The next time you look at a book or film or game and sneer at how being very smart and very charismatic just makes the whole plot go by in Easy Mode for a character, I need you to remember that WH meeting yesterday.

“THE NON-ARTIST FIXATION ON HYPERREALISM AS THE PINNACLE OF ART IS CLEARLY PART OF THE REASON SO MANY ADULTS THINK THEY CANNOT DRAW OR CONSIDER THEMSELVES TO BE FAILURES, KAWAII, FOLK ART, DOODLES, OR OTHER EASIER ENTRY POINTS ARE CONSIDERED CHILDISH, WHICH IS WHY JAPANESE DRAWING BOOKS ARE BETTER…”

THREAD: Judge Ellis is the first federal judge to review extensive body cam video of DHS's actions in Chicago. She finds that DHS *repeatedly* misled the public and made claims that were disproven by agents' own videos. I'll go through some of the most egregious ones here.

The president is calling for members of Congress to be executed. Also known as Thursday.

When I asked about this, elsewhere, most people who replied said it was because it gave them a chance to play the downtime for the PCs and not be in ‘quest mode.’ I like to run games where we hit family/friend life of PCs fairly often so this kind of session doesn’t tend to be needed in my games

I'm literally giving y'all the blueprints for how to build community around ANYTHING you are interested in, all it takes is a consistent bit of effort, and I get dismissed with this implication that I somehow got lucky or like "hah, I wish I was as passionate about anything" dude that's YOUR choice

The ttrpgs that people play can sometimes get them so stuck in a specific style of play that opening up to a different style becomes very difficult. We had a thing on tiktok last year about pbta games and how some saw playbooks as restricting creativity or them only being good for one shots.

I love the genre mashup. Give me all the Golden Girls/Cthulhus and WWII/Draculas you've got. But I'm also looking for non-mashups. Sometimes it feels like the industry has an allergy. Westerns without magic. Drama without aliens. Detectives without Cthulhu. www.explorersdesign.com/one-genre-ga...

"...I am a hater, which is a kind of integrity." "...I am more than a critic: I am a hater." "I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response." EVERY LINE IS A GEM. 1/

just learned we won an award for our blog post about Tom Holland and stormwater management. remember, when you see an article about stormwater management, you repost it. i don’t make the rules.

there are 4 types of guys online. no exceptions

That's a lot of words to say "he did record money laundering."

The reason I’m so confident in front of an audience is that I’ve eaten shit in front of an audience enough to know it won’t kill me. (Thanks, stand up.). I’ve done bad shows, bad sets, bad improv shows. I’ve done more good ones. It’ll even out

Metagaming is great and leads to more satisfying play in many contexts and what people actually hate is what Blades in the Dark calls "being a weasel"

A reminder that seven years ago almost to the day, the CIA determined that Mohammed Bin Salman ordered the killing of @washingtonpost.com journalist Jamal Khashoggi. I hired and worked with Jamal for a year. www.washingtonpost.com/world/nation...

Going to PAX Unplugged? Looking for something rad to do Friday afternoon? Wanna possibly be GM'd by yours truly? Get tickets to come play in The SCIRE, A CBR+PNK mega-game hosted by @mythworks.bsky.social ! It's gonna be preem, choombas 😎 www.myth.works/products/sci...

The chief problem with being a filmmaker is that literally ANYONE can watch them. Even teen loving perverts who don't understand THE MOVIE'S MAJOR PIVOTAL PLOT POINT. The fact that it's wrong is literally the crux of Lester's emotional turning point. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you Richard?

We really need to stop pretending that all, or even most, metagaming is bad. Take away your hit points and the numbers on your sheets and you’ll play differently. I can metagame to make sure that a player who’s been quiet or bored has something to do.

If nothing else, openly horny tabletop RPGs are a positive development because the alternative isn't NOT being horny – it's just not admitting that it's a horny thing. If you think nobody was playing "Paranoia" for the D/s vibes in 1988, you're living in a fantasy world.

My kid was explaining Mr. Beast to me, and he’s kinda like Arcade from X-MEN, no?

