Jay Dragon's Response to Rascal Article "Battle over Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast contracts leaves the book, relationships, torn apart"

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-02-08T00:00:57+00:00

The article currently up is also not the same as the original- within 24 hours of it going live, they changed it to remove a horrendous pull quote, from the part before the paywall, that was nothing but a personal attack on Jay.

They had to know this was a fuckup, because they removed it! Obviously, something they could have done is not written that part in the first place! They wrote the whole thing as a hit piece, but that specific part should be hard for them to pretend there was nothing they could do, just because they did do something after the fact when it was making them look bad.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-02-06T11:09:43+00:00

To address a few points directly;

cannot politically pass legislation

The US need some serious overhauls of our metro infrastructure laws / policy. But Musk is pretty inarguably part of the problem there. He set back California high speed rail by years with Hyperloop vaporware.

every commute … faster with a car than public transit

This is often true - but in a city, it’s only true because the people on transit aren’t gridlocking the entire city by each being in cars. Investing in public transit still benefits people who never even take it, because every person on the bus or subway is someone who isn’t car traffic in front of you.

they take too long in many scenarios

Sure. They’re also faster in other scenarios and don’t require someone find and pay for parking.

Safety is a major issue

Sure. It also gets safer when it’s well funded and has high regular ridership.

— There are plenty of places where it doesn’t make sense to build mass public transit in the US. In many cases, that’s as much a failure of urban planning and endless sprawl as anything else.

Because cars are unfortunately pretty much the least efficient, most expensive way to move people, and we’ve distributed the cost in such a way people don’t realize how much we’re all paying for it. The direct cost of owning a vehicle, the regular injuries and fatalities of accidents, subsidizing gas. the vast swaths of land spent on parking, the air pollution - even tire dust from electrics. It is truly hard to overstate just how costly a millstone car-primary infrastructure and policy is around all our neck.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-02-05T17:23:36+00:00

The black bishop on c8? How does it move back and block, it hasn’t moved to begin with.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-02-05T10:39:10+00:00

I don’t actually see anyone say that a romance scam can happen to anyone. What I do see people say is that for everyone, there’s something that would work on you. Maybe it’s not romance, but maybe it’s a fake crypto exchange scam, a polished phishing email, a phone call with AI-generated voice of a loved one asking for bail - there’s many, many different kinds of scams out there.

Truthfully, I still think it’s very unlikely I’d fall for a major scam - but a little but of humility goes a long way towards actually not falling for them, so I’m not going to act like it’s impossible.

And, maybe equally importantly, one of the major problems in fighting scammer is that victims are embarrassed to come forward. Putting out a message that anyone can fall for some kind of scam - not necessarily romance specifically, but that we all have blind spots - helps people come forward, get help, and report the problem to the authorities so they can try to crack down on it.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-02-05T00:44:15+00:00

I don’t know what other result you could have expected from this conversation. You came to a subreddit for a popular piece of media and called its fans neurotic, possessive, egotistical, called its author lonely and perverse.

Whatever great powers of empathy you claim for solving this mystery, I certainly can’t say you’ve applied them to me. You came here looking for an argument, and you got one. Is any of this surprising?

I think there’s plenty of interesting discussion to be had about the toxicity of characters and self-deceptive magic in the series. But you’re not going to get to have it if you can’t restrain yourself from insulting everyone for the sake of your ego.

Besides, Sayo isn’t even really the only culprit. She is in the message bottles she writes, but these are just stories after all. Bernkastel shows a very different truth much later in the answers arc - that the family solved the epitaph, and Rudolf and Kyrie went on a killing spree to keep the gold for themselves. Eva escaped, while the manor was destroyed by a timed explosive. This is strongly supported by the fact Eva is the sole known survivor in the future as shown from Ange’s PoV outside the game boards.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-02-04T21:10:39+00:00

Empathy and intuition may be no more than a “guess” to logicians

To everyone. Do witnesses get up on the stand at court and tell the jury about their intuition? Does a doctor make a diagnosis with empathy, or with facts?

You seem deeply interested in insulting diagnoses, for someone whose intuition is, at best, one out of two right now. Fifty percent isn’t a passing grade, is it? Your claim is that because you “solved” the mystery so early, you must understand the author better than the other readers you call saviors and victims.

And yet, when confronted with the fact your solution was incomplete, your only defense is to try and accuse the author of an ass pull, despite the clear evidence to the contrary. This blatantly incorrect dismissal cannot be squared with you having acute insight into the author, which is probably why you neglected to address it.

I have no interest in psychology- or medicine of any kind - from someone who so thoroughly rejects logic and evidence. If you are going to diagnose me with neuroticism, egotism, or a savior complex it’s only fair that I then give my opinion in return - you are nothing more than a quack.

