^{(i actually thought this was ammunition from an old disc gun)}

…all my turntables have included 45RPM adapters for the spindle; never needed anything separate for the records…

…i have a 5" adapter ring for 3" compact discs, though: that has seen legitimate use in all my slot-loading players, although drawer-loading players always included detents for smaller discs, and of course portable players snap directly onto the spindle…

…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)

…those are what i use, but whereas i can avoid touching anything with my hands until using a towel and any residual dampness air-dries between my fingers and skin, hopping across the bathroom to a towel one foot at a time is awkward and best and my feet are pretty much going on the ground immediately after mostly-drying them…

…maybe he only protests on factorial dates so the signs stay manageable…

…you gonna write out that whole f*cking integer?..factorials make for snappy handheld signs…

…nah man, they’re just itching for an excuse to roll out deadly force and mass voter suppression…

…washing my feet in the sink is trivial; drying them well-enough not to track around slightly-damp feet afterward is a hassle…

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)}

…where’s spock, the rock, doc oc, and hulk hogan?..

Anyone Who Has a Fantasy

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

…folks frequently presume i’m a recording on telephone calls; i used to do radio so i guess my extemporaneous diction comes across more composed than anticipated…

…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…