World's okayest Dungeon master

(With reference to this post here.)

There were a couple of major factors in play there.

First, a big chunk of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition's popularity had come about due to robust third-party support, published under the auspices of Open Game License (OGL). Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, however, was not licensed under the OGL, being subject to a much more restrictive license imaginatively titled the Game System License, or GSL. Hasbro reportedly refused to negotiate with existing third-party publishers to get them on board with the GSL, or to offer transition support of any kind; instead, they simply demanded an immediate halt to the publication of all 3E material, and attempted to bludgeon publishers into compliance by threatening to yank their trademark authorisations (i.e., the agreements which allowed them to put the "D&D compatible" logo on the covers of their books).

Predictably, this approach was not well received. The largest of 3E's third-party supporters, Paizo Publishing (now Paizo Inc.), elected to produce their own game which was statblock-compatible with 3E in order to provide a venue for other publishers to continue producing OGL material; many of their peers decided to gamble on Paizo's plan rather than play ball with Hasbro, and this is how we got Pathfinder. Hasbro's behaviour thus caused D&D's third-party support to crater nearly to zero with the publication of 4E and created D&D's largest competitor.

Second, 4E was badly behind the curve on digital availability. Shortly before 4E was scheduled to drop, the digital masters (i.e., the files provided to printers in order to manufacture the books) were leaked on file sharing networks. Hasbro responded by panicking and ordering an immediate and indefinite halt to e-book publication of D&D material (in spite of the fact that the leak had demonstrably originated from their print production arm rather than their e-publishing arm), even going so far as to refuse to honour pre-orders for 4E's now cancelled e-book version.

Combined with a series of mismanagement-induced delays which caused 4E's virtual tabletop tools to miss the game's publication date entirely, and a decision to paywall what few first-party resources did manage to hit their target behind a monthly subscription, this resulted in 4E being available exclusively in print for the first two full years of its lifespan, at a time when D&D's competitors – including the aforementioned Pathfinder – were literally giving their core rules away in digital form for free.

this kind of thing sounds like something that would kill d&d as a franchise entirely with how badly hasbro fumbled it, so i'm surprised to see 5e not only still kicking, but also still the primary force to the point that people will say "homebrew 5e" for anything. what's up with that?

#spike after learning Oz plays guitar: why İsn't he in the band? #buffy: he's already in his own band. which is actually a real band unlike our fake band that you keep forgetting is just a cover story #spike: we're never going to make it in the music industry if you don't stop calling our band fake

Spike (with reluctant but knowledgeable backup from Giles) finally convinces her that "Slayer" risks bringing copyright lawyers down upon their heads, a fate worse than vampires

You're talking with a cishet man, and the conversation has turned a little bit serious, you're talking about your feelings or maybe your family, and in a moment of really letting your guard down, you tell him something personal. In my experience, this often happens when I come out as gay, which often takes me a few weeks or months after meeting a new person, but I've seen it happen when someone opens up about drug addiction, or their wife cheating on them, or basically anything where you might want the other person to keep it a secret.

In response to this revelation, the strait man immediately gives you verifiable kompromat on himself, as a way of reassuring you that hey, you gave him a big secret he could socially wreck you with, now he will give you one of his, so you're both safe. You were out on a limb, telling him you have a husband, so now he's telling you about the time he committed treason. Now we're even, I can't betray you by gossiping, because you could get me locked up for 20-to-life. Mutually assured destruction.

When Harry Met Sally turns 36 — July 12, 2025

So the thing about When Harry Met Sally, which you probably know as "the movie with the orgasm scene" and possibly as "the ur-text of the modern romantic comedy" and which Nora Ephron herself came to be slightly annoyed about being primarily known for — it's a 1989 movie about people who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1977, which means it's a movie about a very specific cohort that a lot of people have forgotten existed, which is: people who were born around 1955, missed the actual sixties entirely (you were 13 in 1968, which is the wrong age to have done anything), graduated into the Carter economy, and spent their twenties in the disco-into-Reagan transition that nobody has a good name for because nobody wants to claim it — and the movie is completely about this, it's about what happens when you're old enough that the sexual revolution is just ambient background radiation you grew up in rather than something you fought for, so you get all the license and none of the politics, which means you get to be cynical about sex in a way that would have been unthinkable to someone ten years older and embarrassing to someone ten years younger.

