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ultimately what i find grating about the incursion of psychotherapeutic jargon into quotidien speech isn't even that it makes you constantly sound like you're about to institutionalise me (it does, but im lucky enough i can generally just lie, or avoid you forever) -- it's the insistence that by doing so you've magically eliminated the communicative ambiguity that characterises literally all speech, body language, social cues, norms, expectations, &c &c &c now until the end of time inevitably and always

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Pokemon designs are so gauche, its as if they were monsters designed for the amusement of children

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you dropped this king *grunting really hard as I try to rip out a big section of carpet*

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It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

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i think of this image at least once a month its so funny how this is just what its actually like

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me: huh, i have this problem, i wonder if i can find any resources to help support me!

google: 7 ways to KILL a person with this evil manipulative abuser trait! how to know if someone you know has this trait and is LEECHING off of you and SECRETLY ABUSING you! remember that people with this trait are EVIL and SUBHUMAN and UNWORTHY OF ANYTHING GOOD!!!

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tried to explain to a white liberal that i felt weird seeing white people make racist sounding jokes about AI ("tin crow laws", "wirebacks/silverbacks", "my daughter better not come home with no god damn clanker") because of how ingrained it is into the "white" identity to incite genocide by inventing an outgroup, and how that's the only "white heritage" that exists because "whiteness" was invented 200 years ago from ideology.

i was told i was "flexing my history knowledge" for bringing this up, and then accused of promoting bioessentialism for saying racism defines white blood-- something objectively true, as "whiteness" cannot exist without an outgroup.

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christian: I'm so happy god invented girls

atheist: while the concept of gender has been used to enforce a senseless hierarchy that subjects us to violence every day, I am happy to call myself a girl and to love other girls as a declaration of pride despite our oppression

agnostic: nobody knows where girls come from, therefore I see no reason not to follow you into this "feminizing basement",

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every part of living as a person in 2025 feels like fighting a losing battle. and you’re supposed to just get on with it or you’re weird

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we are the daughters of the women you couldn’t sell to one direction

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It's important to remember that Luigi Mangione is being framed for murder. The "evidence" they have on him is absolute clown shoes absurd.

They're trying to win this by swaying public opinion. That's why they're doing movie deals about it and staging ridiculous photo ops.

They're gonna try to give this kid the death penalty to cover up for their own gross incompetence and in the hopes that they scare the working class out of trying to fight back.

Please don't help them do this by using his name as a synonym for political assassinations. Please do not perpetuate the idea that he's guilty.

[valgee]

the thing about being nonbinary is that you really do start to forget that other people have such strict walls around what is and isn’t allowed for genders. i thought we all agreed that we made that up. could you climb out of the cave real quick and feel the sunshine for a minute.

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recommendatation: grab an angel by the halo and pick it up without supporting the body so that it hurts a lot

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op has clearly never been to a poetry slam

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kids deserve so much more respect and it turns out that saying that is a great way to locate the horrible people in any community <3