Random Accidents

(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.

Personality hire

The vast majority of the playerbase makes regular pilgrimage to go stare at it. There is fanart. There is poetry. One of the main things to do while waiting for a party to fill is just to go hang out with the . There was a hotfix the night before last and people were actively *begging* the development team to leave this beast in the game as long as possible.

The simple yet useful Arabic numeral:

crossposting from bsky - glad I stopped using spotify when I did and that I unlinked it from my discord, but still

Signs of spring, ranked.

If the worst of what I'm ruminating on is true, I then ask myself: so what? What would I do with that information if it was confirmed? What options exist? If "lay down and stop breathing" isn't on the table, what are all the other possible ways forward?

In the theme of the world, if you feel like nothing matters, or like people are uncaring/cruel, then what? What does that mean for YOU, and who and what you would like to be? Do you think that uncaring/cruel label applies to you? What label WOULD you apply to yourself, and how can you embody that?

If the world is full of only inaction, then any act i do is a force of change. If the world is full of hate, then any form of love I give is a revolution. If the governing parties are in the business of death and poverty, every breath I take and every moment of indulgence I find is a counter culture. It doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be nonstop. It doesn't have to be viral on the internet. Look at what's around you, and take steps to mold it into something you do care about. Something that does give you hope. Start as small as necessary. Even the division of a single molecular cell is part of growth.

If you're always focusing on the changes you can make to improve your surroundings, you won't miss the moments to enact bigger, stronger change, either. Ask yourself "what can I do, right now, to be the person I want to be in the world I'd like to live in?" Sometimes the answer to that question is plant some flowers, or paint a wall, or eat your favorite food. Sometimes it's to create art with meaning, or to connect with people that want to fight for the same things. To hug someone else who is struggling or make a meal for someone that's tired. Other times it's going to go vote, sharing your opinion, attending a protest, calling some fuckass politician, because those actions are one molecular cell of growth more than laying around and doing nothing.

I think a lot of the times the powerlessness convinces us that if we aren't solving the whole problem, we're not doing anything. But power is just a lot of individual actions piling up and gaining momentum, and if we all keep doing what we can see needs done around us, it stacks. It grows. And eventually, we gather enough to enact change.

I don't live in a walkable city.

I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.

People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!

I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.

Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.

Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.

I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.

A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.

Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.

It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.

And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.

It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.

They're just bike racks.

But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.

It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.

Technology will not save us.

I'm highly sensitive to poison ivy and, as a defense mechanism, I've gotten very good at spotting it. If it's, say, creeping out of the shrubbery toward the path in front of a store, I'll walk in and say, "Excuse me, do you know who does your landscaping?"

One time I did this at the zoo, and in the time it took me to walk through one exhibit, there was a guy ripping it out.

I understand why a lot of queer people from a Christian background associate it with bigotry, because Christians almost never use it for anything but a clobber passage they can use to prop up their bigotry.

But the other side of that coin is that Leviticus is very obviously largely irrelevant to Christianity. If you have had the misfortune of interacting with fundamentalist Christians enough to even recognize Leviticus for this, you will know Christians don’t even follow Leviticus, because most of them believe its contents have been superceded by Jesus and “the New Covenant”.

The only reason it’s synonymous with that one verse to you is because Christians mostly don’t give a shit about the rest of it.

The ones who use it against gay people are just exploiting and ripping out pieces of texts they don’t live by from one group of people they don’t care about or understand to weaponize them against another group of people they don’t care about or understand.

It’s a two-for-one bigotry. On one hand, the supremacist Supersessionism & exploitation of Jewish texts, and on the other, the demonization of gay people. The problem is, if your response to the latter bigotry is to frame Jewish texts as dusty, ancient, misanthropic legalism, you are just agreeing with the bigoted underlying logic of Supersessionism that they believe in.