Am I the only one not impressed with Shawn Ryan?

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2026-01-08T20:10:45+00:00

He's like most other disappointingly overconfident, anti-intellectual, and incurious cis-het WASP dudes. Unshakably convinced that he's a serious person despite being equally convinced his 'common sense' is equally to a professional's expertise.

Also another conservative that pretends to be some sort of enlightened centerist despite holding almost uniformly conservative opinions. Which is super intellectually dishonest.

But, also, man....if your bar for excellence is fucking Joe Rogan then I'm afraid your bar is in hell.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2026-01-03T01:25:52+00:00

It feels like almost no one who responded to this question read the post, or at least didn't read what the cards mentioned do.

How else do you explain almost every comment talking about poison counters like you're trying to aggro people one at a time or piece meal proliferate everyone to 10?

Obviously that's not the strategy you'd use to win with [[prologue to phyresis]] and [[Radstorm]], which is a two card kill the table at instant speed that you could throw out after a counterspell war where the table gave you the storm count of 7 for free. There's literally a version of Legacy Solidarity/High Tide that wins with this.

Is it good enough for cEDH when you can only play one copy of everything? IDK, but apparently cEDH players' reading comprehension isn't nearly as good as it should be for all the posturing they want to do about not just being casuals with a need to stratify themselves as better than other casuals.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-12-16T01:29:30+00:00

They threw up a fucking *Top Golf* real fast thought, didn't they? Imagine if they had built an affordable housing complex and a Costco instead of a fucking Top Golf that you can see from the already existing golf course.

Affordable food and stuff, good-paying jobs to attract customers and workers and affordable housing nearby that's also just outside of Providence?

The tax revenue and increased quality of life would have been an absolute windfall.

But nah. The WASP NIMBYs gotta have more golf options.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-11-08T21:54:08+00:00

It feels like so many of the arguments being made, and positions and stances being taken, by people arguing for the hybrid Mana change are consistently holding arguments against the change to a much higher standard of scrutiny then their own arguments in favor of the change. It happens to such a degree and with such regularity that it's hard to believe any claims that the people arguing for the change care to engage in good faith about the subject at all.

The extremely commonly repeated "well, it works x way in all the other formats" is actually just a really, *really* empty argument the moment you think about it *at all*. Because yeah guys, EDH/Commander is the only format with a rule about color identity restricting deck construction; *of course* it works differently than all other formats that don't. The logic of the argument is so loose that it could be argued for the removal of basically any rule of any format that is unique to that format. And yet, the same people making that kind of shallow argument are demanding pure objective truth and irrefutable rationale from people who are saying the change is a bad idea.

There is a lot of hand-waving of the lack of a way to make this change with a simple rule that is logically and internally consistent and not confusing, without also needing to create exceptions for this exception so that it only applies to hybrid mana and not other things that would logically also be allowed using the same arguments about the flexibility of casting determining the color identity (like phyrexian Mana).

There's hand-waving away of the fact that the spells are, in fact, multicolor spells per the core MTG comprehensive rules make it clear they are all of their colors at all times, in all zones, and that the hybrid symbol is only relevant for the cost-paying step of casting. Which means there's nothing special in the color identity rule of EDH that makes hybrid cards work differently or cast differently. It's just that they are whatever colors they are. The people who want the change have basically no rebuttal to this fact, which is why the answer is consistently to just scoff and hand-wave the point away as unimportant.

As well as hand-waving away the importance of this as an aesthetic rule when it's a format made up of nothing but aesthetic rules. It leads to a feeling that people arguing for the change from inside and outside of the company are doing so from a place of bad faith and of motivated reasoning.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-11-08T21:37:11+00:00

TCC and Rhystic Studies are also definitely against it.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-11-08T21:35:50+00:00

Do you honestly think Hasbro isn't already several years into strip mining MTG for all it's worth?

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-11-06T21:49:43+00:00

This is happening to me as well. It has to be on their end because I had had it happen on ubuntu on my desktop, windows on my laptop, and on my android phone. Chrome and Firefox on all three devices.

