I always strive to create the best thing ever, and chasing big dreams is a great incentive at doing my best - I wish everyone played my games and read my works!

Yet everything I do, I release it for free, and never attempt aggressive marketing that may annoy others, because it’s first and foremost about self-expression, channeling all my pent-up creative energy into a passion project. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Also, artists don’t have (or deserve) to live in poverty just to produce “true” art! Making money should not be the prerogative of big, soulless corporations!

I was kind of disappointed by it, to be honest. It’s PDK in name only, it’s more of a revamped Drakewarden. Which, honestly, is cool as fuck and I’m happy that it’s finally playable, but I’m sad that it had to replace the PDK instead of being its own subclass.

Maybe I’m biased because I love the PDK so much that I homebrewed my own version and I’ve been playing it for two years in our campaign lol

A politician from one of the modern countries that still imprisons people for lese-majesty wants to end social media anonymity? Sounds like a great idea!

Curious to see Roman deities addressed in Gaulish. I wonder how that happened? The article doesn’t explain it.

Hopefully this finding will contribute a little in our understanding of Gaulish.

Some of the readability updates (monster location, possible loot, ability scores and initiative bonus) are cool.

The stat blocks themselves, though, retain the usual problem, imo. These monsters are not up to par with a party of their level. The CR6 cyclops has no legendary resistances, for example, in a game where every martial character forces a saving throw on a hit with the newly introduced weapon masteries.

They also removed some flavour from the stat blocks. The dragon doesn’t make claws/bite/tail attacks, for example, but generic “rend” attacks.

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Interesting. The article suggests that there is the possibility that ancient humans domesticated a canid species that is similar but different from the wolf and the dog (although there’s no consensus yet).

I’d kill to have more knowledge of the prehistoric times.

Oh, right. December 24th. The Christmas Eve, the day preceding Christmas. December and its Christmas.

That December 24th?

That chicken has something to explain.

Terminator was almost correct. The real terminator will be Arnie walking around in a fursuit.

I’ll be back. UwU

Electing Trump the first time was the equivalent of Brexit.

Electing him twice is the equivalent of setting your own home on fire, walking back inside while the house is still burning and taking a nap, hoping that the flames will only destroy your neighbour’s house.

Chilling on a rock and enjoying its best life.

Robert Silverberg’s “The man in the maze” is a cool science-fiction book based on the Greek play Philoctetes. Iirc it’s a very short story (maybe about one or two hundred pages), I don’t remember the exact length but I recall reading it in one sitting. It is a very character-driver story where the “maze” itself is an allegory about mankind, isolation and disability, but it is very much enjoyable as a casual read as well.

The protagonist (“man in the maze”) is an astronaut who has been somehow cursed to always radiate its emotions in such a way that others, even his family, find repulsive, so he self-exiles to a remote and long-dead planet to live the rest of his life in isolation. But when an alien species makes hostile contact with humans, he is needed again, as his “curse” is the only way to properly communicate with them and maybe convince them that humans are sentient beings and thus their equals.

I’m Italian. School explains all there is to know about sex and stuff, so I never needed the “talk” with my parents. I also had a bigger brother that would tell me everything way before the time lol

About drugs, I think I already got everything from TV? I certainly didn’t need my parents explaining to me that drugs are bad.

EDIT: For those curious about how/when SexEd is taught in school in Italy: I had SexEd in my 5th year of elementary school (10yo), 3rd year of middle school (13 yo) and again in high school (I think it was the second year, so 15 yo, and then in my fourth year as well, when I was 17 yo). My parents were required to consent to the school teaching us SexEd only in elementary school; no consent form was required from middle school onwards, it was mandatory.

And I think that drugs were discussed in school as well. I think in middle and high school, around the same time as SexEd.

Oversexualization. Panty shots, ass shots, boob physics, the same old jokes from the ‘80s about a guy “accidentally” groping a woman, guys peeping into a girls’ space, suggestive poses, barely-disguised fetishes (included, but not limited to, harems, incest and pedophilia).

It got to the point where a friend would recommend an anime, I’d watch it, and walk away halfway through the first or second episode because it was just unbearable. Friends would tell me to turn a blind eye, but why the fuck should I put up with sexualizing minors in a show? I’d rather spend my time doing something that doesn’t make me feel sick.

