Hell is empty

43 year old Muppet enthusiast. Occasional science fiction/fantasy/TTRPG writer. Cis white guy. Bisexual. This is a place where I reblog things about politics that were said by people who seem smarter and better educated than me, post TTRPG crap that will reliably hit the single post text limit, and share a lot of screencaps of my FFXIV character, Captain Siege Zabac.

[ladycreep-deactivated20201127]

[talkshows-deactivated20150818]

the anniversary of library paste man’s death is in four days.

[basketghost]

One hundred and ten years ago to the day. Amazing. Incredible.

[1dietcokeinacan]

RIP😔🙏📚🍯

[tranthony]

grout white shark

[xalatath]

Interested ✅️

[desertleviathan]

If you're bored as hell and would enjoy reading a great big wall of Worldbuilding text followed by taking a very brief survey, I'm soliciting feedback for a TTRPG project. This setting is heavily inspired by Final Fantasy 8, featuring a number of military academies that train students in combat and magic (including the summoning of arcane entities) and then employ graduates as elite mercenaries.

There are eight such schools in the setting, but I'm trying to figure out which one appeals to people the most so that I can develop one fully as the default setting of a starter module. If any of that sounds cool to you, hit the following link!

NESTs - the Esper training academies

Twenty years ago, the Starfall War changed everything. The sites of battles are choked by grief-maddened poltergeists. The environmental dev

[desertleviathan]

Updated with more info about the Institutional Aeons, those spirits that guard each school and can potentially teach trusted Espers specialized magics.

[desertleviathan]

I know it's a lot to read, but I feel like it's pretty good stuff. Decent stuff. Acceptable quality stuff.

A third or perhaps even fourth response to the poll would be super exciting, if you have 10 minutes.

[desertleviathan]

Ok. So clearly either nobody gives enough of a shit to click the link in the first place, or they looked through and decided to bounce out without getting to the survey. That's fair. It works out to 7 pages of dense worldbuilding text, and I didn't really expect this mess to do big numbers, but I figured I could get like... a third response, to break the tie. It's been enough days of posting here, on bluesky, and half a dozen discord servers, that's about as clear an answer as I could get about the interest level in this setting.

Message received, I won't waste any more of your dashboard space with this topic.

[princesssarisa]

Where did your first name come from?

I was named after one of my parents

I was named after a dead relative or family friend

I was named after a living relative or family friend

I was named after a religious figure

I was named after a historical figure

I was named after a fictional character

I was named after a place

My parents just chose a name they liked

Other

Voting ended onJul 13

Having been named after a character in The Great Gatsby by my English-major dad, I thought I would ask about this.

[desertleviathan]

If you're bored as hell and would enjoy reading a great big wall of Worldbuilding text followed by taking a very brief survey, I'm soliciting feedback for a TTRPG project. This setting is heavily inspired by Final Fantasy 8, featuring a number of military academies that train students in combat and magic (including the summoning of arcane entities) and then employ graduates as elite mercenaries.

There are eight such schools in the setting, but I'm trying to figure out which one appeals to people the most so that I can develop one fully as the default setting of a starter module. If any of that sounds cool to you, hit the following link!

NESTs - the Esper training academies

Twenty years ago, the Starfall War changed everything. The sites of battles are choked by grief-maddened poltergeists. The environmental dev

[desertleviathan]

Updated with more info about the Institutional Aeons, those spirits that guard each school and can potentially teach trusted Espers specialized magics.

[desertleviathan]

I know it's a lot to read, but I feel like it's pretty good stuff. Decent stuff. Acceptable quality stuff.

A third or perhaps even fourth response to the poll would be super exciting, if you have 10 minutes.

[desertleviathan]

If you're bored as hell and would enjoy reading a great big wall of Worldbuilding text followed by taking a very brief survey, I'm soliciting feedback for a TTRPG project. This setting is heavily inspired by Final Fantasy 8, featuring a number of military academies that train students in combat and magic (including the summoning of arcane entities) and then employ graduates as elite mercenaries.

