Brooks Moses

• There are three sections in the list: "TODAY", "LANDING PAD", and ... I'm sure there was a name for it, but it's basically "THE LIST".


• Every morning, you go through THE LIST and select what you will work on that day, and move it to TODAY. Then you work on those things.


• When you think of things through the day, you note them in the LANDING PAD.
  


• At the end of the day, you take a bit of time to consider how the day went compared to the TODAY list, and whether you're expecting too much or too little. Then move whatever's left in TODAY back to THE LIST, along with whatever appeared in LANDING PAD.


• On a regular basis, clear things out of THE LIST that aren't getting done and can be jettisoned.

stewarthicks : I think in some ways the implementation was flawed, in that the "original" video often contained the contradiction of views within itself. You mentioned the tone being a bit uneven in a few spots, and I think some of that was that in parts of it you were genuinely talking about the good things in the architecture, and in parts of it you were talking about how "great" the thermal bridging and rust-stains were. And so the overall video contained a duality of being a "pro vs. con" video and being a "sarcastic criticism supported by thoughtful criticism" video.

With that said, I personally have two orthogonal appreciations for it. First, I enjoyed it as entertainment; it is a visceral delight to see some of these aspects of architecture being so well skewered in the ways that they deserve. Second, I appreciated it as an experiment; even though I agree with [the previous commenter] that it's flawed, it's trying something different and finding out what works and what doesn't, and making something new. That which doesn't change becomes repetitive, and I would guess that even if you don't do another video "like this one", your videos will still be more interesting in the future as a result of this.

Besides which, YouTube videos aren't public buildings; even if it is completely no good at all, it won't destroy a neighborhood in order to doom multiple generations of students to an uncomfortable, badly-climate-controlled, depressing, and terrible classroom experience. So you might as well try some things that are likely to be interesting failures every once in a while.

Meanwhile, I think this video succeeded in one of its goals: I now would be fascinated to see some deeper explorations of a lot of the topics that you touched on here. Certainly the practices of treating vibrant lower-class neighborhoods as tabula rasa to build a sweeping new vision of a mono-plan piece of city didn't start with Mies, or with the builders of IIT. Where did it start? What cultural and architectural forces fed it? Was it as big a thing in European cities as in the U.S., and if so, was it at similar times or much earlier because the cities are older? Then, with Mies and the "minimalist" movement: Insofar as the minimalist movement takes Meis as its patron saint, how much was and is it following what he actually intended, and how much is it a misunderstood and minimalized corruption of his ideas? What are the corruptions missing? This architecture seems to have some commonalities with the Craftsman ideal of "honesty of materials", but also differences in that some commenters mentioned that those steel beams are not actually structural in the way they appear -- how did Mies and its other originators think about that connection? Some other commenters mentioned that one of the things that distinguishes genuine Mies buildings from bad imitations is a precise use of proportion and spatial relationships -- is it perhaps that minimalist buildings are not so much inherently bad but inherently difficult, and so they show shortcomings in design and maintenance far more than maximalist buildings? And perhaps the failings of the IIT campus and surroundings are not because of the minimalism so much as because the minimalism lays bare the places where Mies's architecture missed the mark, and the places where the maintainers and city planners very definitely did?

In any case, I am fascinated by the video many paragraphs after having watched it, and I would be delighted if you were to produce videos going further into any or all of this. Even if, and perhaps especially if, the videos are their own experiments with their own unique and interesting ways of missing some marks.

There's a certain amount of "if the players don't like playing with mental-compulsion effects, find some different kinds of tools to play with" that applies here, but I think you could also do some useful things with pulling from how ADHD and OCD and depression and other sorts of real-world compulsions and altered mental states affect people. Instead of simply saying "you can't" or "you must", give them some mechanical consequences.

One option, drawing somewhat from depression, is "you believe that this line of thinking is entirely in character." When the character is compelled to act a certain way, what happens is that the reasons they would do that thing feel very important and easy to imagine, and all the reasons that they would not do that thing feel very unimportant (if not entirely false) and difficult to imagine. The world to you looks like a world in which doing the thing is something you would completely-in-character choose to do. (But I'd notice that something has changed? Maybe, but this affects how you perceive the past as well as the present. Roll a wisdom check to see if you actually can tell something's up. And even if you pass, the world still looks very wrong so it's quite difficult to figure out what's real and what's compulsion, especially since it's mostly in gradiations of things.)

Another, drawing somewhat from OCD, is sure, you can avoid the compulsion. Roll a willpower check to do anything else. Difficulty increases each time you do. Fail the willpower check, and you don't do anything. Take disadvantage to intelligence and perception, because you're distracted, and that gets worse the longer you avoid the compulsion. Soon you're also taking constitution hits, because the stress levels are making you physically ill. If you successfully avoid it long enough, you're a shaking immobile lump. But, sure, you can avoid it if you want to.

Or, drawing somewhat from ADHD, doing anything else requires fighting distraction constantly, and fighting minor physical discomforts, and those distractions always lead back around to thinking about the thing you're being compelled to do. Alternately, if you are thinking about that thing, there's a penalty to perceiving anything that would be related to doing something else. Your party member is yelling at you not to put the chalice on the altar? Yes, they're right next to you -- but you still have to succeed on a difficult perception check to notice that it's not just some random unimportant noise. Waving hands in front of your face, or holding you back? Perception check to notice that there is some meaning attached to the gesture rather than just an annoying impediment with no more meaning than mud on your glasses or a stuck boot.

Hypnosis and mind-altering drugs of various sorts could also be relevant here, as sources to pull from. Can you ignore the hallucination? Sure you could -- but would you, in character, actually ignore a ten-foot-tall fire-breathing evil paladin bearing down on you with a greatsword and screaming "die" in ways that are causing rocks to literally fall from the ceiling? And, if you do, are you then able to ignore the feeling that your arm has been cut off, with consequent gushing of blood and feelings of faintness? Maybe if you crit on a perception check to tell that this is a hallucination, and also crit on a willpower check to believe it, but even so, that hallucinated paladin is still going to be remarkably distracting and affect your other rolls.

But, yeah, if the players just want to argue their way out of the hallucinated paladins and warped perceptions rather than having fun with the consequences, maybe for that group of players it's better to stick to the real paladins attacking them.