Rambling Thoughts – Preorders

I mentioned pre-orders in a post about fandoms and identity the other day. There has been a narrative in the vocal online gaming community that pre-orders are bad. That buying a game before you know how good it is or isn’t is giving in to hype or letting the company win. There was certainly a time that I agreed with that, to a point, but as I get older and circumstances change, I find myself further and further from that point.

If I know I will want to play/watch/listen to/read something when it becomes available it justs saves me time to pre-order it when I make that decision rather than leave it hanging. I don’t see it as any different from paying water charges or property taxes for the forthcoming year in one lump sum, something people do as standard. No-one accuses people who do that of being crazed fans of utility payments with no self-control or sense of perspective. It’s just a practical choice often preferred by those who can afford it while those who can’t are channelled into the less-convenient route of monthly or quarterly payments.

bhagpuss

Bhagpuss’s comment reflects something that’s closer to my current view, thought I find habits die a bit hard. Years spent avoiding pre-orders by default means that I typically react the same way. “It’s not out yet? I’ll just wait then.”

There are a number of practical reasons for this. One is that it’s often been hard for me to extrapolate my financial situation into the future combined with the fact that I can be quite forgetful. If I pre-order something months ahead of time, I have a tendency to forget about it in the intervening time. Having a random $60+ surprise charge was something extremely problematic.

While this is arguably negligence on my part, given the variety of technological solutions, I avoided the problem entirely by not putting myself into that position. It was easier to just wait until it was out. Fortunately this is also no longer the case either. As I’ve gotten older and got a better grasp on the household financial situation, I find that it’s just not the issue that it was when I was younger. While not ideal, if I did forget, we have more than enough in savings to cover any weird surprise charges.

It’s also slowly become the case that $60 isn’t as much as it once was. Sure, I don’t want to be buying every game that hits the street, but once every few months is hardly a problem. If the money remains after all the bills, obligations, and necessities are taken care of, I fail to see a problem.

As an additional note, not all platforms wait either. Amazon does, for example, but Epic Games does not. If you pre-purchase through Epic you’re charged immediately, which also eliminates this problem. Of course, if you change your mind, you’ll have to try and request a refund, so it cuts both ways.

Another reason I have cited to defend this behavior is the inevitable “it might go on sale in a couple of months.” Typically more of an excuse than a reason. This does occasionally work out. I paid significantly less than retail for both No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 due to their rather rough release.

In reality, I think it’s something akin to “Steam Sale Syndrome.” The idea that everything on Steam goes on sale sooner or later, so you may as well wait. For what, to maximize the number of games I can buy? Rather surprisingly, I’ve actually played about 66% of my library, though in some cases that just means I tried to launch it. Having said that, steamdb.info says that my average playtime is just under 30 hours per title. This is likely being driven by a couple of dozen titles with several hundred hours playtime, but that still seems acceptable.

What about the argument that the game company “wins” or is somehow tricking you into buying a broken product by getting you to pre-purchase? First, I have yet to see a game that’s perfectly balanced and bug free at release. It’s just not a realistic expectation. I remember buying Morrowind off the shelf and being unable to play it for a week or two while I waited on a patch. A manual patch at that, back in those days.

In the case that I know I’m going to enjoy a product, even if its release state is rough, then I fail to see how the corporations are “winning.” They didn’t make me pre-purchase it. I get to pick and choose which games and companies I feel are worth the alleged risk. in reality, if I get so much as six hours of enjoyment out of a full priced game, I have easily matched the cost of seeing a movie. The wife and I going out for a nice dinner and a movie would easily cost more than this, usually just on dinner alone.

The other part of this is that we purchase things all the time without being certain of product quality. Let’s take books for example. While typically less expensive than your typical game, you can’t exactly know that you’ll enjoy it until you’ve read it. Yes, you can make some assumptions based on author, genre, and so on, but surely it happens that people buy a book and didn’t enjoy it as much as they expected. It happens. Of course, you can’t really resell or trade a digital purchase quite the same way you might with a book, but I think the analogy more or less works.

