There is a whole sequence in the CRPG I'm playing where your character can shame someone for "looting the dead", and your paladin party member will gently be like "hey is that who you really want to be" to them. It is very funny to me.

I keep kneejerk wanting to fall back on some wry witticism, but like... this is bad. Like really bad, in a broad international stability sense.

i fear i must update common vernacular, in this case the devil's threesome. i can now confirm that having the flu and covid at the same damn time is in fact the most infernal threesome on record.

Broad rule: under tradpub structuring, if money is flowing from you as the author, you are being scammed. Other people will get paid *upstream* from you from the book's proceeds, but you shouldn't have to be writing people checks.

Tiny Tim, who lies dead but dreaming in forgotten Rl'yeh, where with strange aeons even death may die...

A procedure mask box converted into a candy bowl #justERthings

This is a v. cool thread even beyond interest in the game itself. A lot of games of all types do place violence as, if not the default option, than certainly as a primary option. Others try to discard it altogether. Neither is *wrong*, but it's interesting to consider violence as a failure state.

me and my decade long project took that personally

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is such a good comic series, and seeing bits of it brought to life in the teaser trailer is amazing. Like the line "Krypton didn't die in a day, the gods are not that kind." gives me goosebumps knowing the context in the series.

This is irresponsible coverage. You are not making the choice to speak with your loved one. You are making the choice to have a bot puppeteer their image. They are still dead and gone.

This has been a wildly stressful 30 days, but I appear to be coming out the other side intact so hey. A win is a win.

The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I'm just so pleased for capitalism that it finally found the sawdust to put in the bread that was art. And now we all get to consume it, wondering what percentage is what.

It's the moment many have been waiting for—the ChangedStars full catalogue (+EK) 50% off SALE! You'll be able to get it all half off across both itch and dtrpg!

we call it the mouth of a river but it's more like a river's anus if you stop and think about it #insomniathoughts

Hot take Tuesday! people finding exploits and broken rules in TTRPGs should be treated as a bad player issue, not a bad rules issue. No system of any kind has ever been perfect or proof against bad actors. And any energy spent trying to write a system that turns bad players good is wasted.

If I said that I think the Mortis Gods are actually a huge mistake vis a vis Star Wars, and that I wish they'd be reconned out instead of becoming important in the next season of Ahsoka... Is that a hot take or a lukewarm take?

i shall rise from this dumpster fire, rise, rise and soar, like a Phoenix composed purely of trash

There should be a Mary Shelley Award for debut sff femme writer or a Margaret Cavendish Award for most daring femme-written work. Just saying.

Well, I am 40. It is weird. I was "supposed" to die at 30, I had a whole plan laid out and everything. And then that didn't happen. And here I still am, ten years later. Hm.

I heard someone say today that they were "incapable of giving an unbiased review of [book series]", and it has left me in a rabbit hole of semantic self-debate. Like, I think I get what they meant -- their review would be altered by things outside the book series itself -- but... 😵‍💫

This morning a conversation with a friend has led me to analyze watching Farscape and Babylon 5 as a callow youth, and the impact this may have had on me hating the fuckin fash.

You know what just struck me? There's zero Predator vision in Badlands. Not one bit. That's so weird, given this is the Predator is the protagonist of this one. There's even a shot from his point of view specifically at one point, and it's just done as normal footage. Huh.

Normally one of my little boosters is I let myself get a Starbucks coffee on Monday morning each week. But ya boi does not cross picket lines. Might see what I can find elsewhere, but SB it will not be.

i am sorry but I cannot stand for this blatant body shaming of saturn

When I tell you Kit is an absolute purrbaby. Like she purrs so much. But you wouldn't know unless you can feel it because she has the quietest purr. Like you legit can't hear it unless she opens her mouth. Contest with Alley Cat, who I could hear purring from across a room.

No, like, I get it wacky inflatable flailing tube guy. Me too, buddy, me too.

Two people agreed today that I look and sound like Seth Rogen, and I dunno how I feel about that.

