burntsquirrel

[burntsquirrel]

Mood.

I played a cool retro JRPG which transformed into a side-scroller beat'em up when you entered combat. Customizable Golem ally that helps you in fights, improving the abilities of your Wrench, setting up traps and structures. It took place on a steampunk iron oil rig in the middle of a vast ocean, and you would delve deeper and deeper to lower levels to discover the history of what and where this is.

I looked all over for this game, scoured the internet, asked reddit, browsed entire catalogs of old video games, searched for characters that used Wrenches as their weapon, asked strangers if they knew this game, etc.

The only conclusion is that I dreamt it one night.

say what you will about fever dreams but im just currently pissed off that the time-bending magical universe mystery manga that I dreamt up isn't real. like literally it was made so that different scan update sites would branch different timelines so you could hop between character timelines in a sorta quantum plot depending on the site and chapter headings.

i do not remember what my brain named the manga

[burntsquirrel]

Skype shutting down, tragedy, best emoji, yeah yeah yeah, very important.

Why is nobody talking about this single frame?

in light of skype finally shutting down [#estonian loss] dont understand why broader emojis never incorporated the skype emo emoji. it is one of the most crucial emojis in the world and the only way to access it is being shut the fuck down.this world is so cruel to its endangered species.

[burntsquirrel]

@theshitpostcalligrapher I know you're not currently taking commissions and such, but for your future consideration.

wore my thigh high boots on a walk today and we had to take a path through some long grass and while everyone else was rolling their pants into their socks and putting on jackets to protect themselves from ticks i was standing there smug as hell in my thigh high leather boots.

[burntsquirrel]

Chupacabra preservation

What do you believe in now?

[burntsquirrel]

You can write a heart or ❤️ using two characters: < and 3.

Making a diamond is also easy enough: <>

But, as I look around, I can't find anything for making a club or a spade. So I decided to come up with my own ideas for them.

&3 for Club and &> for Spade

Here are my reasons for these designs, but also if someone can suggest something better that meet these criteria I am open to suggestions!

I want them all to face the same way. Diamond can face either direction but Heart, a staple and immutable factor in this has only one direction.

I want them to be two characters. Heart and Diamond are easy two characters so Spade and Club should as well, to make them all uniform in design.

& is a common character in text and found in most any application or device able to produce text. I don't want characters that are too obscure or hard to access. It should be easy to produce these symbols.

Finally, I like how there are only a total of four characters used in making these four symbols, and each character shows up exactly twice. Each black symbol begins with & and each red symbol begins with <. Then half of the symbols end in 3 and the other half end in >.

Again, if anyone has other ideas or suggestions, I am open, but I think the four above criteria should be maintained.

[burntsquirrel]

I've been a big fan of 4ED for a long time. I have since gotten bored of and sold most of my 5th stuff but still have pretty much all of my 4ED books.

My favorite things that were implemented in 4ED:

Minions. The minion mechanic was fantastic and something I still use to this day. I don't think I can add anything that others haven't already said about minions.

Monster Creation. The rules and tools given for creating enemies and monsters, beyond just leveling them up or down, were so useful for me.

Action Economy. Again, standard, move, minor was simple and elegant.

Everyone Did Something. No matter what your class was, who or what you were, you had a range of abilities that did something. It wasn't just wizards, clerics, and druids who had strange or lasting effects. Martial classes all had important impacts upon events and did more than just, "I roll to hit this guy with my weapon".

Ugh, actually there's just so much to go over. Skill challenges, enemy classifications, easy traps and hazards, starting play at higher levels, etc.

Anyway, big fan, would rather play 4ED than 5th.

Okay specific things I like about D&D 4e:

Healing surges are just a really good pacing mechanic and makes resource management important. They also scale better than 5e's hit dice, since a single healing surge always heals a proportion of the character's maximum hit points and the number of healing surges a character has stays mostly the same.

Despite the claim that the game is more combat-focused than other editions, it actually has a lot of objective rules-mediated support for non-combat scenes. I'm not even talking about skill challenges, skill challenges kinda sucked until they overhauled them and even then were kind of half-baked, but even without resorting to them the actual mechanics for the skills have plenty of predetermined, objective rules-mediated uses beyond "the DM determines a difficulty and then you try to roll high."

The Fighter is really fun to play.

I absolutely adore the worldbuilding of 4e. The cosmology actually feels mythological and like it has a mythic history. All the different inhabitants of the universe all fit into the cosmic tapestry instead of being a patchwork of unrelated ideas. Also, it introduced the Feywild, the Shadowfell, and the Astral Sea, so hell yeah.

Related to the cosmology, I love how it actually sneakily brought back the old Law vs Chaos conflict, albeit with the extremes being Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil and with Good and Evil as middle steps. It's actually really BECMI in many ways.