Having said all that. I’m not telling anyone they should or shouldn’t pre-order. I’m saying everyone must make that choice for themselves, based on their own tastes and circumstances, and shouldn’t be ashamed of knowing what they like. My circumstances have changed, and my behavior with it. I’ve been much more likely to buy DLC at full price, and even went so far as to pre-order Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. I can afford to do so, and I can be reasonably sure that I’ll get at least 20-30 hours of playtime out of it at a minimum. Most of my Borderlands titles are actually over 100 hours each. It seems reasonable to assume I’ll enjoy it enough to get my “money’s worth” out of it, and likely much more.

Y’all take care. Feel free to disagree with me in the comments.

Rambling Thoughts – Habits and Timing

I’ve mentioned in the past that Blaugust, done daily for a month, is a good way to build a habit. At the very least, you get used to making time to do something. Once you’re used to it, it’s relatively easy to continue. To a point.

Something I hadn’t really thought about though is the little components that make it easier. Recognizing a good topic when you see one, for instance. While I managed to pull off Blaugust this time around, having taken such a long hiatus often made it feel like I was having to fight for it. It was significantly harder to find a daily writing topic than I recalled. One of my answers was to re-evaluate my topic criteria and pass on a few self imposed restrictions.

What I hadn’t realized is how habitual “topic mining” was before. Like a mental background process that watches for subjects that feel ripe for expansion. It’s not exactly a cure-all, but it helps keep the gears greased. What really surprises me is that it took a month and a half or so to kick in. A month ago I was just throwing every idea onto paper and hoping something would jump off the page. Also a perfectly valid tactic, but one that wasn’t working as well. There were a lot of days where I stared at the list thinking I didn’t really want to write about that right now..

A few bad habits have kicked in too. Automatically avoiding the same topic on consecutive days. Perhaps I should lean into those things a bit, but I’ve been putting at least one post between them so far. This has also led me to consider when a post should go live in relation to others that it’s connected with. I have also thought about how related the posts really need to be before that heuristic gets used. Just how related do they need to be before they get spread apart?

I don’t actually have a solid answer to that last one yet. At a glance, it seems related to the main topic. No consecutive posts about a specific game or topic, but it’s okay if the main topic is technically different. I sometimes go a step further though and simply neglect to mention the connection. The two recent Borderlands posts are obviously connected, but also led to my thoughts about fandoms nested between them, and the organizing of those posts and ideas spawned from bhagpuss’s comments led directly to this one. A very organic network of ideas that may not appear connected from the outside.

This post itself was brought about by choosing not to address some of those ideas immediately, and questioning if they should even be addressed separately. Also wondering which topic(s) they should or shouldn’t be distanced from. If I even care, at this point. No good rule goes unbroken and all that.

Y’all take care.

Rambling Thoughts – Getting Things Under Control

Having more of a “get motivated” than a “stay motivated” sort of month, it seems. I have a lot of new projects on the table, quite literally in a few cases.

I’ve been reviewing a lot of old habit and seeing which ones I can nudge and in what direction. Most of them are fairly small changes or changes of convenience. Preparing different things for dinner, getting more exercise, and getting my jungle of a yard back under control.

Dinners are a weird territory. I often lean toward relatively easy to prepare foods because it’s easier to shove something in the oven and let it sort itself out than it is to actively prepare something. I’ve also been wanting a few things like chicken pot pie so I decided to make a slightly larger than average one using a 13*9 cake pan. Overall reaction was positive, but like many things on this week’s menu, the picky child didn’t like it. That’s normal though, and I’ve given up planning meals around it.

This isn’t an entirely new effort either. I had already made an effort to break things up a bit. This is more a continuation of that effort by introducing additional variety and making a few adjustments to our established foods.

While I’ve been making a half-hearted effort to be less of a potato, my wife decided to invite me on her run training this weekend. I find that the interval training was a bit too much too fast, though I did manage to keep up for the first mile. I told her if I joined her again we would probably need to modify the interval pacing a little bit.

I also decided that now was a good time to start walking and poking around with Pokemon Go again. This is one of those convenience changes. The kids’ bus stop is a little down the road, for safety reasons, and there just happens to be a Pokestop on that corner and enough space to get out and walk around. If it isn’t raining, it’s even close enough that I can walk there, though that hasn’t worked out lately.

The yard is more a problem of neglect. My previous mower gave up the ghost early in the year, and it took a while to obtain a replacement. I finally have, though, so now I must fight with it to get it back under control. I’ll be glad to see it done after the fact, though, and I’m sure my neighbor will as well. It doubles as a convenient source of exercise too, I guess. Going to be a bit hit and miss until it stops raining so much.

