wraelk
1yr ago
I've noticed a number of sit-down places, not even chains, that do put the calorie counts on their menu, without this legislation.
wraelk
1yr ago
The question is, of course, how many of them change their voting behavior based on this?
Because if those votes reliably end up in the same hands every time, it doesn't really matter what their more nuanced opinions are.
wraelk
1yr ago
There's value in changing brands as a result of controversy, even if the company getting your money remains the same.
If Gillette sales suddenly dip by 50% and Braun picks up those sales, even if P&G ends up with the same number of sales, there are a bunch of factories that are going to be retooled or closed, a bunch of people that are going to be hired and fired or moved to different divisions that may have offices in different areas. Those are costs, and those are visible events among the executives of the company. To say nothing of the cost of running the ad in the first place: while marketing has some issues with showing its actual effects, the underlying theory is you increase your sales.
Yes, it's technically possible for them to just repeatedly bait and switch you: once you're established with Braun they do something exactly as controversial. But what then? You're not going back to Gillette. Maybe there's a third P&G brand that makes razors that you go to, but sooner or later you'll move outside P&G's ecosystem for your razor, unless they're spending even more money to set up new brands as fast as they collapse. Maybe you still buy their shampoo, but it's not like there's a binary "yes they're our customer/no they're not our customer" thing here where once you buy one P&G product they've won. They want your shampoo money and your razor money and your lotion money and every other bit of money they can get from you, and insofar as you move away from that that's a failure of their profit-seeking goals.
It probably won't bankrupt them as a company, but that's probably an unrealistic goal in the first place. What it will do is send a clear signal "hey, doing this thing that you thought would make you money is instead costing you money", and that's both attainable and effective for changing behavior.
wraelk
1yr ago
Have you tried just blocking everything you don't like with uBlock Origin? There are probably prettier filters out there somewhere, but i got it down to what felt like a reasonable website experience by just cutting out everything I even slightly disliked using "block element" on right-click.
No, I actually think this is right on the money for how a boycott should go.
Bud Light tries a marketing tactic and immediately sees its sales crater: even if the sales are going to its other Anheuser-Busch brands there are real costs in having to drop large amounts of production on one brand and move it to another.
Plenty of people work for Bud Light but not AB, and if they have to cut, say, a quarter of production those people are at least having their lives disrupted and possibly being laid off and replaced. Even if AB's sales stay completely level, that will be a significant event.
Meanwhile, they paid for that privilege: that was a marketing campaign that was intended to raise sales. And the people at the top of AB who are at least going to casually glance at new marketing campaigns are the same ones who had to reorganize after this Bud Light stuff. If AB goes under the company that replaces it is determined by market demands plus luck, with no guarantee they won't be more ideologically opposed to our Bud Light boycotters.
Instead, AB sticks around and learns the lesson "don't waste money on the trans stuff" which is what the boycotters wanted in the first place. Not only is it the most direct goal, it's much more attainable than trying to take out the largest brewery in the US.
In addition to this, cancel culture is an ethereal and poorly defined thing, but this all feels a lot more pure to me than it could be. Brand does advertising, consumers change their purchasing behavior of the brand as a result. No major agitating for collateral damage, not even really that much of a push to get people fired*, just "we're not going to buy this anymore because of what you did with it, you figure out what happens next".
*I'm sure people on Twitter were loudly calling for both, but it seems like the impact on a consumer level was much bigger. I would ideally just have people change their purchasing behavior and make a relatively-quiet confirmation of "yes this is about the Mulvaney thing", and this feels like a step in that direction if not in any way perfect.
wraelk
2yr ago
Honestly, until the 5.5e controversy reared its head, I hadn't even considered the issues with making races feel thematic after the "swap abilities wherever you want" rules change: I was much more focused on having a lot more exciting build space, because 5e characters feel so shallow that any way to get more customization and interesting mechanical parts of a character was a big deal.
I wonder if that's part of the reason there's not more outcry against this, that established players are just excited to have more customization levers again. Because it's really easy to get through 5e and kind of be "done" with archetypes: you just don't have that many decision points to make in a lot of them. When you've played your third Variant Human Fighter (this time with a halberd!), getting to usefully play a Tiefling Fighter feels like a breath of fresh air.
I think the real thing a lot of these players want is a deeper system, where being "dwarf" doesn't mean you're doing the same thing every time: you can be a big tough mountain guy but play to different parts of that for different characters and thus "dwarf fighter" doesn't define most of your character. Pathfinder 2e's racial feats seem like they cover this, but mainstream D&D clearly wants to be a lot simpler.
