They tend to be dress shoes or workboots nearly exclusively, and as styles have changed, there's little growth in the industry.

It was great for a bit! I felt more well dressed, I was always comfortable, and it was incredibly functional.

Now I realize I like fun clothes too much to stick to the uniform always. But it's nice to have it around to fall back on.

This is how the fediverse works, and it's _vastly_ better than any subscription service (not least because it means that anyone, regardless of financial situation, can find a server to be a part of.)

There's a fedi version of Reddit (lemmy) but it seems to have been a bit of a half-cooked design, rather than something that could truly take over for Reddit anytime soon.

edit: source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

Maybe "the library" concept reeks too much of socialism for the average individualistic American.

But the tool library near me is a group of old guys who volunteer to run it out of a church basement. No faceless Other, just a community of people who want to work with others and put in the work to keep it going.

I also live in a city with one of the highest-rated public transit systems in the US. The buses don't smell and they're affordable and provide great jobs to thousands of city residents while making it possible to cross the city for $2.50 (or $5 for the entire day.)

And lastly, no one is talking about "forcing" you to do anything. You're welcome to own your own set of tools if you don't want to use the libraries (I own a set of my own, but it can be much smaller because I can always pop by the library for something I don't own.) The commons are opt-in, aside from the rare cases where they need to be protected from people who refuse to be a part of the community that cares for the commons.

What's most important is that you get an electronics soldering _station_ of some type and not a basic plumbing/electricians iron that is just a pen on a cord. Those are extremely frustrating for working on a PCB.

Other interesting boat designers (this is sort of my obsession):

You might check out Matt Layden's designs for similar micro-cruisers.

A totally different but equally iconoclastic designer is Dave Zeiger, of TRILOBOATs. Those are great big liveaboard boats sailed up in Alaska, but they tend to be built on the cheap and breaking all the rules of traditional boat design.

The late Phil Bolger influenced Dave Zeiger, if you want to go even deeper. Well known for his "brick boats" and pioneering the "instant boat building" techniques that leverage plywood and epoxy.

There's also James Wharram, who pioneered Polynesian-style catamaran designs and making them at home, and is pretty much single-handedly responsible for the boom in catamaran designs we've seen over the last ~50+ years of yacht design.

OK, infodump over.

I definitely find writing a nicer experience with a pencil, a fountain pen, or a felt-tipped pen - ballpoints require too much pressure to be comfortable.

WotC also isn't really pushing narrative play mechanically, but instead culturally aligning itself on the sort of role-play-heavy style that's growing because of the broad success of Critical Role and others. Because of those shows, most people's conception of D&D includes lots of talking in character and extensive character backgrounds and long story arcs carefully planned by the GM, which are all pretty narrative in my book.

The real big difference between 2011-2012 and now (in my, albeit biased, opinion) is the popularity of the OSR (old-school renaissance.) The OSR has gone mainstream (I can find OSR material at my local game store now!) So while the narrative indie scene keeps developing and the OSR scene does as well, WotC is sort of caught in the middle, and players fall anywhere along the spectrum (even when ostensibly all playing D&D 5E, which has hacks and optional rules to push it one way or the other.) But imo most are pushed to the narrative side because that's what most people are exposed to in the form of Critical Role.

The author here seems to be someone still interested in the sort of narrative game evangelized by Wizards Of The Coast and popular D&D media like Critical role, which XP for gold would be a bit of an odd match for.

Additionally, one of the problems they encountered (players looting too much and leveling too fast) was of their own making, when they reduced the leveling thresholds by a factor of 10. Players won't worry about looting mundane objects worth 10gp if they know they need to get 6000 to level up - that effort is better spent on finding bigger hauls of treasure.

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