The first half of the description, combined with the unmentioned ambition of LotR, made me think of Star Citizen. But we’ll have to wait another 5-10 years to find out if they manage to deliver on that ambition, and stand the test of time.

Glad to see this! I don’t remember the password for my old lemm.ee account, but this was the only community I could think of that I would have missed from my subscriptions, so now you’ve saved me the effort of going looking for it.

He’s actually trying to make them destroy each other so his handlers for the UAE can fill the power vacuum afterwards.

I wonder if they’re just telling him it succeeded, to keep him from ordering another one.

The new analysis contradicts the social media platform’s claims that exposure to hate speech and bot-like activity decreased during Elon Musk’s tenure.

They might both be right. I know my exposure to hate speech and bot-like activity decreased since I stopped engaging with that platform.

I can’t speak from real life experience, but one movie that actually handles this really well (as far as I can tell) is The Quiet Man, during a fight.

There’s an example of an impromptu, casual bet between two individuals who are understood to trust one another, where they actually set the odds and agree formally, and it all happens very smoothly and naturally so as not to be boring:

“Five to one on the big chap”

“Given or taken?”

“Given”

“Taken”

Handshake

IIRC, they don’t actually show them agreeing on the wager itself, but a later scene shows the outcome and lets you calculate it for yourself. These characters are established to know one another, so I figure they either have a known amount between them that they default to for casual bets, or they just determined that off camera.

There is also an example of the more chaotic, mass, unplanned betting, where a character who is already established to be a jack of all trades known to the community pulls out a notebook and takes on the role of bookie. I think they even show the odds being adjusted in real time as the fight progresses, but I don’t recall for sure.

Makes me wonder if the actual public squares, sans idealization, were also a place for morons to be morons and heart each other for being morons.