It's the early 2000s, and I'm a 10ish year old, we didn't have a lot of money, but my dad made sure we were in the PCMR, while we only had dial-up in one room, every bedroom had a functioning PC that was built by my dad. He built all through the 90s and as long as I can remember as a kid. Our PCs were a compilation of hand-me-down parts tossed from one computer to another always trying to achieve 1 more fps in Half Life, Doom, AOE2, SimCity, Theme Hospital and so many more.
My favorite thing of course was a piece of software called GameMaker 5.x, now it's some nonsense yoyogames or something but back in the day it was an awesome game creation tool that required no internet. My first taste of coding was in GameMaker, I coded and coded and coded, and I knew the manual inside and out. My first real "game" was a cross between Breakout and SpaceInvaders. You had to break out of blocks using the paddle, but there were also aliens and some other stuff that would eat away at your paddle. It had a couple of cool features and even a high score table. I told my Dad, and he was so excited, he played and got 9th place sandwiched between my scores. We went to lunch and talked about the game and even strategy.
Soon we had DSL, and I quickly went got into PHP, HTML and MySQL. I used an old PC in my parent's closet to start a forum hosting website, PhpBB. And it quickly became really successful, and wow were my parents proud of me when checks from Google started showing up in the mail (Adsense). Once it outgrew our internet and that PC I even was able to sell it for 1000 dollars to another host ( I was probably 15 at the time). I used the money on a new PC with a sweet ATI Rage.
I turned 17 and joined the Army, he was so proud of me, he bought a jacket that said ARMY on it and wore it almost every day. Then, I can't really explain what happened, I was on my own now, in the Army states away and we sort of grew apart. Altleast, I did. He always reached out, and I wouldn't return his calls or emails or texts or anything. I was always busy and life was just too important to talk to Dad. Weeks turned into months of no contact.
2012 comes and I get out of the Army, by this time Dad had been sick for a while but never seriously. In and out of the hospital constantly while I was away, but never anything I needed to come home for. Then I got the call, it was serious this time and I should come. I get there, but he's already non-responsive, they said his liver was all shut down, and he wouldn't recover. The nurse said when he was there he liked listening to his classic rock on his laptop and maybe I should turn it on and play some music. I turn on the laptop and right on the desktop there it was, my game.
I started some music and launched the game from my childhood. I checked out the high score table and there were over 400 entries, some really, really high scores overtaking all of mine all named Dad... except the top one, the top one was named "i miss anon". Not long after that, he was gone.
I'm sorry Dad, I love you.

After reading just the title of that post about running a long chronicle in this system (before I read the actual post and realized it was just about moving from D&D and not getting at the inherent limit on how long a personal horror game where “and then it got worse” is the basic theme can go on before becoming unplayably grim or subverting itself into some sort of superhero-esque shape to keep going) I thought about how I would set up as story in broad strokes to go on for a good long game in V5 while preserving the grimness, the personal/political horror, and the actual playability for the maximum duration.
The central goals I set myself for the arc to satisfy were as follows:

1. The game had to be able to run consistently for a long time with the same characters with minimal chance of the circumstances getting bad enough to make it basically impossible for the characters to do anything and not requiring any character deaths without their being wildly unlucky or wilfully stupid.
   
2. The game had to be able to cope with introduction of new characters to allow players to change characters if they really want to or feel they can’t play that character anymore for personal reasons.
   
3. The game had to avoid the player characters escaping the fact of their vampirism and monstrous parasitism.
   
4. The game had to preserve the personal and political aspects of the horror without being excessively browbeating or gentle enough to ignore for long, to avoid being superfriendsy or a caricature.
   

And the problems in usual set ups that I identified for this were:
• starting with the impression of having nothing or very little, on the bottom, makes rebellion feel entirely justified like they have nothing to lose. This allows self justification and ignoring the horror of being an inherently exploitative monster seeking to escape all external regulation.
• if you have a vampire who is trying to do good against the weight of an Evil Institution, that tries to foil them at every turn, then they will be an antihero or they will be crushed by the Institution.
• if things get too bleak and the characters are stuck, the game is unplayable without deus ex machina intervention.
From this, I arrived at the following general outline, a specific story for which I lack the ability and time to create and run, so I put it here for y’all to use (these numbers are not session numbers):

1. For parameters for the player character creation for the story require that the characters A) be involved with the same faction (the Camarilla works, though a strong Anarch Barony that has taken and held a Free City is potentially better), B) have at least one mortal touchstone, C) have some kind of privileged position in the faction (either as a coterie collectively, like a grand purpose, or each individually, such as good status, good connections, etc, or a mix). The starting in a privileged position with things they care about is important.
   
2. The players start in a position of privilege, with rivals and obstacles, but the power is largely more on their side than not.
   
3. They achieve goals that feel righteous, but also are gradually confronted with the horrific side of the system that grants them their privileges and come to the realization that achieving anything within or through that system will involve those horrors. Bonus if they get the impression that some of the people who have been the most helpful and positive for them actively want those horrors to be propagated.
   
4. They are turned against the system that privileged them and supported them, using their privileges and contacts to work to overthrow it (this is why a Barony that has come to strongly resemble the Camarilla is potentially best) and gain liberty and the ability to do good without the system perverting it.
   
5. They succeed, with difficulty, and manage to overthrow the system, destroying the old monsters who supported it and preserved it. This should feel like it was a bit of an uphill battle, with points about “you don’t understand, it was necessary” and “we only did what we had to, and sure, maybe I even enjoyed it, doesn’t mean it didn’t have to be done” and so on having been made to their faces by the perpetrators of the worst atrocities.
   
6. They begin trying to achieve good things and improve the city, and have some success (really emphasize the horrific side of feeding and the vampiric parasites angle here, if you haven’t focussed on it as much).
   
7. Their actions and successes at achieving positive change and failures in covering things up as brutally and thoroughly as the old system draws in some attention from hunters, not quite full second inquisition, but hunters who begin by killing an ally. The hunters are also revealed to be doing some serious political/social good in the community (if the players choose not to kill the hunters, distancing themselves, they will be assassinated for this by some other faction in the WoD like Pentex, the Technocrats, the CIA, etc).
   
8. After the hunters, either recycle 5 and 6 until they begin having to exert control and limit Masquerade breaches and leaks or they make a big enough splash to draw in the Second Inquisition more fully. If they begin controlling, go with option a, if they make a splash go with option b.
   

8a. They realize their actions are beginning to recreate the system they destroyed and are effectively rebuilding, and this allows you to keep the story going as you explore the horror of having become the power and knowing why it exists and eventually ending it with a confrontation with a new batch of neonate idealists, bonus if they were the protégés of the coterie or otherwise are people the coterie helped privilege and support.
8b. The Camarilla step in and offer to help and to manage the problems, offering them positions and support and effectively bringing them into the system. If they started Camarilla, the new Camarilla guys can disparage the previous administration, and if they were Anarchs they can claim the Cam is better at reduced mess and really cares about people’s safety and the health of the community (without a healthy stock of humans, how’s a vampire to feed properly?). If they accept, they become part of the system, see 9a. If they reject the Cam and fight the SI, the Camarilla will keep offering help until they are accepted or badly enough rejected to create a problem or the situation escalates badly. If they are accepted, see 9a, if they are made enemies of in a significant and meaningful way, see 9b. If things go wildly badly for the characters, see 9c.
9a. They become part of the Camarilla and are faced with more atrocities and their complicity in them, and this can be taken quite far as a grinding down of Humanity. It’s a long term endgame.
9b. The Camarilla brings up new support and the institution destroys the PCs because they overplayed their hand.
9c. The Second Inquisition destroys the PCs and the Camarilla moves in about 20 years later after the heat fades.
Thematically this deals with privilege, exploitation, the weight of institutions, the fact that systems exist for a reason and are never cruel without a purpose (even if they can be excessive or have bad purposes and bad reasons, like maintaining the existence of vampiric monsters), and the horrors of revolution that fails to fix the root and so simply grows anew the same atrocities as before (in this case, the root is that vampires A) prey on humans and B) have the Beast constantly pushing them to be Worse).

After reading just the title of that post about running a long chronicle in this system (before I read the actual post and realized it was just about moving from D&D and not getting at the inherent limit on how long a personal horror game where “and then it got worse” is the basic theme can go on before becoming unplayably grim or subverting itself into some sort of superhero-esque shape to keep going) I thought about how I would set up as story in broad strokes to go on for a good long game in V5 while preserving the grimness, the personal/political horror, and the actual playability for the maximum duration.
The central goals I set myself for the arc to satisfy were as follows:

1. The game had to be able to run consistently for a long time with the same characters with minimal chance of the circumstances getting bad enough to make it basically impossible for the characters to do anything and not requiring any character deaths without their being wildly unlucky or wilfully stupid.
   