Hopefully at least some of these changes will stick. Small modifications to effort are easier than large ones, though.

Y’all take care.

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Hey, it’s Blaugust time! The goal is to simply promote and stimulate the blogging community by encouraging people of all skill levels and backgrounds to post. The official post can be found here and it’s never too late to start.

Rambling Thoughts – Temperature, Humidity, and Adhesives

I’m going to go really far out on a limb and touch on a subject I have a little armchair knowledge on. I am not and should not be treated as an authority, really, but I always thought it was an interesting subject because I had never really stopped and looked at what “relative humidity,” the most often discussed form, actually was. For anyone interested in a more detailed explanation, check out the ideal gas law. That’s the mathematical model of what’s going on at the chemical level.

My interest stemmed from working with adhesives. In particular, I was trying to describe and identify factors in the variation of curing time. I’m of the opinion that manufacturing and industry largely thrive on consistency and predictability. Variation creates inefficiency and acts as a barrier to automation, which like it or not, is our best ticket to getting humans away from the damaging and dehumanizing nature of repetitive work.

While I will not bother to identify the specific product in question, it is a two part silicone product with a relatively inert base resin and a hardener with a rather intense ammonia quality to it. It’s extraordinarily thick. Somewhere in the 60k-90k centipoise (cP) range. Your average ketchup is in the 50k-70k range. It’s also quite heavy, about one and a half times the weight of water.

It was observed that cure times varied significant between summer and winter in our region. I live in “the South” where summers tend to be hot and humid and the winters are typically cool and dry. Actual trials in controlled conditions showed that both temperature and relative humidity had an impact on cure time. Not a huge surprise, many chemical reactions proceed more quickly with more available heat energy to speed it along, and the product was stated to have a “moisture cure” component to it as well. It seem reasonable to assume that more available water vapor means faster curing.

The typical working time in the summer could be 1-3 minutes, with about 1 1/2 being typical. In the winter It was usually 2-4 with 2 1/2-3 being normal. I realize a minute doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you’re using the product in an application where it can be seen, it can be the difference between a nice smooth finish and the Rocky Mountains meets Grand Canyon.

Now, it’s not realistic to expect to control the actual climate. Evidence indicates that as a species we’re not even committed to preserving it, much less controlling it. You can control for these things by adjusting the working conditions, but you need to know which adjustment to make and how far to turn the dial.

When I tried to understand “relative humidity,” thought, I quickly learned that temperature is an important factor. That method of humidity doesn’t tell you how much actual water vapor exists in the air, but rather how much it’s holding relative to its current maximum.

My favorite analogy has always been a glass of water. Mathematically we’re usually talking about a volume of one cubic meter, so let’s say that cubic meter of gas is an empty glass that can contain water. If I have a 20oz glass, and it contains 10oz of water, we would say that it’s half full. For this example, it’s at 50% relative humidity. The glass contains 50% of the maximum amount of water that it can hold.

What makes this unique is that as heat increases, the “air” in our cubic meter gets thinner, creating more room for other things like water vapor. In my example, this means that we have a larger glass. We’ll say the new warmer glass as a 30oz capacity. If I pour my 10oz of water into it, the actual quantity of water hasn’t changed, but the relative humidity has. The warm glass is only 33% full. We have a relative humidity of 33%.

This meant that a cold winter day with high humidity (something we don’t tend to get much of locally) still has less available water vapor than a hot summer day with low humidity. The question it left me with was what impact did the actual humidity, the literal quantity of water vapor, have on the curing of the adhesive?

Unfortunately I never gathered sufficient data to answer this question. My understanding of the mathematical model I needed to test it was critically flawed, which meant my actual humidity humidity numbers weren’t usable. Not exactly a satisfying ending to the story, but I’ve always appreciated what I learned in the process. Maybe you will too, I hope.

Y’all take care. Watch out for that humidity.

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Hey, it’s Blaugust time! The goal is to simply promote and stimulate the blogging community by encouraging people of all skill levels and backgrounds to post. The official post can be found here and it’s never too late to start.

Blogging – My Current Challenges

Something that I’m attempting to just power through, though still of concern, is the amount of material I have to draw from for my posts. When I started this blog I was focused primarily on games and gaming. A long-standing part of my life that I’ve had little time for in the last year. I used to write about Warframe weekly. I used to play FFXIV daily. I also used to at least try the free game(s) from Epic Games and talk about those every week.

