All those “active listening” skills to trick people into thinking you’re paying attention or care. Lol

Thanks, I was about to suggest this too. Aegis is awesome. :) I can’t understand why most banks sms a code instead of using something like this. It’s insanity.

On one hand I have my personal firstname-lastname-dot-com I’m still hosting for years. I’m not a webdev but WordPress is awfully bloated and everything else needs a touch of webdev skills.

So it’s been at “coming soon I’m working on it welcome to sample example theme page” for years, but hey it’s indexing well based on age alone!

The other is a fun clever one I route through cloudflare to access all my home server stuff via HTTPS over TailScale. Never have to expose any ports to the big scary world wide web. :p

I like to think that glass is half-ass full.

I got personally screwed by this when I sunk the cash into Substance Painter / Designer, and then they “joined the Adobe family.”

At this point any software in my pipeline that’s not FOSS would be considered a point of vulnerability.

Peggle fans stand with you likewise. :(

Not gonna lie I kinda respect people who can do that. I, the forever-GM, am also always “the funny one” and didn’t really grow up with positive associations with expressing “deep, moving, dramatic, or sorrowful” emotions.

If I made people sniffly at my table I’m afraid I’d get concerned and everyone would feel awkward. Or maybe I’d feel the most awkward and feel forced to make something goofy happen like a Marvel movie writer lol.

If I got wrapped up in it and made myself emotional? Ahh! It’s like that “I showed up to school/work with no pants” nightmare!

But that’s like, human, right? Being moved by stories. I worry I won’t be able to tell impactful tales with depth beyond “beer, pretzels, and Monty Python jokes” unless I can get get past that personal block. =\

TL;DR: Anyway, not afraid to go dramatic and your players keep coming back. That’s really fascinating and I genuinely mean that. Power to you!

corpos bring a real army and then hit you with an orbital particle weapon

(Credits Roll)

🎵

[Verse 1] I couldn’t wait for you to come and clear the cupboards But now you’re gone and leaving nothing but a sign Another evening, I’ll be sitting reading in-between your lines Because I miss you all the time

[Chorus] So, what do you wanna do? What’s your point of view? There’s a party, screw it, do you wanna go? A handshake with you, what’s your point of view? I’m on top of you, I don’t wanna go 'Cause I really wanna stay at your housе And I hopе this works out🎵

If ya know, ya know. 😭 Lol

Thematically this is just a tone to set for running an RPG, but system wise…

If sticking to Sword and Sorcery…

I want the consequences to be so real that a decent player might need 2 or 3 backup characters, where a happy ending isn’t garunteed in the slightest and the DM is fine to end the campaign in total tragedy.

…You might like Dungeon Crawl Classics. Uses funky dice (optional), and you start with a few “level zero” characters that go through a deadly dungeon known as a “funnel.” The survivors end up as your level 1 character(s).

Maybe thematically it’s not about pull-no-punches storytelling or anything, but the system itself is brutal and rewards player cunning, wit, and luck, to overcome challenges. (And no, the DM isn’t required to be an adversarial psycho lol.)

Never played it myself but it falls into that category of “OSR” kinda games that try to revitalize the spirit of classic “Player smarts vs. Consequences” gameplay over theatrical plot-beats.

Apart from fantasy, my favorite system is Savage Worlds. It can run any genre, the game by default is “cinematic” and favors the players as heroes, but many mechanics make the numbers “swingy” so nothing is ever “not dangerous.” With the right rolls, a squire can behead the Orc war chief, or a lowly thug’s .38 caliber could put your spec-ops commando in critical condition!

It’s also heavily customizable. You want pulp adventures where heroes shrug off bullet wounds with sheer grit? Easy!

You want what you described up there where every victory is won tooth and nail? Try adding an optional rule where every wound causes a potentially permanent injury in a setting like “War of the Dead” or “Weird Wars Rome / I / II / Vietnam” and things are gonna get real tense, real quick.