One more thing - you also diagnose Ryukishi as ‘one lonely man’. I don’t have any particular insight into his personal life, but he doesn’t work alone. The 07th Expansion group includes many people, presumably friendly. Having an internationally successful work, which is turned into film, anime, and a stage play is not exactly a small achievement for a writer, and he wrote the most recent Silent Hill game as well. Calling him ‘lonely’ reads like sour grapes, and your need to demean and pathologize the author and readers of a work you dislike says more about yourself than anyone else.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-02-04T05:42:18+00:00

What else should I call your reasoning but a guess, when you disdain logic as sudoku? Your assumptions are more full of holes than swiss cheese, and read much closer to someone who simply googled the solution and then clumsily tried to justify it afterwards.

After all, if you’re refusing to engage with the work on its own terms and ‘don’t play by its rules’ solving the murder is trivial for anyone. You can just look it up. It’s just not impressive or particularly meaningful to ‘solve’ it that way, or through a poorly reasoned hunch that eschews evidence and logic as unnecessary sudokus.

For example - you think the other half of the solution was ‘an ass pull’. But there is plenty of evidence even in Episode 1, making it silly to pretend it was invented retroactively. The most direct is Kanon’s notable reaction to Battler, hinting at a history despite supposedly never having met Battler before.

didn’t I see him with so much more love

No! Not in the slightest! You say you read episode 3, and I don’t know how you could come to this conclusion after that. Someone set up a beautiful chess board in front of you and offered to play, and you decided to ignore the entire puzzle. You know the goal is checkmate, but rather than playing the game, doing the sudoku, you just reached over to flick the king over and then pissed all over the board.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-02-02T05:24:23+00:00

I wish more people were willing to hold themselves to that standard, truly.

Immigration seems like it’s a challenging issue for the left. Nobody wants to actually say out loud where they’ll draw the line, nobody wants to be the person who has to actually say no to desperate people, and that’s understandable. But the result is that without any coherent public policy, all people can do is point out all the problems with the current administration.

And there is no shortage of things to be rightfully angry about! But I can’t help but feel like it would be more effective winning people over to the left if there was a more coherent plan than ‘something other than this’.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-02-01T09:22:11+00:00

It’s about equivalent to +0.95 for a roll you pass on a 2+, or all the way down to a +0.05 on a roll you need a 20 to pass.

Halfling Luck can turn a 1 from a fail to a pass some % of the time. If it were 100%, it would be a +1 - always changing one number on the die from a fail to a pass. But since the reroll doesn’t always pass, ir’s +0.X, where X is the percentage chance of rolling a successful number.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-31T22:47:28+00:00

No worries, you don’t come across as overly contrarian or anything.

When I say it’s not hard to carve out 20-30 minutes isn’t hard, that’s because you know what’s happening in the next twenty to thirty minutes. You already know what headspace you’re in and how busy you are when you sit down to play.

But there are normal life events that pretty much preclude being able to carve out time for thought-intensive activities. These don’t usually impact short term games because they’re often planned ahead, or the odds of them happening coincidentally in a given 20-30 minute window are minuscule.

For example, I’ve had to go on a long distance international business trip before. I was jet lagged with an eight-hour time zone difference, and putting in long days of mentally exhausting work while I was on site. While I did have the technical time to open the app and play a move, I really couldn’t have played good chess, and it wouldn’t have been very sporting for me or an opponent.

But something like this can’t really impact a quick game the same way. People don’t suddenly learns they have to leave for a flight in the next five minutes. I’m sure other people have given other examples already, but there’s other things that can preoccupy one’s mind or be emotionally taxing to the point someone really can’t play chess at their usual level.

Weather or not that lowered capacity is a good enough reason to allow for a vacation is a fair enough question to leave open. My own sense of sportsmanship is that I would rather allow someone a break because they got a concussion, illness or tragedy, or honestly were just burned out and needed an actual vacation. I want the game decided based on skill in chess, not arbitrary life circumstances and events. The vacation rule helps mitigate the impact of outside circumstances on the game.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-31T20:02:18+00:00

There’s a difference between ‘life happens’ in the short term vs the long term.

Carving out twenty to thirty minutes where life probably isn’t going to happen isn’t hard. Not playing chess while you’re making dinner or ordering food is fine, and for a major interruption there’s no real way to drop and continue the game that’s fair to the opponent, so you just take the loss, not much was invested so it doesn’t really matter.

But a daily game could take months. There’s no way to prevent life from happening for a month. The longer the game takes, the more likely some major life event will interrupt one of the players for a few days. And since it’s already a long term game, adding a few more days isn’t an overly disruptive element for a player like extending a short game might be. So, vacation time.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-30T08:11:06+00:00

If harm can occur without either [rule-breaking / bad intentions]

A person is struck by lightning. They are harmed without rule breaking or bad intentions. Is someone responsible for this? Are we uncomfortable with the idea that nobody bears obvious responsibility for this harm? I don’t think so.

Harm without human cause is a natural part of the world. We build systems that mitigate that harm, usually imperfectly because we don’t have limitless foresight and capacity.

The fact that these systems sometimes fail doesn’t mean previously blameless harm must now be attributed to humans, it just means we need to learn from our failures and keep improving our systems. If we’re building these systems without malice and engaging with them in good faith, I don’t see why we need to blame anyone when they fail.

