Crust Monster

the Tumblr porn ban and features like Tumblr live, twitters implosion, the threat of a TikTok ban, twitchs new rules restricting streamers ability to advertise, discords new changes to make it more like social media instead of the messaging app it is, YouTube's ridiculous policy restricting content and banning creators for "the children" (advertisers), literally everything meta is doing

the whole internet is forcebily losing its creativity and uniqueness and being forced into bland corporate boxes and being censored in an effort to make the rich richer

Here’s a Wraith I drew for This Mortal Coil! Currently funding on itch.io right now. The more money we raise, the more monsters get illustrated!

for those who don’t know what the internet archive is, it’s a virtual library full of media. books, magazines, recordings, visuals, flash games, websites - a lot of these things either don’t exist anymore or cannot be found & bought. heard of the wayback machine? that’s part of the internet archive. it is the most important website to exist, and i don’t say that lightly. if the internet archive goes down, the cultural loss will be immeasurable.

so how can you help?

boycott the publishing companies involved in this. they’re absolute ghouls, frankly, and don’t deserve a penny. the companies involved are harpercollins (imprints), wiley (imprints), penguin random house llc (imprints), and hachette book group (imprints). make sure the websites are set to your location as it may differ worldwide.

learn to torrent. download a torrent client (i recommend transmission), a vpn (i recommend protonvpn - sign up and choose the area that’s closest to your continent/country), and hit up /r/piracy on reddit for websites. with torrenting, you can get (almost) any media you want for free in high quality, with add-ons such as subtitles, and with no risks of loss. i would also recommend getting into the habit of watching stuff online for free. the less you can pay to a giant corporation, the better.

get into the habit of downloading and archiving materials. find a TB external hard drive, ideally the higher the better. it’ll probably cost around $60 for 1TB and continue to go up, but they’re so so useful. if you can’t afford a drive, look for any GB harddrives or memory sticks you have lying around and just fill them up. videos, pdfs, magazines, songs, movies, games - anything you can rip and download and fit on there, do it, because nothing is permanent.

donate to the internet archive. this is the most important option on the list. the IA relies entirely on funding, and it’s going to need more to fight this case. whatever you can donate, do it. i promise it’s helpful.

and finally…

Some of the best times I’ve ever had playing D&D were with 4th edition. It’s the only edition where I got just as much enjoyment out of interacting with the mechanics of the game as I did hanging out with my friends playing make believe. That said, it’s pretty hard to get back into 4e after playing other editions of D&D, and especially other RPGs in general. Once the game gets going it’s easy enough to play, but the sheer amount of effort you have to go through to make a character, and to level them up between sessions is daunting. Plus, the game is slowed down by lots of bonuses that are so small, and rules so specific, that they don’t have any meaningful impact on gameplay. The way I see it, these problems are mostly due to “vestigial 3.5-isms”–game elements from the previous edition that stuck around even though they didn’t need to. 

The goal of 4e Fix is to create a supplement that can be used alongside the core 4e books which removes these vestigial game elements, and incorporates a handful of modern game design elements to streamline and declutter the D&D 4e experience without altering so much that it stops being D&D 4e altogether.

To-Do:

Simplify races (renamed to origins) down to 2 traits each. Get rid of  minor bonuses too small to matter.

Simplify classes. Get rid of class features that provide minor bonuses too small to matter. Rewrite class features that provide feats.

Get rid of ability scores–just use modifiers.

Get rid of the “add ½ your level” bonus some stats have. Adjust monster math to compensate.

Simplify weapons and armor, taking inspiration from the way D&D Gamma World does it.

Experimental:

Get rid of both feats and skills–replace them with a single new thing that fills both roles.

+½ level that happens on a bunch of stuff is because Monster Math goes up +1 per level, and adding up other bonuses (enhancement, stat boosts, feats) - you slowly drift out of sync up to a difference of +15 - which is fixed by ½ level.

Essentially, 4e fix is not gonna be compatible with 4e at all.

You’re right, 4e fix will not be compatible with 4e. At least, not in the 4e + Essentials kind of way. The goal is to streamline the mechanics of the player characters to make jumping right into the mostly unaltered mechanics of the rest of the game less of an ordeal.

Also me: oh shit oh fuck look how pretty:

For our session today!