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Cake day: July 5th, 2024

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  • No, not even close.

    I’ve used Unix systems for years at work, and have dual-booted windows with various flavors of Linux at home for just as long. When I just need something to work, particularly something new or after a stressful day at work, I just use windows.

    Why? Because it will just work. Maybe it won’t work precisely how I want it to, maybe it will send all my data to Bill’s push notifications, but it will run. In the rare case it doesn’t, a quick google will fix it.

    Compare that to Linux, where most things will work most of the time. And when they don’t, you get to hunt through GitHub issues off-the-clock like a peasant, wading through comments from people with entirely different configurations and ‘dunno it works for me’.

    Linux is for tinkerers, and for people who want a Unix shell and can’t afford a Mac, it has a long way to go to be more than that.



  • DnD good and evil are distinct from common usage of the terms; they are cosmic forces, objective truths. Each action reverberates through the higher and lower planes and tilts the scales towards victory for one side or another in their eternal struggle. This lore doesn’t leave a ton of room to change the alignment of entire races (and that is by design, structure makes it easier for people to get in to the setting).

    But this is just in the established settings, any DM is free to homebrew any setting and justification they like.

    Note that I am not trying to defend this as the height of storytelling, it isn’t. It is a consequence of how the setting is justified - with deities being active participants, having specific rules for granting and revoking powers, and the physical presence of higher and lower planes embodying perfect conceptions of ‘good’, ‘evil’, order, chaos, etc. All of this can be changed, and again any DM is free to change it, but the ‘deep lore’ of the established settings over the past 40 years is drenched in this stuff.

    One way to consider it is simply - the Drow aren’t evil because they are Drow. The Drow are evil because their culture promotes actions that align with the literal true definition of evil that is present in the setting. Evil doesn’t mean bad, it is just a label aligning with some physical rule of the universe. Just like the positive charge of a proton and negative charge of an electron are labels for physical rules of our own universe. Positive isn’t any better than negative, but they are inherently distinct.