Harry is a political consultant. Sally is a journalist. They are bourgeois in a very particular late-70s/early-80s upwardly-mobile way — the movie is set in New York and the New York is the New York of Ed Koch, not the New York of the 1970s fiscal crisis, it's the city on the way up, and their apartments look like it, their careers look like it, their whole problem is a rich-people problem which the movie never once acknowledges as such because in 1989 this was just what movie people looked like.

The Katz's scene is the thing everyone remembers and it's so heavily mythologized (the "I'll have what she's having" line is carved into the booth) that it obscures what the scene is actually doing, which is a pretty aggressive argument about heterosexual miscommunication delivered in a register — woman publicly simulating orgasm in a deli to prove a point to a man about whether he would know — that in 2025 would read as either radical-feminist didacticism or cringe, but in 1989 was mainstream romantic comedy, this was the Thanksgiving movie, this played in Peoria. The frankness is the artifact. Nobody would make that scene now. Not because it's offensive but because it's too arguing, it's too interested in making a structural point about sex to be allowed inside the genre anymore — the rom-com as it evolved through the 90s and early 2000s (which WHMS basically invented as a genre) systematically removed the sociological content and kept only the meet-cute-to-wedding scaffolding, which is why the Katz's scene feels weirdly unlike the movie it's from if you only know it from clips.

The other thing is that Ephron was writing Rob Reiner's love life — Reiner had just gotten divorced, was depressed, kept telling Ephron horrible things about being a single man in his late thirties in Manhattan — and Ephron took his material and a bunch of her own material and made it into a movie that's structurally a Woody Allen movie (split-screen phone calls, walking-and-talking in autumn Central Park, the Gershwin, Jesus Christ the Gershwin) but with the Allen persona surgically removed and replaced with what is essentially Rob Reiner's therapy, performed by Billy Crystal doing Rob Reiner. Think about that for a second. The film that launched modern romantic comedy is a Woody Allen cover version performed by a director who was working through his divorce via his female friend's screenplay. The whole thing is a hall of mirrors and the mirror at the center is Reiner's loneliness, filtered through Ephron's ear for how men and women actually talk to each other, filtered through Billy Crystal's delivery, which softens Reiner's native abrasiveness into something female audiences could tolerate as a romantic lead.

What the movie argues — and this is where it's dated in the most interesting way — is that men and women can't be friends because sex always gets in the way, and it argues this as if it's a controversial claim that requires 95 minutes of screen time to establish, which tells you how much ambient optimism about post-revolution gender relations was still in the water in 1989. The premise of the argument is that the sexual revolution was supposed to have solved the friendship question — if sex isn't a big deal anymore, why can't men and women just hang out? — and Harry's position is that it didn't solve it, it just made the unsolvability less discussable, and the movie ends by agreeing with him, which is a fairly dark conclusion dressed up in a New Year's Eve kiss. The structural pessimism about heterosexuality is the actual engine of what reads as a feel-good movie, which is probably why it aged better than its imitators — the 90s and 2000s rom-coms inherited the scaffolding and threw out the pessimism, and without the pessimism the form is just machinery.

Another thing: the movie is obsessed with telling the story of how a couple met — the old-couple interviews interspersed throughout are a genius structural device that accomplishes about four things at once (tonal punctuation, thematic underlining, sociological documentary texture, and a running argument that every couple's story sounds stupid when you tell it, which is the movie's actual thesis about itself) — and this device was specifically mining the Studs Terkel-era appetite for oral history, which was a 1970s cultural product that was mostly dead by 1989 but whose aesthetic Ephron grabbed on the way out. Nobody would shoot those interviews now. They'd feel too slow. They'd also feel too real — they have the texture of actual documentary because Reiner shot them with actual couples first and then had actors redo the best ones, which is why they feel weirdly authentic compared to everything around them.

