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also if you need some kind of formal certificate to prove you took the class, usually you have to pay, but make sure you check your public library resources first! You might be able to get a certificate for free!

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

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Okay, poll time. How many languages do you have a smattering of? This includes everything from fluency all the way down to knowing just a word or two.

(Proper nouns and adopted words don’t count.)

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Two hummingbirds in my yard are aggressively chirp-clicking the confrontation song from Les Mis again

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So I was trawling through the Essek tag when I came across a great post by @tarydarrington (here’s the link if you want to read it), and roughly three paragraphs into commenting, I realized I was writing a whole meta and should probably just make my own post. So here we go: 

Throughout Campaign 2, there have been a few themes that have been repeatedly reinforced, one of which is that love and compassion are what changes people. We’ve seen it with the Mighty Nein in how they came together as a bunch of liars and con artists, then slowly learned to trust each other and chose to be better because of that trust. We’ve seen it in Matt’s NPCs: not just in Essek, but in Astrid and Eadwulf, in the Gentleman, even in Artagan, who will always be kind of a shit but who was ready to sacrifice himself at Rumblecusp to honor the love of a girl who had been so faithful to him it opened a path to divine power. Compassion is the alchemy that transforms people into better versions of themselves, and we see this play out again and again in the Mighty Nein’s journey.

And it doesn’t always work, because sometimes the people to whom you would offer your compassion are dealing in bad faith. Sometimes you find yourself facing the man who abused and manipulated you, and you know there is no kindness you can offer that he wouldn’t twist to his own ends, no mercy that wouldn’t end with more innocents hurt. Sometimes you find yourself staring into the face of the friend who sacrificed his life saving you, only to realize that they aren’t the same person anymore, that the kindness they held in their heart has gone brittle and cold.

But then, every so often, you find someone who by all rights should be irredeemable. Someone who has done terrible things for selfish reasons, without regret. Someone for whom mere kindness shouldn’t be enough to make them change… except it is, and they do, not because compassion alone can redeem them, but because, having experienced compassion, they find themselves wanting to be worthy of it.

There’s a quote from The Good Place that really captures what I’m saying here: “Why choose to be good every day if there is no guaranteed reward we can count on […]? I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people. Simply put, we are not in this alone.” This, I think, is why Essek’s arc resonates so strongly with me (and with others). Because Essek is proof that love can change a person, so long as that person is willing to change in response. And yes, it’s a long journey. Yes, he’s still learning. But he’s trying, and he wants to be worthy of the trust the Mighty Nein have offered him.

And then I think about Caleb, who was also changed by the Mighty Nein. Caleb, who loves fiercely and deeply, even when he cannot bring himself to turn that love inward. For so long, Caleb’s goal was to bend reality to his will–not to redeem himself, but to unravel his past so that it never happened at all. A part of him still wants that, as he admitted to Essek in the tower in episode 133. The temptation of being able to rewrite the past still tugs at him, and probably always will. 

But what Caleb hasn’t fully realized–and what I think the overall narrative is pointing towards–is that that isn’t how you bend reality. You don’t change the world by seeking power. You change the world by changing people, and you change people through kindness and mercy and love. That’s what I love about Essek, and what I love about Critical Role: the fact that I can point to this show and say, “This. This is what I believe the world could be, if only we could extend our compassion a little further, if only we could bring ourselves to acknowledge the strength that comes from loving and being loved. The world may be full of terrible things, may even be full of terrible people, but we were not born with venom in our veins. We can choose to leave the world better than we found it.” And I think that’s beautiful. 

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shadow / giant 2e kickstarter launching !!!

2 player ttrpg in the wolf & cub trope ala logan, the last of us, stranger things, etc ...

play as a jaded adult who's supposedly given up on caring, trying to keep a traumatized youth with strange powers safe in a world that's intent to hunt them down & separate them

🎲🃏 brand new asymmetric mechanics using d6s & playing cards (yahtzee-like combos with rerolls vs dice towers 👀👀)

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ ALL STAR ALL QUEER CULTURALLY DIVERSE TEAM including here, there, be monsters! designer @wendiyu, apocalypse keys designer @temporalhiccup, and exceptionals designer @sahonithereadwolf with awesome custom art by @paladinbaby !!

want to check out the first edition?

🍂 check out shadow giant 1e here

🍂 check out renown party of one podcast's actual play here @partyofonepod

🍂 listen to an interview between myself and @thecoppercompendium discussing the essentials of the game

🍂 featured on dice exploder's best games of 2024

and of course ... kickstarter launching 9/9/25 !!! 👀

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hostile work environment

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Bro absolutely COOKED with this.

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Linkifying it

all of you bitches is weak on the bible (https://www.kryogenix.org/crsearch/)

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Feel free to reblog to have more people to vote. Feel free to explain why you voted the way you did. DO NOT SENT ANON HATE FOR HOW PEOPLE VOTED.

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imagine a version of this campaign where jester bought a pair of tiger cubs instead of a weasel. there's an alternate reality where the nein just had some fucking tigers with them. and then became pirates

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Visitations: Available on Itch now!

I just released Visitations: a solo game of ghostly encounters inspired by A Christmas Carol.

In the game, you create a terrible person, describe their sin, then create three ghosts and narrate the conversations between them. All you need to play is the game, a deck of cards and journaling tools!

Additionally, all the art for Visitations is made of public domain images from antique books. While editing these images, I ended up making more than I needed, so I'm also releasing a PWYW art pack! Check it:

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Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.