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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« on: September 25, 2020, 01:14:31 PM »
rum
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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« on: September 25, 2020, 11:35:53 AM »
booze
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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« on: September 24, 2020, 09:30:14 PM »
ones
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General Gaming - The Arcade / Re: What are you playing?
« on: September 23, 2020, 10:12:39 PM »
Duly completed the game. Mostly got the endings I wanted with the one glaring exception of getting quite a bad result for Sagani, who given she was about my favourite NPC was a bit of a bugger to say the least. But having looked it up, it was kind of hard to reconcile the ways to get better outcomes with the sort of character I was trying to play :/
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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« on: September 23, 2020, 12:25:02 PM »
drown
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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« on: September 23, 2020, 11:06:57 AM »
fear
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General Gaming - The Arcade / Re: What are you playing?
« on: September 23, 2020, 10:54:24 AM »
I've not tried just hiring random adventurers yet. Presumably they have like no interactions at all?
Also, I'm taking a break from the game for a week or so I think. I got completely stuck on the Adra dragon (I can see ways you're meant to kill it, but it seems like tbh even if you do the tactics perfectly you still only have a fairly low chance of pulling it off: having an enemy monster which if it plays optimally genuinely cannot lose against your top level party feels OTT).
Also, I'm taking a break from the game for a week or so I think. I got completely stuck on the Adra dragon (I can see ways you're meant to kill it, but it seems like tbh even if you do the tactics perfectly you still only have a fairly low chance of pulling it off: having an enemy monster which if it plays optimally genuinely cannot lose against your top level party feels OTT).
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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« on: September 22, 2020, 09:42:23 PM »
Scape
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General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: Exilian Pubmoot - Sep 22nd?
« on: September 22, 2020, 07:02:52 PM »
The Jolly Boar Inn is now once more open 
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Narnia Total War / Re: Prince Caspian movie styled Units
« on: September 22, 2020, 02:59:47 PM »
Neat! Did you do the modelling on the gryphon?
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Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Re: Warhammer: Tides Of The Old World
« on: September 22, 2020, 01:53:14 PM »
If you email me any PDFs you want to be here (james at wavcott dot org dot uk) I can upload them properly and pass you the link, we've definitely got server space for that sort of thing just the forum's inbuilt system is a bit restrictive.
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Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Re: Warhammer: Tides Of The Old World
« on: September 22, 2020, 12:49:35 PM »
Lovely! Regarding Man 'O War, I think the lizardmen got a giant turtle in that? Which I'm full in favour of.
How available is WFRP 2nd? I played what I think must have been first ed once at high school but I've not played much of the game.
I think the overall plan looks sensible too. Are you planning to do much by way of general sea monsters etc as well as ship to ship combat?
How available is WFRP 2nd? I played what I think must have been first ed once at high school but I've not played much of the game.
I think the overall plan looks sensible too. Are you planning to do much by way of general sea monsters etc as well as ship to ship combat?
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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« on: September 22, 2020, 12:35:34 PM »
What any group think isn't monolithic of course.
Regarding dubsartur's point: generally, I don't think this is hugely a point of debate about UBI in the UK: there aren't actually that many varied systems for cash payment for living costs since everything got rolled into the awful Universal Credit system, which everyone except the Conservatives now kind of dislikes (arguably UC isn't actually that bad as a theoretical delivery system for benefits, it's just that it was cut back really hard while being implemented so people lost money hard as they moved onto it and it had huge IT problems so it's got an unsalvageable reputation on the left). I think the two big things which would be necessary but tricky to realise the full potential of a basic income would be to have it used for student living cost support and to dovetail it properly with pensions - there'd be some pushback on the latter I suspect. The other thing to note re the mix of subsidies is that you probably actually do still have to manage separate housing and disability payments even with a UBI: housing costs are so variable in the UK that paying just enough to someone in London would mean dumping vast additional sums on people who live in poor bits of the north, and disability likewise has hugely variable costs that probably need independent assessment. The big financial benefits to UBI aren't actually the decreased administration costs, but the income security, which gives you a far more flexible labour force (easier to move and retrain if you're not too poor to do so when out of a job), and to things like healthcare where lower stress levels can genuinely decrease strain on the system.
The big anti-UBI argument in the UK is "if you pay people without forcing them to work they won't work". Which actually we know from pilots isn't true, but it's still the core argument one hears. I don't know a lot about the demographics of UBI support: most of the places that seem to have strong UBI campaigns are urban and northern. The Lib Dem group in Hull is where a lot of the most pro-UBI people in the party hang out, Sheffield has a strong UBI network, and Leeds council recently passed a pro-UBI motion put forward by the Liberal Democrat group there. So there's definitely an explicit pro-UBI activist network in the UK in a way that there wasn't five years ago. My guess is that UBI support tends to skew more northern, urban, educated, and young, in general: it tends to appeal most easily to people whose work is irregular in its hours and availability, so contract and gig workers, who again tend to be younger and more urban.
