I have to wonder how much some of the problems of the TTRPG culture are due to a fundamental lack of empathy. To be fair, you can have a lot of compassion, morality, and sympathy for other people without a hint of empathy, as many allistic people do. But empathy is vital to many modes of play.

Also, this reminds me that concentrating on a brief period of Western European history for the "standard" of fantasy roleplaying, when there is literally an entire planet and thousands of years of amazing shit to take inspiration from, is the most boring mayo thing ever.

It might be just my autistic PTSD showing, but crafting phrases out of words, sentences out of phrases, mansions of meaning out of paragraphs of sentences, painstakingly, deliberately, and as if pulling every hair out of my body with a single pair of tweezers, is the entire joy of writing things.

sure, when Claude frequently hallucinates unrealities and develops multiple instances of itself to communicate with and sort out those unrealities, the government pays it a trillion pounds, but when I do it I "need psychiatric help" and "your friends and family are concerned about you"

Note: We do not use AI. Period. We pay humans to create our games, end-to-end. Adobe recently implemented a feature that quietly injected AI alt text into Umdaar. We've removed it, updated the PDF, and disabled the feature. We apologize for the error, please download the latest PDF. Also: Fuck AI.

OK, so as soon as I get myself a proper blog without a skeet character limit, there are a number of topics I need to write about in more detail: - Rules vs mechanics - Negative space in TTRPG design - TTRPG as language / music - Experiential frames of limited narrative presentation

Sometimes it feels like a lot of people in specific art movements pretend the empty bits they didn't notice or care about were empty can retroactively be treated as intentionally applied negative space, and as someone who cares about intentionality in art, that bothers the shit out of me.

Going to think about this every time people try and act like WotC is somehow a "progressive" company or that D&D has become a great "queer game" somehow

The system makes men like Trump inevitable. The problem isn't Trump. It's the system that made Trump and will continue to make others like him.

As if there already weren't good reasons to never buy anything from WotC again, this should be your sign

Farage knew exactly what he was doing yesterday. June hit and the far-right needed an excuse to restart another summer of riots and violence that is becoming regular for the UK. Another grieving family manipulated. Absolutely disgusting.

If you say "I support Palestine Action", they might put you in jail. If you incite a racist riot, they put you on the news.

The latest episode of Critical Role has the phrase "seven-pointed pentagram" uttered at some point and I am begging you to look up "heptagram".

I will never describe myself as an ally either, because while I might not be the best representative of queer folk, dammit I am still one of us

I have a lot of gripe with how D&D APs treat Perception and Insight rolls, and especially how frequent they are, because they appear to be there solely to prevent the host from withholding information that they have from the guests, rather than create and contextualize such information.

Notice how the papacy's good acts are all statements and the horrific ones are actual actions and policies with serious resources behind them? The Catholic Church has a massive healthcare network and inflicted a total trans care ban there last year. They're an enthusiastic part of trans genocide:

And one element of specifically female tech literacy is being very well aware that when new software fails to deliver what's been promised to senior management happy to swallow the hype, women will be immediately blamed for 'operator error' far more than men.

If you have nsfw set to "hide" I implore you to set it to "warn". You still won't see anything except for a blurred post Otherwise once they roll out account-wide adult content labeling a whole lot of people including me are going to disappear from your timelines, even our sfw text posts

I have a sort of unique trans experience. I have four kids. Three were born before I started transitioning. My youngest? I feel so much differently with her. I physically ACHE when I'm not around her. Her crying makes my boobs hurt. Don't try to tell me HRT is meaningless. It's huge.

Out of context lines: Ah yes, the two genders: TTRPGs and improv.

Analysis | By all accounts, the deal Donald Trump is negotiating with Iran would be worse than the one Barack Obama got without a war or fuel spikes. However, Trump will be doing it while White.

This is real. www.whitehouse.gov/aliens/

today I came to the grand realization that a vast majority of my game design philosophy choices are probably just me Doing An Autism and if you want me to explore that any further just be warned that it involves a lot of trauma

You know what Trump hates being called? What he *fears* being called more than anything? A Loser. Just call him a Loser. You don't have to be cute about it.

A good articulation of why I've found so many Actual Plays so frustrating. They're barely playing the game I want to see them play! They're playing a different game (that they're very good at).

