ownership has been whittled away slowly but steadily over the past 20 years.

There was a time that a private vehicle was the only practical means to cross the two rivers (Han and Yangtze) that divide the city. Buses of the time were hideously uncomfortable, highly unreliable, and painfully slow. Going from my home to the then-largest park in the city (Zhongshan park) was a good 2.5-3 hour trip by bus. By car, even through traffic jams (which buses had to go through as well, obviously), it was 1-1.5 hours instead.

Today that same trip is slightly lower by car (cut off about fifteen minutes because of the Yangtze tunnel) but by metro it’s about 25 minutes. And you don’t have to hunt around for increasingly rare parking, then pay for that parking on top of it. And then repeat that when you get back home. More and more people aren’t bothering to drive at all, leaving their cars in long-term parking “just in case” and that case never comes.

Personally I haven’t owned an automobile since the second line of the Wuhan Metro opened, and the bus service got upgraded to serve it. There’s no point. The rare times I need to use a personal vehicle in specific, taxi services are more than sufficient. For the price of a car I could use, after all, a taxi to go from one end of the city to the other and back every day. For two years. That very infrequent case of needing a taxi is a trivial expense compared to just the purchase price of a car (not including insurance, maintenance, fuel/electricity, etc. etc. etc.).

So “never” is a really long time that’s ending as I watch.

The Apartheid Manchild has this weird obsession with Mars.

There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next decade. (I frankly doubt that there will even have been human footprints on Mars in the next decade!) There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next century. There will likely be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next millennium. And I’m saying that last one not because I don’t think we’d have the technology in a thousand years, but rather because there is no point in living on Mars.

Mars has nothing we need that’s worth maintaining a settlement in the face of conditions harsher than the absolute worst the Earth has to offer. If people want to live in a permanently cold shithole with nothing usefully accessible they can just build a house on Antarctica. It’s a far cheaper way to fuck around and find otu.

Read George Polti’s The 36 Dramatic Situations. It’s a list of plot elements that have a snappy title, a list of participants in the plot element, a brief discussion of how it works, and then (unfortunately dated) references to dramas that used them.

Using this when building a world, or a campaign, or a local setting, lets you quickly set up a bunch of conflicts (ideally with interlaced participants so that single NPCs (or PCs) can be in different roles in different dramatic situations. Then you just let the events flow logically, and as the dramatic situations get resolved you get a plot. PCs can interfere with these dramatic situations and thus have an impact on resulting plots even if the overall setting is far larger than they are.

For depth in world-building I use a rule I call “Y-cubed”. (I got it from somewhere else but can’t recall the source anymore.)

For every detail you make, you ask the question “Why” three times.

So a village the characters have reached stop all work every 77 days for a festival. Why? It celebrates an ascended local hero who saved the village from a magical blight. Why 77 days? It took 77 days for effort for the blight to be defeated. … And so on.

This is a rapid way to both build depth in your setting quickly, as well as inspire possible mysteries and intrigue for investigation later.

A slight modification works also for giving NPCs depth.

Anybody who thinks that the Apartheid Manchild was ever intending on reducing spending needs to be given a dunce hat and forced to sit in the corner.

Robert’s cynicism is cracking these days soon. His laughter is increasingly forced and joyless.

These are shit times.

Would this be the military that could only reach a standstill in Korea? That lost in Vietnam? That lost in Afghanistan? That ran away scared from Mogadishu? That “won” in Iraq by generating the world’s largest collection of terrorists until the blowback lost you two large towers and a smaller one?

That military?

At work? My go-to activity is to get the Hell out of the toilet as quickly as possible.

I hate squat toilets, see.

From above:

A large portion of Americans only have 2 brain cells and they’re both busy fighting for 3rd place.

And here we have a case in point: an American who can’t read history.

I’ve been listening to Tanya Tagaq’s Retribution album this morning. She’s by far the best Inuk-punk performer in the world, no exceptions. (I say this with confidence because she’s the only Inuk-punk performer in the world. 🤭)

Simon Whistler is a presenter and it often shows. He’s pretty entertaining, and he has the look of a scholar which gives him some gravitas and credibility when he talks, but he isn’t particularly knowledgeable of anything (including topics he’s already covered in one channel when presenting the same topic on another).

