ZDL

I'm pretty sure that my point was clear: "never" is a very fucking long time when it is already happening.

But sure, go get your feelings hurt. Buhbye.

Realities on the ground outside of the USA say otherwise. Here, for example, after a huge push toward ownership of individual vehicles, an ever-increasing proportion of those vehicles are permanently parked. Outside my window, for example, there's a square that is filled with cars parked bumper to bumper that haven't moved in the past year or two. Technically they're owned and would certainly be counted in ownership statistics, but it is physically impossible for any but the four cars at the end of the square to even be taken out of the lot.

Why?

Because the advantage of private ownership has been whittled away slowly but steadily over the past 20 years.

There was a time that a private vehicle was the only practical means to cross the two rivers (Han and Yangtze) that divide the city. Buses of the time were hideously uncomfortable, highly unreliable, and painfully slow. Going from my home to the then-largest park in the city (Zhongshan park) was a good 2.5-3 hour trip by bus. By car, even through traffic jams (which buses had to go through as well, obviously), it was 1-1.5 hours instead.

Today that same trip is slightly lower by car (cut off about fifteen minutes because of the Yangtze tunnel) but by metro it's about 25 minutes. And you don't have to hunt around for increasingly rare parking, then pay for that parking on top of it. And then repeat that when you get back home. More and more people aren't bothering to drive at all, leaving their cars in long-term parking "just in case" and that case never comes.

Personally I haven't owned an automobile since the second line of the Wuhan Metro opened, and the bus service got upgraded to serve it. There's no point. The rare times I need to use a personal vehicle in specific, taxi services are more than sufficient. For the price of a car I could use, after all, a taxi to go from one end of the city to the other and back every day. For two years. That very infrequent case of needing a taxi is a trivial expense compared to just the purchase price of a car (not including insurance, maintenance, fuel/electricity, etc. etc. etc.).

So "never" is a really long time that's ending as I watch.

The Apartheid Manchild has this weird obsession with Mars.

There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next decade. (I frankly doubt that there will even have been human footprints on Mars in the next decade!) There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next century. There will likely be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next millennium. And I'm saying that last one not because I don't think we'd have the technology in a thousand years, but rather because there is no point in living on Mars.

Mars has nothing we need that's worth maintaining a settlement in the face of conditions harsher than the absolute worst the Earth has to offer. If people want to live in a permanently cold shithole with nothing usefully accessible they can just build a house on Antarctica. It's a far cheaper way to fuck around and find otu.

Read George Polti's The 36 Dramatic Situations. It's a list of plot elements that have a snappy title, a list of participants in the plot element, a brief discussion of how it works, and then (unfortunately dated) references to dramas that used them.

Using this when building a world, or a campaign, or a local setting, lets you quickly set up a bunch of conflicts (ideally with interlaced participants so that single NPCs (or PCs) can be in different roles in different dramatic situations. Then you just let the events flow logically, and as the dramatic situations get resolved you get a plot. PCs can interfere with these dramatic situations and thus have an impact on resulting plots even if the overall setting is far larger than they are.

For depth in world-building I use a rule I call "Y-cubed". (I got it from somewhere else but can't recall the source anymore.)

For every detail you make, you ask the question "Why" three times.

So a village the characters have reached stop all work every 77 days for a festival. Why? It celebrates an ascended local hero who saved the village from a magical blight. Why 77 days? It took 77 days for effort for the blight to be defeated. ... And so on.

This is a rapid way to both build depth in your setting quickly, as well as inspire possible mysteries and intrigue for investigation later.

A slight modification works also for giving NPCs depth.

Anybody who thinks that the Apartheid Manchild was ever intending on reducing spending needs to be given a dunce hat and forced to sit in the corner.

Robert's cynicism is cracking these days soon. His laughter is increasingly forced and joyless.

These are shit times.

I am not sure what you mean by saying the CPC isn’t Communist anymore.

The CPC has never been communist.

It's socialist.

The number drops a bit when the polls are done in secrecy. Still far higher than any western government, mind.

To clarify for any pseudo intellectual who happens to be reading:

" is true for you utter idiot" is not an example of the ad hominem fallacy.

" is true because you're an utter idiot" is an example of the ad hominem fallacy.

Glad to be of service.

Have you considered taking a communications course so you don't sound like a pretentious, obfuscating jackass?

Eschew gratuitous obfuscation. (See what I mean?)

In AI alone, we lead the world.

*Deep Seek has entered the chat.*