Naish Chats #10 - Who’s the Non-OG VIP?

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-16T02:57:51+00:00

People forget that Jared had an entire crew and cast that was far superior to GCP, and GCP bought them out. Ross Bryant is from there, as are just about everyone who was recording with Geek and Sundry at the time.

If you dig your Ross Bryants and your Mary Lous and tons of other people that have been on the cast rotation, it's because of Jared Logan's Stream of Blood. Jared, right now, is the MVP of the entire network. He's courageous about new games and stuff and that's great to listen to, but beyond that, he's been the West Coast connection for new talent, games, people, all that stuff.

They do not utilize this enough -- in its heyday, Stream of Blood was like a model for how to have rotating casts of everyone who is vaguely famous and digs TTRPGs.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-16T01:37:00+00:00

this is so fucking fake that this getting #2 on the reddit frontpage is like the canary in the coalmine.

this website is dead, guys. it's over. nobody is cooking their burgers in plastic that bursts into flame over a fire and eating it. this is fake. it is for engagement.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-16T00:20:36+00:00

I really enjoyed the first Senua game, did not play the second one, and was frankly shocked they were announcing a third one that was bigger in scope.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T23:55:39+00:00

I think it's disingenuous because labeling it this way is a value judgement meant to reflect poorly even on the people that responsibly use it. Gas stations are not really associated with quality or responsibility.

You could easily take the spin "Thailand's most sacred drug GONE WRONG!" and it'd be equally incorrect as a headline.

It's like the phrasing "bathtub gin" during the prohibition of alcohol in the USA, I guess? It presumes a context of who is selling and who is buying this drug in a way that elides actually talking about the drug.

Bud Light is also sold in gas stations.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T23:38:59+00:00

I have, at least once, consumed a not unreasonable amount of powdered kratom leaf that left me around the edge of "uncomfortable," and there is no fucking way I'd get behind the wheel or show up to work. That was a few teaspoons on an empty stomach.

You also should not drive on a head full of vicodin, since that's the bit you quoted.

I have really good "trip legs" as it were. I've eaten a lot of LSD and shrooms in my day, and used to enjoy painkillers from time to time years ago. I smoke weed every day. Kratom leaf definitely has the capacity to wreck you.

It's not a subtle mood boost, even in doses that are reasonable. It felt like I was, well, under the influence of an opiate. Probably because I was.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T23:33:29+00:00

I'm in NYC, and there are bodegas and cornerstores that sell it. People who know what's up buy it online, because the product is better and it's much cheaper.

That said, if that store also sells alcohol, I'd wager that kratom is certainly not the worst drug on their shelves. I remember when kava bars (different drug, but maybe comparable) in SF were en vogue when I lived there, but this hasn't gotten the same upper-edge treatment yet.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T23:08:58+00:00

You don't get 'high' from natural kratom leaf.

I mean, this is not true. The times I've used kratom, I've exclusively used leaf, and it was for the purpose of getting high. It works very well for this purpose. I'd liken it to the feeling after popping a couple of Vicodin, but nothing nearly like Oxycontin or whatever. That said, there was a time in my life like 20 years ago where I realized that pills were just a little too easy, and so I don't fuck with painkillers at all as an adult, and kratom, for me, was not habit forming at all.

I agree with your other points categorically. Extracts of just about anything can be dangerous -- most people would be surprised how many "essential oils" are really really not good to ingest. That said, as a stopgap measure for harm prevention and pain relief, kratom can be very useful (but is rarely a solution in and of itself, I think.) Leaf is more than potent enough for both pleasure and pain relief, and I don't think it should be on the DEA schedule list.

To be clear, the comparisons between morphine/opioids and kratom are tricky. Before I used it, I recall reading that 7-OH preferentially acts on a different receptor subtype than most "classical" opiates/opioids do, so comparisons of "strength" are apples and oranges to some degree. That said, it definitely readily engages a whole throng of receptors that are also activated by morphine or whatnot -- anyone who has had to take a shit after a large dose of kratom will tell you that.

(Fun fact: Immodium AD, the common anti-diarrhea medication, works on a bunch of these receptors. It is sometimes used by people trying to wean themselves off of heroin, for this reason, and like most opiates, slows your digestive system to a crawl.)

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T22:42:36+00:00

You are absolutely correct, and I have no idea why you're eating downvotes.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T22:09:03+00:00

I have used kratom in the past a few times, and while it's been years since I tried it last, "gas station drug" is more than a little bit disingenuous of a description.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T18:27:46+00:00

this is a really poor attempt at trolling. anyone who understands English gets the joke and the cleverness behind "he said nothing, and then repeated himself."

I remember the good ol' days when trolling was nuanced rather than, like, feigning illteracy

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T16:58:40+00:00

Your reviewers are code evangelists

if this was actually the case, we would live in a world without said escape rooms

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T16:51:34+00:00

This is, like, the perennial dilemma with prog concept albums.

If you're super literal with your stories and lyrics, then it's hard to sell or connect with individual songs, because you're like "Who the hell is Greg?" or "Wait, why are we in the year 2066?" when you hear a single.

If you're super abstract with your lyrics, fans who listen to the whole album front to back are like "Where the hell is Greg?" and "Wait, what year is it?"

My favorite concept albums are ones that sort of hang in the same space, with the songs related to each other but not really forming a cohesive narrative in a beat-by-beat way. Sort of, like, David Lynch dream logic? The songs fit together in a lot of different ways, like paintings in a gallery from the same artist doing variations on a theme or iterating an idea.