The movie is thirty-six years old. The characters, if they existed, would now be seventy. Their children, if they had any, are older than the movie's main characters are. The sexual revolution they were in the tail-end of is now something that happened in the deep past. And the genre it founded has largely collapsed under the weight of its own conventions, which is maybe just what happens when you strip-mine a specific sociological moment for a genre template and then run the template for thirty years past the moment.

The sweater Billy Crystal wears in the carpet-unrolling scene is a cream Aran-style cable-knit, mock-neck, intentionally oversized so the shoulders fall — the costume designer was Gloria Gresham, and the piece was specifically chosen to read as something Harry would already own, the kind of thing a Manhattan political consultant in 1988 has had in a drawer since college.

Billy Crystal had the actual sweater in his personal closet for about thirty-five years and then, sometime around 2016 or 2017, donated a bunch of his old clothes to UCLA's theater department, which is where he thinks the sweater went. UCLA can't find it. They have looked. A UCLA Magazine reporter went to the wardrobe department, then to the Health Auxiliary Thrift Shop, then through Westwood, and came up empty — and the head of the costume studio workroom, who had been asked about it many times, told her they had considered just buying a $20 sweater off Amazon to give people an answer.

A $20 sweater off Amazon.

That's the joke, but it's also the entire economic argument, because the actual sweater — the one Crystal lost — was a 1980s Aran jumper, hand-loomed or hand-knit, probably Irish or Scottish wool, probably 100% wool at a tight gauge, which in 1989 cost real money and in 1989 was also a normal thing you could buy at a normal department store because of a specific and now-extinct trade regime.

The regime was called the Multi-Fibre Arrangement. It was a GATT-era quota system, in force from 1974 through 2004, that put hard quantitative caps on textile and apparel imports from developing countries to developed ones. The original purpose was to protect domestic textile labor in the US and UK and Western Europe, which it did, partially, badly.

It also did something else.

The accidental effect was that a huge share of the knitwear sold in American department stores in the 1980s was made in Ireland, Scotland, England, New Zealand, Portugal, Hong Kong before 1997 — places where the quotas were either nonexistent (the rich ones) or where the people doing the work had decades of training and decent wages and entire towns built around the trade. The sweater you bought at Bloomingdale's in 1985 came from somebody who had been making sweaters for fifteen years in a place where making sweaters was a real job.

That regime had a clock on it.

The MFA was wound down gradually through the 1990s and killed completely on January 1, 2005 — phased out as part of the WTO transition, which had been agreed in 1994 at the Uruguay Round.

The phase-out is when the curve breaks.

Knitwear production moves to China, then Bangladesh, then Vietnam, and the fiber content drifts — wool gets cut with acrylic, then mostly replaced by acrylic, then by polyester blends, then by whatever's cheapest that month.

The gauge gets looser because tight gauge takes more yarn and more machine time. The construction gets simpler because the workers turning over every nine months don't have the muscle memory for complicated pattern work. The thing called "merino wool" on the tag becomes a much shorter fiber than what was called merino wool in 1985, because the supply chain has figured out it can sell the short stuff and most consumers can't tell.

You can still buy a real Aran sweater. It costs $400. The Dunhill mock-neck that the menswear blogs keep nominating as the closest commercial match to Harry's was $650 in 2023 dollars.

So when reach-one-moment looks at a forty-year-old department store sweater and feels it's nicer than anything available off the rack, the rosy retrospection theory only covers some of it. The rest is the difference between a 1985 piece of clothing made under a quota regime that protected skilled labor and a 2025 piece of clothing made under a free-trade regime that didn't. Both were "off the rack." The rack was a different rack.

(The nostalgia bias is real too. People do project warmth onto their childhood clothes. But the underlying physical durability question is settled — you can do a fiber analysis on a thrift store sweater from 1988 and a Banana Republic sweater from 2019 and the older one will be longer fibers, tighter gauge, fewer plastics. The nostalgia just rides on top of a real material thing.)

Anyway. Back to the actual object.

