I did this one campaign which was a hexcrawl where the party was shipwrecked on an island purported to hide the lost city of gold.

The site of the shipwreck was home base, but the party obviously wanted to explore. There were some NPC crewmate survivors, so they would assign them to work on projects while they were exploring. I would always tell them that “some guy” was working on their stuff.

Cut to a few months later when they have a sort of mutiny on their hands. It seems that one crew member in particular was fed up with how much work they had to do while the party went adventuring that they turned the crew against the party.

The mutinous ringleader’s name? Sum Gai

There’s this ad I keep seeing that I really despise. It’s for teeth-whitening toothpaste. The actress is wearing a white coat then holds up a tissue to her teeth, lamenting that her sparkling white teeth are ‘still yellow’

They cut away to teach you how toothpaste works, because surely you’ve never heard of this newfangled thing, and when they cut back she’s no longer wearing her white coat and says how much whiter her teeth are.

It’s transparently obvious that the wardrobe and tissue are just to give you something whiter to look at. But like… your teeth aren’t supposed to be freakishly white. It’s just something that Big Toothpaste wants you to feel bad about the way your body is. Also, using whitening toothpaste when you don’t need it can damage your enamel and cause you long term problems.

Well as long as Bill says it’s cool, I guess I don’t have to form my own opinion

I have the D&D 3.5 core rulebooks on my shelf in the nerd nook. I know that I’m never going to play 3.5 again, but it’s the system I first got into the hobby with. It would feel wrong to get rid of my personal history of nerdship.

Last week I bought a gallon of water and while transferring it from the bag to the car I dropped it on the pavement. Helplessly watching as the bottle burst, and it all drained away.

Let’s pour one out for each other

I used to have really bad chicken-scratch printing and I wanted to improve.

The exercise that really stuck out for me was to find a font I liked in a book on calligraphy and started practicing the alphabet.

Before I started practicing, I didn’t pay much attention to how I was forming a letter, I’d just draw it - and it would look messy. Once you start looking at each letter as a discrete number of strokes you start paying attention to the small parts and the whole looks much better.

If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a guide with arrows showing which way to draw each stroke. Super helpful. Note that this font uses a fountain pen, so it’ll look different with a standard ballpoint:

So does this mean that the “Second Breakfast” contingent of the Fellowship can be stored in one Hobnibble? Seems apt.

I suppose if you’re going to die of the beetus it might as well be in your sleep

In this economy!?

Surely you’ve thoroughly thought this through though?

Cry havoc! Let loose the goose of war!

HONK

I prefer to think of a regular size bee with a giant cowboy hat

If you make a venn diagram of the symptoms of ADHD, PTSD, burnout, anxiety, bipolar, and autism you get pretty close to a circle

I am not an artist

Proceeds to bust out a rad li’l dude doing a sick kickflip

I was probably a child when I last read it, so I might have some details wrong, but here’s how I remember it:

A child is given a toy rabbit. A fairy visits the toy rabbit and gives it the gift of awareness. The child and the toy bond with each other and grow to love each other. Unfortunately, the child becomes dangerously ill, and after the sickness their possessions must be incinerated to prevent contamination. This includes the toy rabbit. However, the fairy arrives at the last minute, declaring that because the rabbit learned to love it was therefore a real rabbit, and with a wave of her wand transforms the toy into a living being and whisks it off to the woods were it lives happily ever after with the other rabbits.

So I guess my question is this - Do you think the velveteen rabbit and the fairy are real? Or is the fairy’s magic an invention of the child’s mind?

I think the narrative required the velveteen rabbit to be burned because it was so horrible. To the grown ups it’s just velveteen, but to the child it’s a dear friend. Even as children we know that being burned is horrible. So the child invents a solution where their toy can live happily ever after even after it’s thrown in the fire.

I think there’s definitely some Heaven and Hell symbolism to be had too. The velveteen rabbit was damned to hellfire unless it accepted love into its heart during its life. Then it is granted into the afterlife. In fact, you could say it was reincarnated into a higher spiritual form.

The story explores coping with loss as seen from the point of view of a child. Even though the velveteen rabbit was just a toy, the child has given it a soul. If you have a soul, when you die you go to the afterlife and live happily ever after. It’s a comforting story to a child, and one that many people around the world have believed throughout the ages.

Isn’t showing the sun your grundle purpose enough?

Anecdotally, I have two pairs of glasses where one has the filter and the other does not. I experience less eye strain when working at the computer with the filtered glasses. There’s a definite yellow tint to them, but you don’t notice after a while.

However, I 100% believe that it could be the placebo effect, so take from that what you will.

…no 🥲

I’m doing a lot better now though

When I was a kid I saw an elderly man get hit by a car. He rolled over the top, which I guess is safer than being run down, but he got a lot of air and hit the pavement hard. Just kept rolling over and over. My parents shooed us away from the scene, but I can’t imagine it ended well for him.

One time I was riding a bus that rear-ended a motorcycle. I didn’t see the collision itself, but the driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

We often take for granted how dangerous traffic is. Your life can end in a moment doing something we casually do every day.

I was working in a department store when a middle-aged woman collapsed in front of me. It was really warm, heat exhaustion I supposed. She looked like maybe she was drunk because she was moving kind of erratically, so I went to see if she was okay and she just fell. I’ll never forget the sound her head made hitting the concrete or the fact that she didn’t even blink. Remarkably, she was okay and was up in a few minutes, walked away and everything, really surprised me.

The thing that probably fucked me up the most though was some videos on YouTube. I was working for a video analytics company, and we were trying to build an image classifier that could detect firearms. Well, you need data for that, so we were scraping videos of gun crime. Mostly what we were looking for was armed robbery. Lots of videos put out by the local police of somebody holding up a convenience store, and that wasn’t a big deal. But every now and then you’d find a video of someone getting shot and that really affected me. Eight hours a day of looking at gun crime with the occasional homicide peppered in was a recipe for disaster. I definitely needed therapy after that job.

What a precious little goober