It also attracts the wrong kind of audience. Since the medium is so keen to produce oversexualized content, that’s all people look for and talk about. Any anime discussion thread degenerates into gross memes about “flat is justice”, “twincest is wincest”, people patting each other in the shoulder while calling the other “man of culture” for sharing their kinks, and shit like that. It’s so extenuating that, back when I was interested in the medium, I still actively refrained from interacting with fellow fans because I felt grossed out by them. Fun fact, I had a female classmate back in highschool who was interested in anime, and I thought that I could find common grounds with her, but no, it was the same thing, just reversed (she would only watch anime with sexualised boys).

The medium also forgot what its name stands for. I haven’t seen “animation” in “anime” in years. It’s just still frames and more still frames and whenever there’s an action sequence, the characters will constantly interrupt them to explain or think about the thing that I’m already watching and needs no explanation, or having flashback sequences, because it’s cheaper to animate. The fact that Ghost in the Shell and Akira from thirty years ago had better and more fluid animation than the shit they produce now is just sad.

Never heard of it, but it sounds like it was a great place. Sad to see it fail against established giants of the internet. I would’ve been interested in trying it out before the end.

I think this is a problem that multiple small realities like this (including Lemmy) are facing. There are people interested in them, but they don’t know them, so they can’t join.

Oh boy. Just one?

I guess I’d go with “signing up to a random online forum back in 2012”.

I was a very shy and introverted kid back then, without friends or social life to speak of. I would spend all my time playing videogames and reading books.

That online forum gave me a chance to speak to other people while staying “safe” in my shell. Without realising it, I slowly gained confidence and social skills that helped me make friends both online and irl, some of whom I still speak with to to this day. Thanks to one of the people I knew on that forum, I now have a job that I like.

I wouldn’t recommend online forums nowadays to fight depression/lack of social skills, as the internet has become a cesspool. Online chats are breeding grounds for political extremists. But in my case it definitely helped.

A close second would be having a girl in college confessing to me. I had never really thought about my sexuality back then: it just wasn’t on my mind, like, ever (which should’ve been a red flag, but whatever). She was really nice and wasn’t pushy at all, but I knew that I couldn’t leave her hanging forever, and I had to give her an honest answer in a relatively short time.

Well, long story short, I realized I wasn’t straight. At first I thought I was bi, then gay, but a few years later I understood that I am ace (again, should’ve been obvious by the fact that I literally never thought about sex for the entirety of my teenage years, but I’m dumb).

But seriously, there are so many important moments in one’s life, it’s difficult to choose only one or two. Watching nature documentaries with my brother as a kid turned me into a huge animal lover, to the point that I’m literally unable to kill a fly because it makes me sick. Thanks bro, those are some of my most treasured memories!

The brothers Grimm for me. I don’t see many people discussing it online, but I enjoyed it. That scene where the horse eats a kid is still distressing to me years later.

I don’t have a reference to how it was before, but I tried Beyond once and it was terrible. I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone to spend money on such a horrible piece of crap.

I have way more fun filling the character sheet by myself. I use Emmet Bryne’s custom character sheets and the Spells 5e app when I need to reference spells.

The CEO constantly starves the D&D team. They don’t have the budget they need to make a good product.

Respectfully, I disagree. I’ve seen much better 3rd party content from smaller creators who charge less than WotC and offer much better value. As much as I’m sorry for those who were laid off, the problem with the DnD team is not their meagre numbers, but their lack of care for the brand.

The DnD team (which consisted of both writers and playtesters) had ten years of consistent player feedback on 5e, and one and a half year of OneDnD playtest, and only did the bare minimum. You don’t need hundreds of people to write a rules update. Heck, it took me (only me, a single person with no collaborators or playtesters) a week to write a replacement for the 5e fighter, and I recon I did a fairly decent job. There were Monk revisions floating around that were miles better than the abomination that they attempted to push in UA6. Heck, I also wrote my Monk revision during that time, and it took me about two/three days at most. During the playtest, Crawford claimed that the Warlock’s Pact of the Chain was never meant to be as “spicy” as Pact of the Blade or Pact of the Tome, which is bullshit (it was clearly presented as an equal option to the other two); instead of rebalancing Chain and Talisman, they just folded the Pact Boons into the Invocation system and called it a day (again, lazy game design). I did that for my homebrew Warlock in about… half a week of brainstorming?

I could go on, but the point is, I would expect those who are paid to create content for the game and do it for a living to do better than what I can do for free in my spare time.