We have masked men grabbing people off the streets with no accountability. Perhaps you should be asking for evidence of lack of human rights abuse.

I thought I recognized that name: Nylund also wrote some books for the Halo series which I enjoyed, although I was already a fan of the games.

I believe he was a staff writer for the Halo series in house as well, something like Marc Laidlaw at Valve, and the books emerged from internal storytelling written for the series. Very interesting stuff.

I also highly recommend his older books Pawn's Dream, Dry Water, and especially A Game Of Universe. They're available on Kindle and part of the Unlimited program so easy to check out.

I enjoyed Braid and this revelation doesn't change that, but there's a lot of entertainment and it's easy to not support someone who has views (or at least doesn't express them publicly) that conflict with my own personal values.

If you don't care about competitive balance or the "identity" of magic it probably didn't.

Long answer: the introduction of non-magic sets like SpongeBob SquarePants, Deadpool, or Assassin's Creed are seen as tasteless money grabs that dilute the quality and theme of magic even further, but fans of those things will scoop them up.

The competitive scene has been pretty rough, but I haven't played constructed formats in a while so I'm not as keyed into this. I just know that there have been lots of cards released recently that have had to be banned for how powerful they were.

Personally, I love the game, but I hate the business model. It's ripe for abuse and people treat cards like stocks to invest in.

yeah I hate that Lego has been doing this too. most new sets are co-branded garbage.

Firefox (and probably others) allows you to set up custom search engines (like Wikipedia). So when I know I am trying to get to Wikipedia or npm or whatever I just do an @wikipedia and type my search.

I’ve used keyword search for many years, maybe since Netscape. Set it up and type “w thing”, no quotes. Can be a lot shorter.

Yep, I prefer the Firefox keywords for various sites, and to disable search support entirely.

For those who haven't tried this yet: the bookmark for Wikipedia might look something like this:

    Name:    [SEARCH] WIKIPEDIA
    URL:     https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s
    Keyword: w

Then, when you want to do a Wikipedia search, go to the URL&search bar, and enter `w` as the first word, followed by the search term, such as `w cats`.

Also, you might want to disable the other search engine and portal page features as much as you can. This requires setting some preferences not on the Preferences pages, so going to `about:config` preferences, to set, e.g., `keyword.enabled` to false.

Note that you control the keywords. So I thought Wikipedia deserved a one-letter keyword. But `a` went to archive.org Wayback Machine (which also meant I could just prefix any URL with `a` and a space), while I made myself spell out `amazon` every time I was in danger of unnecessary consumerism.

Also, there’s a shortcut to make the entry. Right click on the search input of the desired page and select make keyword search.

I disagree with this thought. I think it's really easy for people to react to things being done for other people (who may have it better or worse off than you) with a sense of abandonment. The reality of the situation is that some people do need more help than others, and a lack of empathy prevents us from seeing that. The idea that receiving help means that person has "given up" their responsibility to society is harmful to society itself in my opinion.

I've been looking at moving to Austin and love board games. Unfortunately with everything canceled I can't currently use Meetup to check out the scene. Would you mind talking a little bit about what the board game scene is normally like in the area?

Sure thing! I'm caveating this with the fact that I've only been in the area for 2 years now. After I found some good groups, I haven't actively looked as often.

Meetups - Austin is pretty heavily split between North/South of Town Lake (Lady Bird Lake). A lot of people don't "cross the line". - North Austin has a lot more gaming groups than the South Austin region, at an estimated ratio of 3:1. - A majority of groups meet at local game stores, but there are a few that meet at restaurants and breweries (which I prefer the vibe of). - Most groups meet in the evenings on weekdays. I haven't seen many weekend groups, unfortunately. - Most groups play a wide variety of modern games, so you'll always be learning new games. There are very few groups if you like the "classics" (Monopoly, Life, Sorry, Catan, etc.) - Most groups are decently sized, with anywhere from 10-30 folks showing up on a weekly basis.

Locations - Austin has a small, but high-quality selection of Board Game cafes. Favorites are Vigilante and Emerald Tavern. - Austin has a lot of local game stores. One of the more heavily trafficked ones is Dragon's Lair.