At this point, I hardly have time to think about doing any one of those, much less all of them. I suspect I could carve out maybe an hour a day, at the most, but haven’t found anything I wanted to play enough to make the effort. This isn’t to say that I’ve stopped gaming entirely. I’ve spent about fifteen hours on the Legend of Mana Remaster over the last couple of weeks because it’s easy enough to play on the Switch whenever it’s convenient to do so.

Perhaps exploring the MMO options on Switch, few though they may be, is worth considering. Alternatively I could see what may or may not run on my laptop. I feel the MMO itch a bit, but really don’t see where there’s a lot of time to pursue one.

I’ve been in a bit of a reading no man’s land since I finished the Discworld series. I picked up a couple of non-fiction title, but like MMO games, reading is the sort of activity I can and will tend to focus on to the exclusion of all else. I have to be a bit careful or I’ll end up reading instead of writing, which is a bit counterproductive.

Unfortunately I don’t do much else. I don’t watch much tele. I’ve been ignoring YouTube. There just isn’t a lot to talk about outside of whatever is bouncing around inside my head. That can get repetitive quickly and isn’t always fit for public consumption.

On the bright side I’ve added a couple of things to my list just by writing this and still managed to find something to write about in the process. Smells like victory to me.

Y’all take care.

Rambling Thoughts – Identity and Voice in Online Presence

A recurring theme for me in the last couple of months has been identity. Both how I view myself and how I present myself to the outside world. As a general rule, I tend to avoid speaking about the former. Mostly because I consider myself the foremost authority on myself and figure anyone offering suggestions is on thin ice. Not always, I realize sometimes it can be difficult to see myself accurately, but I do try.

The second, however, is an interesting topic in its own right. I can remember many times, across forums, chat programs, and online games, many now defunct, where I presented myself with a specific persona. Not just a specific name, but a distinct identity. Thorough enough to cause some degree of identity confusion in myself once or twice. That’s probably a bit on the extreme end though. What’s on my mind is something more subtle.

Let’s take this blog for example. There are certain aspects of life that I typically avoid talking about. Certain tones and voices that I aim to use. In a way, when writing a post I fall into a certain sort of persona that is unique to the blog, and possibly the activity of blogging itself.

When I visit certain social media platforms and forums I have noticed something similar. Some of them have a unique voice, some don’t, and some are recent enough that I can kinda tell how and when it developed. In one or two cases I can actually identify several different voices that depend on mood and context.

Ironically, outside of a couple of instances, I don’t tend to do this while gaming. I may use the name associated with one of the personas occasionally, but I don’t tend to play role, as it were. I don’t tend think of different characters as having a specific or unique voices, though I’m sure there is a general one that they have in common. Likewise I have always struggled with this to some extent within tabletop gaming as well. At a glance there seems to be something about the activity of gaming in general that puts me within a specific mindset with a specific voice.

That’s just an off the cuff assessment, though. How to use or test that idea is a bit tricky. For all the words and thoughts I share here, I don’t tend to play games in an overly social manner. More of a detached efficiency. I’ll have to think about that.

It may simply be the non-social nature of my gaming habits. If I’m not taking the time to talk or interact with people, there is no opportunity to develop a voice. If I’m doing all my group content with friends and family that I already know, then those interactions already have an established voice to fall into.

The few games that did have a voice or persona were, unsurprisingly, heavily social. I also have no idea where I was going with this idea. It’s an interesting line of thought I need to archive for another time.

Y’all take care. Hope you found this interesting.

Mismanagement – Ranting Against the Machine

Third time’s the charm right?

I’m struggling a bit tonight to find a proper voice/tone for a post. Got about halfway through two others and it just didn’t feel right. I hadn’t generally thought of myself as relying so much on “intuition” when writing, but I should give that some further thought.

I find it both sad and amusing to observe new front-line managers. I remember so well when I was in their shoes. Young, ready to follow the rules, get the job done, and climb that career ladder. It’s so hard now to identify exactly where that changed. When I realized the rules were generally more like guidelines that only applied to some of the people some of the time. When I realized that looking out for your team members was way more useful than literally anything the boss said.