2. The game had to be able to cope with introduction of new characters to allow players to change characters if they really want to or feel they can’t play that character anymore for personal reasons.
   
3. The game had to avoid the player characters escaping the fact of their vampirism and monstrous parasitism.
   
4. The game had to preserve the personal and political aspects of the horror without being excessively browbeating or gentle enough to ignore for long, to avoid being superfriendsy or a caricature.
   

And the problems in usual set ups that I identified for this were:
• starting with the impression of having nothing or very little, on the bottom, makes rebellion feel entirely justified like they have nothing to lose. This allows self justification and ignoring the horror of being an inherently exploitative monster seeking to escape all external regulation.
• if you have a vampire who is trying to do good against the weight of an Evil Institution, that tries to foil them at every turn, then they will be an antihero or they will be crushed by the Institution.
• if things get too bleak and the characters are stuck, the game is unplayable without deus ex machina intervention.
From this, I arrived at the following general outline, a specific story for which I lack the ability and time to create and run, so I put it here for y’all to use (these numbers are not session numbers):

1. For parameters for the player character creation for the story require that the characters A) be involved with the same faction (the Camarilla works, though a strong Anarch Barony that has taken and held a Free City is potentially better), B) have at least one mortal touchstone, C) have some kind of privileged position in the faction (either as a coterie collectively, like a grand purpose, or each individually, such as good status, good connections, etc, or a mix). The starting in a privileged position with things they care about is important.
   
2. The players start in a position of privilege, with rivals and obstacles, but the power is largely more on their side than not.
   
3. They achieve goals that feel righteous, but also are gradually confronted with the horrific side of the system that grants them their privileges and come to the realization that achieving anything within or through that system will involve those horrors. Bonus if they get the impression that some of the people who have been the most helpful and positive for them actively want those horrors to be propagated.
   
4. They are turned against the system that privileged them and supported them, using their privileges and contacts to work to overthrow it (this is why a Barony that has come to strongly resemble the Camarilla is potentially best) and gain liberty and the ability to do good without the system perverting it.
   
5. They succeed, with difficulty, and manage to overthrow the system, destroying the old monsters who supported it and preserved it. This should feel like it was a bit of an uphill battle, with points about “you don’t understand, it was necessary” and “we only did what we had to, and sure, maybe I even enjoyed it, doesn’t mean it didn’t have to be done” and so on having been made to their faces by the perpetrators of the worst atrocities.
   
6. They begin trying to achieve good things and improve the city, and have some success (really emphasize the horrific side of feeding and the vampiric parasites angle here, if you haven’t focussed on it as much).
   
7. Their actions and successes at achieving positive change and failures in covering things up as brutally and thoroughly as the old system draws in some attention from hunters, not quite full second inquisition, but hunters who begin by killing an ally. The hunters are also revealed to be doing some serious political/social good in the community (if the players choose not to kill the hunters, distancing themselves, they will be assassinated for this by some other faction in the WoD like Pentex, the Technocrats, the CIA, etc).
   
8. After the hunters, either recycle 5 and 6 until they begin having to exert control and limit Masquerade breaches and leaks or they make a big enough splash to draw in the Second Inquisition more fully. If they begin controlling, go with option a, if they make a splash go with option b.
   

8a. They realize their actions are beginning to recreate the system they destroyed and are effectively rebuilding, and this allows you to keep the story going as you explore the horror of having become the power and knowing why it exists and eventually ending it with a confrontation with a new batch of neonate idealists, bonus if they were the protégés of the coterie or otherwise are people the coterie helped privilege and support.
8b. The Camarilla step in and offer to help and to manage the problems, offering them positions and support and effectively bringing them into the system. If they started Camarilla, the new Camarilla guys can disparage the previous administration, and if they were Anarchs they can claim the Cam is better at reduced mess and really cares about people’s safety and the health of the community (without a healthy stock of humans, how’s a vampire to feed properly?). If they accept, they become part of the system, see 9a. If they reject the Cam and fight the SI, the Camarilla will keep offering help until they are accepted or badly enough rejected to create a problem or the situation escalates badly. If they are accepted, see 9a, if they are made enemies of in a significant and meaningful way, see 9b. If things go wildly badly for the characters, see 9c.
9a. They become part of the Camarilla and are faced with more atrocities and their complicity in them, and this can be taken quite far as a grinding down of Humanity. It’s a long term endgame.
9b. The Camarilla brings up new support and the institution destroys the PCs because they overplayed their hand.
9c. The Second Inquisition destroys the PCs and the Camarilla moves in about 20 years later after the heat fades.
Thematically this deals with privilege, exploitation, the weight of institutions, the fact that systems exist for a reason and are never cruel without a purpose (even if they can be excessive or have bad purposes and bad reasons, like maintaining the existence of vampiric monsters), and the horrors of revolution that fails to fix the root and so simply grows anew the same atrocities as before (in this case, the root is that vampires A) prey on humans and B) have the Beast constantly pushing them to be Worse).

Looking for a solution to a specific problem.
I want to edit videos on an amateur level, mostly run 24 hour non-gaming pre-recorded YT livestreams, maybe some gaming livestreams as well. The non-gaming streams need to be at least 1080p, gaming streams - 1440p.
I don’t know anything about stream video encoding, all I know is that there’s a difference between using the GPU and the CPU, also that there’s a difference between Nvidia and AMD GPU’s for streaming.
I don’t care about ray tracing. I 100% care about high quality streams and game recordings.
I’m a chronic multitasker with 2 1080p monitors at the moment, looking to add a 4k monitor and have them running simultaneously.
Specific questions:

1. Should I get 2 PCs, 1 for streaming, 1 for gaming/editing or would this be overkill since my streams would mostly be non gaming streams?
   
2. Should I encode w/ CPU or GPU? 2.5. AMD or Nvidia for GPU encoding?
   
3. How achievable is this with a $1500 single-PC build? I can up the budget to $2000, but who doesn’t want to save money when possible :)
   
4. Everyone is saying that the Ryzen 7 7800x3d is the shit for gaming, but how will it do with streaming?
   
5. What MOBO/CPU/GPU combo would you recommend? Please drop a PCPartPicker link if you can.
   

Thank you 🙏

As I've been GMing a Daggerheart campaign, I've had to throw together a few homebrew things in order to keep things fresh and engaging for my players as well as scale some things on the fly that weren't covered by the existing text. One of those bits are Environments, which I absolutely love (and so does this Reddit if a few topics are any indicator). So I'm making this topic to discuss how I go about making my own environments and what I've extrapolated from pre-existing ones in the Playtest material.

Breaking Down Pre-Existing Environments: Base Stats

To make an environment without rules or a template, we need to take a critical eye to what is being provided and see if we can't figure out general "guidelines" on how the developers make them. The most obvious stuff is that we need a Tier, Type, Difficulty, and Potential Adversaries to form a statblock.
The golden rule about environments is that an environment's effects need not be necessarily detrimental to the players. A variety of environments offer beneficial effects to PCs, though this is predominantly through environmental passives - more on that later.
Tier is simply what level your party is at. This information is covered in the playtest material more in depth as to what tier your players should be encountering, but a general rule is that the environment will match the same tier as your adversaries.
Type is broken down into four categories:

• Exploration: For when your party is moseying about to get from one destination to another. This should not be confused with Traversal which is a more specific environment that can be within another environment.
• Social: For when your party is in a populated environment where there isn't as much of a risk of expected dangers. These environments are good for cities, towns, tribal camps, etc.
• Traversal: These environments are fairly specific and are meant for environments that impose some measure of difficulty or danger to your party within that contained environment. Steep mountains, canyon cliffsides, raging rivers, thorny brambles, etc.
• Events: These are likely the least common as they pertain to a particular event (hence the name) that occurs in the course of the story. It need not be specific to a certain biome or challenge and for the most part will be the result of the story culminating from adversarial gatherings (Cult Ritual), a festival, or otherwise.