Conventions - Austin has a yearly board game convention with a great group of regulars (https://www.boardgamebash.com/) - You're only 3 hours away from the Dallas/Fort Worth area which holds BGG.con in both the Spring and Fall (https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/BGGCON). Biggest board game convention in the US next to GenCon. - You also have PAX South in January held in San Antonio, only 1.5 hours away.

Other Notes - There's a really welcoming community of 20-30 folks that meets once per month to help board game designers get feedback and playtest their games. One of my favorite recent finds. - There used to be a REALLY popular weekly meetup that was specifically for heavy games (2+ hours) that pulled in a crowd of 30-40 folks, but it got dissolved and never really had a replacement. I'm not sure what happened, but there is more of a demand for that here. - It's an unfortunate truth that the board game hobby can sometimes cater to some...interesting characters. From my experience, there's MUCH LESS of that in Austin and everyone has been super friendly and welcoming.

I hope that helps! If you're interested in more info, feel free to reach out to me. Email is just my username@gmail.com.

Awesome thank you! I'm up near the twin cities; the saint paul board game meetup goes to a lot of breweries and I prefer that vibe too. I like the game aspect but I think the social part is important too. I'm hoping to move this year, but a lot of that depends on how long the pandemic lasts unfortunately. I'm happy to hear there's some good groups. I don't mind traveling a little bit to meet up, but I'll check out the north side a bit more if it's nerdier.

I find that I reach that half-life at a company too. After I sweep up the things that are in my control I start noticing all the other problems that are hard for me to affect and then I get complacent. I think I probably need a change of scenery. I have a 2 week vacation to Japan coming up so I think that will be a good time to clear my head and really get a chance to digest what is going on. Thanks for sharing your perspective with me, it helps a lot.

That sounds amazing, I have always wanted to visit Japan! A change of scenery, and especially international travel I've found to be a great palette cleanser. Have a great trip and try to not think about work!

Thanks! I'm really excited; everyone I've talked to that has been there hypes it up a lot. I will definitely not be thinking about work haha.

I have definitely internalized the idea that it's all just tradeoffs. I think I value delivering quality software and it's hard to feel like I'm doing that when I see so many production outages and most of my interaction with co-workers is people telling me something is broken. I get that stuff happens sometimes, but we can't seem to keep a test environment stable. Managers are definitely aware of the issue, but I feel like it keeps getting worse. I can't hold back a tidal wave alone.

Thank you for sharing your perspective.

I have definitely been thinking about this a lot, however, it's difficult to know what to do when this is the only long term job I've ever had, and the first time I've really had a career.

I don't think the company is looking to sell; it feels like the top is just not concerned with reliability and most of our funding goes into new feature development, which in turn makes things less stable.

Identifying what's wrong is probably the most difficult part for me. It feels like a systematic failure that I can't affect.

Right, it's not at all unusual that you can't affect it. In any large organization, if you're not one of the top few, you usually cannot, by which I really mean you may not, because the things that need to change you're not allowed to touch.

But, it's not time wasted, if you analyze how it works. What happens when good suggestions are made? What is it about the business that makes the leaders unconcerned with reliability? Sometimes it's that the wrong metrics are being looked at (e.g. new customers, not looking at attrition rate). Sometimes it's that the people who can sign the checks for a sale are not the ones who use it, so new features (in theory) make a bigger difference to the bottom line than real-world reliability. Sometimes it's that there are too many levels of management between the top and the developers. It's an interesting problem to look at as a feedback loop, from reality/users to management, and figure out where the signal is getting lost or drowned out.

But, in the meantime, start looking for new jobs. Also, when interviewing for new jobs, try to find a way to talk about this which gets the point across about why you are dissatisfied, that does not sound so negative that you come across as a negative person. A diplomatic way of phrasing this may be important in a job interview, not a thing to try to come up with on the spot.

Part of me wonders if I need to rewire how I think about this. Like I realize that there are things outside of my control but deep down I don't accept it, or something like that. Maybe it would help to get out and have conversations like these more often with peers. I'll look around on meetup to see if I can connect with people; I don't really have any friends in tech that I can talk to other than my co-workers.