As to the Lib Dems' stances on poverty: we're against it, unsurprisingly, but there's a difficult internal split because of the party's time in government (2010-15) between members who argue that the austerity measures taken during that period were justified to stabilise finances and people like me who think they weren't justified and leaned far too hard on the poorest to pay for problems they hadn't caused. In general the party agrees more about the future than the past on this, and has sat left of Labour on benefits for the poorest since about 2016. (Labour have generally tended to advocate spending more money in total in recent years, but much of that is on universalising benefits that are currently means tested - for example, making free childcare available to middle class as well as badly off citizens). Part of the issue for both Labour and the Lib Dems is that both are very, very middle class parties with lots of people talking about social issues who've never really experienced them, and who are nominally committeed to "making politics more diverse" but don't understand what the barriers to that look like when you're on the other side of them. I mean I include myself in that, but I do what I can to work with people who do understand these things on a more personal level. The Conservatives meanwhile now have older white working class people among their core voters, mostly appealing to them on more conservative cultural principles.
Re what Baragon said about the UK being four different countries: yes, though some are more different than others.
Sorry that was a bit of a ramble, hopefully it contained some interesting oddments.
Regarding dubsartur's point: generally, I don't think this is hugely a point of debate about UBI in the UK: there aren't actually that many varied systems for cash payment for living costs since everything got rolled into the awful Universal Credit system, which everyone except the Conservatives now kind of dislikes (arguably UC isn't actually that bad as a theoretical delivery system for benefits, it's just that it was cut back really hard while being implemented so people lost money hard as they moved onto it and it had huge IT problems so it's got an unsalvageable reputation on the left). I think the two big things which would be necessary but tricky to realise the full potential of a basic income would be to have it used for student living cost support and to dovetail it properly with pensions - there'd be some pushback on the latter I suspect. The other thing to note re the mix of subsidies is that you probably actually do still have to manage separate housing and disability payments even with a UBI: housing costs are so variable in the UK that paying just enough to someone in London would mean dumping vast additional sums on people who live in poor bits of the north, and disability likewise has hugely variable costs that probably need independent assessment. The big financial benefits to UBI aren't actually the decreased administration costs, but the income security, which gives you a far more flexible labour force (easier to move and retrain if you're not too poor to do so when out of a job), and to things like healthcare where lower stress levels can genuinely decrease strain on the system.
The big anti-UBI argument in the UK is "if you pay people without forcing them to work they won't work". Which actually we know from pilots isn't true, but it's still the core argument one hears. I don't know a lot about the demographics of UBI support: most of the places that seem to have strong UBI campaigns are urban and northern. The Lib Dem group in Hull is where a lot of the most pro-UBI people in the party hang out, Sheffield has a strong UBI network, and Leeds council recently passed a pro-UBI motion put forward by the Liberal Democrat group there. So there's definitely an explicit pro-UBI activist network in the UK in a way that there wasn't five years ago. My guess is that UBI support tends to skew more northern, urban, educated, and young, in general: it tends to appeal most easily to people whose work is irregular in its hours and availability, so contract and gig workers, who again tend to be younger and more urban.
As to the Lib Dems' stances on poverty: we're against it, unsurprisingly, but there's a difficult internal split because of the party's time in government (2010-15) between members who argue that the austerity measures taken during that period were justified to stabilise finances and people like me who think they weren't justified and leaned far too hard on the poorest to pay for problems they hadn't caused. In general the party agrees more about the future than the past on this, and has sat left of Labour on benefits for the poorest since about 2016. (Labour have generally tended to advocate spending more money in total in recent years, but much of that is on universalising benefits that are currently means tested - for example, making free childcare available to middle class as well as badly off citizens). Part of the issue for both Labour and the Lib Dems is that both are very, very middle class parties with lots of people talking about social issues who've never really experienced them, and who are nominally committeed to "making politics more diverse" but don't understand what the barriers to that look like when you're on the other side of them. I mean I include myself in that, but I do what I can to work with people who do understand these things on a more personal level. The Conservatives meanwhile now have older white working class people among their core voters, mostly appealing to them on more conservative cultural principles.
Re what Baragon said about the UK being four different countries: yes, though some are more different than others.
Sorry that was a bit of a ramble, hopefully it contained some interesting oddments.
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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« on: September 22, 2020, 12:06:30 PM »
Council
15
Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: [Dev Log] Tourney: The medieval tournament sim
« on: September 22, 2020, 12:02:17 PM »
I'll have a think. I guess one could do "Squire's Armour", "Knight's Armour", "Paladin's Armour", "Hero's Armour", or some such like that that? A question to bring to next time I do medieval pub maybe