Difficulty is simply the "goal" or number that players' rolls typically have to meet in order for an environment's conditions to proc, but as stated in the playtest material, an individual adversary's difficulty may differ.
Potential Adversaries are exactly that! Your adversary choices should roughly be made to fit in the environment. While having your party encounter Pirates can be novel and fun, it wouldn't make much sense to have Pirates in a Desert environment without some decent story-telling and worldbuilding.
The stats of our environment are ultimately the mechanical side of things, but they help to express how dangerous that environment is. A peaceful city is a much different environment than a pirate haven much the same way that a cordial shop is much different than a royal court! Consider how our stats express how dangerous or challenging the environment is for our players, respective to their tier.
On the subject of the stats expressing the challenge of your environments, we need to ask ourselves some questions about how that environment is defined: If our Forest Meadow is Traversal (which as you'll remember tends to be more difficult/dangerous than Exploration), what is it that makes it a Traversal environment? Perhaps the grass here has a toxic pollen that hampers the PCs, causing them to mark Stress on failed Strength rolls when they breathe it in as their fortitude fails them! Or maybe the meadow has secret pitfalls at every turn that risk characters twisting an ankle if they aren't savvy enough to spot them through the foliage!
Difficulty is a bit more of a consideration. To start, remember to stick to our party's Tier and base it on that. This is actually covered in the Playtest document with a general baseline by tier, but we can have a range if we want something a little more or less significant. I recommend a range of -/+1 and no more than that. Your environment can be easier to overcome with not-so-hostile effects, or it can be particularly challenging and harsh on failure! I personally like to contrast my difficulty values with my damage values, with lower difficulties having higher damages and vice versa.
Damage is a tricky part. As mentioned, I like to scale difficulty and damage contrasting one another, but generally speaking, our environment should not do more damage than is necessary to impose a Major threshold's worth of damage. For this, I like to have higher difficulty/lower damage focus on the Minor threshold, and higher difficulty/lower damage focus on the Major threshold. A strange consideration in the playtest material is that the Tier 3 guidelines suggest a whopping 4d12 damage base which is fairly reliable for nailing the Major threshold, so my suggestions alter from the norm there to account for it as the highest possible damage output.
To simplify all of this, let's put it in a table:

	Tier 0	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3
Playtest Suggested Difficulty	11	14	17	20
My Suggested Difficulty	10 - 12	13 - 15	16 - 18	19 - 21
Playtest Suggested Damage	1d6	2d8	2d12	4d12
My Suggested Damage	1d4+1, 1d6, 2d6+2	1d8, 2d8, 2d6+5	1d8+1, 2d12, 2d12+5	2d6, 4d8+7, 4d12

An Example: I've made an environment with a Difficulty of 13, which is slightly less than is suggested for a Tier 1 environment. To compensate for an easier difficulty to overcome, I've scaled the damage a little higher to potentially dip into Major Threshold territory. This signifies that my environment - while not as overtly challenging - is still quite dangerous if the character doesn't take it seriously!

Passives, Reactions, Actions, and Fear

Now we're getting into the true meat and fun part of crafting an environment. We need to consider what happens in our environment, but to do that we need to take a magnifying glass to what makes an Action... well, an Action! We'll look at a few examples provided by the developers and see how we can draw inspiration from those.

Passives

Passives are typically fairly mundane and non-hostile to our players. In fact, many Passives are actually quite beneficial to our players in certain conditions! Environmental passives can offer beneficial effects on trait rolls for players, such as having advantage on a trait roll or a beneficial modifier to those rolls. However, to gain these, players typically have to sacrifice something of value or put in some measure of work to get them. This can either be offering up gold (such as the Bustling Marketplace) or by doing some investigative work with a Presence roll (such as the Local Tavern).
Now, an important distinction for Passives is that it largely depends on the environment's type. Whereas Social environments tend to offer players beneficial effects, Traversal are quite the opposite! Traversal passives can sometimes include a Progress Countdown, requiring players to perform several trait rolls in order to overcome the environment's passive condition. A good example of this is The Climb passive of the Cliffside Ascent, which requires players achieve multiple successes to reach the top. Otherwise, they might not reach the apex or, worse, fall to their deaths!
When making passives, consider if the environment would play to player's favor or if there is some challenge to overcome.

Reactions

Reactions are a bit uncommon, but do have a place! Reactions generally are what happens if a PC engages in a certain activity. Maybe they've failed a roll and some negative consequence occurs as a result (such as the Gossip reaction of the Baronial Court). Maybe they've ventured off by themselves and become separated from the party (such as the Crowd Closes In reaction of the Bustling Marketplace).
Reactions typically only incur a Stress mark on failure for the offending player, but they can affect multiple players at once depending on the circumstances. Remembering our golden rule, however, these reactions may not necessarily be damaging to the players! A player might perform an action in an environment that denotes a beneficial result like turning a Fear roll into a Hope roll (such as the Relentless Hope reaction of the Hallowed Temple).
When considering Reactions, think about something a player is likely to do in that environment. A sacred garden with lots of lowers might prompt a player to smell the roses, but if those roses are living and don't want to be disturbed, they might be a bit more prickly than the player expects!
Reactions can come with a Fear cost, but most of what I'll talk about with that will be covered in the Actions section, so keep reading!

Actions: True Actions and 'Fearful' Actions

Actions, in a word, are diverse in their application, and are the bread and butter of your environments. They are generally how the GM influences the story directly in a way that ups the stakes. This is primarily through the use of GM Moves and Fear tokens and serve as a fantastic way for the GM to utilize these resources outside of combat. To clarify a few things, I've divided actions into two types: True Actions and Fearful Actions, to help denote which ones use which resources.
To start with True Actions, an important distinction for them is that they may be used even without an action tracker in play and regardless of action token costs. This means that a GM can utilize their resources even out of combat! Super handy for when you're capped on Fear and still want to twist the narrative a bit.
Actions in environments are generally how the GM influences a scene by imposing some adversarial encounter that may not necessarily result in a combat encounter. They can be used to summon potentially adversarial NPCs/adversaries to confront the players for a variety of things (such as the You Are Not Welcome Here action in the Abandoned Grove or We Met Again in the Baronial Court). This can be a social confrontation or even a direct, non-violent removal of the players' items (such as the Sticky Fingers action of the Bustling Marketplace).
True Actions are also ways to make things much more difficult for the players through the environment itself interfering with them, imposing trait rolls that come with status conditions on failure (such as the Grasping Vines of The Burning Heart of the Wood). We can also utilize them to keep our adversaries in play, healing their damage or removing their Stress (such as the Aura of Death of the Necromancer's Ossuary).
Yet, our golden rule still applies here, as we as GMs can utilize True Actions to coax the players into things that may benefit them, like finding a rare(r) item they might need/want (such as the Unexpected Find in the Bustling Marketplace).
Fearful Actions are much more insidious and do not benefit the players. These actions require spending Fear tokens and come with nearly guaranteed negative effects toward the players, manifesting primarily as direct summons of adversaries to oppose them or truly difficult circumstances that can include damaging effects. Fearful actions are how we as GMs take a hard narrative twist to directly challenge the players.
These actions are much more narrow in scope but can impose a Progress Countdown to resolve (such as the Framed! action of the Baronial Court) or worse yet, cause direct damage to the player if they fail a trait roll or are not aided in some way (such as the Fall action of the Cliffside Ascent). Moreover, Fearful Actions can even give Adversaries some beneficial effect on spawning, such as coming in unbeknownst to the players or using one of their actions without a cost right off the cuff!
When considering the creation of these actions, consider how the environment or adversaries could impose incredibly difficult circumstances on the players that need not necessarily come from the mechanical stats themselves. Having a Chaldworm pop up immediately with its Superheated buff already going is a huge way to ramp up the stakes in an encounter the players never even knew they were engaged in!

Special Note: Progress Countdowns

Its special because Progress Countdowns are the culmination of long-term effects that the players have to resolve, and should be used sparingly! These can either be attributed to an environment's Passive or Action, may have a Fear cost, or other various circumstances. Ultimately the big consideration here is that Progress Countdowns are a bit of a wildcard but are generally included to up the stakes for the players in a way that goes beyond just the one scene. They may be spending quite a bit of time tracking down that thief that stole their goods (such as the Sticky Fingers action of the Bustling Marketplace)!

Summary

So now that we have an idea of what considerations go into making environments, let's summarize so we can quickly make some environments using the information we've already gone over!
Tier: Base this on your party's level! Type: Refer to prior Type breakdown! Difficulty: Refer to prior table! Potential Adversaries: Specific to your environment and creativity!
Environment Features:

• Pick a combination of no more than five (5) total different Passives, Reactions, and Actions.
• You'll want 1-2 Passives which define the general aura of the environment itself and how it interacts with the players
• 1-2 Reactions if the players are likely to engage in a particular activity. Remember that these can have Fear costs if they're more challenging!
• Fill the rest with Actions that express how the environment is interacting with the players either through the environment itself or through NPCs/adversaries!
• If your Action summons NPCs/Adversaries to confront the players in a way that it not necessarily violent, use a True Action (with action token costs)
• If your Action summons Adversaries to violently confront the players, use a Fearful Action (with Fear token costs).
• When utilizing Actions, remember that you can use them as a means of influencing the challenges players face by directly imposing difficulty on them without the use of an adversary/NPC!
• If you utilize a Progress Countdown, remember it can come with either an environmental Passive or as an imposed Action.