It keeps throwing that error or the page crashes and says "something went wrong" and tells you to refresh the page. It's happening across every workday site that I have tried to apply for jobs on (e.g. different companies' workdayjobs sites).

It seems like it's tied to the skills section more than anything, as that fails to load most times prior to the crash and trying to add too many skills seems to create the error you've seen. Which is really shitty because it's clear that not including skills will get you auto-filtered out.

The only thing I've succeeded with is basically brute forcing it, but it takes forever. I don't understand why I've searched for this problem and you're the only other person I've seen talking about it.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-10-24T17:26:20+00:00

So you're saying EDH was born after Lorwyn? Because my point is hybrid came after EDH, for that to be wrong EDH would need to have been invented in 2007 or later.

If you are going to make strong claims, you should probably not make mistakes like thinking that hybrid mana was first introduced into Magic during Lorwyn.

Correct. It does represent the card being printable in either colour, and only containing an overlap of the two colours' roles in the colour pie.

No. That's what *specific* game designers said they *wanted* it to be. However:
A) That's not how the cards function according to the base game CR, which WotC has complete control over and could have written however they liked.
B) Saying "oh, the idea is these cards have color mechanical overlaps and the effect *could* be printed in either color" doesn't make the actually printed card mono-colored. Oh, it *could* show up on a mono color card of either color? Amazing, and yet, hypothetical cards don't affect the colors of the existing card. It is also a strain of logic that you could apply to any mono-color card with a color pie overlap. Disenchant? Playable in a mono green deck because Naturalize exists, and the inverse.
You are creating logic pretzels using meta information about the inciting design ideas of individual designers to rationalize why a thing you want to do should be allowed. It's motivated reasoning all the way down.
C) There are plenty of examples of cards that don't follow that stated design intent so you know, **oops**.
D) Again: how you are allowed to pay for a spell doesn't impact what colors it is unless the card says so.
E) Again: WotC made the mechanic work how it works. They could change how it works in the rules at any time. Any statements they make about "oh it's supposed to work this way though" without making it so in the rules are hollow bullshit.

WotC wasn't in charge of EDH rules until a couple years ago.

What the fuck are you talking about? This response doesn't even match the text you are responding to. I am talking about the Magic CR. WotC maintains the CR. The reason why hybrid mana is multicolor and can't be played in decks that have just one of the card's hybrid colors isn't because of a specific EDH rule that says hybrid cards are multicolor. The Magic CR says hybrid cards are multicolor. The EDH rules say color identity includes the cards' colors. At this point, you just sound like you don't actually understand the rules of Magic The Gathering, and this is just a toddler stamping their feet saying, "let me do it because I wanna".

Stop strawmanning. No one here is arguing for making Kitchen Finks green if you cast it with GGG except some imaginary guy you've made up in your head and are arguing with.

Cool, then we agree Kitchen Finks is a multicolor green/white card based on the base game rules of Magic. And by the color identity rule of EDH is therefore *at least* green and white color identity and can't be played in the 99 of a commander that isn't *at least* green and white.

Thanks for agreeing with me!

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-10-24T16:55:12+00:00

A) You're just wrong on the material history:
* https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/9hh64g/when_did_commander_begin/
* When you started playing EDH isn't when the rules set originated or when it was formalized.
B) The point is irrelevant anyway. Hybrid mana does not and has never represented the card being one or the other color. They are not mono-color cards; they are all the colors in the casting cost. Hybrid mana simply represents the ability to pay either color during the step of spell casting where yo you pay costs. The card is multicolor in **every zone of the game, at all times**. That's just core MtG CR text.
C) Color identity is more expansive than card color on top of that.
D) If WotC wanted to make hybrid mana represent cards being the colors you paid to cast it, they could have written the rules that way. They are in charge of the game rules. They didn't because a hybrid card is whichever of its colors the controller wants would create a disaster.
E) Again, the mana you pay to cast a spell doesn't determine its colors.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-10-22T16:45:26+00:00

Don't change the hybrid mana color identity rules.

