So today I decided to ditch instant messaging / texting / whatever in favor of longform emails, phone calls (which I'm terrible at), and proper physical letters.

I want to focus on the physical letters part because that's a skill I'd like to train, but I only have a couple people who it looks like will go through with that. Most will either let me float away (understandably!) or will contact me in the more convenient ways I'm allowing myself to engage in. So after playing Kind Words, I'm thinking that writing to strangers could be a fun exercise! This could be a couple people meeting here and writing letters, or it could be a whole thing, depending on interest. Casual letters are beautiful things, let's try to make some :)

If you want to participate, please post at least the following:

Age group:
Topics of interest:
Country / Region (please don't post your address, that can be done through PMs):

Hey, friends. I'd like to take a few minutes of your time to talk and converse. Please, feel free to join in. I'm not trying to make any points or whatnot, but I need to get this out of my head.

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that there is a lot going on these days. I know that there's always a lot going on, but it just seems to be on my mind a lot more than it used to. I'm unsure if it's because things out there actually are heating up, if the current news cycle is finally paying some attention, if I'm just more interested/aware as I get older, or if it's some combination of these. Regardless, it just seems like there's so much to think about.

To begin, there's the domestic stuff. We have an inevitable recession coming our way sooner than later (recessions being a feature of our application of Capitalism, after all), and, of course, the mess in the other Washington. I'm doing my best to keep up with the impeachment, while not letting it really "get to me". As I get older, I find that I care more and more about the wellbeing of my country, and the utter shame that is this current administration makes me genuinely concerned for the health of our nation and the people in it. I cannot help but think to myself that I am watching the arguably most significant political crisis since Watergate unfolding before me - live, in real-time. It's wild, as you know that you live through history in the making, but you never really think that you're going to live through something of this caliber.

While I'm hopeful that our own brush with populism will turn out OK (our 3 branch government is remarkably robust), I still worry about us and the other countries that are dealing with it now too. We have Bolsonaro and Duerte, Brexit and Trump. We have the mess in Bolivia, and frankly I still don't exactly have my head wrapped fully around what the hell is actually going on there. We have the trickery of Putin and his loyal cronies. Even populism aside, we have the unrest and violence in Lebanon, Syria, Chile and Iran. And of course, let's not forget our friends in Hong Kong.

I look at the HK situation and feel extra helpless. I was 7 when Tiananmen Square happened, and I kinda remember it. I certainly remember tank man on the news, but that was about it. I see what's going on in Hong Kong and I cannot get past the feeling that they're literally fighting a losing battle for their lives. I can't imagine how they'll survive this without getting steamrolled, unless a foreign power steps in. You know that'll alter the course of the 21st century. I mean, hell. Even if things turn out rosy, this is still probably one of the most significant events of this century. And here I am, watching it in real-time again.

This isn't even touching on the literal concentration camps that China is running for the Uighur Muslims. Shit, even my own country is running camps for children right now. How TF does this even happen? By the time half of us even find out, these camps have already been up and running for a good while. What can you even do?

Then there is a the ever-looming specter that haunts us and feels inescapable: global warming. I don't think I need to elaborate on this one, just a quick peek at the fires and floods, droughts and melting glaciers says it all. Again, we're along for this ride in an enormous mechanism that individually we are wholly powerless against. I sincerely hope that we do manage to engineer our way out of the worst of climate change, but I am honestly not hopeful that we will limit our emissions enough to keep us under the 4° warming that we're seemingly on the trajectory for. I sure won't be alive in 2100, but my youngest nibblings just might - or at least their kids will be. What kind of world are we leaving for them?

How will these things affect and feed off each other? Will we look at the period between WWII and the early 21st century as one of unusual peace and prosperity?

This stuff keeps me up at night, and sometimes it feels like doing your best is just a vain exercise in futility. I know it's not, in that everyone doing their best would make huge changes, and that no matter what happens, I can go to my grave in good conscience knowing that I did what I could. Still, some days it all feels like too much, you know?

Anyway, thank you for listening to me, and letting me talk. There's a few people in my life that share the same concerns, but it's hard to find anyone to talk to about the breadth of all this shit that there is to worry about.

So, anonymous strangers on the internet, how are you feeling about the world situation these days?

A recent discussion got me thinking about how a lot of the standard genre descriptions for games are either opaque to the unfamiliar or seemingly incongruous with what they are describing. Almost any game can be described as a "role playing" game because you "play" the "role" of a given character. Adventure games often aren't very "adventurous" and often just mean that characters talk to each other instead of shoot each other. In survival games you survive; in racing games you race; in casual games you... well, usually match 3 but not always? Also why are we so focused on camera for some games (e.g. first-person shooter) but not for others (e.g. third-person sports)?

So, let's throw away everything we know about genres and start fresh. No baggage from gaming history; no widely understood conventions; no games that reference other games (e.g. "Souls-like"). Your goal is to make gaming genres as clear and accurate as possible, at the expense of convenience, tradition, and, in some cases, good taste.

Turn "roguelike" into "procedural death labyrinth". Turn "battle royale" into "shrinking-zone dead-is-dead killfest". Feel free to propose not just genre redefinitions but whole a whole taxonomy if you feel it's warranted. After all, some genres need a hierarchy of identifiers.

Be as formal or loose as you want, and the main purpose of this is to have fun, though if some great new terms happen to fall out of it you won't hear me complaining.

I've been noticing a couple of weird formatting issues with tags on topics. For some posts, the first tag is shown before the metadata, then the rest of the tags are on a new line below. This isn't always the case, and so far I can't find any rhyme or reason for whether it does or not. It's not like some CSS float issue or anything, it's actually creating two <ul>'s. — example

The second issue I've noticed is sometimes the dangling part of a letter like lowercase "g" will be cut off by the footer. It seems like this is caused by .label {line-height: 1.2;}, but it's also inconsistent, and I haven't figured out why. In this example the "g" in "climate change" is not affected.

Maybe it's just me, I dunno. Firefox 70 on linux. I'd create a gitlab issue, except I am very lazy.

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?