I figured I'd pay for a month of Netflix so that the movie creators would get paid.

I paid and THEN Netflix asked for a phone number. Why do they need a phone number when we all know SMS spoofing is trivial?

At this point, I hadn't even logged in, and I was done with Netflix. Then and there, I cancelled my subscription.

However, the next day, I was able to log in with no problem. No phone number needed.

Alright. I figured I could use the month's worth of Netflix I paid for. I searched for the movie and tried watching it. I couldn't.

• "You can't use a VPN"
• "Your browser doesn't let us spy on you enough"
• "Honestly we're just tempting you to get this movie through piracy lol"
• "Nah, we don't care about you. We care about profits xoxo"
• "Nah. No refunds. We warned you"

I don't know what I was thinking.

Oh yeah, I wanted to support artists. But Netflix made it impossible. What a joke.

Why do this? Because surveillance capitalism wants you to be less free. It wants you to be glued to the screen. It wants you to buy whatever advertisers want you to buy. But you can fight back by deliberately poisoning your data.

I used to not really care about stationery. That changed when my uncle showed me his fountain pen. I had never used one before. I couldn’t believe how smooth it was. He suggested I went to stores and tried different pens. That way, I’d find what I like. And that’s exactly what I did in the last couple of weeks.

I found out exactly what I like at a price that is reasonable for me. When I now have to write something by hand, I get excited about it!

Everyone will have different tastes, but here’s what I learned for myself:

• Lamy Safari Rollerball sucks*. I thought I was getting a pen for life, but the ink flows inconsistently. This same problem has been reported by other people online. This pen was not designed for rollerball. It was designed as a fountain pen.
• InkJoy Gels are alright. They’re an improvement over normal ballpoint pens, but they’re not as good as other gel pens, such as the G-Tec-C4.
• G-Tec-C4 is my new go-to. They’re relatively cheap and the experience of writing with them is amazing.
• I rediscovered mechanical pencils. I tried one that had buttery-smooth lead. I fell in love. I won’t buy any yet, because I have pencils at home, but I know what I will eventually buy (a metallic mechanical pencil with Uni lead).
• Point balls are not my thing. I haven’t found one I like. Unfortunately, they are probably the most environmentally friendly pen that is both convenient and cheap. If someone has a good recommendation, I’m open.
• Fountain pens are amazing for writing, but they’re not resilient. I need pens that will survive my life. I fling my backpack around. I don’t want to have ink spill all over. A fountain pen is an amazing writing experience that doesn’t fit naturally in my life. I could be wrong. Are there resilient fountain pens?

*Edit: I said this because I used my Lami Safari Rollerball in smooth paper. However, what I said stopped being true the instant I tried the Lami Safari Rollerball in rougher paper. Thanks, [email protected] for the heads up!

Writing scenario keys can take time, especially if you do it following the footsteps of Justin Alexander.

In particular, writing everything that characters see at a glance when they walk into a new area in a box can make everything a bit harder to prep. You've got to build boxes again and again, a box for every area. And not only that, but you've got to create boxes for normal text and also for headers or lists… It's so many boxes.

To supposedly make your life easier, you can create styles called "boxed text" and "boxed heading", and 'just' apply that to text, but even that is clunky: finding styles and applying them is not the fastest process, and sometimes you make mistakes that aren't that easy to fix. For example, what happens if you change your mind and you want the "boxed heading" to be a first-level heading instead of a second-level heading? Or if you want to reduce the size of every font in the document by 2pts? There may be LibreOffice experts who have learned the tricks to do this, but when I tried doing it it was a pain in the butt.

Markup languages are a better solution

So is there a better solution? Yes. Markup languages. With those languages, you write things once and then you export it as a PDF. Quick. Nice. Right.

How does it look? Here's an example. If I want boxed text, I only write boxed_text[]. That's it.

Here's how it would look in the editing document:

boxed_text[
= Area 1: Entrance to the Dungeon
- Burlap sacks everywhere (GM Note: From previous adventurers preparing to enter)
- A wall filled with scrapes made with swords. The scrapes spell out names and dates
- A metal door, scraped with the word "Don't"
]

Markup languages are faster

Wait. Isn't that more complicated than using LibreOffice? Surprisingly, no. Plenty of coders will tell you that using the keyboard efficiently is way faster than using the mouse efficiently. A mouse has one or two buttons you can press. However, a keyboard has five or ten times more buttons, because you can use all ten fingers. Additionally, a mouse takes time to move around and aim at your click target. This may seem like counting pennies, but in my experience going from a mouse to learning to use a keyboard is like going from walking to learning to use a bike: learning to use a bike takes time, but once you learn how to do it, you'll go way faster than when you were just walking!

