My hypothesis is this is tolerable for iced coffee but it would be too much with hot coffee. I feel like the scent alone would be too strong.

I’ve worked with people who read Capital annually and I can’t get them to show up to an action on time or to get through it without calling a mentally ill unhoused person a reactionary.

I’ve worked with people who haven’t skimmed the manifesto but work every week getting food for their communities.

The latter are much better to work with.

Ideal conditions would mean organizers are all super politically literate and active, but I agree with you that you can’t expect every member of a movement to read stuff like this as a prerequisite to organizing. Cadre members? Of course they should read. But the fascists aren’t making general members read hefty political tomes.

There’s people who won’t like me saying this, but I put a pin in the revolution talk to work on what’s immediate.

Like you, I’ve tried local groups and found they tend to have small, disconnected local chapters and actions sometimes have questionable efficacy.

I think some of this comes from being so focused on “the revolution”. I get it, groups like PSL don’t want to get bogged down becoming a band-aid organization. They want to get rid of the broken system, not be a food bank in a system designed to make people hungry. I’ve done the reading so I understand where they’re coming from here.

But then I attend meetings with groups that have about 10 regular attendees who mostly seem to tell each other to read more theory and paint a lot of banners. They get frustrated that the revolution didn’t come after the latest sit-in, call each other every political science term in the book, and break off to form an even smaller, less effective group.

What I’m trying now are advocacy groups for specific causes I care about. They more often seem to include members of impacted communities and have a better idea of their needs.

I actually can’t tell if the whole “this is urgent you need to hurry” in an open world game is a new trend or not but I see it everywhere too.

Earliest I can think of is Skyrim. Everything was a big emergency. Finish one quest and the character dialogue was like “Another dragon attack! You need to get to this next quest right away! Hurry!”. But it’s supposed to be game designed for screwing around. I can’t help but feel it’s influenced this trend.

Playing Oblivion re-mastered I’m realizing Oblivion wasn’t this way. The stakes were high but much more of the dialogue was like “Ready yourself, take the time you need, and we’ll talk next steps”. There’s important stuff to handle but exploring dungeons was treated as you getting prepared to handle the big bad.

Impending dragon attacks in Skyrim, missing son in Fallout 4, turning into a mindflayer in Bg3. These feel urgent, not conducive to exploration and meeting everyone and crafting potions and shopping for deals on weapons.

All that being said I had the same problem in Bg3. Didn’t long rest enough in the beginning because of it.

Replaying Bg3 makes me realize how pointless poisons are most of the time.

Anyone beefy who I might like to debuff or DOT is inexplicably immune to poison, blindness or falling asleep. Not even just bosses, feels like anyone I can’t kill in two rounds with Lae’zel is immune to these poisons I lovingly made.

Some elixirs are cool though.

Creating nonexistent patterns in an attempt to understand it. There was a cluster of hand killings near a small town in Kyrgyzstan and there’s no way that could just be random chance.

No graphite on the roof.