There are eight such schools in the setting, but I'm trying to figure out which one appeals to people the most so that I can develop one fully as the default setting of a starter module. If any of that sounds cool to you, hit the following link!

NESTs - the Esper training academies

Twenty years ago, the Starfall War changed everything. The sites of battles are choked by grief-maddened poltergeists. The environmental dev

[desertleviathan]

Updated with more info about the Institutional Aeons, those spirits that guard each school and can potentially teach trusted Espers specialized magics.

[desertleviathan]

If you're bored as hell and would enjoy reading a great big wall of Worldbuilding text followed by taking a very brief survey, I'm soliciting feedback for a TTRPG project. This setting is heavily inspired by Final Fantasy 8, featuring a number of military academies that train students in combat and magic (including the summoning of arcane entities) and then employ graduates as elite mercenaries.

There are eight such schools in the setting, but I'm trying to figure out which one appeals to people the most so that I can develop one fully as the default setting of a starter module. If any of that sounds cool to you, hit the following link!

NESTs - the Esper training academies

Twenty years ago, the Starfall War changed everything. The sites of battles are choked by grief-maddened poltergeists. The environmental dev

[anneapocalypse]

Opinions on rez macros in FFXIV! (aka macros that drop a message in the chat that you are in the process of resurrecting a specific player, for the purpose of alerting other rezzers, or just expressing yourself.)

Do you like it when healers use rez macros, or not?

Please read all the options, and share in tags or replies why you picked your answer if you like.

Rez mancros: yay or nay?

Yay! (Healer main)

Yay! (Red Mage or Summoner main)

Yay! (Other)

Neutral. (Healer main)

Neutral. (Red Mage or Summoner main)

Neutral. (Other)

Nay. (Healer main)

Nay. (Red Mage or Summoner main)

Nay. (Other)

Voting ended onJul 8

[desertleviathan]

I can see the obvious value in letting other people with raises know that you've got this one, especially if you're a Red Mage and you'll be sniping the rezzes faster than others can react. But on the other hand it can be pretty demoralizing for someone who's already having a hard time with content to also have that highlighted for the whole team every time you pick them up. I think a short, simple, strictly informative Rez Macro in Team Chat is acceptable, and anything else is rude, especially if you feel the need to blast the info out to the whole Alliance Raid or something.

[desertleviathan]

I got the Aitascope today in a Roulette and it got me thinking about how Heavensward, and ARR patches 2.4 and 2.5 that were more HW prologue than they were ARR epilogue, were overwhelmingly the "Surprise, your friends are dead" part of the story. All the friendly dead folks who pop up down there to say hi in the Aetherial Sea died between 2.4 and 3.5. Ok, Minfilia was technically not 100% dead until 5.0, but she was a spirit in another dimension and not a person in a room I could visit and talk to, and that's pretty dead-adjacent IMO.

Meanwhile contrast Stormblood, the "Surprise, your enemies are alive" part of the story. We have death fake-outs that get reversed for Yotsuyu, Zenos, Gaius, and Emperor Solus. But they also gave us back Gosetsu, so it wasn't 100% architects of genocide who got spared, and I guess that's better than nothing.

It's just weird how those two specific types of stories are so densely concentrated in those respective story segments.

[desertleviathan]

FUCK YES!

That's only the second time I've pulled this off in 8 years playing this game.

[desertleviathan]

I haven't updated this since Endwalker, but imagine Gulool Ja Ja on there. 2 out of 3 kids not being fucked up is actually a pretty solid rate, all things considered. He also maintains the trend that in this setting Adoptive Fathers are way less likely to suck than Biological Fathers, as a statistic in both columns at once.

[sisitosito]

I cannot take any credit for the decorative lovelieness herein, except for guilt-tripping our beautiful FC leader Hya into decorating the house and doing a gorgeous job of it. I love how she decorates. A TOUR, THEN: The is the main room at the entrance. Behold, a kitchen, where we keep the sensibler food. Sisi likes the table because it's not massive, so she can reach the sensibler food upon it without the lala lifter. Ask Sisi for her opinion on the lala lifter if you wanna hear some swears.