Above all remember the golden rule! Any and all environment effects can benefit the players somehow. Your environments need not necessarily be adversarial to your players; be kind to one another <3

Everywhere I go online, especially Reddit, everyone is always complaining about their financial status and how hopeless they are and constantly dehumanizing rich people, I’ll always hear: “They just got lucky” or “they exploited everyone around them”. They will say absolutely anything to avoid taking accountability for their own lives because it makes them feel better about themselves when they know deep down they lack discipline. The truth is that the famous and the wealthy are humans too. They may have more materialistic goods than the average person but they still feel the same feelings as us and they are allowed to feel depressed as well. I also don’t even want to hear the whole manipulation thing because everyone manipulates and uses eachother at times, we’re all fucking flawed, you can’t expect anyone to be perfect humans and while that’s not totally excusable for a lot of people and the actions they do, we need to look at others and see if what they’ve given the world is a net positive or a net negative. If all they’ve done is worsen the world with their presence, then yeah they’re fucking assholes but we have to focus on ourselves instead of delving on how much we hate other people. It’s quite frankly extremely unhealthy and it’s out of our control to change others. Why complain, it’s only gonna make everything worse for you and those around you.
We must better ourselves and stop focusing on everyone around us. A lot of us humans like to think we don’t have much control at all in our lives, that everything comes down to chance but if you’re reading this, chances are, you’ve already been very fortunate because I’m willing to bet 95% of those of you reading this on your phones and pcs are currently living in first world countries or are very well off in third world countries. You’ve already had luck handed to you on a silver platter. Now you have to enact on your existing luck the best way you can and create opportunities for yourself which is a lot more possible than a lot of people think. The more you go out and do things and talk to people, the “luckier” you will get. Just fucking do things and stop complaining. You sure as hell won’t be getting any luck or success sitting around all day.
The truth is, people spend too much time lying to themselves, it’s one of a humans favorite things to do. Focus on yourself, you know deep down what to do if you take the time to learn yourself. It’s not guaranteed but you might as well try to achieve the success you want because what other option is there? Life is going to be fucking tough regardless, might as well give it an effort to shape our lives how we want.
I know a lot of you will talk about how unrealistic I am in this post and to those of you who do that, I’m sorry you’ll keep living your lies and continue to make excuses until your death, I’m sorry that you will have spent your whole life with a fixed mindset that only hindered you. You know there are certain efforts you can make to squeeze the most out of your life, you know that inside of you, but you will choose comfort every time if you think making certain changes are unrealistic. I’m sorry and good luck.

3.23 has some great UI and gameplay improvements but my first experience actually playing the patch with someone else was terrible. Solo it seems ok.
What is the point of having 100 person servers if the tickrate is between 3-5 fps, we should be targeting 30 minimum and reducing player count if that cannot be achieved.
The player 2 player desync particularily in FPS mode is terrible, I was completely invisible to the other party member for a good 5 minutes until we crossed into a different object container. Besides that the rubber banding is insane, put 2 PCs playing star citizen next to one another and you can really see how different each player's perspective is.
Anyway session ended with the ship exploding randomly on our way to the first mission of the night, so... wake me up when the networking works :)

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Hi everyone. Recently finished Death’s end, and I’m wondering if anyone else shared or could break down my doubts in relation of black domains:
Starting from the following concepts in the book:

• light speed travel is achieved by bending (flattening) space
• black domains are achieved by interaction/ instability between the post-light speed trails left by light speed travel

We can think consequently that: - black domains are created by modifying space. This makes me think that space is more dense in black domains, and light speed is perceived as slower from an outside viewer. This is a little the opposite of what I’d expect when thinking about “flattening space for allowing light speed travel, but the light speed engine isn’t a concept that’s explained nor explainable, so let’s skip it and take it as granted).
Now… this brings to:

• given gravity is effectively a bending of space given by the presence of mass, and the black domain reduction of light speed is a bending of space (of some sort), we can think that gravity and light speed effective value aren’t independent from each other as they derive from the same base concept (bending of space(-time).
• consequently, escaping a black domain should be possible. Light would still escape the domain either tho slowing, as applying a concept such as that of “escape velocity” (based on gravity) from before changing space time conformation seems nonsensical. Meaning: the escape velocity would change together with light speed I imagine event horizons to be based on ratio of mass/% of max light speed if we think that gravity and lightspeed are interconnected concepts.

So I’d think black domains wouldn’t actually be black/transparent. Nor feasible.
And this was my main point of discussion.
Another thing hard to swallow is: why when locked in a black domain, computers cease to function? It’s explained (and rational) that in a black domain traveling at 12m/s or so is relativistic (high % of max light speed), and therefore the internal clocks of the travelers are extremely slow. But from the travelers point of view the pcs should still work, slowly compared to external observers but till at normal speed for the traveling ship. So there would be no need for “neural computers”. I found this made up tech unnecessary in this context.
Anyone else like me enjoying these topics and willing to engage? Appreciated!

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As the VTT space becomes more populated, I see that for the most part it’s very DnD focused, which I suppose makes sense given the economics. However, I play theater of the mind(TotM) – which is not to say I never use maps or floor plans, but I certainly don’t use miniatures or tokens.
So it occurs to me to wonder, what would a VTT that was designed specifically for the kind of gameplay that I embrace look like? What is a TotM VTT?
Here are my thoughts, but please add your own as well if you have any on this topic.
While I am happy enough using 3D tools like Dungeon Alchemist to build important set pieces like the PC’s lair or any other important and frequently used space, I’m not going to put in that kind of effort for any scenes or locations that PCs aren’t constantly coming back to. So while having the ability to create 3D dioramas in a VTT is a “nice” add-on, like I said, I already have Dungeon Alchemist and like, so having 3D scene building is of really minimal value and priority to me, as makes sense given the TotM playstyle I embrace.
So then what support do I need?
Honestly, for me the best TotM VTT I have used so far has got to be Tabletop Simulator, because it acts as a real table that I can put actual character sheet on, on which I can use tokens to track various things, and I can even import rulebooks and custom art for the table too. It even have 3D dice simulated that can be literally rolled across the table.
I guess for me, the starting point for an ideal VTT for TotM play would be something like Tabletop Simulator then.
But I think if we add a layer of resource management on top of that, that would make it even better. By resource management, I mean the ability to store, organize, and present items like character sheets, npc/monster sheets, various other write-ups, art, sound files, maybe video clips, maps, and so on. And ideally this data storage system would be one in which both GM *and* players could create notes and store their various creations, although each player’s stuff should be able to be hidden from other players, and the GM should of course have “superuser” privileges to see everything, and to show or hide game materials as needed.
Another great element of the game data might be that the players and GM can loof stuff up from outside the game, during the off-time, as needed.
Stuff like audio ambiance and background music I am pretty “meh” about, but that probably because I have hearing disabilities that make me turn off all music and extra audio to hear the other players better and more clearly. Still, I can’t imagine fancy ambience to be nearly as useful as a well-designed and cohesive game data management system.
If the data system worked a lot like MS OneNote, which I currently use for a lot of my game data, but built-into this hypothetical VTT platform and easily shareable, that would be excellent, since you can drop into OneNote any clippings you like, text, art, graphics, links, files, tables, etc. – ie, it’s not just text. And OneNote is VERY organizable, using multiple hierarchies.
I think I would like to have two more things in this ideal VTT, both dealing with facilitating communicating between the players as well as the GM, especially during the times between games.
The first would be a game specific forum where people can have conversation threads/posts on various game related topics that would be open to all participants in the game to read and contribute to. So, for example, a player might start a thread about a mechanics question or a story want, and others can chime in.
The second would be a private messaging system to pm other players or the GM as needed in between games, if you have something interesting to share, or a cool idea, or a question you want to ask directly.
So let’s add this up:

• A 3D environment that simulates a literal tabletop, with the presence of character sheets, handouts, tracking tokens, rollable dice, rulebooks, etc.
• A well-designed data management system for storing, organizing, and managing all the game resources including art, files, writeups, sheets, rulesets, etc.
• A communications portal for discussions for the whole game group as well as private messaging between individuals.

Other than that, I’d just like little quality of life things, like an in-game avatapicture of my character with my character name underneath, etc.
I guess the best way for me to achieve the closest thing to this as I can is to actually use Tabletop Simulator and use a shared OneNote Notebook to store game data in, as well as Discord for communication.
But a custom solution that actually integrates all that would work SO much better I think! To bad that, to the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t exist!
So, are you a Theater of the Mind player? Do you prefer to avoid gridded battlemaps and miniatures? Do you prefer narrative flair to wargaming tactics? If so, what would you think would be the ideal VTT for support TotM playstyles?

