…big boxes killed malls in the 2000s, the retail apocalypse killed big boxes in the teens, and covid put the nails in big retail’s coffin…

…powerhug!..

…never heard that specifically but fourty years ago my parents ambushed me with their pastor telling me that i’d go to hell for becoming vegetarian; something about god creating animals for exploitation and to reject that was forsaking his will…

…then they tackled me to the ground, pried my jaws open, and shoved chunks of chicken down my throat: nice people…

…industrial shredder: quick, efficient, good-enough for baby chickens, good enough for ICE agents…

…blue raspberry gatorade…

…astroturfing; good catch…

^{(i was trying to parse when bra-stigma had been a thing after the twentieth century)}

…it’s an okay movie: perfectly servicable Standard Hollywood Treatment^TM; competently written, directed, performed, and edited; genre trope in-jokes liberally sprinkled throughout…

…i believe most positive reactions stem from defying expectations that it be a bad movie, rather than actually being good…

…human empathy is not a team sport…

…satellite galaxies != galaxy clusters; andromedia is 2.5 million light-years distant and the cluster in this study is about ten times that size, 23 million light-years across…

…that’s correct: i assumed 0.01c and didn’t adjust for time dilation, which can drastically affect the calculations depending upon how far we push relativistic super-science, although the required energies are commensurately absurd…

…so what you’re saying is that we should start calling drow shiela and bruce?..

…nope, we installed ours on the full water supply: it’s essential here or plumbing fixtures will fail…a properly designed softener won’t add significant salt to your potable water since the brine flushes clear after each recharge cycle…

…i don’t think you should drink that; it looks bad for you…

…softeners are essential in aquifer country; our zojirushi served us well for a decade but after our whole-house filter blew out a couple of years ago i’m starting to see iron deposits despite the softener…

…for those distances we’re talking hundreds of millions of years at relativistic velocities, even billions…

“You unleash a string of insults laced with subtle enchantments at a creature you can see within range.”

…its only component is verbal, and while it’s not subtle casting it’s fair to characterise as subtle casting; i’d argue for first-round surprise in the context of open dialog and in fact that’s how we’ve played it at my tables…

…sandy petersen, greg vaghan, and alex kammer have all published great fifth-edition material based on the king in yellow: take a look at cthulhu mythos, aegis of empires, and the end of everything for inspiration…

feet.

…it’s a tarantino thing…

…yeah, i think that’s an essential cultural distinction between tabletop and videogame backgrounds; i started seeing the transition in campaign styles in parallel with the advent of structured narratives around the mid-eighties leading into the nineties…

…by contrast, our groups routinely swap DM roles across multiple tables which all share the same more-or-less persistent world, although individual character and DM experiences can vary within the boundaries of narrative coherence…that sustained investment is the fundamental point of of our tabletop campaigns; it distinguishes freeform from prescribed gameplay and is why we chose open-ended campaigns over closed-form boardgames…

…are you familiar with the old RPGA living campaigns?..ignoring the structured campaign setting, that style of pickup game used to be how most folks played…

…if player characters aren’t at liberty to move between campaigns, then ultimately no, they don’t have agency: they’re just ephemeral labor playing-out the DM’s narrative with nothing to show for it afterward…

…mind, i’m not damning that arrangement - some folks enjoy the transient experience - but i have no interest in investing my own creative energy toward anything that i don’t keep…

^{(i already deal with that sixty-five hours every week and remuneration barely suffices to stay my contempt)}