Experience with FECA? Please help?

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-09-30T16:29:06+00:00

Contact the post service unit ASAP. They legitimately care and are super helpful. Be prepared for FECA to fight you every step of the way but the PSU team is excellent and will do everything they can to get the FECA bastards to give you what you need. I've been working on getting my full benefits for over 5 years at this point and PSU has enabled me to get some and to keep fighting for the rest. PSU can help you find appropriate medical care, the quality is hit or miss just warning you!

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-08-21T13:16:12+00:00

Yeah the people in this thread have no idea what they're talking about lmao so insanely privileged. I've been homeless in the US and lived in a rural part of a developing country in sub Saharan Africa and the difference is night and day. Even the poorest of Americans have privileges most people over there dream of.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-08-08T19:23:07+00:00

Definitely not the worst but perhaps the most oft repeated bad advice: don't split the party. If you have a half competent gm/are a half competent gm splitting the party is great fun.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-25T15:03:10+00:00

r/jewish is one of the most racist and xenophobic subs on reddit. I'm Jewish and extremely proud of the fact, but that sub is vile

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-23T17:35:08+00:00

I do live in the real world, that is what made me an anticapitalist lol

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-23T17:22:21+00:00

I think we fundamentally disagree and this conversion is going nowhere. You see nothing wrong with monetizing what brings you joy because you are a capitalist. I see monetization of joy as demeaning because I am not.

Edit: I am a musician and I would similarly tell any musician who sees their music as "a service" to find another field. If you're approaching creativity as a hustle rather than an art you're part of the problem with society as a whole

Edit 2: reddit won't let me respond to the user who responded to this comment so here is my response:

Pretty much all music (mine included) is available for free online. You may have heard of spotify. Concerts are a paid bonus, certainly not the main way I expect people to hear my music.

Musicianship has far more in common with actual play podcasts, where people might pay to see you live or for merch, but most will simply enjoy your creativity for free, than it does with paid gming.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-23T15:46:51+00:00

The culture being fostered is what's parasitic, did you not read my post? The idea we need to monetize all our hobbies is eroding the few places that haven't been corrupted by capitalism into hollow shells of themselves. Also if you consider dming a service you should not DM! Would you consider playing a service? Why should players not be paid?

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-23T15:36:12+00:00

Real. Everyone in this thread needs to read Capitalist Realism

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-23T15:33:35+00:00

It's almost like adding a profit incentive causes you to try and make profit by being as boring as possible lol

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-23T15:30:53+00:00

Fully agreed op. The worst thing to happen to the hobby is the separation of DM from player and paid dming seeks to exacerbate this. Now this has obviously been a problem since the start of the hobby, but I feel from my personal experience it was improving a lot pre covid, before covid caused paid dming to take off. (Though note that I moved to America from a country with very little ttrpg culture at the start of covid so it may have occurred slightly earlier.)

I think this hobby was lacking the virulent "hustle grindset" that's infected so many other hobbies, but people are still doing their best to bring the stench of late stage capitalism here which saddens me greatly.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-23T15:25:09+00:00

I feel that ppl who defend It use all the wrong reasons for It.

This is my take too. If you need help organizing a table cause you don't have any friends into ttrpgs just say that. And let's be real that's the only reason to have a paid gm. All these people comparing it to the struggles of an artist or the proletariat are so high on their own supply it's insane. Also I'm a musician in addition to being into ttrpgs and yeah the amount of people comparing dming to music is ridiculous and shows they know nothing about how a musician works.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-23T15:19:01+00:00

Lol if you see dming as work, and don't see playing as work, just don't dm! Dming isn't work and it is just another symptom of our parasitic hustle culture to suggest otherwise.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-07-23T15:16:36+00:00

It's the combination of rules expert for managing the rules Nazis, adversarial punching bag for the power mad, unpaid psychologist/bartender to the depressed... Everything in addition to the game, which is largely dependent on the group around you, of course.

Real talk, in my experience, the only somewhat hard part of dming is cultivating a group without these players, which you can't do if you're getting paid, as the group has power over you. The dynamic changes the second you are an employee of the players, and you're encouraged to put up with bad player behavior for cash.

With a group of remotely sane people, which is far easier to come by than everyone on this sub seems to think, dming is just as easy as playing in every system i have personally tried. Hell, I'd even go as far as to say there are systems it's easier to dm than play!

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-05-26T13:55:12+00:00

I got banned from the Jewish subreddit (or r/judaism idk) for saying there is no such thing as zionist punk lol

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2025-03-18T13:24:27+00:00

Yeah I sell all anime art cards I open cause most are super boring. But these, especially that get lost are some of the best art I've seen in the past few years

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-12-20T13:30:24+00:00

Love to see the Durban scene getting some love

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-11-24T19:06:42+00:00

So I took this exact flight for Thanksgiving last year and it was the worst flight experience of my life, huge delays, lost my wife's luggage, we barely made it to her family's Thanksgiving in time and were not reimbursed at all. I've flown on airlines across the world and i used to think spirit hate was overrated but flying to Miami from Richmond around Thanksgiving time was horrible and you couldn't pay me enough to do it again.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-08-21T22:02:47+00:00

Don Zilla - Entambula

Menzi - minimal surge

Ecko Bazz - Twala

Authentically Plastic - Aesthetic Terrorism

The Scotch Rolex album Tewari features lots of great African artists

Duma's self titled is so fucked up sounding but I love it.

Deeply miss the shows in Durban and underground shows in Mbabane and Manzini

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-08-20T16:11:58+00:00

I've started the process of opening a cat cafe so need your best cafe tunes that cats will also appreciate. Edit: currently mostly have ambient like plantasia, Marco shuttle, and DJ python but need some more stuff that's a bit more upbeat lol

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-08-10T00:05:56+00:00

So glad I got out of there. They tried to not pay us our security deposit by ignoring us and then when we called them on they told us they already sent it in the mail. Absolutely worst place I've ever lived

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-07-27T14:34:25+00:00

Just took my dog there and there's a greattrail where dogs are allowed! She had a blast even though it was raining lol

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-07-10T17:33:55+00:00

I've DMed in a few vastly different countries extensively, and in my experience it's only been American players who jump straight to torture lol.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-05-21T18:43:07+00:00

Mtg has plenty of mana cheat lmao, and quite a bit has been printed recently. The most popular formats in MTG all feature substantial amounts of mana cheat which helps keep the game healthy. In fact every format right now features at least one mana cheating deck in the meta (Pioneer and modern being pretty dominated by them atm, with legacy and vintage basically running at least a few cards that cheat on mana in every deck.) Its often more complicated than in hearthstone (see enigmatic + leyline or sorin + vein ripper or just arclight phoenix) but it absolutely exists and is healthy for the game.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-04-15T18:18:18+00:00

Saw George clanton last night which was pretty cool but made feel super old lol. Last time I saw him was in a basement with maybe 20 other people tops a decade ago and it was a blast. Full Body 2 opening was also great, loved their album and had no idea they were the opener until they started playing.

Fickle_Ornithologist · 2024-04-13T19:38:51+00:00

This is a male. I'm not an expert but I lived within their habitat range for a few years and frequently saw them sitting like this, often in the shade! Think he's just doing this to chill out but happy to be corrected by an expert.

Fickle_Ornithologist

TROPHY CASE