I was bullied by multiple people into posting what was originally a rant intended for 4 people about how some improvisors miss out on the joy of following a TTRPG's textual rules

The headline reminds me that unqualified white men like the POTUS are innocent after proven guilty (or in this case liable), while everyone else has to be guilty after proven innocent. "Accuser" is not the right word. "Survivor" is.

courtesy of @krikrit-t.bsky.social teal deer: A lot of people who come from an improv background often ignore the rules of whatever TTRPG they are playing, but only because they are already playing a different game with its own rules However, this has a lot of implications for non-improv players.

A lot of parenting advice out there is only really valid for couples or larger family units where one of the grown-ups is neurotypical and is not employed full time. Which is not true for a lot of double neurodivergent families with children, and we need more advice applicable to our lives.

It struck me that the damage that AI sycophancy does sounds very much like it inflicts the user with the confidence and capability of a mediocre white dude. It really IS a hell of a drug.

wait when and why did it mean the other two things

Could there be a better example of "the trans debate" than 98% of women supporting trans people and then one single lone person voting against them and getting their way regardless. It's all such a fucking sham

today I was taking care of my child as any normal parent when an email I got from my workplace made me black out with rage because someone put an unauthorized sticker saying "trans rights matter. trans women welcome here." ON THE MEN'S LOO These murderous people & their petty bullshit, I swear

One of the TTRPG concepts I keep coming back to is the idea that you should only roll if the outcome is in doubt, and failure is interesting. And to that I say, you should also only roll if failure is thematically appropriate.

I feel strongly about this, plus it's personal (Brexit has affected my family profoundly). This petition seems to be doing well, but could do with more shares and signatures if you're eligible (British Citizen or UK Resident) and feel strongly about this too. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74...

The Marketplace of Ideas people immediately forcefully shut down all dissent, bought all media, sued & fired all critics & arrested & caged journalists reporting on their heinousness as soon as they got control & all of this was entirely predictable & people who warned of it were called overreactors

see, for a while I had been seeing EHRC as an initialism, & never actually looked up what it stood for, because I was convinced that it was the European Court of Human Rights, and kept thinking “what does the ECHR have to do with the UK and why would they be so transphobic” & then saw where the C is

All the stuff in the nesting doll of and under this quote, but also: Arguing online is also a way of heating your views up to put them into a work. And it's a preventative against repressive, false positivity that papers over rot and nonsense. It's a problem, and a solution. Both.

The thing about Andy Burnham’s statement is… the UK has parliamentary sovereignty! Nothing, not even the Supreme Court, can prevent the parliament from just passing new trans protection laws that would make the previous interpretation invalid. He doesn’t have to implement it if he doesn’t want to.

threw me under the bus in the time between me recording a podcast where I say ‘he used to be slightly woker on trans rights, but we’ll see how long that lasts’ and us editing and releasing it

Possible addendum: you don’t have to support them with money at the cost of neglecting your biological needs, but you also cannot be surprised or angry if those projects fail to keep going

Many well-known TTRPG folk (indie, freelance, and more) perch in shit apartments, eat on a tight budget, and work furiously and not always successfully to keep their heads above water. I don't know percentages, but it's not a *small* slice.

In high school I studied science instead of arts (music, literature, visual arts, pick your poison), because my parents confused my autistic aversion to non-perfection for disinterest

maybe the real murderer was the capitalism / tech feudalism we made along the way

Trans people have been around your whole life. You’ve been sharing bathrooms with them your whole life. They’ve been in your communities your whole life. They’ve even been playing sport your whole life. And you didn’t care *at all* till a few years ago when every right wing org decided you should

if you're cis and you are asked by your management to police bathrooms, "can you confirm in writing that you are ordering me to approach customers to discuss their sex?" is an email no manager wants to reply to

this is what I mean when I say "don't let orgs and managers see discriminating against trans folk as the path of last resistance". transphobes are persistent and annoying. be just as annoying. show them compliance is going to be a legal nightmare

For two weeks, arena folks have been getting *daily* anti-union emails from the company fearmongering about how scary unions are. Now, they're sending letters to our homes. The union isn't a third party, WE ARE THE UNION. This doesn't scare me. I am voting YES for #uwotc-cwa! #wotcstaff

When asked ”what is 2 plus 2”, and a Statesian Democrat says “6, 10 on a bad day”, and a Republican says “one billion, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a traitor that deserves death”, the following three can all be true: