Husband and I appeared in his oncologist’s notes as “very pleasant young couple.” We are a pleasure to have in class.

Not on my 2024 bingo but alright

I've touched on this in passing in recent posts, but: speaking as a technical writer, it is 100% okay to mix mechanical text and flavour text in your short-form RPGs. The rule against ever allowing the two to meet is a good one in its original context, but it's important to understand that the original context in question was long-form RPGs written in an era where it was customary for an RPG's main rulebook to contain a full-length novel worth of microfiction. Like, yeah, drawing a bright line between between which bits of the text are the game's actual rules and which bits are for narrative inspiration is valuable when the alternative is making people painstakingly comb through three hundred pages of microfic every time they can't remember what this or that piece of mechanical jargon means, but that's less of a concern when your game is only 1500 words long. Don't feel that you're not allowed to get a little fancy with your skill descriptions just because some random urban fantasy game from 2006 abused the privilege.

(If you're fuzzy on why this was ever a problem in the first place, it's because people mostly don't read long-form RPGs cover to cover. Sure, they might do so once or twice in order to gain a baseline familiarity with the material, but thereafter, they're going to be engaging with the text principally as a reference manual. That is, whenever they pick up the book, 95% of the time it's going to be to look up or refresh their memory about something specific. A bit of microfic that was a fun read the first time around quickly becomes an annoyance when you're trying to find a specific piece of information that's drowning in a sea of unformatted prose with no easy way to locate it.)

For those who have no frame of reference on the sort of thing that inspired the "strict separation between rules and fluff always" dictum, let me give you an example.

I picked up an RPG back in the aughts where character creation chapter was formatted as an orientation-lecture-slash-personality-assessment being delivered by one of the game's iconic NPCs. The GM was literally instructed to sit their group down and start reading the text aloud, in the voice of that NPC; every so often, a little piece of the character creation rules would pop up in a sidebar, and the performance would pause for the players to carry out that step.

Sounds like a fun gimmick, right?

It was, kind of, except that this was not a short-form game. The character creation chapter was fifty pages long. If you wanted to roll up a character solo – or even refresh your memory about available choices – you had to wade through fifty pages of screenplay-formatted dialogue hunting for nuggets of rules in the margins.

This was an exceptional case, but far from the worst; in this context, that whole generation of gamers developing a knee-jerk aversion to letting the fluff touch the crunch isn't exactly surprising!

Children's novels are so funny because a character can die brutally but as long as nobody swears it's ok

variations on "feel old yet" meme:

lying (overshooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 36 years ago

lying (undershooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 7 years ago

lying by a ridiculous amount (overshooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 900 years ago

lying by a ridiculous amount (undershooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 15 minutes ago

real date of event no one reading was alive for: feel old yet? the great san francisco earthquake happened 118 years ago

real date of event no one reading was alive for or cares about: feel old yet? prince frederick henry died 395 years ago

event no one reading was alive for and also lying: feel old yet? the great san francisco earthquake happened 4 years ago

event that did not happen: feel old yet? brian mulroney was assassinated 48 years ago

event that did not happen and even if it did this would be a lie: feel old yet? brian mulroney was assassinated 197 years ago

real date of event on a cosmological scale: feel old yet? the sun was formed 4,600,000,000 years ago

lying on a cosmological scale (undershooting): feel old yet? the sun was formed 12 years ago

lying on a cosmological scale (overshooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 12,000,000,000 years ago

real date of a personal anecdote that only you know or card about: feel old yet? i made a really good stir fry 5 years ago

reversal: feel young yet? frozen 3 is coming out in 3 years

reversal on a cosmological scale: feel young yet? the sun will collapse in 8,000,000,000 years

reversal (lying about event): feel young yet? the first episode of spongebob will air in 3 years

reversal (lying about time, overshooting): feel young yet? frozen 3 is coming out in 8,000,000,000 years

reversal (lying about time, undershooting): feel young yet? the sun will collapse in 3 years

reversal (lying about time, really undershooting): feel young yet? the sun will collapse in 12 minutes