DISCLAIMER: I'd like to note that I do not consider myself an expert on many of the topics he talks about or even economics in general but a lot of what I'm about to say is pretty easily verifiable and basic, and I'll try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so. Given my lack of expertise, none of what I say here should be considered as the final authority on these topics, it's a reddit post for fucks sake, I encourage everyone to search up the relevant data and information on the topics they are interested in or claims they find dubious. It's really not that hard and all the links and data I'm gonna cite here took me less than five minutes to find for each piece of information. If you're not familiar with where to find this data it might take you longer but I promise that anyone with access to the internet can do the same thing I'm doing. Finally, for those looking for some opinionless, academic argument, that's not what this is, this is gonna sound like a rant because it is, I'm posting this for nothing more than my own satisfaction, take from it what you will.
Ok I'm writing this after I finished the whole thing and I said that I'd try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so and the basically entire second half of this is my opinion and I don't make that very clear so sorry about that.
Honestly I'd love to be wrong because I really do think that younger people are at a disadvantage compared to previous generations at the same age but the arguments he makes and the data he uses throughout his talk just sound like such bullshit to me.
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott\_galloway\_how\_the\_us\_is\_destroying\_young\_people\_s\_future?
https://www.profgalloway.com/war-on-the-young/
Scott Galloway recently did a Ted talk titled "How the US is destroying young people's future", as well as an accompanying blog post. He's made some fair points about how young people have been put at an inherent disadvantage and that they have it harder than previous generations. That's most likely true and I personally support that point of view, but the a lot data and numbers he makes this argument with seem to be cherry picked, misleading, or just straight up wrong. So let's break his talk down. u/JustTaxLandLol made a pretty good post about him comparing median wages to the S&P500 (https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott\_galloway\_compares\_median\_wage\_to\_sp500/) but I think that Galloway's mistakes are much more comprehensive than just that particular slide.
The first slide with data makes a claim about how pre-tax income, adjusted for inflation, has decreased across generations from grandparents to parents to kids, and that cost of public colleges and home prices have increased significantly across generations too. First of all, categorising generations by whether they have children or grandchildren is kinda nuts. That's a very wide, overlapping, range of ages. If he has actually fixed age ranges for each generation that don't overlap and just made these categorisations for the sake of understandability to a nonacademic audience, I still think that's the wrong choice but fine. However, his claim that real income has decreased across generations is weak at best. This working paper (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2024007pap.pdf) from the Fed Reserve was published February 2024, and from the figures that start at page 35, shows that by almost every categorisation they could think of, GenZ earns more at the same age than every previous generation before them. There's some conflict here with Raj Chetty's work but I don't have the time or knowledge to reconcile the two perspectives but at best, the pre-tax income numbers Galloway presents are questionable at best. Furthermore, he doesn't provide anyone a chance at even checking the sources he gets this information from. Not once in his entire talk does he cite a single source. He couldn't even have some tiny text at the bottom of his tables or diagrams saying what organisation he got this data from. Ok so that crossed out bit is wrong, he does have sources they're just very very faint and you can see them if you squint hard enough at the bottom left corner of his graphs. But the source he gives for this slide is a joke. Here's the link https://www.profgalloway.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Table-01.png
His "source" is his own analysis. Ok so by his analysis, the average cost of public college is 56000*0.43 = 24080. I'm gonna use numbers from this US News page (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/paying-for-college-infographic), which might not be the most reliable source in the world, but it's probably somewhere in the ballpark. So according to US News, average tuition for the 2023-2024 school year for out of state students going to a public school is 23,630 and 10,662 for in state students. If these numbers are anywhere near accurate, the only conclusion I can draw is that Galloway has cherry-picked his data by only including the cost for out of state students in his analysis. First of all, public schools in the US are there to provide affordable access to higher education FOR RESIDENTS OF ITS STATE. Using only out of state numbers is absolutely ridiculous. Secondly, even if he used only the in state numbers, 10662/56000 is approximately equal to 19%. So if I use his very very questionable pre-tax income numbers, cost of public college for in state students has still increased across his categorisation of generations. It's not like his point would have been invalidated if he had used the in-state numbers, a trend of tuition increasing as a percentage of real income across multiple generations is still very bad. This is my opinion but I guess that he just wanted to find a nice shocking number. I didn't catch this but in their post, u/JustTaxLandLol notes that later on Galloway says "real median income from labor is up 40% since 1974" so he's also contradicting himself in the same talk.
I couldn't be bothered to look into the house price to income column he has so I don't have any comments on that.
His next slide is a point about how the percentage of 30 year olds earning more than their parents did at 30 has been decreasing very significantly over time. This is from a paper in 2016 by Raj Chetty (link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal4617). I've seen some counterarguments about the methods used in the paper but there are counterarguments for basically every inequality paper in existence so I'd take them with a grain of salt. Those points are more complex than the scope of this post and I lack the expertise to be making them anyways so I believe this slide. I'll admit that Galloway makes a good argument for this slide.
Right after this slide he says "As a result, people over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in five people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary, righteous movement...". He supports this with data on the percentage of US adults who feel "extremely proud" to be American.
Before I talk about the data on this slide, I'd like to be a little anal about things and pick apart his wording and causal claims he makes. When Galloway says "as a result" he's making a causal claim about the relationship between a young person's earning ability and their national pride. Leaving aside the econometric issues of making random causal claims, this is a ridiculous marginalisation of all the other critically important issues in the US. It seems pretty clear to me that reduced national pride amongst younger individuals is a combination of a lack of social mobility (or however you want to word your version of the fading American dream), the continued existence of systematic racism and sexism, US response to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, bodily autonomy (abortion), and many other issues. Not to say that the economic disadvantages of young people doesn't play a role in causing this lack of national pride but come on. He also says "this creates an incendiary righteous movement...". Ok if the "as a result" from the last sentence could be interpreted as the economic disadvantages of young people play some part in their dissatisfaction with the government, it should be obvious to anyone not living under a rock that many of the political conflicts and movements that have erupted in the US over the past few years have little, if anything, to do with earning ability. In the slide after the poll data he shows three photos, one of a MeToo protest, one of a BLM protest, and another of a pro-Palestine protest. I can only interpret this as him making the claim that the younger generations economic difficulties are causally linked to those movements, which is totally bananas.
Now lets talk about the data. He got this from the Gallup polls (link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394202/record-low-extremely-proud-american.aspx, there's a link to download the pdf with the poll numbers at the end of this article). There are 5 options for the Gallup poll: "Extremely proud"; "Very proud"; "Moderately proud"; "Only a little proud"; or "Not at all proud". So Galloway is cherry-picking again. To be fair, it's true that even including the rest of the answers, a quick glance at the data suggests (very strongly) that young people are less proud than older people. There are also more young people who choose "Not at all proud" (11% for 18-34 and 1% for 55+). Though there is probably some argument to be made about whether "extreme" pride is a good thing. Furthermore, "pretty good" and "very good" do not reflect the extremity of choosing, well, the most extreme option.
As an introduction to his next slide he says that "a decent proxy for how much we value youth labor is minimum wage". I've never heard of this before and am very very skeptical but I'm willing to attribute this to my own ignorance so I'll leave that sentence alone. So on this slide there's a graph with two lines, one is minimum wage across time adjusted for inflation, the other is whats supposed to be minimum wage if adjusted for productivity (also adjusted to inflation I assume). Galloway got this data form the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/), which shows that this gap between productivity began around 1979. This was when Carter was president and right before the Reagan administration. Those who know about the economic history of this time probably won't be surprised since a lot of the policies of this time were rather inegalitarian and heavily favoured the wealthy. I agree that many of the policies of the time contributed heavily to the inequality America faces today and though I haven't read any studies about how this affects minimum wage workers, I believe that minimum wage workers or low income workers in general today have significantly lower purchasing power relative to a few decades ago.
What I have a problem with here is the idea that productivity and minimum wage should increase in tandem. According to the EPI, "Productivity measures how much total economywide income is generated (i.e., for workers, business owners, landlords, and everybody else together) in an average hour of work" and "pay is defined as the average compensation (wages and benefits) of production and nonsupervisory workers. The pay for this group is one appropriate benchmark for 'typical worker pay' because production and nonsupervisory workers have made up roughly 80% of the U.S. workforce over the entire period shown in the figure and because the data for production and nonsupervisory workers exclude extremely highly paid managerial workers like CEOs and other corporate executives". Before I try to break down my complaints with the measures used, my immediate reaction when I saw this was that it seems rather stupid to compare the relationship between average productivity and minimum wage in an industrial economy against the same relationship in a service oriented one. There are just more jobs now that let you make an impact on the economy far beyond what you are paid and it is so so difficult to quantify this change. Using a similar argument, I really have no clue how macro people make models or do estimates for things like productivity but I'm quite skeptical about the reliability of using such a measure of productivity because of the increased prevalence of second, third, or n-th order effects that would be present in a measure of something like total gdp but pretty much impossible to identify for any employer. For those who want to read more about this difference between productivity and compensation I think this is the most relevant paper from EPI (https://files.epi.org/2015/understanding-productivity-pay-divergence-final.pdf). There are some points I'm not satisfied with in this paper like them attributing the entirety of the difference between median hourly compensation to average consumer hourly compensation but that would take more time than I want to spend on this.
Now we're still on the same slide. Galloway says "we've kept it [minimum wage] purposely pretty low" twice in three sentences. Now he's suggesting that there's some collective out there that has the political power and desire to keep minimum wage low. By "we" I think he means to suggest that the old-timers have banded together to screw the young people over. Ok buddy. I'm stepping outside the bounds of what's considered strictly economics here a little but pinning the injustices of society on some ethereal enemy whose existence can never be disproven is the same as taking "advantage of the flaws in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts, and godlike technology" (Galloway's words, same TED talk) to me. Maybe there really is some cabal of scheming geezers out there who have some twisted desire to keep the minimum wage low, but I'm more inclined to believe that a lot of these "injustices" are a result of our existing political and societal institutions being poor and inefficient aggregators of our desires as a society, rewarding selfishness instead of cooperation. This certainly makes the problem harder to solve than if there were just some evil 'others' we could get rid of and be done with. Having a target to direct our outrage at, believing that I am good and they are bad, is easier than facing the reality that everyone is born with the selfishness that creates the injustices we live with but that's not gonna make people more agreeable. As an economist, I study the theory of incentives to use the same human selfishness that creates all the problems Galloway talks about to create solutions that hopefully improve our quality of life. This is what I believe is the beauty of being human, all the good and bad that happens stem from the same desires, it is our job to create institutions and systems that allow us to channel our desires in a way that benefits everyone, but I digress. The point is, this enemy that Galloway creates is an effective tactic at convincing people of his argument, but I don't believe such a perspective benefits society at all. Mistakes should be corrected, that doesn't mean they're always the result of ill intentions.
His next slide compares the difference between percentage increase in median household income against percentage increase in median home price, as well as a comparison of the median monthly mortgage between 2019 and 2024. I have nothing to say about the graph, I agree that over time, home prices have increased to an unacceptable level. The Fed funds rate went from 2.4 percent in Feb 2019 to 5.33 percent in Feb 2024 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds). To his credit, Galloway does attribute this increase in mortgage payments to "an acceleration in interest rates" but what's the alternative? Don't increase interest rates? Then if I was Galloway I'd make the same TED talk and talk about how the continued low interest rates contributed to rampant inflation that made all the poor people even poorer. It seems like he's decided to take whatever bad economic event that seems somewhat relevant and made it to be the result of some group's dogged determination to keep the younger generation down. Why is the increase from pre- to post-covid prices on anything surprising. I'd like to meet the genius who saw covid coming and intentionally created this increase in home prices.
He also says "the most expensive homes in the world, based on this metric, are number three, Vancouver. Why? Because 60 percent of the cost of building a home goes to permits...". I have no idea what point he's making here. Based on what metric, median home price? Monthly mortgage payments? Why do I care about Vancouver, a Canadian city, being number three? Then he talks about how "the incumbents that own assets have weaponized government". Either he's switched to talking about oligopolistic lobbyists in general without saying so or he's still talking about Canada. I dunno. Someone please explain. Then he says "this is the transfer I'm going to be speaking about". Also, everything he just said is talking about how there exists a group of people trying to PREVENT transfers of wealth to new entrants. And there was huge applause after that sentence. Nutsos, all of them.
Ok next slide. Galloway presents two pie charts, comparing the share of household wealth by age in 1989 to 2023. So he's talking directly about inequality in wealth now. Inequality in the US is really really bad, that's a fact. I'm a big fan of the work of Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, and Thomas Piketty. These people have been at the forefront of research on inequality for many years now and though their work is not flawless, I'm convinced by the data they present and the methods by which they have aggregated the data and what they show is that inequality is worse than even what the pie charts Galloway presents suggest. However, this is not to say that Galloway makes a valid argument. Please note the grey bits in the pie chart. If Galloway has shown the numbers for everyone under 40 and above 70, the group that's excluded are those between 40 and 70. So those in the age range of 40-70 owned 100 - 19 - 12 = 69% of household wealth in 1989 and 100 - 30 - 7 = 63% in 2023. I could probably go and find how the age demographics of the population have changed over time and I think that with declining birth rates, the percentage change in age demographics would be pretty close to the percentage change in household wealth but I'm tired of beating every slide to death so I'll leave that to someone else if anyone's motivated enough to do that (if my hypothesis is wrong here just comment and I'll make that change). My first thought when I saw this though was again, this guy has paid no regard to structural change in society. Given the increased accessibility of buying stocks over the past three decades is it really that surprising that older people who have had more time and cash at the start of the digital age to invest in companies that are now massive mega-corporations have experienced a higher return on their capital. This is not to say that none of this change in the share of wealth held by those under 40 is due to some inherent unfairness in our society and I have neither the time nor knowledge to separate these effects out but to say that this was a "purposeful" effort to cut their wealth in half is complete and utter bullshit. Also, this guy makes another causal claim WITH NOTHING BUT A CHANGE IN SHARE OF HOUSEHOLD WEALTH. Congratulations everyone Scott Galloway has just made every econometrician in the world redundant, I always knew my professors were just trying to confuse me with funny symbols and Greek letters, someone get this guy a Nobel Prize.
Then while introducing his next slide Galloway says that his analyst's presence in the audience "brings the average age of the entire conference down in 11 days". So he's saying that TED knows exactly who's showing up to their event before it happens and that they have the exact birthdates of everyone in the audience too and that they've given this information to one of their speakers. A friend of mine has told me he's just making a joke and that I should let this point go because I'm being too anal about things but yeah I become anal about things when someone suggests sweeping institutional changes in a talk viewed by millions of people so thought I'd include it anyways just as another example of the bullshit this guy has been spewing.
When he moves on to the actual content in the slide the first point he makes is about lower acceptance rates in schools. So I don't have data on this because I couldn't be bothered to go find any so again, I'll change my statement if anyone has reliable data indicating otherwise but I think its pretty safe to say that way less people used to apply than before and combined with an increase in international student applications and enrollments the competition is just way higher than before. The most obvious explanation would be that higher education institutions have made the mistake of not increasing enrollments at a rate quick enough to meet demand. However, according to US News (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-many-universities-are-in-the-us-and-why-that-number-is-changing) there were 3982 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the US. and UCLA is ranked 15th in national universities. So why is it surprising now that university education is becoming more popular that higher ranked universities are harder to get into. So instead of expanding enrollment I think that a well thought out plan of affirmative action would be a much better option of giving "unremarkable kids and giving them a shot at being remarkable" (what this well thought out plan may be I don't know, I honestly didn't even search up any statistics about affirmative action this was just the first solution I thought of that didn't involve ignoring the crowning achievement of statistics). To his credit, Galloway does include a point about income-based affirmative action at the end of his talk, though he overwhelmingly emphasises increasing enrollment in schools. I don't have any data about that but I think that class sizes at public universities are large enough as it is.
The rest of the slide gives numbers on college debt of house price compared to first year income. College debt is ridiculously high and many people struggle because of it. I don't have the solution and neither does Galloway because he doesn't really mention it. I think that house price-to-first year income is a poor comparison because it doesn't take into account average rate of income increase and no normal person from any generation is looking to buy a house with first year income but there's probably a more appropriate metric out there that shows a similar change anyways so I'm ok with that.
Then he talks about him and his "colleagues" who "artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity". I would like to meet the professors who have control over enrollment rates because none of mine did. Then he says "to my colleagues in higher ed: we're public servants, not fucking Chanel bags". The marketing professor from NYU says he's a public servant...ok.
The slide after that compares Harvard's increase in endowment compared to their increase in enrollment and he calls them a "hedge fund offering classes". I see no issue with this point, he made a great argument, can't really criticise anything here.
Don't worry though he makes up for it by immediately making one of the most egregious statements in this whole talk. We're looking at his next slide, the one titled "Grand Bargain" now. He says that the government should take some of the money that's supposed to be used to forgive existing loans to about 500 of the top public universities to reduce tuition by 2% and year, expand enrollments by 6% a year, and increase vocational programs to 20% of the degrees granted. Then the slide after that, claims this will double freshman seats and cut costs in half in just 10 years. Ok so he thinks that most of the money "earmarked to bail out the one third of people that got to go to college on the backs of the two thirds that didn't" should go to future students instead because, I assume from the tone of his words, he doesn't think they need or deserve all that loan forgiveness. So why bring up the increase in college debt previously (the slide I talked about three paragraphs ago)? Anyways that's not the crazy thing. Let's see what happens if you reduce tuition by 2% a year for 10 years. So the calculation goes like this 0.98^{10} is approximately equal to 0.81. So with the number he puts up, tuition decreases by 19% in ten years. If everything before this slide could be attributed to cherry-picking, stupidity, or lack of good data, then fine he's just ignorant even though he shouldn't have been if he went up there to make that talk. But now this is just a FUCKING BAREFACED LIE. I cannot think of a greater insult to the audience's intelligence than the fact that this guy didn't think anyone would pull out a fucking calculator and do the calculation themselves. I won't blame the audience for not saying anything because I'm not sure I would have wanted to do that either but at least from youtube and reddit comments there are a decent number of people who didn't realise this. A similar calculation shows that expanding enrollment by 6% per year increases seats by about 80% total (1.06^{10}). Not sure how that translates in terms of freshman seats but at least this is closer than the tuition claim.
Then his next slide compares wages to the s&p500. This is the point of u/JustTaxLandLol's post and I think his post and the discussion in the comments covers most if not all of my thoughts so you can just read that. https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott_galloway_compares_median_wage_to_sp500/
Ok next slide, "The Transfer: Purposeful". Oh yay he's about to make another causal claim with nothing but a graph on the change in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals. And if we skip ahead to the next slide we'll realise that this claim is that the gradual decrease in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals results in lowered senior poverty and child poverty either remains constant or increases. Yes everybody the newest advancement in economic research has just been released. Lowering top tax rates decreases senior poverty and increases child poverty. And Scott Galloway made that argument in 24 seconds (transcript on TED website has time markers).
Man I really set out with the intention to keep the tone of this post as neutral as I could but I'm just writing out my internal dialogue with less swearing now. I apologise to those who would have preferred a more careful and less emotional knee-jerk response of an analysis but this is a reddit post, its not like there are standards.
Now he moves on to talking about social security. Galloway says "it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill". So zero explanation about why it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit, why not more or less, no comment about how many children it would affect, how much money it would mean for each child or family, just some number that you have to accept. Most of the time there's no why to the amount of funding that the government allocates to policies but at least there's some breakdown to how its going to be used, Galloway doesn't even have that. This is before we even consider the fact that child tax credit was expanded this year (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/child-tax-credit-2024-who-qualifies/). Maybe he's talking about some other issue that I'm not aware of but I don't think so. He says he got the social security spending data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which is a think tank. I don't want to sort through their website to fact check so I'll accept it as the truth but as far as I know the actual social security administration releases their facts and figures for the year August of next year so I'm not sure why he didn't just use the 2022 numbers from a more reliable source.
His next few couple slides are about the increasing age of politicians. I think this is a great point but he probably should have used a better example of a younger politician than Justin Trudeau.
Then at around the 10 minute mark, using his slide titled "Generational Theft", Galloway claims that "we pumped the economy" during covid so that the Nasdaq would gain value, causing "intergenerational theft". I don't know if he thinks it was intentional or not but how is he going to completely ignore the fact that the stimulus checks were primarily for households that were struggling due to the greatest unemployment rate we have seen in our lifetime (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/06/11/unemployment-rose-higher-in-three-months-of-covid-19-than-it-did-in-two-years-of-the-great-recession/). I'm really kind of tired of this so I'll let those at the CBR make my argument for me. "Within the first 10 days, households spent an average of 29 cents from every dollar received. The bulk of this spending was on food, rent, and bills" (https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-effective-were-stimulus-checks-us). Damn so turns out struggling families did need these stimulus checks pretty urgently. Shocker. I also think that most people in finance would agree that tech stocks surged over covid because people needed fucking technology... People built PCs to play video games, used online shopping services because they couldn't go to malls, all that.
The next slide is supposed to support his point that the increase in stock prices doesn't allow young people to find "disruption". What. The only thing that matters to any investor is the percentage increase in value of the stock price after you've invested. It doesn't matter if 7 dollars is 1 share of apple or 0.04 of a share of apple. Its stock price going up by 100% means you get 14 dollars either way. I think this guy's arguments are getting dumber as the talk goes on, I actually had to go and find data to refute his points earlier on. Now arithmetic does the work for me, I should have hired a grade schooler to do my analysis.
His next point is about how algorithmic content selection is bad. Yeah its bad. Its bad for everyone, turns everyone into psychos. Though I think there's a very good argument to be made about how such content could affect developing brains. He makes a point about age-gating social media at the end of the talk. This is actually the only drastic measure he proposes that I agree with so I'll leave this alone too.
After a couple slides about Zuckerberg and TikTok (which I agree with, though I think Zuckerberg's damage probably leans more towards older people than young now), he gives a bunch of graphs showing upward trends in all sorts of terrible things happening to young people. Every single one is an issue of critical importance in the US, but importantly, no comparison to older people. For all we know, the trend on every graph could be the same or even worse for older generations. If I had written about this first then I'd go and find the data for it but at this point I just want to be done with this but can't stop without getting to the end so I'm just gonna slap this slide with lack of comparisons and move on.
His next slide shows the difference in 30 to 34 year olds who have at least one child, some of that is probably due to family planning but I still think its a great indicator of people not wanting to have children because its not affordable. Great point, I believe in it.
Next slide, oh god it's a happiness report. I think happiness reports are a fun conversational tidbit but I see no way for it to be reliable enough to be used as an argument in any semi-serious setting. That said, I have no idea how they do these measurements so maybe I'm wrong.
As if the happiness report wasn't bad enough, Galloway is gonna compare the biggest one-day market cap gain (in an unspecified time frame) to the budget of several policies implemented by the government. Oh man. This is too stupid, there's so many things to pick from it'd take too much effort to sort through them. Someone else please make the argument for me.
Then he says universal basic income should have been called negative income tax. Wow the frequency of good points is going up, though I think this is accompanied by an increase in the frequency of absolutely idiotic arguments.
Then he says we should eliminate capital gains tax deduction. The issue of taxing capital gains is a very serious one, but I don't think it actually matters that much how much we tax realised capital gains. Again, not an expert but here's my understanding. If you have a high net worth with a lot of it in stocks and you need cash, you don't have to sell them and get taxed on the realised gains. You go to the bank and say I want to borrow money, I'm going to put these stocks up as collateral so if I can't pay you back you can take these stocks which are somewhere around the value of the principal amount plus total interest over the course of this loan. Because the bank is now convinced they'll get the money back regardless of if you make the payments or not, they say ok here's the money you asked for at a nice low interest rate. Then you take the money, you keep your stocks, which will probably gain value at a rate that exceeds the interest rate by a pretty decent margin, and you can probably make your interest payments pretty easily because hey, you were rich to begin with. If you're really strapped for cash a couple years down the line, you can sell some of the stocks that are now worth more than they were before and cover your payments and not have to pay taxes on the rest that you don't have to sell. Free money. There's plenty more ways to avoid taxes if you're rich but you get my point by now. Now that's a lot of problems without a solution. Luckily we have some economists far more skilled than I am who work very hard to find solutions to these problems. Here's one example of a policy that may help (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/opinion/global-billionaires-tax.html). This is an opinion piece written by Gabriel Zucman (famous economist), for the New York Times. If you don't have an NYT subscription, sorry for giving a link you can't read but if you search Gabriel Zucman billionaire tax, you could probably get a decent idea of what this talks about. Here's Zucman tweeting his proposal for his suggestion (https://twitter.com/gabriel\_zucman/status/1763253132572729623). It probably requires a little more thinking than the NYT article but he did present this at the G20 so that might sound more exciting to you than some news article.
Then Galloway says "we need to remove 230 protection for all algorithmically-elevated content". Zero mention on what 230 protection is so here's an explanation (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230). Basically that was a fancy way of saying that companies should be held accountable of the content on their platform, even if it's posted by an unrelated third party. I'm not sure getting rid of it in its entirety is a great idea (though I have no arguments against that except Orwellian ones) but I certainly agree that most if not all social media platforms have abused this protection and it should be at the very least restricted. To what extent? Again, I have no clue.
Then he goes "break up Big Tech". That's the whole suggestion. This is a terrible idea but the fact that he doesn't elaborate more on how to do this, the ramifications of doing so, or really provide any explanation at all makes me automatically ignore this. Then he makes his point about age-gating social media, like I said before, I agree with it.
His next suggestions are universal pre-K, great idea, then "reinstate the expanded child-tax credit". Not sure what he's going on about here, child tax credit exists and like I said before, was just expanded. Then it's income-based affirmative action. I don't know what kind of affirmative action is best and that sounds like an interesting idea so I won't criticise it. I think the rest of his suggestions are pretty normative arguments so I'll leave those alone too.
Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly agree with the overall theme of his talk. I believe that young people in the US (and many places worldwide) are at a massive disadvantage when it comes to accumulating wealth, buying homes, inter-generational transfers, etc. But you cannot go up on a popular platform like this, make claims as sweeping as he has, and make suggestions as radical and drastic as he has, with garbage arguments and data like this. Saying the right things for the wrong reasons is arguably worse than just saying the wrong thing because it makes it easy for those who want the status quo to remain to make counterarguments. Given how divisive opinions have become over the past decade or so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how many people are eating this up but it kinda scares me how easily people will eat up this shit as long as its for a cause that sounds like its going for some kind of radical change for the good of all and has some imaginary "them" as the common enemy to everyone.
So that's it, I've finally covered all his points. I'm free, thank fuck. I should really proofread this but this has been my past eight hours and my back is breaking from all this sitting, I'm just gonna post this and read it over tomorrow. Maybe do a tl;dr, fix some formatting.
EDIT: As u/myphriendmike and u/Mordoci have pointed out, my dummy corp example was just tax fraud, that's illegal and so it's a bad example, I've removed it. Zucman has some estimates on the "real" tax rate wealthy people (mostly billionaires) pay, maybe I'll include that at some point.
I also corrected my wording in some places.

