Randomness

Yes the fuck it is, stop being a baby

Yes pride is a riot and a fight and yadda yadda yadda but you are not revolutionary for sucking the joy out of queerness. Sometimes, pride is a party. It is a celebration of the fact that we are here, we're queer, and we're not going anywhere. And that is just as important as throwing bricks and fighting cops, actually.

Moneybags is one such term for us.

See, Moneybags is a character introduced in the second Spyro game. My wife and I both love Spyro and definitely spent a good chunk of time during lockdown replaying the remastered original trilogy. Moneybags is a character no one likes. He makes you pay him gems to unlock powers and doors, etc. Real capitalist behavior to keep resources you need locked behind a paywall.

So, anyway, for whatever reason, "moneybags" has entered my wife's and my vernacular.

We definitely share expenses and have access to each other’s bank accounts, but we technically have our own separate accounts (for student loan/tax bullshit reasons). This means that whenever one of has more money in our checking account, that person is referred to as Moneybags and gets to do all the bigger purchases.

Which then makes me wonder what cashiers and servers think then we just casually declare, "YOU'RE Moneybags right now, so YOU get to pay!"

Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.

Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.

Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.

Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.

"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.

AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".

Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.

I’ve always been a serial monogamist and my shortest long term relationships clocked in at three years. So perhaps that’s why when I finally broke it off with my ex I went insane on dating. Part of it was definitely just that between anxiety and loneliness I wanted to fill up my time.

This happened when I was living alone for the first time, no roommates, just me and my little cat Leeloo. I didn’t want to come home to an empty house so instead I set up dates.

Most of these were disastrous. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea and I had a lot more first dates than second because they’d seen enough, including the one where people aggressively complimented me.

But after a few months I had four people I was seeing simultaneously. I was up front with all of them that things were not exclusive, and they all agreed, so no infidelity took place here, just a lot of hijinks.

Here’s who was on the dating roster:

• An apprentice woodworker that we’ll call Jill. I honestly thought at 26 years old that her being 21 wasn’t a problem age gap and I quickly learned that there was a vast gulf of both maturity and life experience between us. Jill described herself as “heteroflexible” and had just dumped her first boyfriend to flirt it up with me.

• A married woman looking for a friends with benefits. We’ll call her Alice. I insisted on meeting her husband first to be sure I wasn’t part of a cheating mess and he gave me his blessing when I stayed over at her house. Years later when he and Alice had divorced I would go on to sell him and his new fiancée an engagement ring and we both realized at the end how we knew each other and it was wildly awkward. Alice was nice, but a hardcore vegan who insisted I brush my teeth if I so much as ate string cheese before I could kiss her. She was also unhappy in her marriage and was feeling out if I’d want to get serious.

• A bartender dubbed Snakebites, so called because of her signature piercings. She cooked me a steak so raw it was still mooing and some of the best asparagus I’d ever had. In our singular sexy encounter she bit my nipple and I never got over it. Really don't bite someone if you don't know their preference and work up in pressure. We weren’t terribly compatible but neither of us were willing to admit it yet. Truthfully I considered still dating her solely because I desperately wanted her bathroom. It had all black tile, black toilet, black sink, a rain shower in the corner and a jacuzzi tub. I may not have loved her but god I loved that bathroom.

And finally,

• My beloved, who I would go on to marry, who was dealing with a lot of personal stuff at the time. Obviously that meant I liked them the best of all the people I was seeing because we were both disasters at the time.

So that’s the cast of this little misadventure. Now, our story begins with Jill.

Jill was someone who heightened my anxiety. Each of the three times she came to my home she brought and left more stuff. A self help book, a ramen kit, the entire Teen Titans collection of DVDs. It was like she was trying to move in. She also liked to deride my taste in things, frequently calling me a pleb when I mentioned a band or show I liked.

She was working on a gorgeous little decorative table in her woodworking program. The main wood for the top had a beautiful dapple of knots like jaguar spots, and when she showed me a picture I exclaimed how pretty it was.

“Do you want it?”

“Oh- I mean it’s lovely, I wouldn’t mind having it, but you should sell it and make some money!”

But she was adamant. She’d give me the little side table. At about this time, Alice was starting to get awfully lovey for a FWB. I knew she wasn’t happy with her husband but I also knew we were not a good fit. Fun fact: Alice and her husband were step siblings with a pretty hefty age gap. They got together when he stumbled upon a kink photo shoot she’d done with vegetables. None of their family was happy about the relationship but they weren’t related by blood so it was fine.

So I was fending off more overt romantic advances from Alice, and feeling increasingly like I needed to break things off with Jill. Snakebites wasn’t ever initiating communication and I decided to pull a lot of plugs at once.

I ghosted Snakebites, told Alice that I thought we should cool it, and in a move worthy of a rom-com I asked my beloved if I could pretend we were exclusive to put off Jill. They agreed and I texted Jill to let her know that I was no longer single.

I was not prepared for Jill’s response. She. Was. Devastated. She flew off the handle. She’d just been waiting for the right time to tell me how she felt about me! How dare I do this to her!

What about the table?!

Practical things like my keys, wallet, chapstick, of course. But also less conventional things like stray buttons, paperback books, little toys, nail clippers, and open bags of candy when I offered strangers new acquaintances candy they always said yes which either says they weren’t raised right or I’m more charming than years of being told not to do that.

I really loved my coats but I did sometimes need to move quicker than they allowed. I remember a friend’s utter astonishment when I saw someone I needed to run up to and said hold my coat. He was left holding my carapace and when I returned he couldn’t stop staring. “You’re so small under there, I’ve thought you were a normal person this whole time but it was all coat!”

At the doctors office getting weighed a week or so later I asked if I needed to take off my coat and boots. She said no, and I stepped on the scale. “A hundred and twenty pounds,” she announced.

My eyebrows shot up and I said, “Sorry, hang on.” I shucked my coat and boots to her impatience and stepped back on.

Her eyes widened and she looked back from me to the coat before saying accusingly, “Ninety seven.”

OP: How I created this visual magic (cr 阿梓蔗)