Brotherhood of The Orb

the past lives in you

in my minecraft server there's a 1/5000 chance of a skeleton running across your screen at any given moment, and sometimes it really scares me

it's all I need

We laugh at how The Art of War is basically just, "An army can't fight if the soldiers aren't eating," but I'm reading this document about conservation of ancient yew trees and it legitimately says, "You should never fill the center of a hollow yew with concrete," so I think that probably making blatantly obvious statements is just the bane of being a specialist in anything

Go

Something mildly uplifting that I've been noticing in my family over the last several years.

We do family events (christmas, birthdays, etc.) at my grandmother's. Everyone shows up with their gifts and eats and has a good time and goes home. When I was a kid, my grandma would to most of the prep, and the women (her daughters-in-law etc.) would also bring food that they cooked, and after it was over the women would clean everything up and wash all the dishes and organise bringing their gifts home while the men sat in the living room with beers and hung out. If it was a barbecue, a man would man the grill, but otherwise they didn't do much except have a good time and then hand everything to their wives to deal with. Girl children would get enlisted to "be a waitress" while the boys went off to play.

Over the past handful of years, this divide has been eroding. Partly it's because Grandma is getting old and can't do so much herself any more so her sons are helping out, but also just in general. My uncle organises the food he's bringing so his wife doesn't have to worry about it. My dad packs up the Christmas gifts so that his wife can relax with some wine. My brother and I did the dishes, and when we left to do something else, his wife and our uncle stepped in to finish them together. A couple of men are still stubbornly lazy but it's just because they're generally lazy; the stark gender divide I used to hate in the expectation of party labour erodes more every year.

Profanity filters on single-player games are just so... incredibly performative. They don't 'protect' the player from seeing the word (you have to type it in order to activate the filter), the only thing they do is scold the player.

My favorite solution to people who get offended at the things they themselves typed is a disclaimer on a puzzle page that said "If you type profanity you will see it."

Out: Can you pet the dog?

In: Can you name yourself Fuckface McShitass?

It's really funny and jarring when you encounter a profanity filter in a single-player m-rated grown-up game for adults, but I don't think they even make sense in kid's games. If anything I think "If you tell the computer to call you FuckNugget it will do that" is exactly the sort of obvious, low-stakes 'actions have consequences' lesson that's perfect for kids.

"This impacts nobody but yourself, and even then it does not alter gameplay or the intended experience, however we cannot allow it and you need to know we disapprove of offensive language. Anyway have fun in Gorequest 4: The Tittening."

redmond & blutarch