Context: I've decided to replace my Pre-Built PC (1060ti + i5 13600k) and will probably build a new PC within the year (or next). I have a 1440p monitor (240hz), and mostly play FPS games (overwatch, Valorant, Apex Legends, League of Legends) and the occasional story game (rdr2, death stranding, GoW, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring).
I know a bit about PCs but not a lot. For instance, I don't really understand what SSD cache is, how much MHz is needed for RAM, or whether 16GB is really better than 12GB for GPUs etc.
My aim is to future proof my PC so I don't have to upgrade it for a few years whilst also achieving high fps on high to ultra settings for most games. I'd appreciate it a lot if you guys could help me build the perfect PC for my budget of £2500 ($3000) max. I've attached what I think is a good PC build below. Thanks
PC Build Plan:
[PCPartPicker Part List](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/FncgWt)
TypeItemPrice
:----:----:----
CPU [AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/3hyH99/amd-ryzen-7-7800x3d-42-ghz-8-core-processor-100-100000910wof) £328.98 @ Amazon UK
CPU Cooler [ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III A-RGB 48.82 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/cdP8TW/arctic-liquid-freezer-iii-a-rgb-4882-cfm-liquid-cpu-cooler-acfre00152a) £78.00
Motherboard [Asus ROG STRIX B650-A GAMING WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/Gjt9TW/asus-rog-strix-b650-a-gaming-wifi-atx-am5-motherboard-rog-strix-b650-a-gaming-wifi) £199.99 @ Amazon UK
Memory [G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6400 CL32 Memory](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/mfhv6h/gskill-trident-z5-rgb-32-gb-2-x-16-gb-ddr5-6400-cl32-memory-f5-6400j3239g16gx2-tz5rw) £117.60 @ Amazon UK
Storage [Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/f3cRsY/samsung-980-pro-2-tb-m2-2280-nvme-solid-state-drive-mz-v8p2t0bam) £165.61 @ Amazon UK
Video Card [MSI GAMING X SLIM GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 12 GB Video Card](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/MmQKHx/msi-gaming-x-slim-geforce-rtx-4070-ti-12-gb-video-card-rtx-4070-ti-gaming-x-slim-white-12g) £719.99 @ Scan.co.uk
Case [Lian Li O11D EVO RGB ATX Mid Tower Case](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/Ksgrxlian-li-o11d-evo-rgb-atx-mid-tower-case-o11dergbw) £179.00 @ Computer Orbit
Power Supply [Corsair RM850e (2023) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/4ZRwrH/corsair-rm850e-2023-850-w-80-gold-certified-fully-modular-atx-power-supply-cp-9020263-na) £109.98 @ Scan.co.uk
Operating System [Microsoft Windows 11 Home OEM - DVD 64-bit](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/dKkWGX/microsoft-windows-11-home-oem-dvd-64-bit-kw9-00633) £108.98 @ Overclockers.co.uk
Total £2008.13

