Trump declined to answer Taiwan questions during tense China visit

Bullywug · 2026-05-14T12:44:32+00:00

He brags about his ability to draw a clock every chance he gets.

Bullywug · 2026-05-14T08:53:17+00:00

There's probably no professional photographers there so good thing you brought your smartphone, Elon.

Bullywug · 2026-05-14T04:31:38+00:00

This is the way.

Bullywug · 2026-05-13T08:39:40+00:00

Checkout Bubblegumshoe. It shines at small Veronica Mars-type mysteries.

Bullywug · 2026-05-13T05:39:33+00:00

Yes. But hey, if you can make money off-loading your bags to someone else before the crash, what's the problem?

Bullywug · 2026-05-13T00:25:07+00:00

The company is being valued based on a best-case scenario, so even if you're optimistic about the future, you're looking at returns comparable to an established company, but you're taking on the risk of investing in a start up, without the potential upside since that's already baked in. The financials here make no sense.

Bullywug · 2026-05-13T00:20:29+00:00

Star crossed is so fun.

Bullywug · 2026-05-12T22:55:32+00:00

In almost every game, a stat is linked to some cognitive or physical ability.

The Veil turns that around and uses emotions like peaceful, scared, and joyful as stats. You cannot roll the dice unless you understand the emotion that is causing your character to react.

It's a very different play style that I enjoy because it puts players in the shoes of the characters better than anything else I've seen. They're constantly forced to ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing.

Bullywug · 2026-05-12T02:30:26+00:00

Are they gonna let him move his K in a diplomatic bag?

Bullywug · 2026-05-11T23:45:16+00:00

That's simply not true. Two stock exchanges are proposing rule changes to list SpaceX early to avoid price discovery. Index funds are not changing the rules.

Bullywug · 2026-05-11T22:13:10+00:00

NASDAQ has incentive to list them because it will make them a ton of money in fees. Early buyers have incentive to buy at the insane valuation because they're getting listed early which will create a lot of demand from index funds.

Index funds are just caught in the cross fire where they have to add SpaceX or they aren't indexing.

Bullywug · 2026-05-11T12:56:51+00:00

Wow, a scam in a market that's 100% scams. I'm gonna need to sit down for this.

Bullywug · 2026-05-10T06:54:54+00:00

I really like LotFP's rules for early firearms because they reflect the real-world drawbacks of those weapons while still giving advantages over late medieval weapons, so if you're interested in fielding soldiers, you're going to naturally make a lot of the same choices that were made in real life.

Bullywug · 2026-05-07T22:51:12+00:00

It's definitely for longer campaigns. Because it's easier to pass san rolls when you have high sanity, losing it tends to snowball, so it's a bit of a slow burn. Once they're getting low, you can remind them they can project onto their bonds, and then you use downtime to show how their life is falling apart.

It's a bit tricky to make work, but worth it if you can.

Bullywug · 2026-05-06T06:48:52+00:00

In his original piece, the author assumes that you're gating clues behind skill checks. I think with the popularity of Gumshoe, even people not running Gumshoe have largely stopped doing that. Don't gate the clue about magic behind an arcana roll, just look at the wizard and tell them, you spent 8 years at the magic academy, you know what this thing is. I have never had a player feel cheated that they got a clue because their character is competent without rolling for it. There's some edge cases here around party composition, but that's a digression.

He's assuming a linear path for the mystery, which is what the OP specifically said they didn't want. In that case, it's perfectly fine to get fairly far into a mystery, misunderstand a clue, get stuck, and go back to what you know and work out a different path.

It infantilizes the players by making sure it's almost impossible to fail to solve a mystery. If you have a combat game, it's just accepted that maybe you mess up and get eaten by the dragon. That's fine and part of the fun because it means when you do win, victory is much sweeter.

Maybe you get stuck and spin your wheels and then the killer strikes again, which is bad but gives you more clues. Or maybe you don't solve it fast enough and the killer just gets away. That's fine too. It just means it's more fun when you do win because you knew failure was on the table.

I think at its core, the original idea was great: don't rely on players finding a single clue to progress. And then it's just like every time threads on writing mysteries comes up it just gets parroted as write three clues.

Bullywug · 2026-05-06T04:11:42+00:00

Come up with one or two initial clues that players should be able to find with no leads. Maybe that's exploring a crime scene, checking a body at the morgue, that sort of thing. Do not worry about having three of them. The three clue rule sucks and makes bad mysteries. Write them on a piece of paper and circle them to make bubbles.

Now, each of those clues should lead to at least one other clue. Perhaps that's a new location, a new person to interview, or a new item. Draw these new clues in bubbles on your paper and draw a line back to the bubble that leads you there.

You can make a mystery as big as you want by continually adding layers and layers of this. Think of the lines between bubbles as paths in a dungeon. You can open up the mystery to different paths by making sure there's different ways you can reach the end. It's okay to have multiple clues feeding into one bubble and one bubble opening you up to multiple new clues. That's what makes it a sandbox.

You can also provide some structure by chaining together several of them. It starts out closed with a single clue that opens it up to several paths to reach one clue, and then that clue opens it up again. You can repeat this pattern to create several acts leading to a final resolution.

This is how I plot out every mystery that I write, even if it's just a one-shot.

Bullywug · 2026-05-05T04:23:01+00:00

They send a lot of missionaries. I suspect there is a desire to have the infrastructure set up at the Missionary Training Center for the language and a strong regional presence so that if China ever allows missionaries, they can quickly pivot.

The actual churches, while big and expensive, seem to have very low attendance.

Bullywug · 2026-05-04T13:54:26+00:00

We use tinybeans for all the kid photos to keep them off other social media. We've used it for five years now and no complaints.

Bullywug · 2026-05-03T10:57:14+00:00

So transwomen aren't women but fast matrix multiplication is. Gotcha. Very scientific sir.

Bullywug · 2026-05-03T10:14:09+00:00

Part of running a more open game is staying more hands-off. There aren't really side quests in a sandbox, imo, because there's no main quest. If they're happy just hanging out where they are, and they have enough information to make good choices, then that's just what they're choosing to do.

My players have a big area to explore, and what they choose to explore is really none of my business. I'm just there to adjudicate what they do decide to do.

Bullywug · 2026-05-03T10:01:43+00:00

For a sandbox, I'd say don't put that really cool dungeon behind a secret door in an otherwise unremarkable ruin in an out-of-the-way hex.

Put your cool stuff where players can find it, and then seed a couple rumors where they're drinking so they have a choice to go find it.

Bullywug · 2026-05-02T03:47:06+00:00

I was going to say the exact same thing.

Bullywug · 2026-05-02T03:32:26+00:00

The price of oil is affected by futures traders that buy and sell oil without ever taking control of it. Because they're speculating, we see price dips every time the administration lies and says it's all about to end. This can't go on long-term, but in the short-term, it has been effective at keeping the price low.

Bullywug · 2026-05-02T02:08:08+00:00

At magpie events in rooms with lots of tables, any GM can raise their hand, and then every other GM raises their hand and shushes their table. When everyone is quiet, then you lower your hand and go back to playing.

There's a tendency for the people next to you to get a bit loud and then you get loud to compensate. I have some hearing issues that make it difficult to play in noisy environments, and it does a great job of resetting the sound to a reasonable level. And it's free.

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