If it wasn't so, some races would be at a numerical disadvantage.
Interestingly, I think the reason they're looking at this from a non-political perspective is because this kind of was the case for 5e: a great many races got passed over for serious character creation because there were better options. Optimizing characters in 5e often fell to one of:
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Variant Human: got ability bonuses in whatever abilities you wanted, got a free feat at level 1. Worked for basically anything, and often got fighter builds relying on specific feats up and running up to 3 levels earlier than they normally would.
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Half-Elf: got 4 extra ability points instead of most races that capped out at 3, 2 of which were in CHA (a useful spellcasting stat) and the other 2 could be in any. Had a grab bag of useful abilities like darkvision, access to a powerful racial feat, and save bonuses.
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Aaracokra: could fly as long as they weren't using armor, which would make casters largely untargetable for much of the early levels (typically the most dangerous phase of a campaign for casters).
Part of the issue was that the balance was a little off, but part of the issue was that things often had to line up just right to make a race playable. Take Mountain Dwarf for example: +2 ability points in both STR and CON , free proficiency with some strong melee weapons, and free medium armor proficiency. But while this all lines up thematically, when you combine them with an actual class it starts falling apart. STR and CON bonuses say Fighter/Barbarian, but they don't care about the extra proficiencies, they get them already. Those would be better suited to a weaker class that doesn't get armor like Wizard, but now you're wasting the ability points that were a big reason you were choosing that race in the first place: a Wizard generally won't care about Strength. Or Bugbear, which got a neat ability (extra reach with melee attacks) but got a +2STR/+1DEX ability bonus, which was generally guaranteed to waste some points since a melee character will generally focus in STR or DEX but not both. It's no accident that the races that did well are very generically useful stats and bonuses.
In a late 5e book they basically got rid of racial bonuses: each race gets the same quantity of ability bonuses, but an optional rule now says you can swap them into other abilities: your Mountain Dwarf still gets +2/+2, but the STR becomes INT and now you have your heavily-armored wizard with all his traits working together well.
This helped a lot with opening up other races: tons of builds that weren't really going to come together now worked well, and even if they weren't as optimized as just running the old straight lines they worked, particularly good news for players that have played many campaigns and have run through all the cookie-cutter builds. But it was kind of a weird thing thematically, because now you're really inclined to play directly opposite tropes. A Goblin Rogue doesn't make any sense, because the Goblin's nimbleness overlaps with the Rogue's nimbleness and wastes space (they both get similar features that you wont' want of). Instead you want a Goblin Wizard, or even a Goblin Barbarian, because now the Goblin abilities are completely new to the class. And I think that kind of points at why people don't want classic racial bonuses, mechanically.
5e is a really condensed game, trying to simplify away from earlier editions' huge slew of bonuses. And in the process they've reduced how many levers they can pull to incentivize things: everything overlaps with everything else, it doesn't stack. This means there's a limit to how much you can optimize on any one axis: you can't build out in one direction, the game doesn't have any new bonuses to hand you other than deep in the class trees. So instead you build wide, trying to eliminate character weaknesses, and in the process run into an inherent conflict. A Gnome fighter works better than a Dwarf fighter, because they aren't giving a Dwarf things a fighter doesn't already have, but a Gnome can branch out into new things. The race-tied ability bonuses end up heavily reducing build space and promoting feel-bad decisions, because now you have to choose between good stats and good bonuses, and a lot of the time the less-exciting but very powerful stat bonuses win out.
wraelk
2yr ago
Making my way through the Wheel of Time: I read many of the books as a child but had difficulty finding them in order at the library, and as a result feel like I missed out. With the Amazon series coming out, felt it was a good time to go through them start to finish. I'm just a little bit into A Crown of Swords now.
Judging by the reread, something happened after the first two books: I mostly remember those events, but everything else is disjointed, I think there were characters I didn't care about as a kid and so wasn't really paying attention to.
Honestly holds up well, and I'm impressed by how many "main" characters they can keep going, and how willing they are to move characters in and out of viewpoint status, as their importance to the story changes. The magic system is also very good, keeping a good balance between standard fantasy tropes and weird creative stuff that characters can innovate with.
Still at least implies the toothless guy was attracted to the toothless girl, even if the converse wasn't true.
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