WES ANGLE

This Pride Month, I’m not feeling very festive. I’m fucking furious. I’m tired. I’m sick to death of watching everything I love get torn apart by bigots, transphobes, and racists. And yet all I see right now online is the usual ‘uwu happy pride month! Love is love!’ posts ???
Trans people are dying. The support networks they depend on are being ripped away. The progression of LGBTQIA+ rights in the UK haven’t just come to a halt, they’ve gone backwards. We’ve dropped from number one in Europe for LGBTQIA+ friendliness to 22nd.
All this bathroom bullshit is not only oppressing trans people, but everyone.

And people are actively choosing not to fight for trans rights and lives because of what? Some fucking fictional book?
I don’t give a damn if Harry Potter was your childhood. I had the merch. I queued for midnight showings. I bought the books on release day and read nothing else for years. It was my childhood too - and I ditched it the second I realized how disgusting JK Rowling really is. That’s how easy it is.

Grow the fuck up and actually support your trans and non-binary siblings instead of making shitty excuses to do nothing. There’s no such thing as an ‘ethical fan’ and I’m not interested in debating it.

Do better. Silence in the face of injustice is compliance.

If you have any issues with anything I said above, then do me a favour and unfollow me right now. This dystopia we’re currently living in isnt going to change unless you help it to.

Actual bill name: Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.

Purported purpose: "to protect children from being exposed to explicit material in the classroom".

How it's sold in the press: "Ban strippers and porn from classrooms!"

Actual text of the bill: Expands the meaning of "sexually explicit content" to include the words "or involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism".

Not and. Or. Meaning "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" is in and of itself enough to be classified as sexually explicit.

I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.

The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.

And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.

Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.

Yeah, big name "actual play" podcasts that pretend they're not scripted and workshopped to hell are a big contributing factor, though I wouldn't classify them as distinct from Hasbro's marketing apparatus so much as one of the most visible arms of that apparatus. The fact that Hasbro isn't paying them directly doesn't mean they aren't serving the brand.

Maaaaaan. So I'm DMing two DnD 5e games at the moment. One of them is a high level combat focused megadungeon with very experienced players, while the other is more open and has more RP with a mix of experienced and new players. I always feel way more drained after a session running the latter game than the former. And I think you really helped me see why. I'm DEFINITELY having to do a ton of track-laying while running that game, because it's such an unfocused game. I feel way more like I have to be an entertainer who's always the one responsible for my players' fun, rather than expecting them to make their own fun using the rules of the game, like the players in my other group do.

Same woman called a mosque and they were ready to help her immediately.