Tonight on GeekNights, we consider what's changed for us between 1998, 2008, and 2018. It's a meta show about our lives and what we've been up to. In the news, we're playing some PUBG, the World Cup is happening, Koko the gorilla has died, Cannabis is legal in Canada and may soon be in New York.
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Rym is WAYYYYYY LESS libertarian :-p
I think a lot of lefty type people have their brush with Libertarianism. I know I did, because the elevator pitch sounds good. Personal freedom tempered by personal responsibility for your actions, against the draft and ill advised military adventurism, keeping the government out of your personal life. Sounds great until you learn what they really mean is the freedom to be a huge ass and trample everyone and devil take the hindmost.
That’s why I call myself a civil libertarian. The actual Libertarians are kind of nuts, if not utter jerks.
Mystery of drain snake story was hilarious.
My first experience with Libertarianism was talking to a friend who got weirdly into Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and he started bitching about how he was paying for other people’s healthcare. He was 16 and only paid sales tax, so the Math really didn’t add up. When pressed on the issue he exposed his feelings that poor people dying from treatable illnesses was totally acceptable if they can’t cover the bill. His defense of everything was reciting her ethics like it was dogma.
It is Hilarious that a majority of Libertarians are people who have yet to actually function in society as an adult.
Spirit of Christmas Present: [quoting Scrooge] Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
I can’t help but think that most Libertarians, ugh I hate the word, it’s filthy in my mouth, fancy that it would be a better life in the Victorian Age. They always imagine themselves as Lords and Ladies, but are ever forgetful that they would most probably have been farmers or serfs.
I want to see a TV comedy series about a cannabis store on one side of state line where it’s legal, and a fireworks store on the other side of the state line, where THAT’S legal. The hippy, laid-back cannabis store owner and the hyper manic fireworks store owner don’t like each other, but they need to team up to deal with the mayors of the two towns, who don’t want either of those stores in their neighborhoods.
Call it “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire”
In regards to Rym’s hankering for some Final Fantasy 4, watching a longplay and skipping through the grindy bits might work. You can’t control who you talk to and they often don’t talk to everyone, but it’s a fuller experience than watching a speed-run.
I stopped going to PaxEast because I was bored. My favorite thing was hanging out, going to dinner together, playing mafia. Once people started taking on responsibility and being busy, it wasn’t fun anymore. Magfest still has that good feel.
My first con: Tokyo International Anime Fair - Wikipedia 2002
11 years. Hard to think it’s been THAT long, but it has.
Yeah, I do notice that most of the people who stopped coming to cons with us have no official ties to the cons. Enforcing East is a big part of why we all go, and it centers the experience.
I am looking a renting a big apartment for East next year though, Magfest style…
We really distilled our con experiences down to only cons that either have all our friends going (for the shared experience), or where the con itself provides the primary reason to be there.
Same. I used to go to PAX East because our close friend lives near Boston and it was an excuse to visit and we finally realized we really just wanted to visit and hang out so rather than spend all the money and effort on PAX we just visit Boston once a year and hang out.
Conventions provide a good excuse to get everyone together, in the context of a broader event. I like going to conventions even if I’m not doing much at the con, simply because I enjoy the context of the convention for the social interactions.
I think I’m actually the opposite.
I’d rather hang out with my friends in a smaller more “intimate” setting, like someone’s house, than a large convention. I end up going to conventions because they’re a good excuse for my friends to congregate together, but I’d prefer to hang out without the convention.
This is the same reason my group of friends all quit our university anime club and formed our own unofficial anime club with blackjack and hookers in one friend’s apartment. We didn’t like dealing with the unwashed anime masses and built our ivory tower where we could watch fansubs without the president wringing her hands about copyright and we could drink and socialize with socially competent people.
This is how my boardgame group mostly formed. I went to my local store’s open boardgame night for a while, met some cool people, and we started playing at our houses and stopped going to the store’s boardgame night.