[-] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

If my PCs responded to the clowns this way, I would absolutely make the clowns demons and the "bag of holding" a portal to a circus themed layer of the Abyss. And that's the campaign now.

It turns out the ruler of this layer of the abyss appreciates your lust for violence and mass murder. That's probably not actually... good? For you?

[-] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That bullet of healing is awesome. Would be great for a supernatural Wild West game. Which, is I think what I want to run next now.

Hammer of Striking. Social bonuses when organizing labor. Combat bonuses only when near many allies.

Pair this with the Sickle of Means. Does double damage and gives Ranger favored enemy bonuses against employers, nobility, land owners and clerics, so long as the wielder forswears ever becoming any of those things. When used to harvest grain, doubles the speed at which grain can be harvested and magically doubles the final yield of the harvest as well. However, if the grain is not freely and equitably distributed (especially if the wielder charges for it), the next time they use the sickle they will immediately fumble and critically hit themselves for max damage.

[-] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Wrong. Fuck printers. Fuck everything about them, from the tree death camps, to the overpriced proprietary ink to the way manufacturers have done fuck-all about fixing their known wifi glitches for literally 30 years. Thank god I'm at a point in my career where the only people who want me to troubleshoot printers are my family, and what I charge them for it is having to listen to me scornfully rant that if you figure out how to work without a printer, Hewlett-Packard has a problem but if you don't YOU have a problem. A bunch of problems, given how frequently my dad and sister beg for support. My wife got sick enough of the rant that she finally stopped using hers, it's been sitting on a shelf in our garage for the last two years. I think she's frustrated about not being able to print sometimes, but oh well, she can go to Kinko's or walk over to my dad's house and use his (which will result in me getting a phone call "Hey @thebard, your wife is here trying to print something and the printer's not working, we tried turning it off and on, but it still won't print, can you..."

A potion of True Healing... heals 1d8+2 damage, recipient MUST truthfully answer the next question they are asked. Sell the characters 6, but don't tell them about the truth serum. Let them figure it out on their own.

Boots of Elvenkind... except Elves can hear you.

A bag of holding that contains infinite clowns. Every time it is opened, 1d4 clowns come out. The clowns are useless in combat and attempt to distract, annoy and mock the holder. While this could be used as a distraction, the clowns will follow the holder, drawing attention to them. You could create a table for what kind of clowns you get (mime clowns, pie throwing clowns, balloon animal clowns, magician clowns, etc). The clowns will wander off after 1d6 minutes. Where the clowns go and what they are (Illusions? Demons?) is unknown.

Druid: You guys go on ahead. I'm gonna um... Commune. With this tree.

[-] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

"The blood of Christ reduces you to a pile of ash. No, there's no way to resist. Make a new character. Dumbass."

-Any decent storyteller in this situation.

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“violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree” Trump said unironically.

8

Linking to the r/denver megathread ONLY because it seems to be the best source of updates right now.

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This is a really insightful and disturbing article.

Sobering thought: What are we supposed to do about 60 MILLION fucking people in this country who genuinely believe that Jesus is coming back any day to reign as an absolute monarch and punish the non-believers for their lack of faith and that this is a GOOD THING? No wonder democracy itself is crumbling. How are you supposed to have a functional democratic alliance with people who are praying every day for their literal god king to come reign over the earth and who eat up the bullshit of ANY and EVERY conman and grifter who feeds into that?

7
Should not chocobos be mounts? (lemmy.starlightkel.xyz)

I'm just asking questions.

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world

I know, he's always been one of those conservative old men writing for teenage boys. That's been true since the 80s. But his themes on a number of subjects got just enough more progressive as time went on, and I was able to stomach his writing. I always pegged him as a centerist who moved VERY GRADUALLY leftward over the decades and mostly wasn't interested in making political points in his books. Though he clearly had regressive opinions about women in the military for a long time, especially when that was a big part of the cultural zeitgeist in the 90s, those even eased in recent decades.

On the subject of abortion, he wrote an impressively nuanced short story back in the 90s about abortion and telepathy. Specifically, about a telepathic scientist caught between pro life and pro choice political blocks trying to use telepathy in an objective way to answer the question of how human fetuses were at different stages of development. While the results initially seemed to favor the pro life crowd, at the end it's revealed that the story is more about the observer effect and that rather than reading the minds of unborn children, he was reading his own mind reflected back to him by developing brains unable to process the telepathic contact.

So I was surprised by just how moralistic and aggressively pro life Judgement at Proteus (the latest installment of the Quadrail series) was.

A major plot point in the book is that a teenage girl, pregnant through SA, turns out to have a

warning! spoiler!gene modded fetus implanted in her by would be alien conquerors who arranged her assault as part of a program to make human beings susceptible to their mind control abilities.

