Think I'm gonna do alright this year

Most of us did not choose to write or draw or design so that we could put products on the shelf. We chose to do it because it’s a set of skills we enjoy exercising, that give us fulfillment. It’s like asking a pro pitcher to just let a machine pitch for them. Fuck off and give me the ball.

This is such a misunderstanding of why writers, artists, and designers do research to begin with, which is to find something unexpected, not capture the average or find reference for the default. And, as always, the biggest misapprehension: We don’t want to NOT do this part. It’s fun to learn shit

Remembering when Succession ended and you'd run into takes like "I am crushed that Siobhan did not get her dream job, which was foreman of her dad's sexism factory"

Been writing a series on running D&D games this year, and this point feels like something I've been trying to sum up for a lot longer than that

About to play in a second edition campaign and I'm messaging the GM how he feels about Player's Option: Skills and Powers. For reference, this is like if he said "let's go get brunch" and I said "sounds good, and afterwards let's ram-raid a gun store"

People should use whatever skill or stat for any check they can justify, to be honest. "But what happens when everyone's rolling Bluff to attack by feinting or Stealth to hide their smirk from the crowd or Arcana to magically light a fire" It fucking kicks ass? Do you hear this shit?

JUST FOUND A FULL REPORT OF DEATHS IN NEW YORK CITY IN 1856, BABY, LET'S FUCKING GO

I thought I liked old documents. Then I started working on a project about old documents, and it turns out I'm eerily passionate about them in a way I'm struggling to process

Fucking howling imagining actually trying to play this. Like you're having a stroke while driving a bumper car

Honestly I think a GM who sucks when they make unfair rulings kinda just sucks anyway. By extension, I think unfair rulings don't really matter. I honestly don't know if this is just me or what

Something I find mildly but increasingly annoying is when we say someone's doing something for "views" or "clicks" or as though the value of these things was intangible. It's not! It's money! They are, most of the time, doing it for money!

One of the things that's so dumb about everyone wanting their own streaming channel is that it depreciates content super, super quickly. Like I would've said "The Da Vinci Code" was worth a few bucks until it was put behind a thin curtain and vanished completely

Been working on more of these lately and the WIP thumbnail haunts me

Sometimes people get the mistaken idea that an old-school campaign means there's no "GM kayfabe" happening. Lethal games benefit from showmanship as much as story games! Whatever the actual threat level is, a canny GM learns to sell it as well as possible.

This here: GM Kayfabe is a whole, extensive thing, to the point that some games ought to address it way more directly.

When I'm feeling well, I watch mysteries so I can try to work out the solution. When I'm sick, I watch mysteries because the solution gets worked out even if I nap through most of it. Two very different fantasies at work here

I've discovered an exercise routine that works for me, and it is, unfortunately, swinging free weights in front of a mirror while blasting fantasy metal

The best tabletop RPG dungeons are, basically, environmental storytelling puzzles. They're testing how well you can put yourself in the scene and ask yourself: "What should I do to avoid being killed?"

These days when you say a game is "experimental," it means it's like soup-flavored ice cream. Daggerfall was experimental like the first caveman to eat a mushroom.

A fun fact for Spoiler Warning viewers is that my catchphrase from Alan Wake ("Coffee? I love coffee!") was borrowed from my then-girlfriend, now-wife, who said her version every time she found a can of Cram in New Vegas.

still rattled by the sheer giddy glee with which some queers are coming for itch.io, one of the largest collections of queer games in existence. i know it's scary to accept, but we do actually have good things worth defending. we have things it would damage us to lose

As I get older, and as gaming stumbles through eras of empire and decadence and collapse, the number one thing I look for in a title is an assumption of mutual respect. "You'll pay attention, and I'll reward you for it. You'll figure it out, and I'll stay out of your hair."

Newgrounds' approach to verifying age is interesting and transparent.

Part of me wonders what this is like to experience for people used to being part of the macro-culture. I grew up with about one and a half friends at a time, and we never knew what the fuck was going on. The only stuff I knew about baffled everybody until the Lord of the Rings movies dropped.

Millennials and older, do you feel it's easier or harder to keep up with the cultural conversation now versus a decade ago? It's definitely easier to fall out of the loop, but it's also harder to find anyone talking about shit from more than like six months ago, so the stakes feel lower.

Honestly, coming in with measured expectations, I thought Superman beat ass and I'm not inclined to argue about it. It doesn't feel overstuffed. The MCU has felt overstuffed; this movie is just brisk. Things happen in it. It's unconcerned with the ponderousness of its own brand, aura, or legacy.

What's the gnarliest RPG-related flamewar you can remember? Like 500 replies, thread locked, half the highest-ranking posters on timeouts, etc?

I don't post art much because I don't spend nearly enough time on fundamentals and I make amateurish mistakes with lighting and anatomy all the time. But I've been making pixelly, indexed-color tokens for the Dungeon Crawl campaign I'm in and I've been really happy with how they're turning out.

The singularity is awesome

I'm going to complain about Batman discourse. I don't know if this will happen again. Here goes.

Before streaming if you said "oh man I loved that show" it meant you'd seen 20% of the episodes in no particular order, and that's an energy I'm trying to find again

i do think heavy rain should be treasured, it's completely possible nobody will ever make something that shit again

People rip on that Han Solo line, but if I grew up being told the galaxy was protected by elite wizards and then I napped for a couple hours and some jarheads shot every single one of them in the ass then I think I'd also not believe in wizards

MOVIE OCCULT BOOKS: Bound in flesh, inked in blood, whispers ominously ACTUAL OCCULT BOOKS: The ancient Britainish people worshipped the god, "Zeus" (pronounced 'Zayus') until he was banned by the Christians...or did he simply become "Santa Claus?" The growing consensus

I feel like Schumer throwing trans people under the bus by suggesting their rights are a “distraction” really needs to be seen especially since even that dipshit had the good sense to at least delete it:

NPC HIGHLIGHT || "OLD GOWL" Dungeons and Dragons, 2024 The only man in Malserac who will row people to its infamous haunted castle. By the time his "customers" realize he's one of the castle's ghosts, it's far too late.

Something I don't think is talked about much is how some people come to celebrity gossip because it's soap opera, and some people come to out of horror. Less "oh my god they were roommates" and more "I hope she gets out because it took me so long to"

abolish ICE

It really feels to me like decades of comment sections combined with a decade of algorithmic content curation pushing engagement bait have combined to kill the primacy of the OP in favor of centering one's emotional response to content. It's a fundamentally different way of engaging w/ social media.

The precursor to more modern movie experiences was the nickelodeon. You pay five cents, sit down, and watch the clips until they loop or you got bored. And I kind of wonder: If a team of brainrot professionals went back in time to 1900, to what extent would cinema have even happened?

"I wish I lived back in the 90s, where everyone was so much more jazzed and optimistic." The 1995 Call of Cthulhu modern sourcebook:

chat, is this true

One of the reasons d20 Modern sucked is because its vision amounts to "action movie" and it came out in one of the all-time worst eras for action movies

I don't blame creators who use garish slop thumbnails, because the game is the game, but every time I see the front page of YouTube I flinch like someone just flicked water in my eyes

Good player quote from the D&D session I'm running: PRIEST: (asks an idiot question) THIEF: Don't you have to, like, go to school to be a priest? PRIEST: I got expedited. THIEF: I don't know what that means. PRIEST (choking back a sob): Neither do I

I painted and rasterized a graphic for the Dungeon Crawl Classics guild I'm in. "If anything, you haven't gone too far enough." It was either that for the motto or another, equally bad Latinization, QUID SI DEUS DIXIT NON ("What If God Said No").