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Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.

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feeling a little improperly hinged. like i'm still in the doorframe but it's rattling when you open it in a worrying way. you know.

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sorry i can't come in to work today. yeah sorry they killed me off last night. yeah i just wasn't relevant to the plot anymore. i should be in tomorrow but i'll let you know.

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I see a lot of people clowning on the people of Pelican Town for not repairing the community center themselves or clowning on Lewis for embezzling and. like. Those criticisms aren't entirely unfair. But I think instead of coming at it from a perspective of "why can't the townspeople do this" we should be asking "why and how can the farmer do this?"

Like. Think about it. The farmer arrives in Stardew Valley on the first day of spring. By the first day they're obviously different. By day five the spirits of the forest who haven't been seen by the townsfolk in years or generations are speaking to them. By the second week they've developed a rapport with the wizard that lives outside town.

In the spring they go foraging and find more than even Linus, who's spent so many years learning the ways of the valley. Maybe he knows, when he sees them walking back home. Maybe he looks at them and understands that they're different, chosen somehow.

In the summer they fish in the lakes and the ocean for hours on end, catching fish that even Willy's only ever heard of, fish that he thought were the stuff of legend. They pull up giants from the deep and mutated monstrosities from the sewers.

In the fall, their crops grow incredibly immense; pumpkins twice as tall as a person, big enough that someone could live inside. The farmer cuts it down with an axe without even batting an eye. Does Lewis wonder, when he checks the collection bin that night and finds it full to the brim with pumpkin flesh? What does he think? Does he even leave the money? Does he have the funds to pay the farmer millions of dollars for the massive amounts of wine they sell? Or is it someone--something--else entirely?

In the winter, the farmer delves into the mines. No one in Pelican Town has been down there in decades. No one in living memory has been to the bottom. The farmer gets there within the season. They return to the surface with stories of dwarven ruins and shadow people, stories they only tell to Vincent and Jas, whose retellings will be dismissed by the adults as flights of fancy. People walking by the entrance to the mines sometimes hear the farmer in there, speaking in a language no one can understand. Something speaks back.

The farmer speaks to the the wizard. They speak to the spirit of a bear inside a centuries-old stone. They speak to the shadow people and the dwarves, ancient enemies, and they try to mend the rift. They speak to the Junimos, ancient spirits of the forest and the river and the mountain. They taste the nectar of the stardrops and speak to the valley itself. They change Pelican Town, and they change the valley. Things are waking up.

And what does Evelyn think? She's the oldest person in the valley; she was here when the farmer's grandfather was young. (How old *is* she, anyway? She never seems to age. She doesn't remember the year she was born.) Does she see the farmer and think of their grandfather? Does she try to remember if he was like this too, strange and wild and given the gifts of the forest?

And does their grandfather haunt the valley? He haunts the farm, still there even after his death; his body died somewhere else, but his spirit could never stay away for long. Does Abigail, using her ouija board on a stormy night, almost drop the planchette when she realizes it's moving on its own? Does Shane, walking to work long before anyone else leaves their house, catch glimpses of a wispy figure floating through the town? Does the farmer know their grandfather came back to the place they both love so much?

Mr. Qi takes interest in the farmer. He's different, too; in a different way, maybe, but the principles are the same. They're both exceptional, and no matter what Qi says about it being hard work and dedication, they both know the truth: the world bends around the both of them, changing to fit their needs. Most people aren't visited by fairies or witches. Most people don't have meteorites crash in their yard. Most people couldn't chop down trees all day without a break or speak to bears and mice and frogs.

The farmer is different. The rules of the world don't work for them the way they work for everyone else. The farmer goes fishing and finds the stuff of fairy tales. The farmer goes mining and fights shadow beasts and flying snakes. The farmer looks at paths the townspeople walk every day and finds buried in the dirt relics of lost civilizations.

The farmer is a violent, irrepressible miracle, chosen by the valley and destined to return to it someday. Even if they'd never received the letter, they would've come home.

They always come home eventually.

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Veronica Mata says she can't understand how the police officers who stood in a school hallway for more than an hour while children and teachers were being slaughtered in a classroom could possibly have been doing their jobs by the book. But that was the conclusion of a new municipalreport released Thursday into the May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School, in which a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers.  "We don't understand. Like, everybody knows what went on. Everybody was there," Mata, whose 10-year-old daughter Tess was among those killed, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "Everybody saw that these police officers stood there for 77 minutes and did nothing to protect our children. Nothing."

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Wait… Isn’t Ed Balls day coming up? ED BALLS DAY, I HAVE TO GET READY TO CELEBRATE 

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So I guess whoever runs this account decided sounding like a mafia boss was a good idea.

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We must be respectful of all languages

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GUYS I JUST SAW THIS ON TWITTER AND I AM DYING

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this is a total normal thing for ANOTHER COUNTRY'S foreign intelligence agency front to say to American university students who are peacefully demonstrating against the genocide and oppression of Palestinians

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I think that when D&D players say that, in contrast to other TTRPGs, D&D is "easy to learn", they are relying on the other person in the conversation to understand the fact that, for the vast majority of players, learning the rules of D&D involves some combination of the following three activities:

playing D&D with a group of friends, some of whom know the rules (to a sometimes, like, encyclopedic degree) and are willing -- often eager -- to patiently explain said rules; additionally, in this circumstance, the explanation and discussing of rules functions as a major fun element of the experience of playing together

watching/listening to at least one and probably several different long-form actual play shows, almost always featuring professional entertainers (comedians, podcasters, voice actors, youtubers, video game writers, etc) doing a good job of making the experience entertaining and often explaining (or learning aloud) the rules as they do it

googling rules and finding a hundred thousand people discussing and poring over the rules all across the internet

like, I'd say that most people who play D&D -- even people who know the rules really well -- rarely (or never) have actually technically read the official original rulebooks.

[shouting desperately over the crowd] it's not about the rules themselves being easy to understand! it's about how ubiquitous community explanation and discussion of the rules is!

players who only play D&D are less likely to pick up other games, not because they think "reading the rules is harder than reading D&D's rules", but because reading D&D's rules isn't how people learn the rules of D&D, and the ways people usually do learn the rules of D&D are often less readily available for other TTRPGs!

if the way Tammy learned D&D was her best friend Stephanie explaining them to her as they watched Fantasy High, and then she filled in the gaps by googling the minutiae and scrolling around fifty forum discussions and Reddit posts until finding answers...

...then if Stephanie doesn't know [specific TTRPG] and Dimension 20 didn't have a [specific TTRPG] season and there aren't a lot of [specific TTRPG] forum posts, then you're not going to convince Tammy that [specific TTRPG] is "easier to learn than D&D", because it isn't "easier to learn than D&D" for Tammy! no matter how simple [specific TTRPG]'s rules are!

and! if you go out of your way to deride and insult Tammy for this, then guess what!! you're not the good guy here!!! you're just being kinda mean for no reason!!!! and you're giving non-D&D TTRPG players a bad name!!!!! holy shit!!!!!! did we all forget that TTRPGs are primarily a community thing or what!!!!!!!

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girls when they get overstimulated in the grocery store

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