Players have lots of tools at their disposal, but dice also “explode” both ways. Sometimes an inconsequential attack can one-shot you into bleeding out, but I guarantee the whole table erupts when a player goes for broke and the dice just keep poppin’! Love that system.

It’s very quick and easy for GMs to run too, I’d say. Great balance between narrative flexibility and tactical “crunch.” :)

I’m not 100% sure I’m getting this one. Is emergency room coffee:

• Super crazy strong because the staff’s gotta commit to being so inhumanly wired at all times?
• Heinously putrid because chaos doesn’t allow for regular cleaning and replacement?

I miss that feeling a little bit. My undiagnosed-ADHD highschool self with like 18 characters hovering around level 20, never maxing one out because the ~30-40 slog was real, just chatting up strangers for fun while hopping around various towns’ mailboxes and occasionally actually doing game content. (Remember when Barrens chat was a meme for basically being like the /b/ of WoW? LOL)

… And it didn’t feel like impending doom or that I was somehow wasting my life away. It’s just what I did after school and that was alright.

It’s how I met my wife though, so it all worked out. :)

I could go on for days but WoW’s peak was a neat way to build social skills while being behind an avatar kept you from being too vulnerable.

I feel like online gaming now has gotten so anti-social and that the mere fear of potential toxicity just has everyone locked up and suspicious; Afraid to talk to anyone they don’t already know. Thanks to, what, basically Discord? Game chats are completely dead.

I remember trying Guild Wars 2 and thinking every other player might as well just be a bot because nobody interacted. :(

Ragnarok was so weirdly awesome. I loved how unique it was and somehow the jank was charming. The sprites and job tree were fantastic too, and I could listen to that music all day. :D

I’ve mostly heard it from musicians on various distro forums and such for some reason. You’re right, there’s JACK, and low latency versions of kernels and all sorts of other stuff. (LMMS is more than fine for my experience level lol)

Mainly I think it’s because a lot of the fancy paid DAWs or plugins boil down to Windows, but I’m not an experienced musician myself to really know what their exact complaints are.

I think it still might just be FUD generated by frustrated people, because sometimes you gotta do a little more than “unzip and run” for a lot of plugins.

Elsewhere in the thread people say he’s an “audio guy”, so that’s actually kinda neat if he’s going to Linux.

We’ve made progress on the Linux gaming front, now we need to dispell “Y’but you can’t use Linux if you’re into sound.” :)

Okay, a suspicious thanks to you, Microsoft…

…So when can we get this treatment for WMR so all our VR headsets don’t become useless bricks kthaaaanks!

Wow thanks for the heads up on that! I kept getting tempted by that “Download” button thinking “No…it can’t be that easy.”

It’s kinda amazing how much content uses existing content…so they quietly can’t ruin downloading without tanking a lot of traffic.

Seriously believe even on Lemmy there’s gonna be weaponized sockpuppets/bots that try to speak the language in order to discourage voting: “Oh if you’re really based you’ll just protest by staying home.”

“You’re a neoliberal shill if harm reduction is your strategy rather than overthrowing the system and rebuilding it into an enlightened paradise overnight.”

I fancy myself an anarchist in ideals, but I’m sure as heck filling a ballot for Kamala so I don’t have to start taking my “bugout country” plans AS seriously yet…

For a lot of reasons, but if the opposition wins, everybody who works for a living is gonna get waffle-stomped, and the only ones who will get stomped harder are those who can’t work for a living.

We gotta play the hand we’re dealt and deal with the biggest fires first…

What left-brain/right-brain not being drift-compatible does to a homie.

Now it’s all AI written. Top 15 hits be like:

"Many are wondering why PC LOAD LETTER is displayed on their printer, and they would be right to ask this, because printer errors can be frustrating.

First let’s start with the basics;

What is a printer?

Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta…"

Because the font was so similar with “Ad” I was instinctively rolling my eyes and scrolling past your comment before I realized it was a comment LOL.

Effective!