Hello,
What I'm trying to achieve is very simple, however, I'm experiencing a little bit of trouble understanding the practical part.
Note that this is for pure experimental reasons, nothing specific is the goal.
This is the network structure I'm trying to achieve:
I'm trying to have two routers, in different subnets, to be able to interconnect two PCs together, each one of them in a different router.
This is what I think should be done, correct me if I'm wrong, and if I'm right please give me some advice on how to implement it.
The two routers are running OpenWRT (installed after fighting to death with them until they accepted the damn firmware.)
In this explanation, PC1 will be the PC connected to the first router, R1, and PC2 will be the PC connected to the second router, R2. R1 and R2 have to be connected together, and be able to reach each other (and make PC1 and PC2 be able to reach each other, even though they are in different networks, which is the purpose of this.)
First, I should set up the network in R1, e.g. 192.168.0.0/24 (I know how to do this.)
Then, I should set up the network in R2, e.g. 192.168.1.0/24 (I know how to do this.)
Then, I should set up a network that will interconnect R1 and R2, e.g. 192.168.2.0/24 (I don't know how to do this.)
Then, I should create an interface for R1 in 192.168.2.0/24 and a default route of ... what? (I don't know how to do this.)
And here I'm stuck.
Note: I watched Jeremy's CCNA video on routing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHwAm8GYbn8
Thanks!