So of course he thinks ChatGPT is smart.

China? You mean that place that blocks Xhitter?

I’m not a Xhitter user so I have no idea what “Subscriptions” even means. How is it different from “Followers”?

Hmmm… Maybe some of those ultra-sticky PVC stickers then. Those can go on fast and are a real bitch to remove.

In general there is no “neutral” source of information. At all. Yes, including Wikipedia with its “NPOV” policy. (It even says that there’s no such thing in its own policies, so I’m not exactly saying anything new here.) Most of the sources you cite as “neutral” will actually be sources that agree, broadly, with your own cultural assumptions that you are likely not even aware of, not to mention actively questioning.

That being said, since there is no such thing as a neutral source of information, you can still have good sources of information. Wikipedia is one such. Is it perfect? No. Because nothing is. But it is good enough for most general knowledge. It gets a bit dicey as a source when you leave the realm of western assumptions, or if you enter into the realm of contentious politics. But for most things it’s just fine as a quick resource to get information from. It’s a decent encyclopedia whose ease of access isn’t matched by anybody else.

Reddit is not, however. Because reddit has no disciplined approach to information-gathering and -sharing. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (with all the strengths and flaws that form takes on). Reddit is a lot of people talking loudly in a gigantic garden party from Hell. Over by the roses you have a bunch of people loudly expounding on the virtues of the Nazi party. Over by the fountain you’ve got another group loudly expounding on how vile and gross the Nazis were casting glares in the direction of the roses. In the maze park you’ve got a bunch of people meandering around and laughing while they babble inanities. Out in the driveway you’ve got a bunch of Morris dancers practising their craft. It may be fun if you like that kind of thing, but it is absolutely not a source of reliable information unless you do so much fact checking that you might as well skip the reddit step and go straight to getting the facts from the places you’re using to check.

ChatGPT, to continue using strained analogies, is that weird uncle in your family. He’s personable, bright, cheerful, and seems to know a lot of stuff. But he’s a bit off and off-putting somehow, and that’s because behind the scenes, when nobody’s looking, he’s taking a lot of hallucinogens. He does know a lot. A whole lot. But he also makes shit up from the weird distortions the drugs in his system impose on his perceptions. As a result you never know when he’s telling the truth or when he’s made a whole fantasy world to answer your question.

My personal experience with ChatGPT came from asking it about a singer I admire. She’s not a really big name and not a lot of people write about her. I wanted to find more of her work and thought ChatGPT could at least give me a list of albums featuring her. And it did! It gave me a dozen albums to look for. Only … none of them existed. Not a single one. ChatGPT made up a whole discography for this singer instead of saying “sorry, I don’t know”. And when I went looking for them and found they didn’t exist, I told it this and it did its “sorry, I made a mistake, here’s the right list” thing … and that list contained half of the old list that I’d already pointed out didn’t exist and half new entries that, you guessed it!, also didn’t exist.

And the problem is that ChatGPT is just as certain when hallucinating as it is when telling things that are true. It is PARTICULARLY unsuited to be a source of information.

you literally can cross-check the sources if you think it is making a wrong claim

When the source is readily available. A lot of stuff is not online and books go out of print and may be hard to track down. There’s a sizable set of bad actors on Wikipedia who rely on this by quoting passages from out of print books out of context to support their stance.

That being said, this is a minor problem and WIkipedia is an acceptable source of general knowledge. Claiming it’s a bad source of information would apply to any other lay-level source including the Encyclopedia Britannica.

That’s just raw numbers.

If one in 100,000 people are total shitheels, in an environment with a million users (and I don’t think FidoNet was anywhere NEAR that size ever!) you’ve got ten total shitheels.

Today there’s 5.5 billion people on the Internet. That would be over half a million total shitheels that can interact with you.

I think you have a few rose lenses between you and your memories. There was a reason why FidoNet, say, had a bunch of nicknames like “FIght-o-Net” back then. The things people argued about weren’t all that different from now.

Weird thing is nor do I. Sadly I have people who keep sending things to me asking if this is real or not. (I guess I’m the only person in my social circle with about a third of the Confucian canon on my bookshelf.)