You can squeeze into the area with waterfalls, but don't be fooled! You are not to use it as a bathroom under any circumstances.

Down the stairs is the basement bar, at the request of one of our members. It's where we keep the orchestrion (Everything Burns, on loop) and the funner food like that one angry pudding (mad because tasty)

Upstairs, is dedicated being booksmart - you can tell what you're getting into as you go up and there's booksmartening areas even on the stairs. The FC's canonical gimmick is being scholarly scribes idk how Sisi even got in and upstairs is dedicated to worthy pursuits, with plenty of books, desks, crafting stations and delicious punsch. The empty picture frames are by design - each FC member gets to claim a frame and add a picture of an area they find meaningful. Sisi took two because that's her way.

The loft above it is Sisi's favourite space. Hya built it specially for Sisi, for being cozy and safe and cluttered, but Sisi still climbs on all the furniture and insists on being in all the photos, because mild gremlin stuff. And that's the house! Hooray! It's at Empyreum Plot 47 23rd Ward on Light (EU) - Raiden, if you wanna peep in and sign the guestbook!

[phaeton-flier]

Not enough people know about wireless-fireless

[phaeton-flier]

Not enough of you were reading ComicJK, a minor webcomic from the late 2000s whose last update was during the 2012 election

[sexhaver]

lmfao the Scots in town for the World Cup have made a pilgrimage to Boston's world-famous Cop Annihilating Slide

[artemissoftstepper]

need a bad sleep reset

this is a very delicate operation which involves not falling asleep until the late enough tomorrow that i can get a normal nights sleep

[voxelfoxkae]

[desertleviathan]

The long-term impact of regularly trying this stunt is that now my body doesn't want a 16 up/8 down sleep schedule, it wants a 24 up/12 down sleep schedule. I've just taught myself to expect longer gaps between more sleep.

[humblemooncat]

Out of pure curiosity, and since I know we have quite a few anxious folks here, I wanted to see if something was worth hosting;

I know that raids can seem like a lot of pressure, trust me. I've put quite a few off since they're not required content, unless I could run them solo. But the stories they tell are fantastic, and add so much context sometimes, or just have really lovely side stories to tell.

So, if I were to help organize a bi-weekly, no stress or judgement, just vibes raid night for sprouts and anxious folks, where we took on normal raids section by section, or a full AR

Would you be interested?

Yes

No

Voting ended onJun 14

If this does happen, I would also love to recruit some folks who know the fights and are willing to help teach those new to them.

Having a patient group is what helped me get into not only normal, but savage raids as well, so I figured this might help some folks experience more of the amazing stories this game has to offer. <3

[desertleviathan]

This is a solid idea! I've been diagnosed with general anxiety myself, and while it hasn't kept me out of this particular set of content, it easily could have. Knowing what it's like to have your recreation sometimes held hostage by your own neurochemistry, I'd love to help out anyone who wants to try this content but finds it intimidating.

Anyway, if there's one thing I love it's running old content and helping first-timers through.

Services I can offer:

Familiarity with all Normal and Alliance Raids, optional Trials, and optional Dungeons including Variant Dungeons (I don't do Extreme/Savage/Unreal/Chaotic/Ultimate content though). Basically I have scrubbed the world map clean of optional quest markers and gone back in to do almost all of it many additional times, but I don't have much patience for the slow pace of progress in this game's more challenging tiers of content.

Willing to jump into a Discord call and be a shot caller, if you give me a couple minutes to watch a video guide and refresh my memory on a specific fight. There are a LOT of them after all, and sometimes the memories don't flow back until I'm in the thick of it, so a refresher in advance is always nice.

Competent Red Mage. I won't judge no matter how many times I have to pick you up off your feet.

Very skilled Machinist/Dragoon/Monk/Viper, if what you want instead is someone who can pick up the slack on damage and also move around the arena confidently enough to wear the Danger Dorito.

OK Gunbreaker.

Mediocre Sage, if there's no one else available to heal.

Cool guy to hang around with.