Also BECMI, the fact that ascension and immortality are written as the explicit end goals for characters. Hell yeag

[burntsquirrel]

every now and then the internet decides it should revamp the ole “stop texting first and see how many friends you lose” when in reality you could literally just communicate that u feel bad that ur the only one texting first

[burntsquirrel]

Okay, so, this is absurd but actually happened...more than once.

There is a crosswalk that I use very very frequently, as it leads right to my place of employment.

There are the white stripes for playing hopscotch on, two bright yellow signs that were misspelled and said "PED CRSOSING" and there aren't any bushes or trees to block your view.

Anyhoo, I wait there, at the crosswalk, at the mercy of someone being nice enough to stop and let me cross (which, by the way, is required by law where I live. You must stop for pedestrians at crosswalks)

So, first, the cars closest to me stop. For this scenario, Blue is the very first car to stop, and initiates the rest of the cars to stop. All cars are now stopped. They have stopped specifically because I am there to cross the street.

BUT! As soon as I step into the road...

Blue Car starts moving, slams on their brakes, honks their horn, and gestures wildly as though confused about where this pedestrian came from.

THE CAR THAT WAS FIRST TO LET ME CROSS NEARLY HITS ME FROM STANDSTILL AND THEN ACT LIKE IT'S MY FAULT.

And, as I said above this wasn't an isolated incident. If it happened once, that would be weird but an interesting story to tell. If it happened twice, I'd be able to do that Professor Doofenshmirtz meme. Hell, if it happened 3 times, I could attribute it to bad things arrive in threes!

This has happened to me four times.

FOUR TIMES.

THERE HAVE BEEN FOUR SEPERATE OCCASSIONS WITH DIFFERENT VEHICLES AND DRIVERS DOING THIS EXACT SAME INSANE THING!

WHAT THE FUCK!

man I realize that changes in road design could make huge differences in the numbers of crashes & traffic fatalities and solely blaming people for driving badly shifts the focus away from changes that really need to be made to the way we approach driving as a society. but also. and I am not being hyperbolic at all. people are not at all conscious of how fucking dangerous driving a car is and I think if you get caught driving drunk, blowing through red lights, speeding in areas with pedestrians, you should get your license taken away for the rest of your life and never be allowed to drive again

[burntsquirrel]

I will need to create some diagrams, because without them it'll be hard to explain the absolute insanity of this particular situation I have encountered.

But in the meantime, yeah, I doubt I could be convinced that more than 10% of the world should be behind the wheel of a car. This includes me, my friends, my mother and extended family, etc. I don't think I know anyone personally that should be driving.

Whether it's because of their eyesight, their tendency to speed, their lack of turn signals, their distractions while driving, improper change of lanes to catch their exit, so on and so forth. These "minor infractions" are the kinds of things that ultimately get people killed.

man I realize that changes in road design could make huge differences in the numbers of crashes & traffic fatalities and solely blaming people for driving badly shifts the focus away from changes that really need to be made to the way we approach driving as a society. but also. and I am not being hyperbolic at all. people are not at all conscious of how fucking dangerous driving a car is and I think if you get caught driving drunk, blowing through red lights, speeding in areas with pedestrians, you should get your license taken away for the rest of your life and never be allowed to drive again

[burntsquirrel]

A while ago, I drew some Helmets

Then after a bit, I drew some more Helmets

Drew some more Helmets today

[burntsquirrel]

Nothing exposes the inability of people to navigate power imbalances quite like the relationship between drivers and pedestrians.

For example, I just had a driver get screaming-at-me mad because I stopped walking at a slip lane to make sure he was going to stop. And like, buddy, I know I have the right of way, but if I assume you are going to stop and I guess wrong, I will literally die. Whereas if I wait to see if you're actually going to slow down, I am just delaying both of us by a couple of seconds. And that might have more to do with why I made the choice that I did than my being a stupid bitch who needs to learn the rules. Like, if you can't understand why the fact that you could effortlessly accidentally kill me (and likely face no consequences) means I am reticent to assume the best from you, maybe you just shouldn't have any power over anyone ever.

[burntsquirrel]

Here is one article speaking about it.

[burntsquirrel]

So, uh...here's actually a crab.

[burntsquirrel]

One of my favorite RPG Systems is OVA: The Anime RPG, and have run/played in such a wide variety of settings and genres with so many unique characters that I would never have been able to see in D&D.

Anyway if you like to think that you care about game design or tabletop roleplaying games as a medium you absolutely need to get the idea that D&D 5e as a game can actually meaningfully support multiple different playstyles out of your head. D&D 5e is still ultimately a fantasy dungeon combat game and the only ones who benefit from people doubling down on its reputation as a multi-genre game are the people at Wizards of the Coast.

