AlexanderRM

[prokopetz]

I think the "joke superboss that looks exactly like a tutorial mob" trope from JRPGs could be productively adapted to all tabletop RPG settings. D&D campaign setting where the highest-level character in the world is a random goblin living in a fishing hut on a river just outside the player characters' home town. There's no complicated backstory explaining why this random goblin is like a 25th-level ranger – they just are.

[prokopetz]

Cyberpunk game where after many travails the player characters finally get to meet the leaders of the Resistance, and in addition to the expected cyborg rock stars and such, for some reason the shopping mall security guard the GM used to demo the stealth mechanics way back in session one is there.

[prokopetz]

You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.

[prokopetz]

Like, my assumption this whole time has been that when folks go "I misunderstood this post that says [thing] as saying [unrelated thing] because I mistook [word] for [completely different word that happens to start with the same letter]", that was a bit. What do you mean they're teaching kids a reading method that's tailored to produce this exact error?

[rlyehtaxidermist]

essentially every core premise of the whole language movement has been tested and rejected by both qualitative and quantitative research, but that won't stop them because they can't fucking read

[anxiousmimicrpgs]

One of the classes in my upcoming OSR game A Most Bloody Devotion. She's a literal corpse. Not undead. Just an actual dead body that people get obsessed with when they touch it.

[prokopetz]

An analysis of posting trends on Tumblr suggests that the ideal form of the visual novel is a semi-linear murder mystery whose gameplay consists of solving middle-school "who lives in the blue house?" style verbal logic puzzles, except every time you guess wrong a mean bisexual MILF makes fun of you.

[aokozaki]

[prokopetz]

It's tremendously annoying that this is the version of the post that trended because Umineko has essentially none of the described features.

[rlyehtaxidermist]

You're not wrong, but the image it conjures of a proper Ushiromiya Battler Studies for the LSAT spinoff is just too compelling

[prokopetz]

It's a shame that most fantasy farming sim RPGs are so squeamish about raising animals for meat because there's such a rich body of folklore concerning Weird Shit Happening to Livestock to draw upon. Like, forget a dungeon crawler minigame – I need enchanted swords and magic potions to deal with whatever is fucking around with the cows!

[prokopetz]

#fantasy farming sim game that slowly reveals itself to be a retelling of the Tain (@carthus-flame-arc)

Fantasy farming sim where you need to complete all of your life goals within five years because at the end of year five you are invariably killed by Cú Chulainn.

(This happens even if you're not a warrior and never go anywhere near a battlefield. He finds a way.)

[alexanderrm]

King of Dragon Pass is probably the closest thing to this that actually exists, although magic things fucking around with your cows is only a couple dozen events plus the raiding mechanics, and you control a clan council rather than a single farmer.

[femmenietzsche]

[prokopetz]

What's the most obscure web based mmo game that you know of that's still running.

It really depends on where exactly you draw the line between graphical MUDs and MMOs. Of those that most sources would agree fall on the "MMO" side of that line, I suspect Nexus: The Kingdom of Winds or one of the other miscellaneous Nexon titles that's inexplicably still up and running would take the prize.

[alexanderrm]

Perhaps you'd count this as a graphical MUD somehow, but as someone currently playing an MMO made by one guy in his free time in 2006 and which went from 1000 players at peak to ~100 players today it feels wild to hear one with a Wikipedia page described as "obscure". The Urban Dead community and spinoffs always referred to that genre as "Browser-based MMORPGs" which seems accurate enough.

[bramblepatch]

The thing is you can have a grassy lawn or even a golf course without it being an ecological disaster, you just have to a: be cool about having the occasional non-grass plant in the mix and b: be willing to live in a climate that supports grass without irrigation.

[bramblepatch]

Golf courses in California are an abomination which is why the sport was in fact invented in Scotland.

[abstrusetheorist]

I always thought that golf as a sport should be adapted to the local native landscape. I think this will encourage regional pride when local golfers completely trounce visitors at Swamp Golf, Desert Golf, Forest Golf, etc. Rich tourists will be pressured to travel extensively to experience all forms of golf, instead of staying in their backyard country club golf courses. Internet discourse will probably somehow get worse but I think this is a small price to pay.

[mctreeleth]

[mogseltof]

Nullarbor Links - Wikipedia

[bramblepatch]

Alright, so, it seems like Australia is on a level of golf innovation the rest of us can only dream of.

[sqbr]

I am Australian and had never heard of either of these??? Now I feel extra unhappy with the golf course near me that's just regular water-hungry grass :/

[alexanderwales]

Son: Which is older, Die Hard or Among Us? Me: ... because of the vents? Son: Yeah. Me: God I'm old. Son: That's why I asked you, because you'd know.

[dykebeckett]

sometimes a video game with a bad story has a good secret story that you can unlock if you pretend the bad parts aren’t there and make up a bunch of stuff

[alexanderwales]

Note: the same is true with movies, television shows, short stories, novels, and songs. I have unlocked the secret good story to many pieces of media this way. It's one of the reasons my gamer score is so high.

