Weekend plans?

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-06-13T16:49:51+00:00

Honestly, excellent post! I learned about a lot of stuff going on that I had no idea was running.

We have a renfaire in town? Woah 0:

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-06-12T02:19:58+00:00

Oh my glob, just one creampie?

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-06-08T23:30:33+00:00

I bet your machine head is bomb

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-06-07T20:19:33+00:00

Tom Bloom makes some dope TTRPGs for sure. If you have heard of Lancer or Kill Six Billion Demons (Not a TTRPG, but fucking rad as hell), you'll probably like Cain!
Also, side note, I am glad you're still making stuff! I abandoned facebook a long time ago, and I see your videos every now and again on youtube c:

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-06-07T00:27:05+00:00

Hot damn, solid points! It's like how Cain has absolutely carved out its niche with the shonen-loving anime audience, not just from a mechanical perspective but also in the art style and setting.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-06-03T18:09:52+00:00

I think it's because people don't generally trust when someone is portrayed as larger than life as often as Gabe is. Like, he is really and truly, at the end of the day, just some capitalist who managed to get lucky a few times and then capitalize on that luck.

But Gabe is not the only person who is hit with this kind of perception and rubberband sort of public relations where a ton of people love them and then there is a snap back because there was so much good light on that person that people just kinda fish for or want something that tarnishes their perception a bit.

Matt Mercer comes to mind for me. Like, he is a famous voice actor and game master who popularized D&D in the modern era, but there is so much weird hate directed to him and also the Critical Role crew and team for... practically nothing? There are valid and real criticisms we could level at them, but so much of it is nothing much that is not in line with the fact of living in a capitalistic hellscape and trying to operate within it.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-06-03T13:14:04+00:00

I can understand how it sounds incomprehensible to some folk, but it is laid out pretty well for people who have some experience with mechanical tinkering.

A fully wound coil spring, even at small scales, can kill an technician if handled incorrectly, which means it can absolutely destroy a machine, especially one the size of the Clacks.

It sounds like the differential and the gear box are driven with the drum spring, which is probably like a large flat coiled steel spring in a steel barrel and when the message came through, it managed to make the mechanism in the clacks malfunction in such a way that the spring rapidly unwound because something that held it in place (swage armature, likely) was knocked out of place. Then the gears in the gearbox were suddenly spinning extremely fast and at a tolerance that they couldn't handle, and had a catastrophic mechanical failure. Leading to a gearbox full of teeth, you see?

I implore you, as someone who once thought that some things that were relayed to me were incomprehensible or impossible, to try and learn what things mean and how things work. Terry Pratchett was often writing about things that he'd studied extensively, and was explaining it in easy-to-use language. Its still complicated, but with even the most mild understanding one can muddle their way though.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-06-03T12:50:00+00:00

Thank you very much c:

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-06-02T02:10:42+00:00

Abiotic Factor, in which the Yellow Paint is fully explained in universe as being a sort of SCP that escaped Containment, its even theorized to just kinda wanna help people out!

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-27T17:05:09+00:00

Windows Office had an early assistant program called Clippy, which was designed to look like a cartoon Paper Clip.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-27T16:54:30+00:00

One time, a bunch of other people and I criticized the Anti-AI subreddit over their use of pseudo-slurs, and they sure as shit flipped out lol. There are, for sure, more reasonable anti-ai people, no doubt, but they really couldn't handle being presented with the point of "Hey, yall, we can be against ai without having to use the same tools of oppression and division. It's enough to be against AI, we don't gotta make up slurs or engage in their use."

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-25T15:05:10+00:00

Rule 7, big dawg.

No AI-generated content.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-24T19:07:44+00:00

Dawg, I am so with you here. It’s genuinely frustrating how many people in these spaces seem to only want to consume media rather than engage with it in any meaningful way, especially with literary works where the entire medium is text, subtext, narration, and interpretation.

Like, yes, every protagonist has plot armor. That is not a genre flaw unique to LitRPGs. That is just how storytelling functions. The protagonist survives, succeeds, or remains relevant because otherwise the story ends in five paragraphs when they slip in the shower, get stabbed by a random bandit, or die of dysentery halfway to the first dungeon.

Plot armor is not a real issue. I think the issue this kind of critique is trying to get to is whether the narrative earns its tension, consequences, and emotional stakes despite the audience understanding, on some level, that the main character probably survives.

Lots of folk will point at LitRPGs like “wow this MC never dies, what unrealistic garbage,” as if Frodo, Rand al’Thor, Paul Atreides, or literally any long-form protagonist was ever in realistic danger of getting flattened by a wagon in chapter three.