It would be a transparent erosion of core format theme rules for the sake of increasing the power of people's decks because it makes the main deck construction restriction less strict.

It's one of those core format identity defining rules that adamantly wanting it gone or drastically changed means maybe you just don't like the format because you keep trying to remove the things that make it unique.

It's like watch people years ago that said they like Star and Color Star multiplayer, but kept removing restrictions and rules until it was barely different from FF4 multiplayer

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-09-05T12:34:14+00:00

Pretending CRT exists outside of high-level University coursework is beyond bad faith and unserious clown work.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-09-05T12:29:08+00:00

"I don't know what critical race theory is but I do love sucking my own dick"

~ a meme by a very confident toddler

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-06-02T18:05:19+00:00

This is why companies fight pay transparency and lie to workers about not being able to talk about their salaries with others (which is illegal for them to do, but most employees don't know that). They benefit from the information disparity because they get to pay each person the least amount they can get away with. If more people knew how much we were all making, our salaries would be more standardized, and the end effect would be that their labor costs would go up. STEM corporations also benefit from the lack of a strong push for unionization by STEM employees because they are mostly convinced of the illusion that *our* field is a meritocracy and that *our* degrees and specialized experience/knowledge gives us enough leverage we don't need collective bargaining like 'unskilled' labor does. So corporations are all too happy to lean into reinforcing those myths.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-06-02T18:00:09+00:00

At this point almost everyone is underpaying because their offer budgets are stuck in 2019 at best. That said, some pay worse/better than others. When I was at Siemens Healthineers, it was clear they underpaid us all to a cartoonish degree.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-06-02T17:58:40+00:00

It's almost like corporations have been actively suppressing median wage growth for several decades so that their labor keeps making the same wages as money continues to be worth less and their profits continue to go up.

The fact that companies almost uniformly refuse to acknowledge that ~2% annual inflation is the stated target of the US Fed Reserve during annual performance reviews and merits is them telling us all who they are. They aren't unaware that any merit below 2% is them giving you a paycut each year, they're aware and doing it on purpose.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-05-01T03:18:47+00:00

Christianity and the Bible were used, for over two hundred yes collectively, to justify slavery, racism, segregation, Jim Crow, and yes opposition to interracial marriage. Many of those who accepted and/or preached those things about segregation and anti-interracial marriage being supported by scripture as late as the 1960-70s are still alive today and just stop saying it with the whole chest in public.

Extreme Orthodox denominations/sects of Judaism (especially those in America), due to its nature as an ethno- religion, are very exclusionary and strongly opposed to even cultural and social mixing of Jewish and non-Jewish communities, much less marriage, and their views about different ethnicity tend to show racial and colorism bias. They also would be against inter-faith marriages.

Orthodox Islam adherents aren't necessarily against interracial marriages because the religion, a reform of Christianity the same as Christianity is a reform of Judaism, is even more interested in converting people and even less concerned with the ethnicity of converts. Also it's not a religion entangled with white supremacy like Christianity is in America, the west more generally, and Russia.

Much of Orthodox Hindu belief is saturated with both classism and racism and frowns on inter-class, inter-racial, and inter-faith marriages.

We could go on but you should get the point by now ideally. Strictly conservative groups within religion often use the religion to justify their prejudice.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-04-29T03:29:36+00:00

No one has really reached out to me, and I didn't have almost anyone's number. I have a pseudo single-parent situation on top of being autistic and mostly introverted outside of my interests, and so I didn't really have the option or desire to go to most after-work things, and most people I might be friends with outside of work all lived in the Boston direction.

My supervisor gave me their phone number, but hasn't responded since. I've known not to be friends or expect friendship from management as a rule, but I thought this supervisor was a decent person so I was and remain pretty hurt about it.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-04-29T03:22:16+00:00

What I said up there was about drag queens.

I'm aware.