I saw a thing about how people are allowed to make villains unrepentent, sexy, and their protagonists. I'm curious about what prompted the assertion, which seemed to have a lot of people riled up but only in the "hell yah" sense. Is there some shortage of douche characters in recent fiction?

Recommend the new show Pluribus on Apple+. It's only three episodes in but so far it's really good IMO

Never underestimate a Tom when he is cornered but ALSO it would be great if I could summon these capabilities sans crises.

the trick obviously is to take a man, teach him to fish, let the man with a thousand fish take 1/3 of his fish because they were caught in "his lake" and then tax another third and use that to give subsidies to the man with a thousand fish, and make sure to never tax him ever because what if he left

It makes me viscerally angry that people this stupid are able to perpetuate so much evil in the world. Aragorn may have been the side of good given too much credit, but Increasingly it is clear Sauron was too competent an evil for the real world.

The tragic and inescapable problem of wanting to explore other romanceable characters, but there's the one character who draws you like gravity.

My PF2e setting hack features Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Beastfolk. Wild, I know! But in all seriousness, the whole project started as an exercise in deconstructing the tropes of the above and trying to reconstruct something interesting. What's your usual favorite among those five options?

Did not expect Predator Badlands to be both funny and heartwarming, but here we are. Loved it.

Thomas Parrott, the man who dares to ask the tough questions. Like "how much would a starfighter cost anyway" and "did the different cradles of civilization all invent swords independently"

Oh, okay, so other wearing pimple patches is "normal" and "okay", but I craft myself a full face black mask and haunt the forbidding tunnels underlying an opera house and suddenly I'm the weird one

Querying is always purported to be this grand meritocratic threshold -- if you're good enough, someone will rep you! -- and certainly it is true I have learned a lot about writing since my last time on the query-go-round. But mostly it filters me by feeling like a humiliation ritual.

Just tossing this out there...any publishers interested in a collection of Manly Wade Wellman inspired stories about a South Carolina ghostbreaker? Got haints, witches and devils of all stripes. Written by me, obviously, over the course of the last twenty years or so.

*sees poster* *twitches* *coughs* *shivers* ... 🗣️THERE ARE NOOO CATS IN AMERICA AND THE STREETS ARE MADE OF CHEEEEESE🗣️

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One of my fuck about projects lately has been taking the AD&D module Temple of Elemental Evil, and wholesale adapt it to the cosmology, geography, and politics of the current PF2e remaster state of Golarion. Will I ever use it? Prolly not. 🤷‍♂️

Alright! That's it. Time's up. Everybody stop being spooky right now.

Sapient species of Weapons Tight™: Humans (+ gorillas, chimps, octopods, & dolphins) Hruhlak -- ageless tyrannosharks Qurong -- dinosaur cheetahs Talina -- eight-legged primates Sruta -- acid-adapted molluscoids Oma -- icthyoid schoolers Tili -- pterosaurlikes Churug -- animal/fungal shapeshifters

I need to just... stop trying to be friends with people who clearly don't want to be friends with me. Come on Tom! Listen to the silence. Absorb the context cues.

Sapient species of Weapons Tight™: Humans (+ gorillas, chimps, octopods, & dolphins) Hruhlak -- ageless tyrannosharks Qurong -- dinosaur cheetahs Talina -- eight-legged primates Sruta -- acid-adapted molluscoids Oma -- icthyoid schoolers Tili -- pterosaurlikes Churug -- animal/fungal shapeshifters

People are complaining about the power scaling of IT and I just kind of hate everything right now.

A friend was subject--treated to an in-depth discussion of politics in the Weapons Tight™ setting yesterday, and at the end she was like '...have you considered doing more with this? Other games too, maybe?' I acknowledged I may have overdone it as an excuse for playing starfighter pilot.

Me: hello I am here for my vaccination yes Employee health: mm no Me: pardon EH: you missed your appointment. It was yesterday at 0800. Me: I... Okay. I'm not... Can we do it today maybe? EH: yah sure whatever Me checking my phone thereafter. I made the call to make the appt at 0821 yesterday. 😶