We’re still in the bad timeline where Biff went back in time with the sports almanac. That one doesn’t get flying cars.

Learning a second language AND professionally teaching English to speakers of said language. English is not broken. English is actually much better than many alternatives. We don’t need to worry about noun gender. We don’t have to worry about tones. We have precise ways to indicate number and time. Formality levels are not baked into word construction. The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling, despite learning this skill being a little complicated— but that complicated nature even has its usefulness.

We rag on English, but it is by far not the worse out there, not even close. It’s just contempt for the familiar.

I once had a session that became infamous amongst my group at the time. There was a magic forest that only the elves knew the way through, but no elves had come through for a while. One of the players was an elf, and I had given him a note explaining that there was a path featuring a sequence of specific species of trees, oak then spruce then elder, that sort of thing. He was supposed to go in the direction moss grew on said trees until seeing the new species, then look for the moss again, and so on and so forth. I expressly noted on the note that if he didn’t see the exact sequence of trees I gave in the note, “something had gone seriously wrong”.

Of course, the idea was that something had gone wrong and the path through the magical maze forest was screwed up, hence no elves arriving recently. My reason for setting it up this way was so that the elf would lead the party into the woods, he’d try to find the path, realize the path was broken, tell the party, and then they’d get down to the business of figuring out what was wrong and fixing it. You know… start the adventure.

Instead, what ensued was an entire multi hour long session of nothing happening. The elf would lead them. I’d tell him the trees they were seeing, out of order. He’d just keep following the moss, the “path” as he always did. I started emphasizing the wrongness of the trees he was seeing. He kept leading the party. I nudged him harder and harder. He just fucking kept going. The party was confused of course, as the whole path thing was supposed to be an elven secret that they didn’t share. And the elf player just kept ramming the entire party’s heads against the stupid wall for real world hours and I couldn’t stop it until I eventually dropped the 4th wall and flat out said this isn’t working, I’ve told you it isn’t working, please do something else! And then we had to end the session and start again next time.

It was incredibly frustrating in the moment, but it actually worked out well for the game as a whole. Became a running gag, a source of a lot of laughs, and it somehow ended up hammering in the point that something was wrong with the world and forest far more effectively than it might have if it had ended quicker. So good times in the end after all…

But MAN was it frustrating in the moment.

Nah, it’s fully polymorphed, it just cast the spell after it sat down.

I legitimately had my players pull that one on me once. Door into a secret lab disguised as a closet was beyond their skill, warded by powerful magic, etc etc. They looked at the floor plan and saw that the closet protruded from the main wall a bit. “Why not go in through the side?” I hadn’t thought about it. I figured the villain hadn’t thought about it either. A simple pickax later and they were in.

Correct. To be more specific, in Tolkien lore, Bilbo (and later Frodo adding to it, organizing it, and editing it) wrote the “Red Book of Westmarch” which was later translated by the narrator of the books into the Hobbit and Lordnof the Rings. Many (most?) Tolkien fans prefer to frame things this way when discussing the stories, and for good reason— that’s how Tolkien himself viewed the stories. As a translation of something in another language. He was a linguist, after all.

Wikipedia has a good article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch

Someone needs to watch more Sesame Street. :p

I actually got my players to remember the name of the evil dragon, and the name is by no means easy! “Ildrephu”

It helped that the dragon itself became VERY memorable, having developed a philosophy around how to best torture people based on Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw’s Chzo mythos. And then instead of fighting the party when they came to storm his lair, it invited them in, fed them, gave them nice accommodations, and made a binding magical contract with them for favorable terms… that tricked them into unleashing the Tarrasque back into the world from its divine prison. And then Ildrephu reneged on its half of the contract anyway, trusting he was strong enough to simply tank the magical backlash breaking the contract would do to him. Escaping the tarrasque and returning to Ildrephu to now be able to fight him at all due to being magically weakened was a highlight of the campaign.

They still talk about him, IRL years later. One of my finest quests I’ve given, and the fact that they remember his name when it’s such a non-English name really hammers in how much of an impression I left with him. It makes me so happy!

I don’t know that stealing is morally wrong no matter what. My rabbi taught that if a man steals to survive, the crime is not his, but of his community because they did not save him from poverty. That teaching really stuck with me. Yes, stealing indicates something is seriously wrong in the world, but there’s a big difference in where the evil lies— is it in the thief, or in the society?

That’s literally what it is. It’s people who want humanity to die out, but without suicide, war, or murder, but instead merely by not reproducing. I’ve seen their communities and it pretty much comes back to misanthropy— hating humanity.

Let’s say they were organizing using telephones instead. Would you want the telephone providers to proactively listen in on their conversations and cut them off based on content? No. You get the police or FBI to investigate and hunt down the people, possibly with warrants obtaining information from the telephone companies, and target the people doing the crimes.

I feel it should be exactly the same with ISPs. The ISP shouldn’t be doing the policing, the police should be doing the policing. The ISP’s job should be passing bits from MAC address A to MAC address B, nothing more.

Her version of “Creep” is actually my least favorite, because I feel she really needed to do more with the lyrics. “Weirdo” makes no sense in an old-fashioned sense, as “weird” means “fate”, often “ultimate fate” as in “your death”, but also in the sense of “prophet” or “fortune teller”. I am creep, I am… fated to die? I am a reader of entrails? I am… what? I don’t get it. These don’t mesh at all with the song.

That’s not to say I don’t like her music. I do! I’m a huge fan! My favorite is actually “Pumped Up Kicks” for doing exactly what I said “Creep” doesn’t do and translating a school shooter into a Welsh archer defending against an English invasion force… “I doth gaze upon the fyrd and I maketh a plan” where “fyrd” is an Anglo-Saxon army. It’s brilliant.

Cargo pants and a white undershirt. It’s hot out.

Long exposure shots can be awesome.

I want to add that all sexual content needs consent. Throwing sex into a game I’m running or playing in includes me in your sexual exploration, and if I’m not comfortable with that (and I’m not) then that’s not okay. And it’s also okay to not be okay with it.