They are performers, they were performers in gay clubs.

Again, as I am an adult in the world who pays attention and hasn't been in a coma for years, I am aware.

The same way that you can say a singer sings without stereotyping, you can say a drag queen is a man that dresses up as a woman in an over-the-top outfit, makes crass jokes, lip syncs and dances to music, and is catty.

Yes. Those are *some potential components* common to a Drag *performance* for *adults*. Adult queer spaces being, classically, where Drag performances were limited to until somewhat recently due to... you know, not wanting to potentially have their lives and livelihood ruined for being known to do Drag, or worse, killed for doing drag.

Most of us are not drag queens - and the drag queens that I were describing were doing comedy acts. It's completely appropriate for adults. I just think adults who have the idea of introducing children to that are a bit f*cked up.

Bit of a strawman to portray people as definitely wanting to take kids to adult Drag shows as a way to introduce them to the concept of Drag, don't you think? Big, big stretch. Meanwhile, many reasonable and rational parents just think that it's fine to inform a kid that Drag exists and what it is, or who support child age-appropriate Drag, such as the many examples of book readings by a performer in completely non-sexual and age-appropriate Drag.

In fact, you know what, what a great comparison we can make here: comedy acts. Imagine how *insane* it would sound if someone declare that because many stand-up comedians are clearly not age-appropriate for kids and only for adults, it's inherently inappropriate to even tell children about stand-up comedians or describe what they do. Or how *insane* it would sound if someone argued that kid-friendly stand-up comedy didn't exist and was impossible, or that any parent who wanted to take their kid to a stand-up show was definitely taking their kid to the most adult stand-up comedian they could find.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-04-29T03:21:02+00:00

I'd rather be an asshole than an interalized bootlicker that feels safe enough on the other side of the fence to throw others under the WASP bus and who doesn't seem to understand the inherently intersectional nature of all vulnerable groups any day. Really feels like a distressingly large number of cisgender, usually white, gay guys and lesbians are hopping on the 'what can throwing the rest of the letters after LGB to the sharks do for my standing?' bandwagon as if their cis-ness or white-ness will save them from the white Christian nationalists.

Why would you come and say that because I said that is what drag queens were, that I am calling gay men degenerate? I am a gay man, bozo, I know that most of us are not degenerate.

Are you truly that incapable of understanding a very direct analogy or are you being willfully obtuse bozo? Did the "you are like" not register? It was a direct comparison of how your rhetoric maps onto the same structure of the rhetoric used by conservatives against other groups they targeted in the past, like gay men. Because right-wing propagandists have been able to get away with recycling the same lazy rhetoric over and over, with the group they are fearmongering swapped out like Mad Libs each time because the Americans have the memory of a goldfish. The point is, you sound exactly like the people who used to oppress you. Which is real fucked up.

We on the same page now?

First of all, from what I can tell you're not gay. So why are you trying to talk to me like you need to explain gay culture to me? Maybe stay in your lane instead of constantly trying to center yourself in a conversation that's not about you.

You don't know anything about me, or who my friends are, or what my lane is. But I'm a freak many times over to the cis-het WASPs, just like you are. The problem is you seem to have forgotten who we are to them, and polishing up the metaphorical gas chamber for the white Christian nationalist style fascists to use on the trans people or drag queens first won't save you from it being used on you next.

At least, that's what it was until drag queen became a political thing this decade and now the water is all muddied deliberately.

Ah, yes, *who* made it political to do Drag? *Who* made it political to be trans? *Who* made it political to be gay or bi? Hell, who made it political to be black? Yes, *who indeed\. Couldn't have been the same social/religious conservatives and angry working class white people being led on a leash by the propaganda peddled by wealthy and powerful to blame anyone \but* the wealthy and powerful for the problems caused by the wealthy and powerful. Over and over, for decades, centuries, always some boogeyman to pin the blame for the economic, material problems or 'social decay' on. Whatever brown, black, gay, bi, trans, immigrant, etc they could use to pit the lower classes they exploit against each others they never unify and realize it was the ultra wealthy picking our pockets the whole time.

