now this is what magic the gathering is all about

fellas, if your gf:

that's not your gf, that's the homestar runner main page

former governor of new jersey chris christie trolling for thick bitches in the middle of fucking nowhere paldea

Some fanart of this ancient figurine! Also got commissioned to draw her hanging out with a friend!

polly recently got the idea in her head that she could become a fairy goddess if she wanted and like that’s a problem but also i have a new excuse to draw her as a pretty pretty princess

Shadowrun: Dragonfall came out ten years ago today! Well the original DLC version for Shadowrun Returns did anyway, which meant the first appearances of best girls Glory and Eiger. The Director's Cut came out in September so I'll probably draw something around then as well.

a couple sessions ago the girls got into…a cat fight

A BREAKTHROUGH FOR SCIENCE

looks like a lot of people in the notes are unfamiliar with the old sonic colouring book edits!

One minute behind the scenes of “Akira” (1988)

I'm getting death threats over this one

never said the hyperspecific poll was about me.

Fucking hell i didn’t realize until I saw the pic

Listen Up RPG Nerds

Since it’s Black History Month, I’m making sure you folks know about Mike Pondsmith.

Mike designed, amongst other things, Cyberpunk 2020 and its wonderful spin-off Cybergeneration. He designed the critically-acclaimed Castle Falkenstein. A black man kicked off interest in two incredibly white-dominated genres in a white-dominated hobby is a remarkable achievement.

Which is why it bugs me that I didn’t know he was black until a couple of years ago. I figure the least I can do is make sure other folks know too.

I’m actually kinda angry at the collective hobby for never communicating this to me before now. I recognized his name and of course immediately recognized the games he’s designed — Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 and Castle Falkenstein are profoundly important and influential works. I don’t think there was much at all in the way of steampunk in the TTRPG world prior to the latter’s introduction (and after it came out I remember arguments over whether or not it “counted” as steampunk).

Mekton 2 was the first time i remember seeing a black dude on a RPG cover

If anything, the OP’s description is underselling Mike Pondsmith’s influence. The guy is single-handedly responsible for creating enormous chunks of the tabletop roleplaying hobby: from Mekton, the first giant robot RPG; to the Urusei Yatsura-inspired Teenagers from Outer Space, the first anime style slice-of-life RPG; to the above-cited Cyberpunk, the first cyberpunk RPG; and even to Castle Falkenstein, which is often labeled a steampunk RPG, but is more properly considered as one of the foundational works of the then-nascent gaslamp fantasy genre. In a just world, the name Pondsmith would be spoken in the same breath as Gygax and Arneson - he’s Kind of a Big Deal!

Anecdote told to me by an associate of his:

“I’ve met Mike Pondsmith, and he is not Black!”

Upon hearing about this, Pondsmith looked down at his hands, turned them over once or twice, and shouted to his wife:

“Honey, I’m not Black! This changes everything!”

And, yes, he’s a Big Deal.

Apparently, back in the 1990s – i.e., before the Internet was readily accessible and people could easily double check this sort of thing – there was some random white dude who’d go around to conventions and trade shows and such claiming to be Mike Pondsmith. He’d sign autographs and everything. I’m not sure if he’s ever been identified, but there are enough older folks in the tabletop roleplaying hobby who have stories about bumping into a white Mike Pondsmith impersonator at some convention or other to suggest that he got around a fair bit.

his other hobby… COLD CASE MURDERS (on the investigating side, not on the supply side) (or WAS it??)

Periodic reminder that you should never trust a chiropractor with your body under any circumstances

Chiropracty is a quack medicine in the extreme. It was invented by a guy in the 19th century who said a ghost taught it to him. It claims it can fix cirrhosis by cracking your spine. Chiropractors are one of the biggest groups keeping anti-vaccine fraud alive. Oh, and they can kill you doing a “routine adjustment”

Like I won’t go so far as to say “Ban chiropractors” because doing so would definitely backfire, but you should literally never ever under any circumstances seek their assistance for any health problem at all.

Since this is getting a few notes I may as well attempt to head off one of the inevitable objections that’ll show up if this gets far enough.

“If Chiropractic* doesn’t work, why does insurance cover it?”

Well, it’s very simple you see, insurance hates paying for things, and chiropractors are cheap as fuck.

Let’s say you injure your back scrubbing a toilet or something. You go to a real doctor, a good doctor who doesn’t blow you off. That doctor may tell you to take some Motrin and call them if it doesn’t get better, but they also might prescribe you a stronger anti-inflammatory, or a muscle relaxer. Your insurance has to pay out for the visit and the medicine.

Let’s say they do that and two weeks later your back still hurts. Your doctor orders an MRI. Your insurance now has to pay for an MRI, which can be a couple thousand dollars, well more than the premium you’ve paid this month, which means they’ve lost money on you.

So you’re lucky and the MRI comes back that you’re okay but you need physical therapy. That’s another couple grand that your insurance has to pay out.

But maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe the MRI comes back and you have a herniated disc. You’re gonna need surgery and physical therapy, and now you’ve not only cost them more than your premiums bring in in a year, you’ve hit your annual maximum which means they have to pay everything from now on. They aren’t happy.

So let’s start back at the beginning. You injure your back, you instead go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor doesn’t have a decade of medical training, they have a certificate from a for-profit college that says they’re a chiropractor. They charge your insurance for an office visit, crack your back a bit, and send you on your merry way.

You might feel better for a while, because the placebo effect is more powerful than you think. But even if you do feel better, there’s still the chance that you’ve got damage. You may still need physical therapy, you may still have a herniated disc.

