_NetNomad

This pattern is driven by an increase in unhappiness among young people both in absolute terms and relative to older people.

also look at the graph in the article, the yellow line representing 2024 is signifigantly lower before 35 than any point on the blue line representing 2005-2018

as someone approaching my 30s in america this sounds consistent with both my experience and many of my peers. our education system is more or less a trauma machine, and couple that with the demise of "third places" (places that aren't school or home for kids to hang out in without having to spend money) and the general state of the world being hard for even adult minds fo wrap around... our world is a difficult and unpleasant place to be a kid. it ain't a cakewalk being an adult either but it is relatively better with a relative increase in agency and more experience dealing with everything

actually either i would probably have to switch seats with O'Brien halfway through because Mariner keeps poking the back of his head and then turning away when he turns around

3 feels like the "right" answer but 7 would absolutely be the most fun

NOT TIMMY

good of you to include pike's hair as a complaint, that way we know who to space

that's just me playing Zork

i'm kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i'd wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it's just "i'm gonna skip this last encounter because we're already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow" or even just "wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace" but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that's part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i'm ok with them using fudging when they feel it's warranted so long as they're not abusing it to the point where there's no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we're all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they're doing, and if we're not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue

there's a good joke in here somewhere about Babylon 5's canonically lesbian XO throwing a fit when the station got a gift shop. "we're not some deep space franchise, this station is about something!"

if you combine the ratings for Discovery and Knuckles, you get to the third position on the chart. Paramount, you know what must be done...

you'll pry my END command from my cold, dead hands...

young ferengi takes human expression "break a leg" too literally