This has always been a fascist psyop

I did the gaybro liches before. It was a PF1 game where 3 of the party members wanted to be goblins. We had an Alchemist (burny), a Barbarian (Bitey) and a gunslinger (shooty). The last player wanted to a be human witch. The player was kind of dumb, but the character got gang pressed into trying to wrangle these goblins in spite of being an immoral shitheel herself. The first adventure (which is the only one they did before the game petered out for other reasons) was they were sent to rescue the local children from an Ogre who was kidnapping them from a village. They discovered that he was very erudite and literate (think Cave guy from Freakzoid) and he was trying to teach the children how to read. The villagers were very angry objectors to the written word. The next adventure (which I had notes for somewhere) was going to pit them against a dragon who had been kidnapping princesses. The players would discover he was a giant nerd, and was treating them well; he just needed them for his army build for wargames against other dragons.

Okay, so fine you get the tone; the liches were two wizards who were like, no homo gym bros in life, who made each other their phylacteries. My plan was to have the players find a diary and they would learn the joke; that was only one of them was gay. The diary would have no surviving identifying marks, so they wouldn't know which one

I primarily use Discord as a one stop shop to play and run dnd campaigns. I first hopped on it around 2017, and its was way better than any other group chat app. Around the pandemic all my groups started playing on it and it became relatively seamless. I joined exactly one streamers discord but that is totally it. In general I wouldn't expect it to be a good archive, or forum, nor do I expect it to be secure. I use armchord on PC. I started using it before it was enshittified. For what it does, it does it pretty well.

For the record, I have used matrix and Signal. I think both have the issue that a critical mass of my friends don't use them. I liked Signal a lot when it had SMS support. I used it as a my primary SMS app, and some of my friends had signal as well, so that was cool. now its more like a specialized messenger app, and I fucking hate having yet another one of those on my phone. Matrix encryption keys are giant stumbling blocks to my friends who do give a fuck. I play ttrpgs with some people who could not give a fuck. I would have to set up the server, set up the account, and then I would have have to do the encryption key for them. And like people say, Matrix logs you out every little while. You can turn notifications off and totally forget about it. For my non techy friends, this is literally a bridge too far.

I literally have two friends who think Matrix is cool. No one else even has an account, much less a server. And the support to meet people who have this app is very limited. Cool, but I think it will always be a niche.

I'm in the process of looking at fire barriers. Do you have any examples of these foil backed fiber glass panels?

Their bakers hotline is extremely awesome

Shoes in general. Youll have so much more stamina at festivals and other places if you have sturdy shoes that fit well.

Hail hail Genovia! A land I didn't maaake up!

The princess is Mia Thermopolis

One of those moves never miss. One only has a 55 percent hit rate.

Once I worked a double with a coworker I had a small crush on. Towards the end of the shift, my sister called me. She was staying in a rural area on the other side of the state. She had started to drive home, and something had popped her tire. She had no spare, and no where was open... and she had an international flight in the morning. I told her, yup yup, I'll go get her.

As soon as I got off my call, my co worker insisted that she go with me. "You're going to need a co pilot." After some back and forth, somehow we ended up taking her car even. That was at 8pm. It was really nice at first. I learned a lot about her. She told me about her fiance, and her upbringing in the south. We got to our destination at midnight, and both of us were bushed. We asked my sister if she could take the wheel for the way home. We both fell asleep.

My sister hit a deer at around 2am. We were still about 90 min from my car. Who do you call at 2am to drive that far to turn around and drive all the way back? I started making calls. We were dropped off at this truck stop; I am trying to be strong for these ladies; one of whom just had her car totaled and one of whom is my literal baby sister. One of my friends made the drive; and Ive got stories about her (which also might just be movie esqe). In any case, I took my co worker home, and then handed my keys to my sister gingerly, because she had some stuff to do at her house before my dad took her to the air port. She made her flight with 20 minutes to spare, at 830 am. My car was the first one she left in working order that night.

I spent the next month helping my coworker get around while my sister was abroad. Didn't get the girl, but that's the story of my life. This had stakes, and acts, and a second act turn!

I think its the larger double standard; men are sex monsters. A woman and a man can't be friends. A child with a man is in danger.

