Dr Simon PhD BA (Juris, Oxon) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

I had no intention of adding it but then there was so much push back, now here we are 🤷🏼‍♀️ Not sure why people get so heated about it. It means I worked hard to learn a lot about my specific thing, and that was formally recognised. That matters to me, but why should it bother anyone else?

A hugely underrated aspect of the Dune universe's appeal is how Frank Herbert built a world where people zip around the galaxy in spaceships but then fight each other with swords and knives. It makes everything 50 percent cooler than a world of ray guns and robots.

This is successful founder of Airtable Howie Liu & wife (she’s 3 years older). They have a great life together, new baby, and I’m sure he’s a loyal provider husband & dad. But she’s not genuinely sexually & romantically attracted to him. To deny this reality is cope.

We have spent £180m on plans for a tunnel under Stonehenge. The project is now scrapped. You can be for a tunnel & think spending is a good idea (even if you think the cost of planning is silly). You can be against a tunnel & think spending is a bad idea. But *nobody* can be for spending on this scale with zero result. And yet that is a peculiarly British outcome. Nobody will be reprimanded. Nobody will see their career affected. But that’s £180m of taxpayer money just wazzed up the wall. Totally without repercussions. Multiply this by airport expansions & train route plans and Thames crossings and power stations and other examples you can think of yourself, and… soon you’re talking serious money.

“In your narrative that you’ve built [as the DM].” Is the “Mercer effect” just railroading players? Is it removing player agency and choice? Is it that players should just follow the plot line of his story (novel) that he wants people to just act in?