But if you keep going back to that chiropractor, they’re never gonna tell you that, and even if they do, it’ll be after 2-3 sessions, so 6-8 weeks at a minimum, during which time you’re putting more wear and tear on that injury, and eventually, you have to go to a real doctor.

But here’s where the magic happens. See, you injured your back in December. Now it’s February. Because your insurance put off sending you to a real doctor for two months, some actuary gets a big fat bonus for “reducing costs” in quarter 4. Meanwhile, your real doctor orders an MRI that shows that the damage is, in fact, much worse than it probably was to begin with. And there’s some evidence of injuries after the fact from the chiropractor. Oh, and by the way, there’s a chance you’re gonna be in pain for the rest of your life even with surgery.

But hey, your insurance managed to post a profit in Q4.

* “Chiropractic” is the “official” term for whatever the hell it is chiropractors do. I don’t respect it enough to use it unless I’m mocking someone who’s defending it.

Alright you guys can have this one back but I swear to god if anyone mentions a fucking podcast on it I’m committing arson.

This goes double if you have any kind of joint hyper mobility or ehlers danlos etc.

Pretty sure @thebibliosphere mentioned getting fucked up by a chiropractor, and I don't have ehlers danlos but I am hypermobile. I went to a very well trained osteopath (theoretically better than chiropractors and, at least in the UK, more regulated but still use some of the same techniques) for a few years and while I would feel better after each appointment, nothing ever really got better and I now look back at the way he handled my neck (which was way, way less extreme than chiropractic work but again, still on the same kind of track) and cringe.

What did help me was finding a physio who specialised in hypermobility and who actually checked my strength and range of motion to figure out where my stability was the worst and give me stabilising exercises. My bad joints are always going to need work but at least with a decent physio I have a hope of strengthening them and reducing pain and damage rather than getting easy temporary relief and making things worse in the long run.

If nothing else convinces you, the fact that every single chiropractor on youtube listens to clients listing off wildly different issues and then does the exact same few adjustments on them no matter what should be a red flag.

I was, yeah. I did chiropractic care for years because it’s what my previous MD recommended and it was covered by my insurance. And it worked great for me, because, as it turned out, I had actual misalignments from my joints being out of the sockets from undiagnosed Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. They were literally popping my joints back into place and relieving a significant amount of my pain in the process.

It turns out the whole “your spine is out of alignment” thing is very convincing when your spine is literally out of alignment due to a subluxated tailbone, hip, shoulder, etc etc.

And then, again on a recommendation from an MD doctor for my chronic migraines, I got my neck adjusted, very gently I might add, and I ended up having to get an emergency MRI for a possible brain bleed because something in my neck tore.

Thankfully it wasn't a brain bleed and I wasn't about to die.

Unfortunately, they’d torn every inch of soft tissue on the right side of my neck from my upper trap muscles all the way around the right side of my skull. I could barely hold my head up for weeks. Everything was agony.

Its been several years and I’m still dealing with the damage.

The spinal specialist I saw during recovery was very adamant about never letting anyone touch your neck like that, no matter how gentle they are. He told me the majority of his patients used to come from motoring accidents, and now a good solid chunk of them were from people being irreparably harmed by chiropractors. From torn ligaments to strokes, he’d seen it all. All because chiro is cheaper than physical therapy.

When I was finally diagnosed with EDS and started getting proper help, the horror that went through every EDS-aware physical therapist when I told them the chiropractor story was palpable. One straight up told me I should be paralyzed.

And then we started working on stabilizing my joints and muscles so that they don’t dislocate/subluxate as much because while the chiro might have been putting my joints back in without knowing it, they weren’t actually doing anything to address the root cause or stabilize the area.

It was just a weekly stop-gap measure that was inadvertently helping my immediate pain but ultimately lengthening my long term recovery.

I SHOULD have been recommend physical therapy from the start, even before we knew I had EDS, but because chiropractic care is cheaper, that’s what my insurance agreed to cover.

And now my head sits at a slight angle from scar tissue at the base of my skull and sometimes my fingers feel a little numb.

Don’t let people adjust your neck. You might fucking die.

So another opinion on the "chiropractors bad" pile:

I'm an attorney working insurance defense; a driver gets into an accident, gets sued, but they have accident insurance, so their insurer hires the firm I work for to represent the driver in that lawsuit.

Despite covering seeing a chiropractor, insurance companies are in reality just as skeptical of them as we are when a Plaintiff (the person suing) is trying to back up their claim that they were injured in this accident with medical records and bills from a chiropractor's office. We call that "crap medical." It doesn't have no value when it comes to evaluating a claim and what the insurer would be willing to pay out to settle it, but if you've had an actual surgery, and you can point to the accident as what necessitated that surgery, then that immediately makes the insurance company sit up and take notice.

Now, the insurance company will probably review the medical bills from that surgery and conclude that the surgeon overcharged for that surgery (and it's not unlikely that he did, in fact; the American healthcare system is a hellscape), but we're immediately going to be much more proactive in trying to get this case settled and trying to get you an amount that'll actually get things squared away because a surgery tells us that your injuries are, in a word, legit.

Everyone gives us chiro records, though, because Plaintiffs' attorneys like sending their clients to a chiropractor for much the same reason that insurers like covering them; it's a cheap and easy way of racking up medical bills that they can point to to back up their client's injury claims. And one hand washes the other, because a fair number of chiropractors have working relationships with Plaintiffs' attorneys, and will charge a high price for their services initially, but when it comes to actually paying out that final bill at the end of the whole process, they'll take a huge haircut on that final bill because they want the attorney to keep sending them suckers er, patients.

If you're going to sue over an accident, get your attorney to send you to an actual medical doctor for your injuries. Please. Wrangling over if these chiropractic procedures and the charges for them were reasonable and/or necessary is so tedious.