Yeah, but still…

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

-Cardinal Richelieu

Not decaying, just formerly dead. He’s described in the book as being quite handsome, actually, except his eyes—which are the eyes of a corpse

Ummmm…

Huckleberry Finn The Merchant of Venice Robinson Crusoe Canterbury Tales Gone With The Wind Both Dracula and Lord of the Rings have some troubling points Pretty much anything by HP Lovecraft

Even Don Quixote has slurs in it.

Are you sure you’ve been reading classic literature?

Well, that’s what happens when you don’t have the constitution for math.

A lot of plants put out those smells as a way of saying ‘something’s eating me!’ to the local predators.

Good! Enough already of this ‘you can be non-white in politics as long as you act like, dress like, and make your hair be like a white person’ bullshit.

If we’re talking the ‘walking down the street at night and you see a woman’ scenario, making noise and keeping a respectful distance helps. Develop a whistling habit, have some jangly keys out, whatever. This especially helps if you’re behind us.

Beyond that, it really depends on the situation, but as long as you don’t leer or loom that’s a good start.

They bring shame to Felix the Cat’s zaniness.

I’m not saying bend over backwards. I’m saying ‘everyone involved in war will SUFFER and live horrible lives and be miserable WRETCHES until they die!’ is in its own way just as bad as ‘and after the war everything will turn out SPARKLY and PERFECT with sunshine and unicorns and rainbows!’, just on the opposite end of the spectrum.

The message ‘you’ll have a terrible life and there’s nothing you can do’ isn’t ever a good message to teach kids, I think.

The truth is the human condition is more nuanced than that. From war, you get everyone from Mad Jack, who routinely charged entire enemy camps with his bagpipes, his sword, and maybe one person as backup, complained when the war ended ‘because it was so much fun’, stayed in the army until retirement, then went on to race boats and make radio-controlled model ships; to the grimly determined people like JRR Tolkien who went through the trenches, processed the horror, and eventually moved on from it, to people like General Ulysses S Grant, who never really recovered from the horrors of war and descended into alcoholism.

If children are old enough to be taught ‘war is hell’ in graphic detail, then I think they’re old enough to understand that different people will react to traumatic events differently. I also think showcasing how people can maybe recover from the trauma of war if they seek help is a better thing to teach than a blanket ‘you’re doomed’.

Eeeehhh the ending was a little…

Like, the author said she wanted to make it as depressing as possible to drive home the point that war is bad.

And yeah, I agree war is really, really bad, and plenty of people never really recover from it. But at the same time plenty of people do, and go on to live at least decent lives. Some of them even turn what they went through into something inspiring. I doubt The Lord of the Rings would have been half as good without JRR Tolkien’s experiences in WWI, for example.

I think that exploring both those themes, and what it takes to come back to yourself after the horrors of war, would have been more poignant. And I also feel that perhaps showing a way through that darkness for at least some of the characters might have been better than the message ‘war sucks and since you got involved you’re going to suffer and have a shitty life forever with no possible escape from the pain but death, fuck you’.

The difference is Air has a guarantee, Ground does not.

Right, which just makes them easy to stuff under the label of ‘other tribe’. And ‘other tribe’ must be run out of town at any cost. Even if they aren’t in your town to begin with.

Sadly true. And yet, they go after the immigrants and not the business owners for some strange reason…

And if you’re a complete sociopath, the ‘less brown people will fix things’ makes a bit of sense too. Less people means less competition for jobs, so more good jobs and higher wages since there would be fewer employees to go around. (This is also why they also want women out of the workforce.)

That’s basically all the racists want, is everything in the country for themselves and their little groups. It’s the dark side of tribalism.

I think my favorite part of endometriosis is the catch-22: surgery is needed to fix it, but to get that surgery covered under medical plans it needs to be proven medically necessary. Endo doesn’t show up on scans well, so generally surgery is the only way to confirm the diagnosis.

I know that. Hence the words ‘if’ and ‘was’. I was just pointing out that if their delusion was true, that four-part statement wasn’t that out there since the actual biblical ‘god’ is a murderous, violent asshole.

In fact, it’s sadly a lot closer to the described ‘god’ than the current Christian ‘god loves everyone’ aesthetic that’s going around.

I mean, if God was real, then those last two points would probably be accurate, him being the Jewish god and all (and the first two might be, too, given he was their war god back when they were polytheistic).

Elon Musk could end world hunger. Full stop. He wouldn’t even notice the dip in his finances. (He offered once, claiming if someone gave him a concrete number, he would pay it, and a nonprofit took him up on it. Surprise, surprise, the whiny little snit backed out.)

They totally could fix the problem. But to those rich shitheads, it’s not a problem. It’s a feature.

Yeah, it was an online group. Everyone immediately quit lol

But seriously, forget real-world politics for a sec. How often in tabletop RPG history has the empire/police state/whathaveyou ever been the good guys and the rebels the bad? Had that DM never played a game before?

I think if that happened to me every marble in my brain would have dropped out too lol

From OOP:

thats the thing he let us do all the worldbuilding at the outset and then decided that the capitalist u.s./cop city proxy we set up was actually an israel proxy that he was going to commandeer to be The Good Guys.

but it went straight over all our heads lmfao

So apparently he let them design the general layout, which had the authoritarian government and the rebels fighting them, and thought the ‘cop city’ they’d made sounded awesome and heroic and was totally the super-cool state of Israel, and the rebels were those dastardly Palestinians, and ran the campaign that way.

Don’t do religion, kids.