What's strange is that the sweater is more famous than ever and Billy Crystal can't find his. The 1989 sweater is now a piece of "iconic" costume history — GQ ranked it the greatest of Harry's costumes in 2019, Mr Porter wrote a love letter to it in 2020, a tweet in 2023 called the decline of sweater quality something that "genuinely necessitates a national conversation" and got 13 million views, the sweater has its own little wing of menswear discourse.

Meanwhile the physical object has vanished into the Westwood donation economy, possibly cycled through a thrift shop, possibly still in a UCLA storage room somebody hasn't opened, possibly already on someone's body who has no idea what it is. The actual cultural artifact and the discourse about the artifact have fully decoupled. We've replaced the sweater with a representation of the sweater, and the representation is what's iconic, and Billy Crystal looking for the real one is the punchline.

Which brings us to the foxes.

The fox cardigan in Project Hail Mary is a hand-knit Cowichan-style zip cardigan with two stylized fox heads on the front, worn by Ryan Gosling for most of the movie. It was sourced from a London vintage fair by costume designer Glyn Dillon, who actually bought the original — which had wolves, not foxes — for himself, and then Gosling saw it at a fitting, asked for a fox version, and the costume department made five copies.

The pattern is a Mary Maxim "Wolf Cardigan," originally published as a knitting pattern in 1959, sold as a mail-order kit by a Canadian company that has been doing this since the 1930s in Manitoba and now operates out of Port Huron, Michigan. It's a Cowichan derivative — the Cowichan being the Indigenous knitting tradition of Vancouver Island, which itself was a 19th-century fusion of Scottish settler knitting and existing Coast Salish weaving practices. The pattern, in other words, has a real lineage.

Then the movie came out.

Mary Maxim sold out of the Project Hail Mary kit within days of the movie's release. They're working through preorders. The kit is $90 and requires you to knit the sweater yourself. They cannot make them fast enough. People are buying yarn and a pattern and needles and producing the sweater themselves, by hand, over weeks, because that's the only way to get one.

A cosplayer named Harmony Leiker started knitting hers before the movie came out, based on the original 1959 pattern, and then adjusted the eyes and color when the costume designer's Instagram post revealed how the production sweater differed from the source. She wore the finished sweater to WonderCon. The labor in that sweater is probably forty to eighty hours. The materials are maybe $100. The aesthetic effect is something nobody can buy.

That's the thing nobody can buy.

This is the fandom predicting an economic reality before the economy admits it: the relationship between mass-produced clothing and meaningful clothing has been severed, the severance has been complete enough that recovering the difference now requires returning to pre-industrial methods, and a non-trivial fraction of the audience is willing to do that. The Project Hail Mary fans are asking when their preorder will ship and whether the fox eyes should be black or brown.

The Knives Out comparison is the obvious one and Mr Porter actually got mad about it in their 2020 piece — they were "a little offended when audiences fawned over the fisherman sweater Mr Chris Evans wore in Knives Out," presumably because the Knives Out sweater was an off-the-rack Aran from a brand still making them, while the Harry Burns sweater was something Gloria Gresham found that read as already-loved.

The Chris Evans sweater triggered a buying spree at Aran-knit retailers. The Ryan Gosling sweater is triggering a knitting spree — a different thing entirely. The Evans sweater was the last possible moment when a movie sweater could send people to a store. The Gosling sweater is the first moment where it sends them to a needle.

(Or maybe the second moment, after Frozen, which Leiker mentions — the Oaken sweater she designed her own chart for. The fiber arts community has been doing this for a while. It just hadn't reached the size where a Michigan family business sold out of yarn kits in a week.)

There's something funny about Project Hail Mary specifically being the catalyst — a movie about a science teacher who has to go to space and save the world, who keeps a stack of t-shirts with science puns and dresses like the kind of guy who would absolutely have one weird hand-knit sweater from his grandmother.

The wardrobe is doing a very specific kind of work: Gosling has to be a regular person, has to be the everyman, but he's Ryan Gosling, who hasn't looked like a regular person since 2003, so they pile him with signifiers of un-coolness, including a sweater that in 1985 would have been at the slightly-embarrassing end of normal and in 2025 reads as artisanal-specialness. The garment didn't change. The economy around the garment changed, and so its meaning flipped.

