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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’ve got a friend who’s otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it’s a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight (“It’s been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!”), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that’s just around the corner.

    Also, he’s incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

    I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I’m pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he’d self-harm out of fear of the future.

    I honestly think he’s just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It’s scary, so it can’t be true.




  • I know at least one is getting frustrated with combat because he can’t roll to save his life.

    Yeah, that’s a feature of 5e combat, not a bug. It’s what makes me despise combat. I miss three times, wait 20 minutes for my turn to come back around, miss three more times, wait 18 minutes, and then combat is over.

    Some of us are just cursed. The only workarounds I’ve found so far are:

    1. Specialize in making the DM roll saving throws, rather than me rolling attack rolls. A spellcaster who focuses on save-for-half spells feels so much better (because even when the monsters pass the save, the player still get to feel useful).

    2. Specialize in party buffs and reaction spells. They don’t have to roll anything to Enlarge or Dragon’s Breath their friends, and they get to feel like they helped. Also, never underestimate how good it can feel to make a Counterspell bot. Even if the bad guys start upcasting their spells and your player always fails the check, they still made them waste a higher-level spell slot than they’d have used otherwise.

    3. Halfling Divination Wizard with the Lucky feat. Three re-rolls, two portent dice, and rerolling all 1s once really helps brute force one’s way through being cursed. And it’s not broken when people like us play it, because we end up finally managing to get around the same number of successes that non-cursed people get normally.

    Notice that none of these solutions are possible with pure martial classes. Steer your player away from those, maybe even let him make a new character. Martials are totally at the mercy of the dice.

    My ultimate solution was to switch systems and play FATE instead. But that’s an extreme reaction to an extreme level of frustration.


  • I was planning a long road trip that I could have done all at once, but decided to break into two days with a hotel stay somewhere near the middle. I was on a bit of a budget, so when I found a room for ~$60, I was thrilled.

    When I got there, the shower handle was plumbed backwards (so the “Cold” direction was hot), the first towel on the rack had brown splatters that were very clearly old blood stains, and while I was showering a big roach wandered up onto the lip of the shower like “S’up, bro,” then meandered off like he did this sort of thing every day.

    The bed was about as cushy as a gym floor mat, the pillows were bricks, and when I sat down on the desk chair to put on my shoes, the whole thing just about collapsed under me.

    The review I left said: “The best $10 hotel room that $60 can buy,” and since then I just make all my road trips in one go if I can’t afford to spend at least $100 for a hotel room.


  • The way you’ve phrased the question, it sounds like you’re asking if we do it on the regular, like stepping on the scale or trying on old pants. Like it’s something we keep track off as a part of our routine.

    In which case, no. I do not measure my penis.

    I have measured my penis, once or maybe twice, back during the period of time I could reasonably expect it to still be working on attaining its final dimensions. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be perfectly average.

    The question “Have you ever measured your penis?” will get you entirely different results than the question “Do you [‘do’ as in currently, in a continuing manner] measure your penis?”





  • I dunno. I’m an autistic anxiety-sufferer who scours subreddit rules before I ever try to post anything, specifically to avoid the embarrassment and shame of doing it “wrong”, and some of those subs are still impossible. Have you ever tried to post anything in r/Showerthoughts? The rules absolutely don’t cover all the things the automod will instantly remove. It uses some kind of keyword tagging system that is never explained in any of the sidebars or wikis. I tried maybe a dozen different thoughts over the course of a couple months and not one of them got past the automod (well, except for the one that a mod reposted as their own 24 hours after mine got deleted, but that’s gotta be a coincidence).

    Or, my second-favorite, the one where your post gets autoremoved for “Rule 4”, but there’s no list of numbered rules anywhere on or linked to the subreddit. I think that’s a “feature” of New Reddit, where Old Reddit users can’t see the sidebars anymore under certain conditions, but I’m not sure.

    And then, third favorite, are the ones OP is probably talking about, where the rules amount to a college textbook’s worth of pages that have been through no developmental editing or copyediting, so they’re more vague than 5e’s description of the Magic Jar spell, but whatever interpretation the mods are using, it’s not the obvious one… or the second-obvious… or the third-obvious…



  • What I wish for is an open platform where left and right can speak freely to each other in polite discourse

    Oh, I see. You’re delusional. You honestly think I should be having “polite discourse” with people who either want me dead, or are ok with voting for people who want me dead.

    Because, see, what’s left? What makes a Republican want to claim to be a Republican other than the culture war bullshit? What do they stand for? They haven’t stood for “fiscal responsibility” or “small government” since W was in office. The straight-up write things like “We stand against teaching critical thinking in schools” (see: Texas GOP party platform) into their guiding documents. And you think they’re going to have a civil conversation? You think I owe them a civil conversation?

    Every server we allow those people on freely will become exploding heads or 4 chan. Go look at r/politicalcompassmemes if you need an example. I don’t know how many times we have to watch it happen before you get the picture, or maybe this is your first ever internet community experience. But you’re wrong. Their bad-faith rhetoric, carefully-stated death threats, and direct personal attacks will drive everyone who isn’t one of them away, leaving only Nazis. If the admins call them out and ban them for that stuff, they’ll end up banning all of them and we’ll be having this same conversation. If the admins allow their speech, but don’t allow us to say “Fuck off, weeb, nobody likes you” without censure, then guess who gets to control the “discourse”? And if the admins don’t ban anyone for it, we’ll become Voat. Since only the slimiest members of humanity can tolerate that vibe for long, guess who ends up owning the server by default?

    You wanna see that shit, you enjoy being called slurs and told to go kys, you are free to seek out the communities who will do that for you. But fuck all the way off with telling me I must put up with it, too.

    Oh, I can block them? No I fucking can’t. I blocked you days ago, and your shit still shows up in my notifications. So, again, fuck off. If I have to listen to whatever dumb shit spills out of your brain, against my will, then you get to listen to my toxicity.

    Are you suggesting that I should have an account on each fediverse instance, just to get all of the content? If so, then what the actual fuck is the point of federation in the first place?

    …you… honestly thought… the fediverse… was supposed to be a centralized content aggregator…?

    What… uh, so, what… what do you think the fediverse is?



  • Okay but why didn’t they have a usable option before killing off the stuff people use?

    They didn’t fucking think about it. It literally never occurred to them to consider all the third-party work that went into being able to make their site actually usable. They just assumed that, obviously, the official app is fine, and people would just “adjust”.

    The conversation they had with the mods of r/blind was a complete joke. It just never once occurred to anyone that people with accessibility needs use Reddit at all.

    The following is a dramatization

    “Who in your company has accessibility certifications, and which ones?”
    “… uh… well, of course we do…[texting their boss what the fuck is an accessibility certification???] I just… [ding! A what? TF is that?]… am not allowed to answer that… … right now…”

    “When was the last time you had a third-party accessibility audit, and who performed it?”
    “…oh, we… totally… had an accessibility audit, just… like… you know, just recently! And it was performed by… uh… [texting Who the fuck does accessibility audits???]… uh, you know, that big company, from Canada… you’ve probably never met them… [ding! What audits? The fuck are those? I don’t fucking know!] I’m just… not allowed to say right now.”