[alexanderwales]

I was helping my son with his parts of speech homework, and the only things he got wrong were "this" and "that". Which meant that we got to do a great comedy bit:

Me: So I think this is the only thing that you didn't get right. Son: And that. Me: What? Son: No, just this and that. I was fine with what. Me: And you think if you had to do this over you'd get it? Son: And that.

[alexanderwales]

One of my favorite bits I ever did, when he was much younger, was when he didn't want to watch the Green Eggs & Ham show, which had just come out on Netflix:

Me: Do you want to watch Green Eggs & Ham with me? Son: No. It looks boring. Me: Well how do you know if you've never tried it? Son: It just doesn't look good. Me: You liked the book though. Son: I don't want to watch it. Me: Would you watch it on TV? Would you watch it next to me? Son: No, I just don't want to. Me: Would you watch it on the ground? Would you watch it without sound? Son: I don't EVER want to watch it. Me: Would you watch it on the couch, would you watch it while you slouch? Son: I'm not going to watch it! Me: Would you watch it on my phone? Would you watch it in our home? Son: I don't want to daddy. I want to watch something else.

Eventually I relented, and we never ended up watching it. Would have been a lot better for the bit if he'd tried it and loved it.

[isayoldbean]

YO HOLD UP THIS AQUARIUM THEY'RE HAVING A YURI DATE IN HAS GOT COELACANTHS?!?!

[isayoldbean]

GIRLS. GIRLS STOP MAKING OUT. YOU'RE MISSING OUT ON THE MAJESTY OF THE COELACANTH

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Went to the grocery store with my kindergartener. We weighed some bananas: 2 pounds even. We weighed a watermelon: 4 pounds even. We weighed some mangos: a little over 1 pound. We weighed the watermelon AND the bananas: 6 pounds even.

“That’s funny” said the child “because 2+4=6 and two pounds and four pounds is six pounds. It’s like the same as math!”

“What happens if you add 6+1?”

“SEVEN”

“What if we put one pound of mangos on the scale?” <mangos added>

“IT’S THE SAME!!”

“OK, what’s 7-4?”

“Three?”

“What if we take the four pound watermelon off the scale?” <watermelon removed>

“Mama! Are you telling me math works In Real Life? Think of all the things you could measure!!”

[not-so-impossible]

[alexanderrm]

@zamboni-whisperer

[nightpool]

Oh Chicago

The Chicago Maroon reports:

> At 1:30 p.m. on April 17, a group of undergraduate students identifying themselves as “UChicago For Our Future” gathered on the main quad, handing out onions to protest the 1958 Onion Futures Act.  > The 1958 law prohibits the trading of onion futures contracts, making the bulbs the only type of agricultural product banned from futures markets in the United States.  > To draw attention, the group brought approximately 100 raw onions to the quad in a large cart. They encouraged passersby to participate, saying that any student who ate an entire onion would be featured on their website. About 20 students attended the event, while others took onions as they passed through. The group also collected 131 signatures on a petition to repeal the law. 

I feel like you might see a protest like this at Oberlin as a joke, but at the University of Chicago market distortions are deadly serious and the protest was in earnest. Maybe:

> “It’s always filled me with fury that we accept such odd minuscule policies that really are just odd market distortions,” second-year Adam Ash, a member of the group, said. “Even if one specific issue seems minute or minuscule and trivial, what matters is a combination of all of these. It’s a death by a thousand cuts to our agricultural policy.” … > The group’s Instagram account was later banned, which Ash claimed was the doing of “the corn lobby.”  

Okay maybe a joke?

(via matt levine)

deep and abiding respect to the uchicago undergrads who decided 2026 was the year we stand up and protest the 1958 onions futures act

[feathershy]

there is nothing you can describe as "subhuman" without sounding sus, even if people that a dog's life is less important than a humans, dogs should have less legal rights than humans, and that dogs shouldn't vote, saying "dogs are subhuman" makes you sound bigoted even though it is unclear how that is different from what people already believe.

[josephbrassey]

“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.

[gudamor]

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day

[alexanderrm]

“Please save me! I’ll do anything for you!” “Then perish.” “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” “Will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog?” “…Then I shall face God, and walk backwards into hell.” “…I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” 

-All of these are from shitposts, regrettably not from literary classics.

[angstriddentrashhuman]

Shakespeare’s ghost is simultaneously thrilled that these happened and irate that he didn’t create them

[i-cant-think-of-anything-to-say]

hunting down tumblr posts i see on pinterest part 411

[alexanderrm]

I regret to inform you I stole this from a KnowYourMeme comment but misunderstood it, the 2nd is from Shakespeare's Tempest and the 5th is from Moby Dick. Naturally it's gotten probably 100 times as many notes as every original post I've ever made combined and is still making the rounds 8 years later, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised it hasn't even stayed contained to Tumblr.