sleeping with a knife beside me in bed, not because i’m afraid but because it is like a lover to me

i love to make fun of notorious white woman Taylor Swift and all of her embarrassing attempts to appear deeper than a plate of soup.

happy to announce that this post is at the top of the taylor swift tag, meaning this is the most widely shared opinion regarding Taylor on this website at the moment.

i mean this from the bottom of my heart: no one is impressed by your loud ass car. actually we talked about it and we all want you dead.

crisis of disbelief

Me, plunking Stinky Bastard Man’s carrier on the counter: hi he’s here for shots and a nail trim and he’ll need to be sedated

Nurse: Are you sure? We can try-

Me: he needs to be sedated

Nurse: Well, it’ll take longer-

Me: he needs to be sedated, he will try to rip your face off

Nurse: Well we’ll try without first and we’ll let you know if we need to sedate

Me, watching her carry him away: you will need to sedate him

Nurse, coming back 10 minutes later clutching her hand: so, we will need to sedate him

Me:

A man with 3 caution stickers on his med file

Since this post blew up and people have asked for this villain’s record, here are some of Stinky Bastard Man’s more heinous crimes:

Ripped an escape hole

in the patio screen door

in a single night

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

oh my god he’s THIS Stinky Bastard Man!!!!

the stinky bastard man, the stinky bastard myth, the stinky bastard legend

No particular reason why he's asking

Might just be the depression talking but i feel the feedback and length of time of a challenge changes how rewarding it feels. Most games are designed to peak in difficulty and reward the player around the same time. Life doesn't work like that. Retail doesn't get harder throughout the day and then rewards you with cash at the end. You struggle daily for 1-2 weeks then get sent a check.

Sometimes it is an easy pay period other times its incredibly difficult, but regardless you get rewarded the same. Thus why people may feel better about overcoming video game challenges while not feeling even a fraction of that reward by doing real life tasks.

If confetti rained down and victory music played when I fucking cleaned my room you bet I'd be way more consistent with it.

If confetti rained down when I cleaned my room, I feel like that might negatively impact my desire to clean my room. Could we substitute the confetti with something else?

no and every time you clean the confetti another confetti charge goes off

One must imagine Sisyphus cleaning his room

marine biology is so scary because it’s such a small field. i was giving a talk on cetaceans and afterward a woman approached me with her husband and she said, “you did very well. [husband’s name] actually pioneered the research and published the first paper on that. We were very impressed by you.”

Which is such a scientific interpretation/public education win I will cherish forever but also for the rest of my life any time I give a talk I will be haunted by the knowledge that the world’s leading expert who literally discovered/invented the topic might be in the room,

which is like, the opposite of what you’re supposed to do for stage fright. In fact I never used to experience stage fright but now I will.

There are limitations to the benefits of being a marine biologist

5 card combo that autowins any duel vs guy who was dropped on his head as a baby

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.

The point is, as a game designer, you are never going to win over the all-indie-games-are-too-complicated crowd by explaining how simple your player-facing rules are and how seamlessly they support the narrative, because their experience of playing Dungeons & Dragons is that they can simply opt out of engaging with any player-facing part of the game they don't care for, up to and including opting out of everything and making the GM do all the work, and they're coming from a culture of play which has a vested interest in treating this as a valid preference. It doesn't matter how light your rules are, you're not going to beat an expected level of engagement of zero!

Please be coherent about this and recognise that what this headline means is:

Poor and marginalised people are being kicked out of the houses they worked decades to secure, just at the time in their lives when they are the most vulnerable

And the ones kicking them out aren't of a specific age either. Soulless assholes come in every generation, and the ones born with too much money are the worst of the lot. Right now, a guy your age is authorising an eviction against someone the age of your grandma. Pop culture generations cannot explain that.

This.

Corn dogs are named for their traditional meat, the unicorn. As unicorns are now extinct, they can only be referred to properly as ‘Corn Dogs and not “Unicorn Dogs” as they were prior to 2009.

This is actually a common misconception! While the Unicorn Dog did exist and was discontinued following the extinction of unicorns in 2009, the Corn Dog is not a rebranding of the Unicorn Dog! The Corn Dog was created in 2003 by James H. Corn, though it remained a relatively unpopular Ohio treat until 2010 when Mr. Corn took the opportunity left by the Unicorn Dog’s exit from the market to take over the niche.

Unfortunately, you've left out a crucial detail. Corn was not the sole inventor of the Corn Dog. He was greatly aided by Jeremy L. Dog, his Yorkshire Terrier, who gave him the idea for the Corn Dog due to an accident. The pet allegedly knocked a sausage off of his dining room table and into the Batter Pot (commonplace in households at the time), then deep frying it on a stick in what was described as "an affront to God committed by one of His own creatures." Additionally, contrary to popular belief, Corn was not in the state of Ohio when he invented the Corn Dog. Rather, he was in the state of Existential Dread.

God this is a weird website.

smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud

this is gonna make me sound very Old Man Yells At Cloud but i just hate how many things in my life assume i will always have access to a quick, reliable internet connection and almost cease to function without it. Obviously certain things Have To Have An Internet Connection, but i want to be able to listen to music if my service is bad. i want to still watch movies if Netflix is down. i want to have a working map when i can’t get a cell signal. nearly every tech product these days bears the fingerprint of the extremely internet-rich places they are developed, high rent offices in Seattle, San Francisco, etc.. I think often the idea of the internet not being available is so remote to them it doesn’t even factor in to development. i remember when the Xbox One was debuted and Microsoft was almost mockingly like “if you don’t have reliable fast internet, then don’t bother buying this”, and there was such backlash they completely went back on so much of that. But now that attitude is just the tech norm.

No you're right and you should say it

I recently had surgery, and at the time I came home, I had both my cat and one of my grandma's cats staying with me.

- Within hours of surgery, I wake up from a nap to my cat gently sniffing at my incisions with great alarm.

- I was not allowed to shower the first day after surgery, and the cats, seeing that The Large Cat is not observing its cleaning ritual, decided I must be gravely disabled and compensated by licking all the exposed skin on my arms, face, and legs.

- I currently have to sleep with a pillow over my abdomen because my cat insists on climbing on top of me and covering my incisions with her body while I sleep (which is very sweet but not exactly comfortable without the pillow). She also lays across me facing my bedroom door, presumably on guard for attackers who may try to harm me while I'm sleeping and injured.

That's love. 🐈‍⬛🐈❤️

cats are so very unclear on what is wrong with us but they want to help

Last time I had a really bad migraine my cat curled herself round my head and purred sympathetically, and actually stayed there through two of her normal mealtimes. It wasn't until I was able to stagger to the kitchen and grab a protein bar for myself that she gave a very small, polite miaow to the effect of "while you're up... could you get something for me too?"

the best trope in media is: “characters turn on the lights, see the monster, and immediately turn the lights back off”