The Nefarious Anglerfish

its incredible that for the whole game the protagonist manages to run over only one person

i had a really strong image of him in the swoump...

today I learned that in 2008, the city council of florence overturned dante’s sentence of execution if he returned from exile. yes, dante’s inferno dante, who died in 1321.

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.

the funniest part is that the vote was 19-5. five people voted to uphold dante’s exile.

The objectively funniest part of this is actually that the city that holds his remains, Ravenna, refused to give his remains back. This was a ploy from florence to have his remains moved back for the tourist money and its been ongoing for a long time. Florence had a fake tomb built in the city to trick people into visiting, and have tried to force the return of the remains.

His actual caretakers have been very steadfast in keeping them hidden, moved, or generally out of reach to respect his choice in life to never, ever, ever return to florence, even when he was first offered the chance to return. This is at this point an almost millenium long feud that florence is really, really mad about losing

so basically the five people who wanted to uphold his exile were in the right

Can’t get this on any other social media

The image used to create IMAGE_DEPTHS was recently found!

via @p0tato-kn1shes

PHARMACIE_OUVERTE.mp4

Cast spell of pharmaceutical seizure

I'm glad to see that someone whose only previous experience was making websites on Geocities was able to find another job.

I’ve been suffering from itchy nipples for a while

you don’t have to post everything i’m just saying

And you don’t have to post that little freak from dungeon meshi but here we are

oh so the nipple scratcher is inciting war with chilchuck nation? choose your next words wisely

You get lots of characters who are trying to do good despite being inclined to evil, why not the inverse?

"I can't say I'm perfect. Sometimes I still slip up and feed the homeless or protect the innocent. But I'm trying to lay waste to creation. Isn't that enough?"

Mods? Take him to the stump of his favorite childhood tree.

Mods, make him busy during a friends planned trip so he misses out on the new inside joke.

Mods… change the smell of his parents house.

look boss, our quarterly "subjection to the brutalities of the Absurd" budget is almost blown already. can we not just shoot this one twice in the back of the head and call it a day?

"this is why we can't have nice things" is a foolish and backwards principle anyway. If something can be easily ruined by a child then it isn't nice at all, it is pitiful and embarrassing. Praise your child for culling the weak.

#“nice dishes” should mean dishes i can run over with my car and still use

#you're mad at your tiny baby for defeating your lowly coward glassware???

#the chad toddler versus the incel antique vase

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

Absolutely fascinated by the Fairy Walrus Discourse. Naturally, I have a take:

This actually is also a fantastic illustration of a truism about Telling Stories that we all implicitly know but rarely acknowledge aloud: the improbable is far less believable than the impossible.

When you invoke the impossible, you silence the critically thinking, reality checking, lie detecting circuitry. Simpler rules reign supreme.

The Walrus, however implausible, is a thing which is real, and so whatever narrative you imagine either precedes or follows the reveal will be constrained by the envelope of the possible.

This is a webbed site all about Narrative.

The person answering the door to a Fairy is in a fairy tale, and frankly most of us would be overjoyed to find ourselves in a fairy tale. Fairy tales have sensible rules, structures we understand, tropes we love and hate.

A Walrus on your doorstep is just one more giant reminder that the world is a maelstrom of chaos, incomprehensible in its complexity, full of moving parts which obey no narrative. It’s another dose of “what fresh hell is this?”

A Walrus on your doorstep is a burden. A Fairy on your doorstep is an escape.

this frame from the fallout tv show is so funny i nearly puked watching it

arcade carpetz!

Unmute !

Oh my goodness, that's a lot of opinions.

Rolling AND crispy meows.