bury me with my money

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

Someone saying your stitch quality is shit on a crochet Facebook group is an asshole. Someone doing that in your Etsy reviews is an unhappy customer in need of recompense.

do you admire those people? is that who you aspire to be as a professional? do they seem like people behaving rationally and sensibly about their craft and the realities of an audience?

how many of you have read or watched reviews of bad art and laughed at how the product got skewered, even brutally? how many of you would be (rightly!! correctly!!) up in arms if the creator responded by throwing a tantrum, demanding that negative criticism only be allowed on their terms, in a format and tone that they approve of?

"oh i don't mean those, i only mean the ones being assholes about it!" my friend, when it's aimed at you, they'll all look like assholes. it's easy to take things personally when they are literally personal. there are reasons a lot of creators employ people purely to manage their public personas or sift through reviews for them, and it's because they're sensible. assuming you will be able to identify Justified crit from Mean crit (which, of course, conveniently never overlap at all) and treat the one with grace and the other with career-nuking violence is not sensible.

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.

Like people make fun of middle aged women for not getting married or being divorced or "always the bridesmaid never the bride" and all like "oh she's desperate! No one wants her! Old maid!' but they become straight up hostile and upset when you tell them you never want to date.