I had a really bad time once where I wanted to run a dark souls inspired “explore the cursed island” game, and only two of four players were on board. One literally tried to open a BBQ shop. The other was more of a wonder around and pick flowers, not fights, kind

On the one hand, this might help fence sitters that are like “there’s no content there”.

On the other, I just don’t personally care for a stream of random images like Instagram et al do.

I dunno man. I’ve had a lot of conversations with players that go like “do you think your character is the first to come up with this hijink? If it works, why doesn’t the entire setting revolve about this infinite damage trick you’re trying to sell me?”

Like, if it was as easy as casting Charm Person on the king to become the new ruler, other people would already be doing that. Therefore, there must be reasons why it doesn’t work.

My parents are difficult. Not the worst people and not monsters, but at many times unpleasant.

Plus it was a house in the suburbs. Not ideal for socializing or culture.

And lastly, living with parents in the suburbs would be huge negatives for dating.

I don’t like to think of people as immutably good or bad, but I get what you meant.

There’s a bunch of factors.

• are they honest?
• are they kind?
• do they care about things other than themselves?
• do they try to make the world better?

So, someone who lies, is cruel, doesn’t care about anyone else, and leaves the world a mess is being a pretty bad person.

Someone who just keeps their head down, goes to work, and is polite to people they meet is kind of middling.

The Oatmeal did a comic worth reading about this: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Some people are really loathe to do any self reflection or assessment. I gather their sense of self and worth is very fragile, and looking too hard might make it collapse.

Like, some people you could say “Eating meat is bad for these reasons” and they’ll just lash out. Not enough emotional HP to tank the hit.

Right. Cognitive dissonance. We all suffer it sometimes. I guess it takes uncommon courage and clarity to work through it. Most people would rather do the least effort to preserve their sense of being a good person.

Being sexist is bad

They are good

They don’t like this show because it has a woman lead

That’s sexist

But they’re good

Can’t change “sexism is bad”. Can’t change “they are good”. Only thing left to change is the reason they don’t like the show. Easy-peasy.

It’s always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.

Even the idealized stuff of “buy a house on one income” was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, “and then the white people burned down our house” were all realities.

This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.

if you tell people that certain opinions are not allowed to be expressed, then they will tell you another reason they dont like the show. That is what happens. If you want the actual reason, you have to allow it to appear.

This is interesting. I feel like people are allowed to say “I don’t think women should lead”. They just don’t like the consequences of having that opinion. They want to say something cruel or afactual without anyone uninviting them from parties.

Many fans are seeing this star trek as being a vehicle for removing masculinity from the show,

If that’s true, it’s another example of conservatives having atrocious media literacy. There’s ample masculinity in the show. Perhaps they’re upset that it’s not exclusively the kind they want to see. Conservatives are not known for enjoying other perspectives and new takes.

Which I guess is your first point again. They have unwelcome beliefs so they’ll contort them into something they feel has less consequences. That’s easier than admitting maybe they’re wrong or their beliefs are bad.

This was a favorite for a long time, by the high water marks: https://thehighwatermarks.bandcamp.com/track/suicide

It feels like suicide or something worse

I’ve got this curse on me

It seems I only dream about the things

that shouldn’t come to be

always I try to find a way it feels

it seems to real to me

I just can’t let it go

I’ll let you know

Just what it means to me

As days go past and it all moves too fast

And I won’t think about it

And when I do it all comes back to you

And I don’t want to change that

Markdown fornatting is really tedious to do on the phone so I’m not going to fix that more.

But the song sounds upbeat, but it’s lyrics are a sad loop they want to break and also don’t want to.

I feel like online discourse about media is spoiled by loud fringes. There’s a distressing amount of people who don’t like women, queer folks, minorities, etc. They won’t say that’s why they don’t like a show. Some of them might not even realize. They just feel unconsciously uncomfortable when there’s a woman in charge or two men holding hands, and they reach for a more socially acceptable reason to reject it.

There was discussion about what the NYC subway announcements should say instead of “ladies and gentlemen”.

My vote was “listen up you little shits, [this train is going express until canal Street or whatever]”

I think they went with “everyone”, however.

41.3 / 50

Kind of hard, but partly confounded by not knowing the best way to use the sliders. Once you start messing around and seeing other colors, I start forgetting the original.

From the copy I thought it would be harder, and more people would be scoring badly, but the comments here seem to show most people near my score. But maybe only people who did well are commenting.

Yeah, I was going to say I saw almost this exact joke recently. That was the other one I saw.

I don’t know if it’s favorite of all time but I thought of this one now:

haha and then what ;) by jawbreaker reunion. Probably gave some software nerds a headache trying to incorporate the semicolon and parenthesis. Points for a confusing band name, too.

https://jawbreakerreunion.bandcamp.com/album/haha-and-then-what

“Patches” might be my favorite track on it.

Why are each of your lines wrapped in ellipsis?

…what many anti-fifth-edition positions miss is that it’s not about learning a new system, it’s about compatibility across a vast ecosystem of disparate settings and campaigns…

I don’t think 5e is especially compatible with disparate settings and campaigns. It’s not an actually generic system like Fate or GURPS. It’s got underbaked or entirely missing whole RPG subsystems and mechanics (eg: social conflict, succeed-at-a-cost, metagame currency). It’s highly opinionated in other regards- hit points, class and level, resting. You can hammer the peg into the hole, but you could do that with anything.

It’s not a good system for modeling anything outside heroic fantasy.

It’s certainly a popular system, but many things are popular without being good. But, if your top priority is going where people are, by all means stick to D&D 5e, reddit, facebook, etc.

Sometimes I still see job postings that are like “MUST KNOW OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING” and I’m wondering who in 2026 isn’t at least passably familiar with it.

But then again I also see job posts that are like “must know Java or JavaScript”

I don’t really have a lot of empathy for people who don’t want to learn a new rule system.

First off, most of those people barely know 5e to begin with. You could swap them into another system and they’d probably perform about as well.

Aside from that, maybe they don’t mean to sound anti-intellectual, but they kind of do. It’s okay to read and learn new things. I’ve had potential players put up more of a fight than it would’ve taken to just read the thing.

Related, I think there’s like a literacy crisis. Many people don’t seem to read or think great.

Reminds me of a long road trip I took in my youth. After a couple days we were basically speaking in in-jokes

This joke is why I will say to DMs getting railroad-y, “are you sure you wouldn’t rather write a book?”