This is connected to; Intimacy is feminine. Men can only be vulnerable or gentle with their partners or families, if then. Its not universal, obviously, but the callous lover and the distant father are not so uncommon so as to be unrecognizable. Intimacy between men is also considered feminine, unless in the military or team sports.

It's a world we created as well. Every double standard listed in this thread is a double standard. But it is also something cultivated by the Patriarchy.

is santa an elf?

Its way worse that that. They can protect people who sexually assault them.

So I think you're right in a lot of ways. But I think your understating a few things.

First, OGL. OGL was great for 3.x edition. It spawned a cottage industry of 3rd party content creators, which by the end of the life cycle, had created content that which was smoother and more refined in the engine than anything WotC ever produced. This allowed 3.x to dig in and become immensely established. The problem is is that it cuts both ways; in 4e era, WotC's biggest competitor was actually Paizo.

I liked 4e, I think its better than 5e. But WotC became way harsher on piracy and 3rd party content in that era. The way powers were structured and templates, it became impossible to keep up with everything without their builder spoon feeding it to you. They were really pushing their "adventure tools." These were buggy, half of them never came to fruition, and they didn't run on mac (even though they were browser based). They only stopped pushing them after they bought a third party site (D&D beyond, which I actually ban from my games). I'm just saying that 3.5 was an accessibility dream, and 4e was actually behind lock and key.

Meanwhile Paizo had the immensely easier job of selling 3.5 weirdos back 3.5, and WotC couldn't stop them because of the OGL. For a while, I thought Paizo was actually doing worse damage to the industry; I was afraid no one would want to innovate if people were just going to play 3.x until the end of time. I guess I was right, because 5e is basically 3.5 will all the interesting parts cut off. And thats why WotC was trying to kill the OGL last year, in the weird way they did. They want the control, but they want the 3rd party support too.

The other thing you understated was just how many grognards there were for 3.x. I literally had a 5e baby pitch to me a cyberpunk 2077 game that he would run in starfinder, but 3.x guys refused to try out 4e. Their complaints were as many as they were meaningless. Orcs aren't core? All classes get spells? I can see the WoW recharge timers! A lot of enfranchised gamers simply did not want to play a new game, and then PF came along, and they did not have to. I saw it happen in my game group, but this also was borne out in paizo's ascendancy in this era.

I want to say one thing to your point @Colalextrast@lemmynsfw.com, that 4e had too much bloat; 3.x had a ton of bloat as well. At least every power in 4e was like, functional. 3.x had dozens of base classes and hundreds of prestige classes that were traps. Hundreds of feats that were not good. I think 1200 officially published spells (at least you could swap those out). The only reason 3.x combat wasn't a crawl was because it was rocket tag; high level spellcasters usually end the fight in one move.

I play 3.5 for a few years. One of my groups swore by it. It was... textured. When you call it a steaming pile of shit, I see your point and honestly agree with you. But I will say it was... completely what it was. It wasn't well designed, but it was immensely interesting. 5e is all of 3.x, but with the interesting parts sanded down. In my estimation, that makes 5e the lesser game.

My mistake.

Maybe its just me, but I see @BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world moon a lot. They post sovereign citizen stuff, which is what i see regularly, but they are also a pretty good poet.

They helped me with a DIY question!

Yeah, brain plasticity is really fascinating. One of the guys I work with, its the only way to teach him anything. He had a heroin overdose like 15 years ago. He has basically no short term memory, but I've been able to get him to retain things via repetition. Mostly repetitive physical tasks, but social media, with advertisers constantly pinging him, has also been a very powerful reminder. He's big into the EDM scene and he remembers events, both past and future, because social media keeps buzzing him and reminding him. I wish there was a way to harness that power for good.

But obviously, I've never seen his brain before.

Based on my neurology classes, I feel like we have some idea what some parts of the brain do. Obviously full on experiments would be unethical, but we can like, observe which neural pathways formed in people with the same life style (so Taxi Drivers have larger and more developed sections focused on navigation). We can observe what happens to people who take the same kinds of damage, and occasionally we get lucky and we can see what happens to people with grievous injuries or rare maladies. Also, we can do experiments on creatures like snails which far less complex brains.

The brain is certainly an interesting a weird black box, but we do have outs to learn some things