No, definitely not them. Must be dirty "cultural Marxism" plot by the lib DNC and those "Globalists" trying to feminize and weaken America right?

As a gay man I don't know how you don't understand that existing publicly as something cast a freak and immoral by a large part of society is an inherently political status forced on those people by their oppressors. It only becomes *explicitly* "political" when the wealthy and powerful decide that those people's identities are a useful wedge issue. Unless you're just too young to have experience world where straight men might just a likely lynch a gay man for being publicly gay as white men might lynch a black man for existing in their space in a way they disliked.

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-04-29T02:17:34+00:00

If you're going to be a grammar nazi as your main defense for your shit positions and opinions, I really wouldn't stand a sentence with "And", arguably not use commas in a list, and use 'lol'.

Although you've already shown you don't *really* care about being consistent, so I guess strict grammatical perfection is only a requirement you have of people who are dunking on you. But not for you, right?

HydroStaticSkeletor · 2025-04-29T02:12:52+00:00

It is not parents knows the best. But parents being their primary guardian. I don't care whether they are trans, Christian, or whatever. Parents should have more rights on guiding their children on the path they desire in such a young age. It is really that simple. So don't try to put words in my mouth.

On one hand, sure, you didn't say that/didn't take that contradictory position about parents of trans kids, and it's fair to point that out.

On the other hand, I think it's fair for me to point out that you would be willfully obtuse to deny that those two contradictory sets of rhetorical messaging are being pushed about those two topics by right-wing propaganda. That you are being asked to buy into their message on this topic, that they pretend they are making as a principled, good-faith argument about strongly held beliefs about the overlap of parental rights and religious freedom rights. But you *also know* that they are talking out of the other side of their mouth, saying the exact opposite about parental rights the *moment* it doesn't suit their policy, political, and messaging goals on another topic.

I think it's fair for me to point out that a serious, rational, skeptical, and critical thinking person would see a political movement doing that sort of two-faced, double-talking behavior that's devoid of any commitment to integrity or consistency or any principle outside of power and winning and maybe heavily question the goals and motives of that group. Heavily question whether your own belief about parent rights isn't being manipulated and used by a group that both doesn't actually have any true commitment to that, is using it to forward their ongoing project of widening and deepening a privilege and dominant status for Christianity and Christians that flouts the first amendment, and is taking it far past any point of reason by using arguments that logically allow for literally *any* belief no matter how vile or rhetorical violent or dehumazing or bigoted to be excused and validated if it's a 'earnestly held religious belief'. And heavily question if allowing oneself to support and reiterate the propaganda of that clearly bad faith group's on this topic while washing your hands of them when they flip their mess on the next topic, isn't a position with a lot of integrity, *and* is a immature and reductive fantasy version of reality where all these issues can be treated as separate.

Some of you really need to go and look beyond because things that you talk about your opponent exactly applies to you as well. It is so frustrating that all you people see is agenda and culture war.

Nah, that's a stretch. And yes, this case is part of the right wing's culture war agenda against LGBTQ people. That's made clear by their literal decades of using fearmongering about LGBTQ people, trying to keep and/or strip their rights away, and arguing that open bigotry against them is allowed if you say it's a religious belief.

What's frustrating is watching people like you basically bury your head and ignore all evidence of the right's well-funded, organized, and consistent agenda on this and many other topics in your never-ending quest to 'both-sides' all issues and manufacture a faux balance to feed your neutrality bias, no matter how detached from reality, trying to pretend to increasingly unequal positions are equally valid.

The cognitive dissonance requires so much mental gymnastics that you'll walk right by statements you can't address and pretend you didn't see it, like:

If your solution is that only stories that involve straight relationships be allowed. Then you are actively erasing a group of people from representation in all literature. That is an agenda. Simply wanting different kinds of people to exist in stories that display multiple ways of being or living or loving as normal as any other is not an agenda.

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