real date of a recurring event that wasn't very long ago: feel old yet? halloween was 13 days ago

lying about recurring event: feel old yet? halloween was 10,000 years ago

reversal of recurring event: feel young yet? thursday is tomorrow

reversal of personal anecdote: feel young yet? my laundry is done in 52 minutes

real(?) date of a nonspecific event: feel old yet? something happened 2 years ago

lying about the reader (undershooting): feel old yet? you were born 5 years ago

lying about the reader (overshooting): feel old yet? you were born 650 years ago

making a reasonable guess about the reader: feel old yet? you were born 22 years ago

technically telling the truth about the reader: feel old yet? you were born between 0 and 120 years ago

threatening the reader: feel young yet? you will die in 7 days

non sequitur: feel old yet? half of all chameleon species on earth live in madagascar

non sequitur (lying): feel old yet? chameleons are immune to fire

lying on several levels: feel old yet? chameleons were invented 36 years ago

self-reference: feel old yet? i started writing this post 40 minutes ago

giving up: feel old yyet?th e emmenkr,tn dbw a 8 gn m hk\

i can't finish the joke someone else come up with a punchline: feel old yet?

declarative statement: you feel old.

subversive declarative statement: time isn't even real.

reference another meme: feel old yet? yeah. this is the beach that makes you old.

reference another meme specifically about injecting non sequiturs into long posts: feel old yet? the glue that lets you walk up and down anything was invented 36 years ago

eat an entire can of sweetened condensed milk. you deserve it.

(sigh) okay... (CRUUEEENNNCH....) (SCREEEEEENCH...) owie.. (CRUUEEENCH)

this is one of the most rewarding things about posting self care tips on this site. witnessing people's lives getting better in real time. this is why I post

sollux captor ft. shirt tavros gave him

Apparently this tiktok was deleted hours after I saved it.

[Video ID: A Tiktok that several users have added onto, each making a different joke about gender.

Person 1: They say “No pronouns? Damn… another victim of gender identity theft.” They start cracking up on the last word.

Person 2: They start off smirking while they appear to think about what to say. Then, they look at the camera imitate a spam call voice, saying, “We have been trying to contact you about your gender’s extended warranty.”

Person 3: They come in through a doorway and yell, “It’s my gender identity, and I need it now!” The camera angle shifts to indicate they’re a different person, and they say, “Tired of not having a gender identity? J.G. Wentworth can help. Call J. G. Wentworth; 877-pro-nouns. They’re your pronouns, use them when you need em’!”

Person 4: They imitate the kind of voice you hear on legal ads and say, “Attention: If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with Gender, you may be entitled to financial compensation.”

Person 5: Starting off strong and dissolving into fits of laughter as they speak, they say, “-and now a word from our sponsor: Raid Shadow Genders; conquer all of the genders" End ID]

i ❤️ my aweosme sample size bias

rb for sample size

*ahem* rb for sample size

Guy who's been lost in the woods for weeks and is now having a Tumblr themed hallucination from dehydration dashboard simulator:

🌲Tree-3816638 Follow

If you squint really hard at my bark it kinda looks like Yaoi. See?

Notes 564

🐦The Squawkerrrrrr Follow

Check out how loud I can be AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Notes 1.3k

🐭Stupid fucking rat who ate all my food Follow

Man I am just stuffed. Can't believe some chump just left a pile of berries lying around. I'm gonna eat his fingers when he sleeps.

Notes 22

🐜Ant237457

🐜

🐜Ant237458

🐜

🐜Ant237459

🐜

Notes 40.78k

🌊That saltwater not to far Follow

Notes Thirsty

👩I don't know this person Follow

Are you ok? Hey. Can you hear me?

Guys call an ambulance I found a guy! He looks pretty bad.

Notes 3

Mio Hashimoto ( contemporary Japanese sculptor, b. 1980)

Perfection. The softness. In its eyes.

things the guy next to me in Higher Biology did. i think about him every day

hate the phrase 'baked goods' just a reminder that all my baking fucking sucks. my baked bads

im willing to answer some questions from the tags

Yeah okay ill reblog that

yo you said your