sorry everyone i used to be in charge of delivering the Post Secrets and the ones that didn’t get published it is because i used to take them home and say malevolent incantations over them and then eat them. so that’s why it didn’t work out for you if that’s the case
If I can recommend you do 1 low-effort thing for the love of God it is this:
Keep 5 cards in your pocket. One will say “yes”, the second will say “no.”
If you lose your voice, or lose speech, or want to make a dramatic embellishment at the right time, it is an elegant and efficient solution that is right there at hand.
But what if people question you from there? “Why do you have that card? Why would you do this? How long have you had that in your pocket?” For this, or whatever else they say, the third card: “I don’t have a card for that.”
“What the fuck,” they ask. They laugh. They are bemused. You bring the energy back down with the fourth card: “I have laryngitis. I’ve lost speech. My throat hurts”. Whatever you expect to occur.
The joke is over. Rule of threes. Now they are curious. YThey wonder about logistics. “How did you know I would say that? Is everyone so predictable?”
As a three-part bit, nobody ever sees the fifth card coming.
“I have powerful wizard magics.”
Gets them every time
On it boss!!
[id: a set of 5 UNO cards upon which has been written, “Yes”, “no”, “I don’t have a card for that”, “can’t talk right now 😢”, and “I have powerful wizard magics 🙂”. End id]
Every tabletop system I’ve ever played was better than D&D
D&Ds cultural niche is to get new people interested in tabletop. It’s only upwards from here.
this is true but also D&D sucks as an introduction to tabletop. it’s genuinely one of the worst possible games a player could start with. it:
is extremely expensive, expecting you to buy three separate $30 rulebooks and pay a subscription fee if you want the online bookkeeping service
offers no meaningful support to GMs whatsoever, giving them a huge workload and making everyone who starts with D&D permanently wary of any facilitator role in any other game ever.
has a horribe play culture stretching back decades that heavily discourages any frank out-of-character discussions about what the table wants from the game as ‘metagaming’
as of 5e, straight-up lies about what it is and contains ('three pillars’ is a crock of horseshit innit)
and all these things not only make D&D a bad game, but they make it an actively detrimental introduction to the hobby, because people who start with D&D interalize all this shit as being true about 'TTRPGS’ and so either refuse to approach other TTRPGs or, when they do, approach it with the weight of all this hanging on them
happy 13th birthday john karkat. i couldn’t think of a good way to celebrate that wouldn’t feel tacky or involve me spending more time drawing than i have time for in the middle of a move, so i guess this is it.
make your mother proud, my son. make today really annoying if you follow people that, like me, enjoy homestuck still, for some reason.
also: fuck, i also got it wrong, it’s technically his birthday on the 18th because i said he was born the day before i posted it. rip.
i really have to stop judging homemade wine before it’s had a chance to age. i made a muscadine wine back in… i want to say it was 2021? i opened the first few bottles after about 6-12 months and it was you know, fine, like any cheap white you’d get at the store. pretty acid, but you know.
but i just cracked the final bottle because i’m moving soon and i dont want to lug it around, and it’s turned this absolutely beautiful golden color and has this super rich caramel/raisin flavor, almost like it’s tending slightly brandywards in flavor, though you know, still pretty sweet and light.
i think this is probably oxidation to be honest? probably from an overdry cork. but i dunno, i’m kind of into it? it doesn’t taste “off”, it’s pretty unique and delicious.
“There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity – the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, ‘Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.’
When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, 'You’re a man now.’ So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.
Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a male can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.
But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, 'If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”
Ugh, was having a great time mocking my recently imprisoned rival when I noticed the camera positioning makes it so that I appear behind the bars, thus framing me as trapped in a metaphorical prison of the narrative, now my whole day is ruined. Fuck.
People don’t like to admit it bcs cringe or w/e but Homestuck really did revolutionize the webcomic as a storytelling medium and I am endlessly frustrated that before webcomic artists could really stretch our legs fucking webtoonz swooped in, set a new, more restrictive standard, and then monetized and monopolized the ever living fuck out of the concept of The Webcomic until it drove away anyone who couldn’t be a professional quality manga artist for free, and now the only webcomics that actually feel like spiritual successors to Homestuck are so obscure they’re basically cult classics that you have to beg people to read.
Like it’s just so wild to be in high school and see Homestuck be like “we’re using like fifteen different artistic mediums to tell this story bcs we can” and be really fucking inspired by that, only to grow up and see basically every webcomic ever have to conform to One Single Standard or fucking perish.
Actually, I realized my real point here: we all need to make our art weirder. Please make weird art. I want more stuff like Prequel Adventure and 17776 and MyHouse.wad and I want it now. Capitalism thrives on conformity. We must be weird at all costs.
casting my little spells