Same as it ever was, except the same isn't.

The thing that gets me about Crystal's lost sweater is that it was probably purchased at a department store in Manhattan around 1985 or 1986 for whatever a Bloomingdale's Aran cost then — maybe $80, maybe $120 — by either Crystal himself or a Columbia Pictures wardrobe assistant, off a rack of similar sweaters, none of which seemed special at the time.

Gresham used it because it was unremarkable. The sweater wasn't supposed to be the thing. The carpet was supposed to be the thing, or the conversation, or Meg Ryan's hair. The sweater happened to be in frame for nine minutes of screen time and now it's a holy relic that the nation's largest public university system cannot find in its own buildings.

The fox cardigan is the opposite.

The Project Hail Mary cardigan, by contrast, was sourced with full knowledge of what it would become. Dillon and Gosling knew. The original was a real vintage 1960s or 1970s Mary Maxim, but the five copies that appear on screen were knit on demand by the production. There is no "real" Project Hail Mary sweater because there are six of them, and none of them are the one in any thrift store in 1989, and the audience knows this, which is why the response is "I want to make one" rather than "I want to find the real one." The relationship between the artifact and the audience changes when the artifact is acknowledged as already a reproduction.

Six sweaters, no original.

What reach-one-moment was responding to in the original post — without quite saying so — was that the WHMS sweater is the last gasp of the previous economy. The carpet-unrolling scene is from a world where a movie character could wear a sweater that read as ordinary and trustworthy specifically because it was the same kind of sweater that real people wore, made by real people who would make it again next year. The character was bourgeois in a way that the wardrobe was telling you was sustainable. Harry could afford the sweater. Anybody could afford the sweater. The sweater was just there.

The Project Hail Mary cardigan reads as ordinary too, but for the inverse reason: it reads as ordinary because the audience recognizes it as something a specific weirdo would have. The cultural register that makes Gosling's Dr. Grace legible — middle-school teacher, Real Genius t-shirts, vintage glasses, hand-knit fox cardigan — is the register where buying things off racks is the norm and having a real sweater means you or your aunt or your grandmother made it. The bourgeois-stable register that Harry occupied is gone. The new register is "individual with weird specific objects from before everything got worse."

And the fans are running ahead of the economy by responding to the cardigan in the only way the new economy permits: produce it yourself, because nobody else will.

Which is, I think, what your sweater observation is actually about — not "things used to be better" in the soft nostalgic sense but "the conditions that produced ordinary good things have been dismantled, and the response is either to mourn them, to pay obscene amounts to a small surviving sector, or to learn to make them again with your hands." Three options. Mary Maxim picked door three and is having the best quarter in its 70-year history. The UCLA wardrobe department picked door one and is buying a sweater off Amazon for the photo. Billy Crystal picked door two by default — he can afford a $650 Dunhill, but he wants the original, and the original is gone.

The original being gone is the actual sweater story.

The Aran tradition, by the way, has its own mythology about lost things — there's a debunked but persistent story that the cable patterns were specific to fishing families so the bodies could be identified when they washed up after a wreck. Not true. But the fact that the story exists, and that it attaches specifically to this kind of sweater, and that it survived despite being repeatedly debunked, suggests something about what we want sweaters to mean: we want them to carry the identity of the person who wore them. We want the sweater to be the proof.

Crystal's sweater carries his identity perfectly well — it's all over the internet, it's the most-photographed object in his wardrobe, it's literally branded onto his cultural persona. It just doesn't physically exist anymore in a recoverable form. The signifier outlived the signified. The myth survived the artifact.

She said, “Oh, how do you set it up?”

I narrowed my eyes at what was clearly a trick for my own good but it genuinely made setting up easier to think I was doing it for her benefit rather than my own.

Later that day she told me she needed to put up a window cling but didn’t want to.

I said, “Oh, how do they go up?”

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

NOT YOUR FAULT BUT MINE

And it was

YOUR HEART ON THE LINE

I really