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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • How can you say that about Emily? Ali Beardsley makes the GM cuss at least as often. :)

    It’s not always bad when your GM says “Fuck you.” Sometimes we say it because you just skipped to the end of the mystery that was supposed to last a few more sessions, sometimes it’s because you use the spells I just gave you to kill my big-bad.

    Mostly it’s beautiful, because you did something I wasn’t expecting and now I get to work around it in real time. It’s not truly a collaborative story until you are making my life as the narrator hard, otherwise I’m just telling you a story on rails.



  • I am in the final countdown of our Brindlewood Bay game that I’ve been GM for a little over a year. Next up is a Dark Age Mage game for that group.

    The other night we are playing a version of Battle Bots with house rules after a couple of years of Shadowrun, originally on 1st Ed modified, later of homebrew simplifications.

    We’ve also played Ultraviolet Grasslands, The Between, Blades in the Dark, and Dungeon World in the last couple of years, along with several house experiments.



  • In the US, checks are still a common way to give money to people as gifts, especially birthdays and weddings and things like that. Also schools will require extra fees like trip costs to be paid by check because they are paid into older bank accounts that they don’t have online payment equivalents.

    Paper checks are a pain, but they have lower fees than most other ways of giving money. Once you’ve paid for the book of papers, that’s it. Each check only costs your account the exact amount written for and the recipient’s bank gives them the exact amount you wrote. No extra percentage or flat fee on the transaction and with smartphones you can scan the check and make the transaction happen electronically between the banks in 5 seconds. Every other way to do this has a flat or percentage fee for the money to move but a paper check is free.



  • It was almost the entirety of AM radio for the past 40 years. Sports and this right-wing trash. On in the background at every work place, hardware store, and cafe until Muzac took over. Had that ranting asshole and his friends pumping into our ears wanting it or not. Many areas of the country had only that and Country Music for hours in any direction.

    When I said “if you knew what you were doing” I meant you can build an AM receiver out of literal trash with a middle school understanding of electrics but no one bothered because you had one built in to every car, every tape player, boom box, alarm clock, and anything else with a speaker. You had a radio in every room of the house and 2 in the garage even if you never turned it on. There’s no way to believe that phones have less cultural push than AM radio had pre-1990.




  • They actually swapped which color was representing which party in election years on TV until the 2000 election. The election coverage went on until the almost the end of that year due to contested Presidential Election that went to the Supreme Court but the concept of “red states” and “blue states” was burned into the collective memory so hard they just stayed like that afterwards.





  • Impedance body fat analysis had a lot of problems, I’ll just get into one:

    The measurements, even the palm to feet ones on big machines in medical settings with handles, are based on a known level of how much human skin conducts electric currents. I’m part of a genetic group that I’m missing one of the 5 types of collagen and so my skin conducts electricity differently and the impedance machine gives me the exact same 44% BF reading regardless of my actual weight. My doctor had to tell me that impedance BF measurements will never be accurate for me so I have to have a DEXA or skin fold if I want to know for sure. This would have been fine if I hadn’t already spent years believing those fucking devices that thinking that even though I was losing fat, I must be doing something wrong be the impedance scale didn’t change as they were “scientific”.

    They aren’t that accurate for the whole population, and we don’t actually know what percentage of the population they are accurate for because no one has bothered to check.