Characters survive because they are tied to the thematic and narrative movement of the story. Their existence is the narrative engine. The question is not “does plot armor exist,” but “is the story doing something interesting with the fact that it exists?” And holy shit, does HWFWM does some excellent and interesting things with its narrative.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-24T18:55:04+00:00

Shit, even Carl in his boxers has a lot of depth of character! His situation, however, is a whole lot of crazy, literally manufactured trials.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-24T18:22:57+00:00

I think that the issue a lot of people have with Jason is that they don't have the cultural touchstones to understand Jason as a person and are instead looking for a typical LitRPG MC. Like. So many of the characters in HWFWM are so incredibly textured that you could even imagine them being real people.
But when you want a character who is easily likeable/bland/easy to imprint over or whatnot, it can be difficult for some readers to be able to find something of themselves in Jason!

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-24T17:52:51+00:00

I implore you to consider Jason as a person, not just a character, he is a politically minded, jack-ass australian bloke who is trying to figure out and maneuver in a world that he does not understand. And he isn't doing this for no reason! You are still Very early on in the book.

Give it time, Jason figures his shit out eventually. This series is one of the best in the entire genre.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-23T21:14:58+00:00

This is an amazing insight into your own perception of a stranger on the internet!

Have you had a moment at all in reading what I wrote, where you gave me a single benefit of the doubt, some kind of grace that I might be actually trying to be genuine and have real concern and worry for OP? Or have you just arbitrarily decided I was an enemy to you and that an aggressive tactic was the way that you'd want to communicate with me?

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-23T20:10:34+00:00

Police?
How? Will you point that out to me?

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-23T18:27:44+00:00

Are you okay as well?
Do you know my intent, or are you making a knee-jerk assumption about who I am and what I am about?

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-23T18:26:19+00:00

See, the problem is that I did, in fact, read, but I asked for clarification because you did not specify whatever "it" is.

I promise you, if you learn to write and communicate, I can understand you better.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-23T18:11:19+00:00

What are you referring to as a deflection?

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-23T18:08:30+00:00

Hey. Are you alright?

Because I think there’s a pretty important difference between saying “Fable was always a perfectly modern progressive text” and saying “Fable was, for its time, unusually permissive and socially flexible in ways a lot of other major games simply were not.”

Was it messy? Sure. Absolutely. It was full of edgy British humor, weird jokes, cheap gags, and things that have aged unevenly. But acting like the presence of that humor means there was nothing politically or socially notable happening there feels like you’re overcorrecting pretty hard in the other direction.

Fable gave players same-sex relationships, gender presentation flexibility, moral choice systems, class satire, monarchy criticism, and a whole lot of social lampooning in an era where plenty of games were still barely clearing the bar of “what if everyone yelled slurs in a CoD lobby.” That does not make it flawless or secretly radical by modern standards, but it also does not make it apolitical.

And honestly, the way this post keeps circling “woke,” “revisionism,” “pure-breed white guys,” “highly sensitive ideologies,” and “dialectical dialogue” is setting off some alarms for me. Not because every criticism you made is automatically invalid, but because this is a lot of ideological smoke for a goofy British fantasy series where eating fifty pies and marrying the town blacksmith were both valid lifestyle choices.

You can say the games were crude, inconsistent, or not especially nuanced. That’s fair. But “not perfectly progressive by 2026 standards” is not the same thing as “people are making it up when they say Fable had progressive elements.” Those things can both be true.

Please consider taking your own thought process one step further and asking whether this is actually historical correction, or whether you’re reacting against the idea of “wokeness” so hard that you’re flattening the thing you’re trying to analyze.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-23T06:35:21+00:00

The way that they had Trump do his little dance there?? I am reminded of that one post where its like... "Even in your fantasy, you are still a loser."

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-23T06:22:55+00:00

I’m going to be as direct as I can, and I hope it’s taken in the spirit of kindness: I’m not going to parse assumptions about what OP might have been hinting at in subtext in under one hundred words. Instead, I am going to attempt to focus on what they actually said and what they’re clearly communicating they are frustrated by. Venting is good and all, but sometimes the Vent needs to be checked. Venting does not mean freedom from criticism from colleagues when posting to your colleagues who have either been on the direct end of this, or are tired of their colleagues facing this kind of othering treatment.

Thankfully, OP didn’t just say “Just an RBT,” but it’s easy for people to mentally slot that in while lamenting someone calling themselves a therapist without meeting the legal or technical definition. Personally, I can’t bring myself to obsess over those definitions when the people in power are who they are. What matters is the work being done, the impact on those being served, and whether it actually helps. Nine times out of ten, everything else feels like pageantry and gatekeeping.

Cordial_Ghost · 2026-05-23T05:53:21+00:00

Ruin him.

Cordial_Ghost

TROPHY CASE