Started playing recently myself. At the start, recommendations have no idea what victory strategy you are pursing, and don’t get that much better at it. They do seem somewhat OK at recommending things that will solve particular problems that city has (slow growth, lack of amenities, etc), though maybe there are better ways available to you. Or, sometimes they notice that your city geography would support a particular wonder or give bonuses to a particular zone. So, if they recommend something that seems weird, maybe check to see if you are missing some mechanical concept. (VI has a lot of obscure interlocking mechanics that can be hard to see, particularly at first.)

This will disappoint Scott Hanson so much.

Geezer Butler is the most important member of Black Sabbath.

These critics should drop using letter grades, in favor of Victoria Jackson’s movie rating system:

• ★★★★: Pretty good
• ★★★: The best
• ★★: The worst
• ★: Pretty good

…and then award, like 15 stars to one team, and 3.5 to another.

Haven’t been paying attention. What stupid deal has Denver done this time?

Mileage varies, I guess. I’ve also been playing since the eighties (late Seventies, really). I’ve been a forever GM for most of that (not a forever DM, though). I have not been particularly active on game design forums, but still have seen every argument on this list someplace at least once a year, since at least the Forge era (so, about twenty years or so). Less often recently, maybe. Way more often earlier.

No team is near me, so I said to myself “I’ll give it a chance and root for the team with the best logo.” But then the teams were revealed and every single one of the logos is terrible.

Is this superficial and dumb? Absolutely. But I haven’t paid attention since.

Are kickoffs still a “live” ball, or a “dead” ball like punts?

Yao Ming (an NBA basketball player) has, nearly single-handedly, saved the lives of tens of millions of sharks by simply asking citizens of China to stop eating shark fin soup. Since he started doing this, the price of shark fins has tanked, and 90+ percent of people surveyed in China support a ban on selling shark fins.

All of that may be true, but it bears little resemblance to the case the US actually filed against Apple. If you haven’t read the charges, you really should. They are filled with reaches that have long been rejected in similar cases, and a desire for government to broadly micromanage. One type of charge, for example, could easily be brought against any company that makes a videogame for just a single platform.

Millions of New Yorkers turned MAGA without them already. Take a look at who “represents” Long Island in the House of Representatives, for example.

If you ignore WotC as being in its own league, a handful of companies are now the “top tier” of RPG production. I’d include Mophidius there, with Paizo and Evil Hat, maybe Chaosium. Their products have extremely high production values and large (by TTRPG standards) followings.

The are mostly known for 2d20 games (Star Trek Adventures, Dune), Dragonbane, Forbidden Lands, Mutant: Year Zero, and now publish some more classic titles (Twilight: 2000, Kult).

I sold a bunch of 70’s and 80’s tabletop roleplaying stuff when I went to college. A few years ago, I reacquired many of those titles at collector’s prices. Not my most brilliant financial move.

Eh. In these kinds of articles, the story is less “rich seize more wealth from others” than it is “assets already held by rich increase in ‘value’”. Almost everything in this article is “stock price go up” and, therefore, the somewhat imaginary “wealth” number of anyone holding that stock goes up. Basically, the headline could be “changes in stock price make the notional wealth of billionaires fluctuate”. Sort of a non-story to me, because everyone listed in this article could have done absolutely nothing all year, and these numbers would have changed regardless. More interesting (if only slightly) would be an article about changes to their actual assets (i.e. did they increase or decrease shares in their company, etc.). I don’t really get the “let’s keep score” for billionaires thing the media does in any case, but this article is on the more useless end of that useless pursuit.

Apparently there are mics on the tips of the goal posts.

#thunk

As a Shadowrun player, I know that “arcology” is a much worse epithet than “hive city”. Well… unless it’s in Chicago.

I read this post as a question.

Third and long, Denver. Time for another ineffectual screen pass.

Armed only with the advice given here, I got 20/20.