That looks rather too saturated to be Eastern Europe.

Succinctly, I would say any GM who says ‘I don’t want to spend my time thinking about the in-game world’ is just someone who would be happier as a player but is taking one for the team. In the metaphor, he’s the guy at the orgy squeezing a fleshlight between his thighs and wearing a wig so his buddies can pretend. He’s trying to be creative with what’s lying around. However, everyone would be happier if he wasn’t in that position. They’re all just too desperate to go elsewhere. I mean, it’s really nice of the guy to do that for his friends, but it’s not really what they showed up for.

Slightly surprised I didn’t get more disagreement.

A prebuilt system has one benefit: the players and DM come to the table with a shared set of expectations. This is crucial for things like adventurer’s league, where the players are all strangers, more or less engaging in a tournament without winners, each using the others to get their RPG rocks off, and can be useful to skip the mechanical design level of play-making. It also makes sense for a corporation to try to hit that lowest common denominator to maximise their audience.

However, I maintain, if no one at the table is creative enough to want to world-build beyond that, they might as well all just stick with consumer media. Those who don’t feel the drive to create aren’t suited to DMing, and a table without a DM is a hetero orgy without a woman.

There was a bit too much of it, but that actually was the reason I included the ‘even the ones I like’ part. Old WoD didn’t pull its punches, and generally was not middle-of-the-road.

Object Oriented Programmers never poop? Interesting.

Slightly unpopular opinion: All official lore is crap and should be generally ignored. (Even the stuff I kind of like) If I want to play in a world where what I can do is limited by the generic, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, crowd-pleasing writers at some corporation I’ll just play a AAA video game. The ability to be participatory in the creation and evolution of the in-game world is what makes TTRPGs different from consumer media. Why would you give that part up, but still leave yourself with all the cognitive load?

Popped open the article to find out, and the answer is neither. The ‘milk’ is crystals collected by cutting open a particular kind of roach and extracting them from its brood sack.

There’s a phrase I didn’t know I’d be using today.

What about a 360deg camera, where the target person is yourself, and anyone else captured is merely incidental/background?

And it’s only March.

The point of having the system before you play is just letting everyone know what to expect on the G part of RPG so they can focus on the R and the P. It kills all momentum to stop and ask, ‘so what system do we want to use’ in the middle of the game. No system is perfect, but it cuts out a lot of work to just pick one and roll with it, homebrewing over the few holes that show up.

I will feed you your liquified body parts, staring at the bottom, and working up.

I will fill your colon with cyanoacrylate.

I will give you an enema with the liquified bodies of your family.

I will tickle your family to death in front of you.

I will do all of the above in reverse order.

Having kids is always an act of selfishness. You don’t do it because you are trying to ‘gift’ life to the child. You do it because you think it will make you happy. Look at your reasons.

“me and my partner have wanted children since we were children” There’s your reason. You have the biological imperative. You want your genetics to continue.

" if a life is not worth living it must be an absolutely horrific and torterous experience." That’s life. ‘Worth’ is purely subjective. Objectively, life is worthless. If you have the right genetics and circumstances, you can ignore this fact, but it’s always there.

“If all of us liberal and educated folks stop having kids what will the world look like?” This is just the ideological version of the biological imperative, the idea of ‘my ideas must be passed down’ instead of ‘my genes.’ But it is based on faulty assumptions. It assumes your kids wouldn’t become fascists just because you aren’t. It assumes the children of members of a political party will automatically join the same one when they grow up. Why would you assume this? Do you have the same views as your parents? Grandparents?

If you want to have your kids, go ahead, but don’t delude yourself that it’s your gift to the leftist cause or to the child. It’s a way to scratch your biological itch to be a parent, just as much as masturbation and sex.

Confirmed. I’m seeing sources from the BBC, Guardian, Independent, and gov.uk.

Cigarette advertising was banned in the US. It famously increased profit because they didn’t have to burn it all on advertising.

Advertising is like nuclear weapons. It’s bad that it exists, harms people around it, and is only needed because the opposition has it. If it disappeared, everyone would benefit, but no one wants to be the first.

I actively avoid shorts so most of what I watch is long form.

• Technology Connections - A guy needing out about household tech
• Unlearning Economics - a trained economist turned public edutainer who kept learning after Econ 101, unlike others who shall remain nameless
• Behind the Bastards - Chummy laughter about the worst people ever
• RPG with DBJ - RPG talk with a focus on creativity and exploring the opportunities afforded by the space of ‘limited only by your imagination’
• We’re in Hell - A guy looking at pieces of media and the ideology infused into them by culture
• Gresham College - lectures on widely ranging topics, presented by professors but targetting the layperson
• The Morbid Zoo - A cool gal doing analysis of movies, usually horror, but sometimes others, with an eye toward ideology and culture (Hellraiser, Smile, Twilight, PotC, etc.)
• Folding Ideas - More film analysis, but with a tack toward various criticisms
• Doctor Who - the old series are all on the tubes now. Not educational, but fun.

So, if you laid on a large enough block of it, you’d have the perfect shape to make a mold for a customized foam mattress?

Oh wow. I only have one crack in my backside.

This is absolutely the answer. If it isn’t funneling money away from actual value creation and into their pockets, it’s evil in the mind of the investors.

They often end up with bits of stuff stuck to them while they’re wet, like feathers, bedding, etc. Poop isn’t uncommon either. The same people who won’t buy salmon unless it has that freshly dyed pink color, and won’t buy potatoes if they aren’t universally convex, balk at the bits that remind them they come from a real place and aren’t just summoned into existence for their sake. Washing the eggs takes off the bits but also the ‘bloom’ which is the natural barrier to bacteria and the like. Hence, refrigeration.

Which Reddit thread did this meme come from again? I know I recognize it but can’t recall the origin.