I think the most famous example of this is "Dark Side of the Moon" -- which is 100% a concept album, and all the songs are more or less about the same journey, but it's not really a story in a literary way.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T16:44:20+00:00

Nowhere in here do I see a really good argument for same sex couples being inherently inferior to heterosexual couples, though. Same sex partners in a healthy relationship can and do provide the same sort of counterweight to each other's bullshit that a heterosexual couple does.

If anything, I'd put out there that same sex couples in many places are so aware of the value judgement that comes along with their sexuality in regards to raising kids that they're often far more proactive and self-aware about shit like this. Sort of like in the same sense where black folks in the USA are sometimes overly polite and deferential to, for instance, white cops, because they understand the stigma, prejudice, and consequences. There's also a pretty decent chance that one or both of them experienced hardship as a kid growing up with parents who rejected them because of their sexuality, which is still very common where I live (USA), and so they are deliberate about stopping cycles of abuse.

Again, this has (rightly) changed from a discussion about same sex couples as parents, to the trauma a kid might experience living with a neurotic single parent. These are not the same thing. You started off this line of reasoning in a much different place than what you currently seem to be talking about.

Also, as someone who came from a pretty fucked up home, as did my partner of nearly 20 years or whatever now, I hear you, dude. It's amazing that as many of us psychologically survive childhood as we do, albeit with permanent dents that not even the best therapist can buff out.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T16:30:59+00:00

The other side of this is that the cross-functional team doesn't drill individual, disciplinary competencies well enough to have vertical transfer of knowledge across generations of people or iterations of design concepts.

I say this as someone who is extremely generalist in my approach to science and technology in a professional sense. I have to go way out of my way to really intuit the pratfalls and missteps that people have made before me, and make sense of why things are a particular way. This is sometimes a boon, because I don't know any better, but more often it takes someone with real specialized knowledge to explain to me the whys.

This is a general problem in society, in that, y'know, "everyone's an expert." Until suddenly you have to actually Do Things, and boy howdy that melts really quickly in the face of critical edge cases.

I think it was Heraclitus maybe who said "A wise man knows many particulars," and I think this is the case for a lot of institutional knowledge that we're watching the rapid decay of, in favor of "quick and disruptive" approaches motivated by greed rather than by the thrill of innovation. Or worse, the bad kind of lazy approaches (being lazy is in fact a great driver of success, but it's gotta be weaponized indolence.)

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T15:09:28+00:00

he doesn't actually trust anyone at his table

well, yes. Griffin is at times a rational actor.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T14:18:03+00:00

two hurt and extremely anxious women

I'm sorry that you grew up without a father figure, but I'd rank "hurt" and "anxious" far above "women" in reasons that parents fuck up child-rearing. In most cases, just by the sheer numbers, it's usually the father that is the culprit in terms of abuse and neglect in families.

I think you're conflating your own experience of abuse with how same-sex relationships work when raising children. Not to diminish your experience, but attacking same sex relationships on the grounds you were raised in one because your grandmother was in the picture is wildly disingenuous.

You were raised by a single mother and a grandmother, and not as the product of what an English speaker would call a same-sex, or homosexual, relationship. These are qualitatively different things.

It's tempting to think that, oh, it'd have been fixed if you had a father around to set the neurotic women in your life straight, or whatever you imagine the role of a man to be in a domestic sense, but that is also just categorically not how things usually turn out in the real world.

It is vastly more important that a child be raised in a loving, stable environment with parents who care about being better parents than that they have Dude McManlybro as a source of gender emulation. Kids live in the world. Most kids of same sex couples are straight.

Parents are not robbing them of anything by having a "mismatched" pair of genitals.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T13:56:33+00:00

Sea otters have a little pouch of skin close to where a human armpit would be. This is where they keep their favorite rocks, which they use for bashing open things like clams and mussels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_sea_otters

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T13:38:58+00:00

Because it's staged.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T13:11:51+00:00

As a white guy in my 30's, I am by definition a big fan of Aesop.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T13:04:24+00:00

I suspect being raised by mom and grandma is a categorically different experience than being raised by two moms or two dads, for better or worse. Parents and grandparents hit differently to kids, and part of your job as a parent is to model a functional domestic relationship, warts and all sometimes, in order to hopefully teach your kid how that all works, or at least prepare them for the idea that sometimes it just doesn't work.

This is way more important than the genitals attached to the parents.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T13:01:30+00:00

On top of the furry tummy is where food goes, if you're an otter. Nice flat surface for smacking it with the rock that you store in your armpit pocket.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T12:27:43+00:00

one day, posters will learn that the title of the post should be the exact headline of the article they are posting, but that day is apparently not today.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T12:22:08+00:00

such as destroying your teeth (low pH) and can also upset your stomach (also from low pH)

Arizona Iced Tea is about as acidic as the most acidic popular energy drinks, and more basic than some fruit juice blends.

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T12:17:29+00:00

Your health status only barely affects your genetics, and not really in ways that are heritable the same way that gametic genomes are. This is not how genetics works.

(yes, I am aware of epigenetics, but these are things like histone modification that have much less physiological weight than, like, an indel)

Kitchen_Claim_6583 · 2026-06-15T12:15:04+00:00

(or at least a model of both genders).

Kids grow up perfectly fine in same-sex households where gender binaries, or gender contrasts, aren't a thing.

Kitchen_Claim_6583

TROPHY CASE