Without a sword a pen will do.

[prokopetz]

I imagine you as being no older than 25, but your personal chronology doesn’t really make this possible or realistic. Can you do something about this?

The curse of having been a kid who was seen as "mature for his age" because he was just really good at copying the register of the adults around him is that you're basically stuck sounding ambiguously twentysomething forever.

[iamthelowercase]

Prokopetz here has previously made reference to having personal memories of the mid-90s. If we assume he was five years old in 1995, that would probably make him 36 now (in 2026).

Frankly I'm treating that as a lower bound, but that's also as far as I'm going to push it.

[prokopetz]

I'm turning 43 on Sunday.

[rocket-enjoyer]

i thought you were in your 50s.

[prokopetz]

My online age is a little bit out of whack with my chronological age because my elementary school was part of one of the first pilot programs to extend institutional Internet access outside of university campuses, so in spite of being in my early 40s I've been online since roughly 1992.* I've been told that having had unlimited and unsupervised access to the mid 1990s Internet as a preteen explains several things about me.

* It might have been 1991, but I'm not 100% sure; I know I was already on Usenet when rec.games.frp.dnd was first created, and the FAQ says that was May of 1992, so definitely before that!

[prokopetz]

@cscolris replied:

OTOH, I'm about your age but still think of you as being a bit older than me because you're much more knowledgeable about the early Internet. You seem to have actually spent time on Usenet and such while I just mucked around on early webcomics and a few message boards.

Yeah, I lucked into exactly the right combination of time, place and access to have been an unsupervised preteen on dial-up BBSes, Usenet, IRC, and first-generation web forums, more or less in that order

[prokopetz]

Honestly, a big part of why I'm excited about @jdragsky's Seven Part Pact is that it'll be nice to have a baroquely maximalist tabletop-RPG-meets-board-game actually available in print that isn't Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.

[prokopetz]

(Like, not that I'm sick of CMWGE by any means, but it would be good to have an example of the type I can recommend to people who would prefer to at least occasionally roll dice!)

[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]

Look, when you see someone talking about a particular bit of tabletop RPG rules tech and your first reaction is "well, that just doesn't sound practical", your first question should be whether you've actually identified a problem, or whether you've merely assumed without justification that every part of the game in question other than the bit you just read about is identical to Dungeons & Dragons.

[prokopetz]

You need to understand that I get "but that doesn't make sense because how would it interact with levelling up" in my notifications like three times a week.

[prokopetz]

Strictly speaking, "ultimate" means "last", not "best". It's often figuratively employed in the latter sense to suggest that the thing so described is the final word on the subject, after which nothing more need be said, but if we're being real technical, describing a game or movie that was so bad it killed its entire franchise as the "ultimate" is in fact correct.

[prokopetz]

@ffoxer replied:

Now I'm thinking about the prefix "pen," which as far as I can think I may have only ever seen in "penultimate"

It's Latin for "nearly" or "almost", and it does pop up in a few other English words. "Penultimate", "penumbra" and "peninsula" are the only ones I can think of that you'd even remotely expect to encounter in everyday speech, though; the rest are all medical or mathematical jargon.

[prokopetz]

#so peninsula means what? #almost island? #lmao (via @actualanxiousswampwitch)

That is the actual etymology of the word "peninsula", yes.

[gifak-net]

[myinnerfrankcastle-deactivated2]

Was gonna make another 40K machine god joke but honestly this looks like some sh*t you see in Silent Hill.

[prokopetz]

bsky post complaining about a TTRPG (lancer, if it matters) uses the phrase "mechanical support for storytelling" and the only thing I could think to do is ask you if that seems like a cromulent complaint to have about a TTRPG because based on everything I've read on your treatises on the subject it doesn't seem like one but I am willing to live in the timeline where I pissed on my reading comprehension

See, the context actually does matter there; while "lack of mechanical support for storytelling" is a meaningless criticism in the abstract because nobody can agree what we actually mean when we say "story", let alone what it entails for a game to support having one, with respect to Lancer I strongly suspect that they're saying "story" in the way that folks who've mainly experienced tabletop roleplaying via Dungeons & Dragons and its various imitators say "story" – which is to say, as a shorthand for "literally everything other than combat"; and by "combat" in this context we mean "things that happen when you're inside a giant robot".

(The problems with treating "story" and "combat" as disjoint sets are, of course, beyond the scope of this post!)

It's a frequent complaint regarding Lancer that the framework of play doesn't give a shit about anything that happens when you're not actively stomping around inside a giant robot, and it's not an unfounded one. Heck, one earlier first-party supplements straight up yanks out all of the non-giant-robot mechanics and replaces them wholesale with something more suited to that supplement's particular milieu and it basically doesn't affect the gameplay loop at all; that's how severe the disconnect between giant-robot play and non-giant-robot play is.

Now, given the kind of game that Lancer is, we can quibble about whether "the non-giant-robot play is almost entirely unconnected with the giant-robot play" is a reasonable criticism, but at the very least it's an intelligible criticism.

[prokopetz]

Arthurian knight kink, by which I mean our RP scene must be prefaced with a lengthy apologetics establishing that it totally happened exactly like this and any other chronicler who tells it differently is full of shit.

