BougieBirdie

I can’t find anything concrete online, but my assumption is that it has to do with the adventure / module design.

Consider a scenario where the party is going to go kill a lich, but first must delve into the lich’s lair before they may fight.

“Prophet” being that the party is forearmed with the knowledge of what the final encounter will be - and perhaps some intelligence on the dungeon.

“Squeeze” where the party has encounters that drain their resources. Those grenades / fireballs are going to be handy for fighting the lich, but they’re also useful for dealing with the lich’s zombie army.

“Monster” where the party finally encounters the prophesied monster and fights the lich.

I’ve never heard this trope named this way, but it’s how so many dungeons and adventures are designed. The party knows they have a particular fight coming up, and must carefully manage their resources because they won’t be having that fight at full strength.

I use a thumbs up reaction as “I acknowledge I’ve read and understood this, but don’t think you require a push notification” so I guess your mileage may vary

In my experience, the fries are great for five whole minutes before they turn into soggy cardboard and broken dreams

It’s a pretty good five minutes though

That’s the plan, yup

Honestly, that’s tough, but fair. No therapeutic tool is going to be a magic bullet solution for everyone.

My wife struggles with something similar. When we try to walk through an exercise together she thinks it’s about saying that her problems are “all in her head.” For my own outlook, I liken it to thinking that although my thoughts might be faulty, my feelings are valid. But hey, I’m not an authority, I’m just another struggling human trying to make sense of it all.

For what it’s worth, one stranger to another, I think that whatever you’re going through you’re totally valid. I hope you find or have found some relief - goodness knows we’re still looking

I highly recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is the best medicine I can afford, because all you need is pen and paper.

If you don’t think you can change your circumstance, then you can try to change how you react to it. The core model of the therapy is to analyze your thoughts and look for patterns in which your brain tries to fuck with you. Identifying distortions and fallacies helps to replace your automatic thoughts with more positive ones.

Example:

Thought: I hate my job, everything about it sucks

Distortions: Overgeneralization, All-or-Nothing Thinking, Feelings as Facts

New Thought: I hate certain parts of my job, but I like X part of it

The whole thing only works if you believe in it, and the important thing is that you’re not just putting a sunny face on things that make you feel terrible. You’re working to restructure your thought based on objective truth.

I’ve struggled for a long time with the Sunday Scaries. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get easier, and I’m going through it right now, but I know if I take the time to untangle my feelings then things end up easier in the long run.

Good luck out there, partner

angry upvote

But honestly, fair. Alien is a 50-year-old movie, so when viewed with a modern lens it might not seem to be anything special.

Part of the legendary status of Alien is just how influential it has been. Before Alien, a horror-scifi movie would be some schlock about flying saucers piloted by men in gorilla masks terrorizing Hollywood. Audiences certainly weren’t expecting a psychosexual thriller about forced oral insemination and mpreg.

And the android! Robots in movies were walking vending machines, and yet the robot in Alien is just some guy until he starts to malfunction. Plus in the context of the franchise, it makes you distrust every single android in each subsequent movie, and might even leave you guessing who else in the cast could be a robot in disguise.

Other movies have done it better since then. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all. And the funny thing is, a lot of the time when you look back at the movies that spawn the tropes, they don’t seem that impressive because they haven’t been totally refined yet.

I have a soft spot for Alien, it’s my favorite in the franchise. It relies so heavily on practical effects, it’s got those retro-futuristic computers which I adore, and the smart woman saves the day (sort of) after all the dumb men tell her she’s wrong. And yet despite what I just said, I don’t think anyone is actually very dumb, the characters are all quite human and I understand and relate to their motivations.

It’s a movie that feels far more modern than it is. You might even forget that it’s fifty years old until you see that explosive finale in gloriously bad 70’s CGI

I also liked Prometheus. It’s not the best in the franchise but it’s certainly not the worst, and it doesn’t deserve as much hate as it gets in the community

You know what would be way better than a symbol for “healthy” food would be requiring manufacturers to label food that fails to meet standards as “unhealthy.” Bonus points if you tax it to death so it’s no longer economically viable to sell garbage and label it “food”

Like, shit, the public perception is that I can’t afford healthy food anyway. But at least if the unhealthy food was also labelled it’d be easier to avoid

I forget which king it was (I’m sure someone here will tell me) but his solution was to divide his kingdom among his two heirs.

So the idea was that one heir would do the dividing and the other heir would then pick which kingdom they wanted.

This is a great solution to making sure people share a cookie / snack / etc fairly. The divider has an incentive to keep things as fair as possible.

I think this ended in civil war though, so your mileage may vary

That’s crazy, how can somebody not know what brand of laptop they…

HOLY SHIT ME TOO

The most attractive part about blockchain is the decentralized ledger showing each transaction made.

I feel like greater minds than mine could come up with a way to use that to fight government corruption. Every transaction is a matter of public record.

I doubt it’s really a practical solution though. Each transaction makes each subsequent transaction more computationally expensive. Plus all these vendors and contractors and everything are accustomed to fiat currency. Likely, they’d just immediately exchange it for cash.

This of course doesn’t tackle the issue of under-the-table corruption where you invite a senator out for lunch and kickbacks. I’m also sure that the government would want to maintain their own ledger, or that conniving people will find a way to cook the books anyway.

Based on what I know of Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect, it seems you’re at your most competent when you feel like you’re at your least.

So if you’re feeling badly because you feel like you don’t know enough to do your job, take some time to remind yourself that other people who appear to be confident have no idea what they’re doing.

It’s fake-it-till-you-make-it all the way down.