I’ve been watching the “newbie” running that area I’m in close proximity to as he slowly turns his team on him and itself. Not usually in large sweeping gestures, but mostly in small subtle ones. The most prominent of which is a very nitpicky application of the stated rules without any consideration for his team members.

A popular one, at the moment, is the stated rule that nobody should be allowed a bathroom break 30 minutes before or after a scheduled break. I understand the reasoning and logic, there are certain individuals that will abuse the privilege by asking for one five to ten minutes before and simply not coming back until after the scheduled break. It’s easier to create a rule for “everybody” than it is to confront a single problematic individual. At the very least it allows you to say that it’s “fair” because you’re making everyone do it instead of singling them out.

In reality, the human body isn’t always compliant with such arbitrary time limits. So what if break is 20 minutes away? We work in an active, hot, and humid environment where people who don’t consume fluids tend to end up laying on the floor. At some point you must accept that the downside of safety is acknowledging that sometimes when you gotta go, you gotta go.

If I would be a better or worse manager for thinking there’s another way, I don’t know. Both the manager and the fill-in have asked me specifically not to give them the breaks. I’m not in their chain of command, so I’ve largely ignored that. In fact, it’s far more beneficial to me to have the workers happy and paying attention than it is to enforce the dumb rule for people who aren’t abusing it, especially when their overlord is typically halfway across the plant. In his defence, that isn’t entirely his fault, just a foolish decision from his superiors.

The whole problem is a sort of metaphor for the larger labor shortage. Draconian policies created partially for business reasons and partially to punish a few exploiters, who always find new exploits anyway, make it difficult to live like a normal human being. It seems to me that it’s the very incarnation of humans as a resource instead of humans as people. I could list off a whole pile of examples, but I fail to see how that would help.

It also seems I have inadvertently tapped into my disgruntledness.

I wish there was some way I could point out to him exactly what it’s going to cost him, but I didn’t listen when I was there and he doesn’t really listen now. It seems to be one of those lessons that is often learned the hard way. I know I did. I know my best friend did.

I suppose that’s enough rant for one day. Certainly has a lot more energy behind it than my other two drafts.

Y’all take care. Remember that workers and laborers are people too, and deserve to be treated as such.

Looking Forward – A Mid-Term Gaming Plan

I’ve felt slightly adrift with my gaming plan lately. I’ve simply moved from one thing to the next somewhat randomly. Not that there’s really anything wrong with that, but there are things in the coming year which require slightly more planning and lead-up.

The first, and farthest, is FFXIV’s Endwalker expansion. I haven’t really touched the game much in the last year. Most of our FC has stopped playing and unsubbed and I just ran out of steam arguing with end-game raid content. This means I’ll need to log in, get back into the swing of things, and get caught up by mid to late autumn.

At some point (probably) before that, the weird kinda-same-but-also-different PSO2: New Genesis will become a thing. PSO2’s endgame had gotten a bit too routine there for a while, but now that I’ve ignored it we have plenty of new stuff to poke through in the meantime.

This is actually the last update, not the next one.

The third and last thing I’m willing to put on a list right now is what I’m currently playing, No Man’s Sky. It’s supposed to have an update in the next month or so with pets or something. I’m honestly just playing because I’m enjoying poking around and it has yet to become excessively repetitive. It will, eventually, but until then it’s on the list.

That seems to be a fairly solid list for the coming year. If my PSO2 migration from MS Live to Steam is set up by this weekend, I might do some PSO2, but I’m expecting most of my weekend to be No Man’s Sky and babysitting 3D printers. Not a bad weekend, if I say so myself.

There are a few other things vaguely on my radar, but not serious contenders. I’m watching to see what becomes of Anthem and it’s alleged overhaul. Elite Dangerous is getting legs at some point, that might be interesting. A nice flavour change from No Man’s Sky, perhaps.

Y’all take care. Excelsior, or something.

No Man’s Life – Thoughts of Permadeath

I have a strange love/hate relationship with the idea of permadeath. The fact that I dabble with it seems to suggest that it has some manner of inherent value, though it does come at fairly high stakes.

That is, on the surface it seems that upon death or failure, the time invested is somehow lost or wasted. This isn’t a big problem with rogue-like games, which are somewhat designed to progress through repeated attempts that give you a progressively better starting point. It can be somewhat more severe when we discuss RPGs and/or MMOs where a single character can easily become a 40+hour investment, with many being in excess of 100. To the extent that it’s more common for playtime to be discussed in terms of days rather than hours.

