Crazy part is, that’s not the most unsettling and/or unhinged promo he did.

This is.

Okay DM, I’m going to snort a line and monologue for a few minutes to get the party pumped up.

I think everyone tries fielding a commoner or “normal” person at least once.

My version was a nobleman’s son that just “wanted to try this adventuring thing out.” He wound up bankrolling the entire campaign, right up until he died in the second encounter.

There’s also Brother Cadfael: a crime-solving sleuth from the 12th century. A high Wisdom stat is exactly what the Cleric class needs, so it would work out pretty well.

A druid who got involved because they’re the party’s weed dealer.

Isn’t that the plot of Dazed and Confused?

A werewolf who doesn’t believe in the moon.

This would play out as an unintentional (or intentional) allegory for addiction, and the denial that masks it. The party would very likely form an intervention of some sort. I mean, they’d have to. After the third werewolf attack or so, it starts to become a real problem.

Exactly. The current turnout is a good sample of the overall population, but we won’t see truly huge numbers until there’s a general strike.

Dammit.

…

Shit, that’s good.

Now we need the HR or Drake meme, comparing both versions.

This is the part that burns me the most. All this, for a handful of years to sit atop the ashes.

Exactly. God would probably want us to not need, want, or use the guns in the first place.

I’m all in favor of zuruck replacing return, because that just sounds cooler. Plus z doesn’t get enough use in my programs these days.

Eh, it’s more like electromancy, but… yes.

That’s okay. The company is set to go IPO in two.

Rearranging entropy by moving heat from one place to somewhere else.

These people are completely broken.

Agreed. Here’s how I arrived at that conclusion, today.

who are high value

I positively loathe qualifiers like this. It’s the presumption that we all have the same values (we don’t), that theirs are the correct ones (really not), and that there’s some kind of objective attractiveness hierarchy in play (less of a thing than you’d think). It’s only four words, but man does this carry weight by conveying a willful ignorance of how people really work. It also something you’d likely find on a 4chan greentext.

take risks, they’re brave, they’re unafraid, they’re confident

These are also qualities shared with the mentally deranged and sociopaths. It’s easy to look like this if you’re crazy and/or don’t give a fuck about others. A dead giveaway is when they’re always like this. Meanwhile, good people that share these qualities are also usually esteemed for their deeds,how they don’t always act like this, and know how to be cautious, when to retreat, and that it’s okay to doubt.

And they have younger wives with beautiful children.

… and we conclude with a cocktailof misogynist double-speak, ageism, and prosperity gospel for seasoning. Just the thing to wash down this shit-sundae of a character endorsement.

deleted by creator

Well, I did have the older version on the left as a kind of rosetta stone for this. Plus, this kind of “init and/or return” pattern shows up a bunch of places, so it makes sense someone would want a quick version that’s harder to screw up or has fewer side-effects.

I’ve also spent years investigating better ways to do things through various versions of C++, D, Rust, Go, and TypeScript. After a while, the big-picture patterns start to emerge and you see different camps start to converge on the same kinds of things. Stuff like these weird features start to feel like learning a new slang term for something you’ve felt, but could never say so succinctly.

In the case of ??= it’s a more formalized Python x = x or y or x = x || y in JavaScript. The catch is that not all languages treat assignments like expressions that can be returned, so you get a clunky return as a separate statement; return (x = x or y) doesn’t always fly. That friction is all over the place, and it’s natural to want a shorthand for this very thing.

Sure enough, after searching a bit, ??= shows up in JS, PHP, and even Ruby has a version.

Edit: more context.

I find this alternate timeline incredibly likely. I had a friend in college who was all about SCO Unix back before they went evil, even when Slackware was the go-to distro. We would have a lot more BSD forks out here now, although NextStep (and maybe even OSX) would probably still emerge as one of the better commercial ones.

As an aside: what I find amusing is that Homebrew is basically BSD Ports, served from a git repo. In 2025, it’s a completely insane way to ship OS software to a single platform, but it does work.

Thanks. That makes a hell of a lot more sense now.