…oh, that’s just the vietnam regional setting…

…i don’t know if i have very interesting stories about the folks who dug in; mostly that ferraris have a reputation for not keeping up with the group on account of breakdowns when driven hard…more entertaining were the rally-star trailer queens which slowed down to crawl over every cattleguard or fresh roadwork for fear of marring their pristine clearcoats while the exotic road cars flew right through, welcoming the well-earned miles…

…a lot of us drive open-topped in light rain - as long as you keep moving the cabin stays fairly dry - but we’ve been caught in torrential downpours a couple of times and come through soaked to the bone before managing to pull off and raise our various tops and targas…next sunny day, you open everything up, let it dry out completely, and follow-up with a detail if it still bothers you…

…when a group of twenty or thirty high-profile cars pull into a small town fuel station, it can draw a lot of attention, positive and negative, but not so much when we pull into a remote roadhouse since those tend to be more common destinations…

…for folks really into the scene, the real rock stars were cars driven in open road races, not the trailer queens: it’s a modest culture which respects real-world capability and experience more than flashy showmanship…use it or lose it, as they say…

…so what you’re saying is that we should start calling drow shiela and bruce?..

…i used to lead a monthly hundred-mile canyon-run which would turn out a broad spectrum of sportcars and exotics, some of which were trailer queens…

…it was always interesting to see how show car owners respond to the opportunity to drive their car the way it was meant to be driven, some of whom embraced the opportunity and others who delicately babied their way around the loop or bailed-out early…

…i was thinking bathtub cheese but that’ll do…

…pretty much this: they’re conformant authoritarians and christian nationalism just happens to be the cultural identity in which they were raised…

“You unleash a string of insults laced with subtle enchantments at a creature you can see within range.”

…its only component is verbal, and while it’s not subtle casting it’s fair to characterise as subtle casting; i’d argue for first-round surprise in the context of open dialog and in fact that’s how we’ve played it at my tables…

…i work with mostly first and second-generation immigrants from all over the world, and a common pattern i’ve noticed among established first-generation immigrants is strong anti-immigrant sentiment; a little bit that they emmigrated to get away from those people, a little bit f*ck-you-i-got-mine…

…that was a significant theme in 2061: oddysey three…

…dogpile introduced me to google when it was a brand-new service: i noticed that all the best results increasingly came from the same search engine, so eventually i cut out the middleman and just started using google directly…

…how times have changed; i haven’t used google for years…

…almost fourty years ago, pulse-dial 300-baud modem from my apple //e running VT-52 terminal emulation into a mainframe shell account: just green monochrome text displaying an rn client, you had to be very strategic about what you chose to display because with that kind of bandwidth characters scrolled across the screen slightly slower than your natural reading pace and significantly slower than skimming past anything you weren’t interested in reading…

…most early usenet clients routinely displayed profound boilerplate warning of posts costing thousands of dollars in computing time, which were pretty intimidating to neophyte users!..

…also, jiggle it to check if you’re in neutral, then jiggle it again just to be sure: ooh, now you’re stopped at a light, better jiggle it…

(okay, that’s an easy tease, but as a compulsive habit it really does help cultivate kinesthetic proficiency through tactile feeback)

feet.

…it’s a tarantino thing…

…where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average…

…yeah, i think that’s an essential cultural distinction between tabletop and videogame backgrounds; i started seeing the transition in campaign styles in parallel with the advent of structured narratives around the mid-eighties leading into the nineties…

…by contrast, our groups routinely swap DM roles across multiple tables which all share the same more-or-less persistent world, although individual character and DM experiences can vary within the boundaries of narrative coherence…that sustained investment is the fundamental point of of our tabletop campaigns; it distinguishes freeform from prescribed gameplay and is why we chose open-ended campaigns over closed-form boardgames…

…are you familiar with the old RPGA living campaigns?..ignoring the structured campaign setting, that style of pickup game used to be how most folks played…

…if player characters aren’t at liberty to move between campaigns, then ultimately no, they don’t have agency: they’re just ephemeral labor playing-out the DM’s narrative with nothing to show for it afterward…

…mind, i’m not damning that arrangement - some folks enjoy the transient experience - but i have no interest in investing my own creative energy toward anything that i don’t keep…

^{(i already deal with that sixty-five hours every week and remuneration barely suffices to stay my contempt)}

…hot tub time machine; absurdly better film than its pitch had any right to be…

…fair enough; i don’t invest my time in campaigns where players don’t retain agency over their own characters…

…west marches vs. one-shot campaigns, plenty of tables for both styles…

…i did not but i’d rather not traffic user-hostile sites, regardless…