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What cute kids, hope nothing deeply traumatising happens to them :D

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A blazing bright summer!

Itty Bitty Summer Dragon stickers ♡

I'm OFFICIALLY DONE with all the itty bitty seasonal dragons :") thanks everyone for checking them out!! It was such a fun little project to do! All the seasons here:

🍂Autumn | ❄️Winter | 🌱Spring | 🌻 Summer

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AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

well…darn

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Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!

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watching a video on brewing Mesopotamian beer and look at this orange man (his ass cannot guard the barley)

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— requested by manbunjon

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great deals at thrifty megamart

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tonight i swore a blood oath to the minimum wage workers at my local subway

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some normal unicorns (and one bicorn)

twitter

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I understand why people might want a lesser known GM to come in if Matt's taking a break, I really do - but I think there's a good reasons for bringing in Brennan, and a reminder about a lot of fan complaints.

The first is the ongoing discussion excellently put in the replies on this post about player comfort in TTRPGs. Yes, people make too much of the "friends playing D&D" aspect of Critical Role and romanticize it to a point that they ignore Critical Role is also a company; but they are, in fact, friends playing D&D as well. For a switch-up this big, for people who have in many cases mostly played with Matt or each other in the GM's chair, having an experienced GM they're also already good friends with and have worked with before is a very understandable choice. I don't think it's as simple as "find someone newer and do some testing," particularly when it comes to a campaign that, even if it's shorter than the others, might last 2 years and be hundreds of hours.

The second is actually quite closely related to the first, which is I think a lot of Critical Role fans especially, but also AP fans in general, want it or other big shows to be everything in one convenient location - representation, a showcase for new people, a platform for their personal beliefs, and the specific storytelling they want on top of that. And that's just highly unlikely to happen! You're going to get a lot of these things, but you're probably not going to get all, and if you want more representation of certain identities you might be better served as a fan to look elsewhere (or, at least, if you have the time, check out other shows concurrently).

I noticed this first with the people who quit Campaign 2 largely over shipping. Their complaints heavily centered on how the cast were all white and insufficiently left politically; but the timing and the actual complaints were mostly about shipping, and the shows they recommended people go to instead were also all or mostly white cast as well (notably NADDPod, which to be clear, I love, but this doesn't address the race nor politics issue those fans claimed to have). And I get wanting to stick with what's comfortable for you, or wanting to stick with popular shows that have a pre-existing fandom...but if you want shows that have, for example, consistent representation of fat characters or characters of color or nb characters or if you want a newer DM to the scene, that's out there! But it might not be on Critical Role. You might need to go out and find new shows. And the thing is, if you play it right (ie, non-obnoxiously) you might be able to get some people to watch with you; a lot of CR folks started watching D20 back in 2018-2019 (myself included) because a few people who watched Critical Role started posting meta or art about it, or because Matt was in Bloodkeep. A bunch of us now are watching Tales Unrolled, with an all-Latine cast, because we know Luis and Christian from Critical Role and Oscar from D20.

I think a lot of people want Critical Role to be a one-stop shop for literally everything they want from actual play...and the best way to expand the space is to, well, expand the space and patronize other shows as well. It's a lot easier and much less of a risk or investment for you as a viewer to go out and watch a show with a different, newer DM, if that is what you want.