It is detrimental to players: players who accept the idea that D&D is good for everything will invariably grow incurious about the types of gameplay that D&D does a poor job of supporting, because if D&D can already do that gameplay then is there any reason to assume that it gets any better outside of D&D? Players will grow to think that D&D is representative of RPGs as a whole, which is simply untrue.

It's detrimental to GMs: when people buy into the idea that D&D can do anything it places blame for the failures of the system on the GM. "A good GM can make it work" becomes the rallying cry of thousands of people who haven't considered whether it's fair to expect the GM to do all the work that the game designers should've done. And more importantly: many game designers have already done the work of making it (playstyles that D&D doesn't support) work! They just have done it in games besides D&D.

And most importantly, it is absolutely detrimental to game designers whose livelihoods can sometimes depend on getting their games out there. These people are passionate about game design, making games that actually do the things that people claim D&D 5e does when in fact D&D 5e simply passes the buck to its GMs, and that is absolutely shameful.

And none of that is to say that D&D 5e the game deserves no credit, but it absolutely does not deserve any credit for things it does not do. When you think about something outside of the scope of its rules that you think D&D supports, ask yourself this: is the support it gives something concrete, like procedures and rules for you to rely on, or is it support in the sense that you have to do all the work but at least the game doesn't actively prevent you from doing it?

And this goes out especially to all the people who say D&D supports queer romance, as a fan of queer romance that's simply untrue.

[burntsquirrel]

Oh! Hell yeah, much appreciated for confirming that I have objectively correct opinions!

But seriously, thanks for this. I love his videos and stories, and I'm glad there are others out there who remember these videos.

While the initial videos mostly just parodied the Mac/PC commercials, an interesting overarching storyline develops, and it shows off a lot of what I like about Superman. Sadly, I shouldn't talk about those particular points as they are integral to the storyline and would be spoilers.

You'll just have to watch ItsJustSomeRandomGuy's videos.

[burntsquirrel]

Something I'll occasionally see people post about is "the older generations' refusal to learn how technology works" which, while sometimes it is true, it often overlooks just how absurdly complicated technology actually is.

I've dealt with some pretty absurdly broken programs in my time, and I grew up with technology. I know how to go about troubleshooting and sometimes machines just suck.

Gremlins are a fictional mythological creature that only came into existence during the first two World Wars. We developed such advanced machinery, such complicated tanks and planes, that missing one small error could end with catastrophic results.

The Military would often attribute these inexplicable malfunctions and errors to Gremlins messing with their machines. Not in any serious sense, but it was used as a motivator for mechanics and such. They had posters encouraging constant maintenance and inspection of your machines, in case Gremlins had come in and eaten a piece or three.

The Cyberpunk genre took the word and has attributed it to people who are bad with technology. Not just bad, but it goes haywire around them. Computers and machines will malfunction and cease working simply by being in the person's presence.

All this is to build up to just how badly my mom has gremlins.

Even just now, what inspired me to write this, she couldn't close out of a window. She couldn't interact with her web browser and it wouldn't close no matter how much she pressed the little x in the corner.

So, I walk over to see what she is doing and what I can do to help, and as she tries to show the issue, it closes.

Earlier today, she was trying to look up dogs for adoption, and a site that she uses frequently had an error that the website didn't exist, and to try running the troubleshooter. When she ran the troubleshooter, it came back saying that there was no problem found, so she refreshed the page and it still said the website didn't exist.

Again, I head over, and as soon as I am there to witness the error, it goes away.

This is a recurring issue my mom has to deal with. At her work as a receptionist, she will often have to contact IT about an error that pops up that, as far as they can tell, is brand new. She would spend five to ten minutes working on trying to get something to work, and as soon as a coworker walks over to see what the issue is, as she shows the steps she is going through, it suddenly works.

I have inherited gremlins from her, but not quite to the same degree. One time I tried to log into my Minecraft account and was faced with an error. I looked up the error code and nowhere was there any evidence such a code existed. I contacted support and they closed my ticket because the error code wasn't a real error. I did all the steps to refresh any information my computer might have, and continued to have the same error.

I gave up for about a month, and when I tried again, it still didn't work. Then, I gave up for a year and two months, and it still came up with that error. Then later in the week, because I was talking to a friend about my issue and was showing them what was going on, I logged in easily, as though nothing was ever wrong.

Beyond just technology already often being a complicated jumbled mess that some people are going to have immense difficulties using, some people have it even worse: they KNOW how it works and it just doesn't.

Fucking Gremlins.

[burntsquirrel]

@littleguysdaily