Markup languages help you keep a history of your campaign

Another way in which markup languages are less complicated is how easily they help you keep a history of your campaign. You can do this easily with version control, such as Git or Jujutsu. With these tools, you can fearlessly make changes to your documents, and trust that your history is saved and easily accessible. You can keep at hand the information relevant for future sessions, and still be able to check on things from the past if you need so. For all of this to work, you need Git to be able to look at the files and understand them. However, this is cumbersome when you're dealing with .docx or .odt files because of how those files are structured and compressed. However, markup languages are transparent and easy to read, and that makes them great for version control.

So, where do you start? You can choose! There are a couple of markup languages systems that you could try, but here are the ones I'd recommend:

• Quarto
• Typst (the one I'm currently using)
• LaTex

So, once again, if you're preparing scenario keys, learning to use a markup language will make it easier and faster to write. It will also make it easier to keep a history of your campaign. It's an investment worth your time. So go check out a markup language!

Non-youtube mirror: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?__goaway_challenge=header-refresh&__goaway_id=abc75c6e815b76f4f3beac79bca740ef&__goaway_referer=https%3A%2F%2Finv.nadeko.net%2F&v=cpuutP6Df84

I run a table. One of the people at the table insisted that I checked out Daggerheart. So I did. And I was very pleasantly surprised.

Why? Well, I admit I had some prejudices against it. First, I sort of made up my mind when I saw the whole licensing issue, Daggerheart basically doing what Wizards of the Coast did with Dungeons and Dragons. But not only that, I also saw red flags in Daggerheart itself: minis.

I saw a video for Daggerheart where the thumbnail showed minis. I was out. I find minis so frustrating. They are in my list of things that I cannot care about. I care about dramatic stories, not combat simulation. I care about intrigue and character growth, not arithmetic. I saw that and assumed that Daggerheart was a combat simulator just like Dungeons and Dragons is. I didn't even pay attention.

But then my friend insisted that I read about Daggerheart. And so I did.

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that minis are optional. Even more importantly, I was shocked to find a game that effectively is Powered by the Apocalypse. I was especially relieved to not find rules for movement that require trigonometry or strange approximations (unlike Dungeons and Dragons, where there are grids and numbers everywhere).

I found a game that prioritized drama. Yes, it still simulates combat, but it does so in such a simple way that makes me happy to run it.

I’m excited! This would be the first game that I ever play when the game is just released. This would be the first game in which I don't even have to pitch to the table; the table already wants to play it.

Of course, these are my first impressions. Maybe they'll change. For now, I'm happy.

Disclaimer: I know LLMs don't "talk", but metaphors are efficient ways of conveying information.

If you're curious about what the LLM told me, the topic was Scrum and how it relates to complex adaptive systems. I was studying those topics by doing Project Zero's Visible Thinking Routines, and I was sending those thinking routines to an LLM to see what it replied with. The LLM told me that it's useful to see Scrum as a set of enablers and constraints. I thought "sure, I guess so", and didn't think much of it. That was months ago, and I hadn’t really thought about it since. However, that changed today.

Today, months later, I was reading about complexity and decision-making and I finally understood what enablers and constraints are.

Some time later, I was telling this story to my partner, and that's when the phrase "An LLM once told me…" came about.

In a way, this story could've happened differently and still been the same. The story could've been a video, a podcast, or even a book saying, in passing, that "It's useful to see Scrum as a set of enablers and constraints". I could've not really understood what that meant, but been okay with it. Then, months later, I could've found a document on the topic, read it, and finally understood what I didn't understand before. That could've been the story.

But in reality it was a bit different. The story happened with an LLM.

Things I've tried:

• Reading McKeown's Essentialism. It had some interesting ideas but it was also a very frustrating read.
• Reading The ONE Thing. It also had interesting ideas, but it didn't solve my problem.
• Understanding that I'm 'simply noticing the commitments I have'. This would be one of the GTD responses.

Things that could work if I did them differently:

• Values writing, WOOP, or the higher Horizons of Focus.

Things I'll try:

• Using Tiny Habits with GTD. In fact, this post itself is an attempt to get potential Tiny Habits!