At multiple points in the story, the health of the fetus comes up and multiple characters go out of their way to say things like "all sentient life is sacred." The main characters express agreement with this sentiment, even while bringing up that on some parts of Earth, it would be legal to abort the fetus. The aliens running the hospital space habitat they're on shut that down quite aggressively.

The girl herself, who is shitty and antisocial to everyone to the point that she loses believably as a character, is shown to want her rape baby to live (at least until the truth about it's conception is revealed) in a way that makes her even MORE unbelievable as a real person (I've done a lot of professional work in my life with teenagers and I just don't buy it).

But then when she DOES change her mind about wanting to keep the baby she risks her life

warning! spoiler!trying to abort by getting drunk to the point of life threatening alcohol poisoning.

This is the most believable part of the story (and where I threw the book down due to the toxic bullshit) because:

  • A teen girl nearly kills herself doing something dangerous because she doesn't think (with good reason) that the adults around her will support her in getting an abortion? 100% believable.

  • The main character initially thinks she's trying to kill herself and calls it "murder." When he figured out what she was actually trying to do, he puts it that "she wasn't the intended victim."

  • A female character, shown to be in a supportive role toward the girl, expresses she can't understand why. The male character mansplains to her "put yourself in her shoes, you might feel the same way!" And she passionately rejects that she would not. Yeah, a woman thinks about being a teen girl, pregnant through assault, discovering she's carrying an alien cuckoo baby, "doesn't understand why the girl would want to kill her child??" In fact, she needs a man to explain this to her? Bullshit! Also, r/menwritingwomen. Pro tip: Would have been MUCH more believable if you'd written the same dialog the other way around.

  • The male character then councils the woman that their job is to "be the girl's friend and help her understand how it's the fault of the people who did it to her and not the fault of her unborn child."

And that's the point where I threw the book down. And realized I'm probably done with yet another author teen me loved who adult me just sees more clearly.

But I worry for the teen boys who ARE still totally reading this author (and other military adventure scifi by conservative old men sneaking their political agenda into it). Given his association with Star Wars, he's STILL a pretty big draw for the teen boy demographic and his latest books are clearly still aimed straight at them, where these ideas can go percolate with all the toxic shit they absorb from the Man-o-Sphere on Tik Tok and Youtube.

Damn! Just had to get all that off my chest.

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No spoilers for Season 2 other than the magic is back and go watch it.

It's so good it makes other Star Wars almost unwatchable by comparison.

I'm also really inspired to go fight some fascism and blast some ~~space~~ Nazis.

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Self hosted alternative to Calendly (lemmy.starlightkel.xyz)

Title says it all. I'd like to host my own instead of sharing mine and everybody else's schedule with some techbros.

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They aren't rewriting history (lemmy.starlightkel.xyz)
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Alt Writing (lemmy.starlightkel.xyz)
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44

"They are not being talked to like they are children. We are helping them understand why their strategy is a bad idea," the source said.

Fuuuuuuuck you!

Said a second House Democrat who spoke anonymously: "It doesn't surprise me leadership is very upset. They gave specific instructions not to do that."

Fuuuuuuck you!

[-] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 106 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I love the Lemmy UI.

But I'm a gen Xer.

There's some great analysis floating around of how different generations actually interpret UIs (and make decisions about how or whether to engage with them) very differently. So there is no "one size fits all" that will make everybody happy. Change the Lemmy UI to something like Photon and I'd be like... "this is dumb." Making a bunch of very different options is a lot of work. If you want to do it... no one is stopping you. The Lemmy project is opensource and you could go start contributing and making pull requests today. You could go run your own instance and make it look like whatever you want and get the average redditors to join that. I run my own instance. We have a whole two users. It works exactly the way I want it to and federates with exactly who I want it to.

Frankly, I'm not sure Lemmy needs to go out of it's way to appeal to the average redditor in order to have a thriving, healthy community. Sure, there are some things I miss about having a giant user base to engage with, but honestly, I'll trade them for the MUCH MUCH lower toxicity. I don't know that "growing Lemmy" should be our focus. It's not like we're getting paid.

The same FBI that keeps telling Congress end to end encryption needs to have legally mandated back doors in it?

[-] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 142 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yep.

I have an old Google account from like 2012 that was a spam trap account I made back when you could easily sign up anonymously for gmail over Tor. It will not let me log into it anymore unless I connect a phone number to it. It hems and haws about how this is "for your protection" but really it's pretty simple that your activity has no value to Google unless they can tie it to your identity and connect it to other activity and then bundle that and sell it to advertisers. (And fuck you Google, I'm not protecting that account from anyone except you... hackers are WELCOME to know I types a throwaway email into some online medical insurance shit...)

In fact, if you don't want companies to collect your data, you're more and more locked out of any app, service or platform that asks for a verified email. I've encountered things recently that won't accept protonmail emails (and invite you to use OAuth to sign in with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, fuck that noise).

I actually imagine that OAuth locked to a major provider FOR EVERYTHING is the future those guys would all like to see.

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thebardingreen

joined 2 years ago