Kpop Angel Hunters, and they have to storm Heaven and kill God by singing too good. This will make someone a billion dollars

mr president sir theres a story coming about how you intervened to help a sex criminal. no sir, not that sex criminal you helped….no not that one either…sir, please stop guessing sex criminals that you helped. ill give you a hint sir, hes a trafficker. no sir, not that trafficker a different one

Woke up thinking about Onibaba (1964). What a film. Two women survive in warring feudal Japan by tricking and murdering samurai, and stealing their belongings. But when someone gets between the two women, the eldest tells of an evil curse that may be on them both... Machete's way up for this one.🔪🔪

In Ars Magica today, my players remembered that if they do big things, consequences will happen. They attacked a guard while breaking someone out and got the town guard and military to do an assault on the criminal underworld. They hightailed it to the covenant to steal something from the Magi.

Me, thinking about causing problems on purpose by synthesizing discourse: Rule 0 in TRPGs is an example of over-tutorialization

Yeah this is a point I've made before, though today's "tutorialization" discourse has helped me bring it more into focus. Repeatedly spending time telling someone reading your game "you can change this if you want" is wholly unnecessary AND betrays a lack of confidence in your own work

Ars Magica: Reign of Spring is back this Sunday at 7pm Central. 10 years later, we return to Apona Meria to find the Magi more powerful (read: rebuilt now that they understand the game) and ready to take their place in the Theban Tribunal. twitch.tv/improvgm

It cannot be remembered enough that these were the same people who got worked up about drag brunches

happy Partially Muscled Skeleton Stands by the Perimeter Fence and Screams for Thirty Seconds Before Vanishing day

I really loved Dispatch but kept waiting for something at the end to tie some of the stuff that felt random together to make it really stick the landing. It might have done a better job in an ending I didn’t have but the one I had didn’t live up to the promise of the rest of the game. Still love it

Stay for the alt text.

nobody does more brutal fashion reviews than the irish

Sometimes it really trips me out that GTA3 came out 8 years after Doom

Was the emergency meeting supposed to be a secret? Because the optics of having to have an emergency meeting about your long friendship with the sex trafficker are not great.

In short, the idea that RPGs could have rules to directly impact narrative (rather than rules impacting character's ability to impact the fictional world, which might in turn impact the narrative) wasn't mainstream back then. Trad was basically the only game (type) in town.

TYPEWRITTEN. TYPEWRITTEN PAINTING.

AOC: "It is unconscionable that what we are debating right now is legislation that will give 8 senators over $1 million a piece & we're robbing people of their food assistance & healthcare to pay for it. How can we vote to enrich ourselves by stealing from the American people?"

This isn’t even the stuff they’re trying to actually stop from getting out.

“whatever club he’s invited to join has been devalued by the invitation”

A togglable "I'm an adult with kids and a job" feature that assumes you only get to play once a week, and dumps a summary of what you were last doing/your current objectives in a corner tooltip on loading a save.

The first John Wick uses a great storytelling tool: “I gave him an impossible task...the bodies he buried that night are the foundation of what we are now." You don't have to tell me what that is. It's better left unsaid. Do this while running games.

Game design MEANS something, and if the reason you picked a mechanic boils down to a shrug, that means something too

even when the democratic party has leverage and one of the craziest election swings the party intentionally self immolates it’s just so exhausting what is even the point of these people

How about we shut down the government for this very popular and specific goal and then, hear me out, we hold out for like a month and a half and then, ok this part is important, after a watershed election where we ran the table, ONLY THEN, fold and don't get the one thing we said we wanted.

BREAKING: Mark Wolf, appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan, writes that he is resigning as a judge to have the freedom to speak out against the president's assault on the rule of law. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

“I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.” aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

i get to play more rise of the ronin when this piece is out. here's a fun little aside

There’s a young southern woman on tt doing an experiment: calling churches & asking if they can help her get baby formula, saying she can’t afford it. Of the 30+ she’s called, nearly every church has said no. The ones who said yes were: Black Baptist Churches A Mosque A small Appalachian church