This was brought about by my starting a new playthrough of No Man’s Sky, mostly as a way to occupy myself for a time, and using the permadeath difficulty on a whim. I’ve always thought it to be an odd play mode, for a game that regularly introduces new bugs to kill you randomly and unexpectedly. It also has an extremely harsh setup on a new playthrough. It took a half dozen tries to make it past the 5 minute mark, which is pretty much just a combination of speed and luck.

One difference I have noted in the past with other titles, such as Diablo 3, is that it tends to change my overall play style. Permadeath encourages a somewhat more slow and thoughtful approach where I would normally just YOLO it and deal with the consequences as they arose. I find myself looking at thing in NMS and doing impromptu risk assessments. A coworker was talking to me about the derelict freighters that I haven’t looked into and they dangers present in them and I was initially of the opinion that it’s something I wouldn’t want to do in such a severe playthrough. Give me a few days to consider it, though, and I start to wonder if it isn’t more a matter of preparation instead.

If I make sure my defences and environmental protections are well established, bring plenty of recharging materials, set up a multitool for that specific situation, and proceed with an extraordinary amount of caution, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

It reminds me quite a bit of my XCOM runs on the Ironman difficulty, a very similar sort of autosave with no/minimal reloading that has much the same feel. When something happens, good or bad, your must deal with the hand you are dealt.

Now, I find that the “waste of time” portion is somewhat case by case. In fact, it relies almost entirely upon nature of games as a form of entertainment. If you enjoy the higher stakes, playstyle, and time spent doing it, then it’s hard to argue that the time was wasted. I would say the opposite applies as well. If you find little to no enjoyment in knowing that your accumulated time can be erased, then that time should be spent in other ways.

What I don’t tend to favor is games with mandatory permadeath. While those tend to be far and few between, I prefer to have the option to choose a more relaxed mode if that’s what I’m interested in. It’s very similar to the whole full-loot PvP setup in MMOs, if it’s optional, I might dabble here and there. If it’s required, no thanks.

Regardless, it’s time for me to move on, I think. Y’all take care, and whatever you’re doing, make sure you try to enjoy it.

The Great GameStop Short

In all fairness, I have not seen The Great Short, though I’ve heard it’s good.

The general shenanigans that are occuring around reddit and GameStop are, however, something I at least generally understand and find interesting. I don’t really wish to discuss that matter in detail, but I shall review it briefly.

When the market is expecting a share price to decrease, money can be made by “shorting” it. Basically borrowing a share and selling it today in the hope that it will go down and you can repurchase it for a lower price and give it back. It is an extremely risky position because your loss is “unlimited.” That is, if the share price goes to the moon instead of going down, your loss from buying the now-more-expensive shares will also go to the moon.

Since GameStop has been doing very poorly for the last several years, shorting their stock is a fairly “safe” bet, as shorts go. So much so that a great many investors were doing it. The thing with being predictable, though, is that sooner or later someone else will figure out your game and exploit it. That is essentially what reddit did. Realizing that the stock was so heavily shorted that they could force it into a “short squeeze” (upward price cycle caused by short sellers being forced to buy back due to price increase) and set out to give it the nudge it needed.

While the memes are entertaining and the investors knew, or should have known, the risk they were taking, I have seen some sentiments I find concerning.

Hidden underneath the humor is a sort of righteous hatred of professional investors and big business. A number of comments I saw on imgur seem to be suggesting violence. While I agree that some things need to change, it all seems a bit… intense. Given recent events involving a violent alt-right, as it were, it conjures for me images of a violent alt-left as well.

A number of people are quite upset about the heavy handed moderation of this reddit community, both on reddit and on discord, but given the commentary, the reaction seems appropriate. Hatred and violence are not the sole purview of nazis and racists, but rather a part of our human nature that we must acknowledge and find other ways to express. It is okay to be angry, but we must recognize that our fellow homo sapiens, even the ones we dislike and disagree with, should be held sacrosanct.

Maybe I’m just crazy. I’m not asking for world peace or perfect harmony, but to try and keep our discourse… civil. Threatening to harm the other guy does not further discussion. It splinters us into cliques who begin to hold positions based on group narratives rather than facts and information.

Okay, rant over, I guess. Y’all take care.