[prokopetz]

I'm going to need you to approach me three times in a series of increasingly flimsy disguises by which I will be utterly fooled, each time asking me one of these five riddles, and you have to act like you're genuinely mad when I get the answers wrong. I can't get it up if the scorn isn't sincere.

[prokopetz]

[prokopetz]

Problems in computationally efficient fluid simulation which have stymied game designers for decades are being solved right now by artists on Patreon whose ability to afford groceries this month depends on whether they can render a video involving several gallons of jizz on a laptop from 2017.

[quackels]

this sure is a sentence

[prokopetz]

I've got more.

[prokopetz]

Flavours of unreliable narrator:

Lying to the reader

Lying to themselves

Simply misinformed

Not paying attention

Has weird priorities

Assumed you knew

Hates you personally

Bad at communicating

Easily sidetracked

Will believe anything

Has weird prejudices

Just kind of dumb

[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?

[lickingandsuckingchristmascoins]

come over

[trangoldin]

American diet and "healthy living" culture is insane and runs DEEP

[jennamoran]

who the heck is eating dice, cards, and pool

[aniseandspearmint]

WHAT is the first one supposed to be? It looks like 'piecing between meals' to me, but that can't be what it says, right?

[prfury-lavaca]

It does in fact say “piecing between meals” and it refers to snacking

[prokopetz]

I'm more struck by the fact that the progression set forth here implies that laudanum and cocaine are less concerning that spicing your food.

[prokopetz]

Having been Very Online in the mid 1990s is rough because half of your formative influences are like "yeah, this Flash video engages in pop culture deconstruction that's strikingly topical even thirty years later and did things to my vocabulary that persist to this day, and I can literally never recommend it to anyone because its core premise is a level of homophobic ordinarily observed only under laboratory conditions".

[prokopetz]

Them: Hey, you were around for the first wave of real webcomics. Which one was your favourite?

Me:

[prokopetz]

#thank god homestar runner aged well (via @shibascarf)

Homestar Runner is the way that it is in large part because it's a response to the 90s edgelord bullshit I'm talking about; while the characters had earlier appeared in print, the Flash animated version that everybody remembers didn't debut until January of 2000. If it's aged well, that isn't an accident – it's a product of its authors looking at the state of 1990s Internet culture and making a conscious decision to be Not That.

[prokopetz]

You'd think "don't use a fictional creature as an allegory for oppressed minorities and as a horde of vile automatons that it's always okay to kill in the same work at the same time" would be a no brainer, but roughly 70% of all works featuring goblins and/or robots demonstrate otherwise.

[bicokun]

Star Wars using this exact formula with droids blows my mind to this day. Like, they really can’t decide whether they’re actually an oppressed group or genuinely mindless automatons whose inner lives we don’t need to worry about.

[prokopetz]

Given that Solo: A Star Wars Story features a droid liberation activist who's very obviously characterised as a mean-spirited parody of a women's rights activist and whose concerns are consistently treated as misguided and laughable (before they blow her up and use her brain to repair a spaceship), I'm not sure it's that the writers can't decide so much as it that they don't want to say what they really think out loud.

[jdragsky]

seven part pact, possum creek's newest fantastical ttrpg about seven wizards crushing each other under the pressures of masculinity, is now live on kickstarter!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sjgames/seven-part-pact

this game is for you if you're a sucker for asymmetrical board games, meditations on the way power shapes masculinity, or incredible wizard magic. check it out!

[greatcheshire]

Did some playtesting for this and it’s truly fun, one of a kind, made for the real magic and mechanics sickos out there

[prokopetz]

I knew a lot of folks who subscribe to the "Rules are Toys" school of tabletop RPG design follow this blog, and if you're one of them, this one may be of interest to you.

[stjohnstarling]

Inside the Booming Business of Monster Porn

Teratophiliacs were once a niche group that bonded over their sexual attraction to monsters in obscure forums. Now—as online communities pro

Okay guys, we’ve got to wrap it up now with the monsterfucking and find something new to do. It’s getting write-ups in GQ, it’s so over.

[stjohnstarling]

Sometimes, in their obsession with monsters, humans end up finding other humans. In 2019, Cachét developed a crush on Salad Fingers, the main character in a British cult web cartoon. She drew porn of Salad Fingers and sent it to David Firth, the show’s creator. Firth loved it and followed her back. “He thought I was a guy because no girl would draw porn of Salad Fingers,” Cachét says.

They started messaging. Cachét complimented his drawing of a human-bug threesome and asked for a print. Three years later, Cachét and David got married. The human-bug threesome drawing hangs on the wall of their home.

Okay this does kind of rule though.

[prokopetz]

I don't think I've ever seen an artist misunderstand their own work's target audience quite so starkly as David Firth finding it implausible that a woman would want to fuck Salad Fingers.

[prokopetz]

Well, you know those anachronistic lever-operated elevators in the hero's solarpunk treetop village? I'm the guy who runs on a giant wooden hamster wheel twelve hours a day to power them. Yeah, no, the embarkation platform has a fixed camera angle that puts me just out of frame; they said it would "ruin the ambience".