Hello, I have years of experience in Dofus Touch in internation server but I never got into 180+ (I usually get there then try new classes, PvP was kinda stale from 150+).
Experienced players, what are your tips about midgame gear progression (120-180)?
It feels like full 5+pcs sets are a bait (not exactly on powerlevel, but rather on the extreme costs they have because they require a lot of the same dungeon resource) and sticking to good 2-3pieces sets and rest with non-meta singletons with good relics is the way to go. Especially for the time required to build em. Am I wrong?
At the moment I'm playing a lv 120 agi sram with full aerdala, on previous walkthroughs I went for rat set at 120 then swap to full Soft Oak for str-int hybrid (even if somewhat weaker, good stats and versatility made up for it and it felt very good). There's no way I am investing my time in Soft Oak in the current economy (and I really hope they gonna change something on dungeon recipes soon).
What are your go-to? I don't care that much about element but I'd like to have GOOD and somewhat CHEAP stuff.
Theorycrafting process is very tedious sadly (you have to check the gear on DofusBook, find the same item from the resources because the pieces aren't in the AH, check if there are differences in stats/recipes, then calculate the total price, then calculate the ACTUAL price with stuff from achievements/dailies, then repeat this process for all items and combinations) and I would love to have a general discussion before diving into the spreadsheet side of the game.
Thank you for any contribution!

I am relatively new to the world of PC modding and have the Cricut as an essential tool. Whether it's decals for the PCs, customizing vinyl wraps for parts or creating painting stencils. However I have also found the cricut to be useful for other interesting uses.
I work a lot with acrylic and have been using Cricut to create precision templates - marking drilling points, custom water tube pass throughs, RGB plates, etching glass, etc.
I must say I am very fond of what the Cricut can do!!
The only thing I wish it had - ability to precision cut 2mm acrylic so that people wouldn't have to rely on CNCs to achieve it.

Hi I wanted to purchase this PC off of facebook marketplace do you think it’s too good to be true? Is it a scam?? It’s sold for $950. They said I could test it at their house and that it was their old personal PC, but they have other PCs on their facebook marketplace.
Description they provided:
Benchmarks: CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive): Well over 300 FPS at Highest Setting at 1440p, and Just as High in 4K. Valorant: Easily surpasses 300 FPS at 1440p, still Highest at 4K. Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Around 100-110 FPS at 1440p with Highest settings. Cyberpunk 2077: Expect around 90-100 FPS at 1440p with Highest settings. Call of Duty: Warzone: Around 120-130 FPS at 1440p with Highest settings. Fortnite: Easily achieves 180-200 FPS at 1440p with Highest settings. Overwatch: Smooth performance with around 250-270 FPS at 1440p with Highest settings. Rainbow Six Siege: Expect around 220-240 FPS at 1440p with Highest settings. The Witcher 3: Around 110-120 FPS at 1440p with Highest settings.
Specification: CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 3.7 GHz 12-Core GPU: Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 CPU Cooler: Deepcool LT520 WH Motherboard: ASRock X570 Steel Legend ATX AM4 Motherboard RAM: Silicon Power XPOWER Zenith RGB Gaming 32 GB DDR4-3200 Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive Case: NZXT H510 Flow ATX Mid Tower Case Power Supply: Corsair CX750M (2021) 750 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply
EDIT: Thank you for everyone replying, I’m not very familiar with benchmarks or anything really regarding PCs besides the basics.