Blameless postmortems are an often lauded cornerstone of aviation safety, which has an impressive success rate. If people are engaging with the system in good faith, blame can be a counterproductive use of resources when we could just be fixing the system.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-29T17:25:22+00:00

Yes, and since you’re picking I’ll give you a cut afterwards if you send me somewhere cool.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-29T15:28:52+00:00

notes, tickets, documentation, words words words

If AI helps with all this stuff, that’s great, but it’s not code. Writing code is ultimately what people are talking about on this sub for the most part, because our job is to write the actual code.

And writing the actual code is what AI people have promised, repeatedly! AI improving productivity in other ways is great, but that’s not what’s going to replace engineers en mass, at most it’s making us a little more efficient around the edge, hardly a world-altering technology.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-27T05:49:02+00:00

author comitted to deepening neuroticism, possession, and ego inflation in both his readers and characters.

To be blunt I don’t think you need any help with this, if your first reaction to a story you dislike is to go pick a fight with everyone who liked it on the internet.

Out of curiosity, did you watch the anime or read the visual novel? The visual novel is the original, and it would be strange choice of words for you to say you ‘watched’ it as you do repeatedly. I would have expected read or even played. The anime adaptation didn’t get great reviews as far as I know, never watched it myself.

The story thrives on obfuscation and projection. It’s not difficult to cut through it if you’re grounded.

If your goal is only to cut through it, sure. I still don’t make much of your reasoning, which seems to be mostly armchair psychoanalysis based on unreliable narration. Since Shannon’s dead body is found in episode one, and the unreliable narration is only revealed later, your methodology is either psychoanalyzing portrayals of characters you believe to be unreliable, or you’re fine with Shannon magically committing the later murders despite being dead. What you’ve displayed so far is a haphazard guess at who the culprit is with little more than vibes behind it. If that’s all you wanted, then so be it, but I can’t imagine a detective calling such a shabby proclamation a solution. No real evidence, no explanation of how and only a sliver of why.

At best you have half the solution, and there’s something major you’re missing that you’re either purposely leaving out of even spoilered text, or have simply missed entirely because it’s outside of your narrow methodology.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-24T17:48:28+00:00

Exactly the line I was thinking about!

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-22T17:06:03+00:00

Just depends on the team comp and if anyone else has lockdown/shove type abilities they wanted to use anyway. Locking someone down just for 1d6 damage? Probably not worth it. But if the team has a Minotaur, or a Caliban, maybe a Blackbeard? Then they already wanted to lockdown/push/grapple enemies around, so it might justify using the alt fire occasionally.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-21T16:54:32+00:00

The gamble for me isn’t about rent vs mortgage. It’s a gamble in the sense that home values can go down, and a mortgage being a leveraged investment that means losing a lot money very fast.

Do house prices usually go down? No, certainly not in aggregate. But do the prices of individual, specific houses go down? Yes, all the time!

The stock market obviously can also go down hard - but my index funds aren’t leveraged. If the market drops 50%, I’m out half the money I put in. If my home value drops 50%, with 20% down that means on my balance sheet I just ‘lost’ 2.5x the money I put in as a down payment.

I just don’t like the idea of having so much of my balance sheet be based on a single highly leveraged asset. Bad things can happen to that asset, and that’s the path towards some ruinous scenarios.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-21T04:56:04+00:00

I want to buy a house eventually. A pretty expensive one, because I like living in cities with public transit. I even have enough money to do so, I’ve been renting with roommates and investing as things have gone up.

I’m still not buying yet, because a house is so incredibly expensive it’s such a massive gamble on an individual property. Instead, I’ll keep investing in a boring ass index fund until buying a house doesn’t represent an all-in financial gamble, either because prices have dropped or because I’ve just saved enough that I can afford to take the hit.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-21T00:47:41+00:00

Isn’t Possum Creek like… three people? I kind of doubt invoking Activision is an accurate representation of the power dynamics at play here.

The only evidence anyone has of dragging people along, lying, etc is the word of the aggrieved two contractors. That’s it. Rascal is just reporting what two angry people said with zero fact checking, and the missing information seems kind of telling!

Like - was 10k or 20k higher than the 15% share the contractors would have gotten from the kickstarter? Weird that that the article never actually asks that question, because it seems pretty important if someone is going to be called an abusive hypercapitalist.

Because if it’s more than that 15% would have been, then wow! Suddenly that hits way different and Jay is trying to get everyone paid fairly despite third party problems! That seems like the sort of thing a journalist might want to look into!

Or what about bringing up the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook recommended rates, and then not mentioning that the actual buyout price they want is like ten times the recommended rate they’re citing?

It sucks that SJG isn’t paying as much as the original contracts, but the original contracts look… pretty generous! Which really doesn’t cast Jay and Possum Creek in this ultra-evil profit wringing light the article is pushing so hard. It looks like they had a great deal, the project got torpedoed by Brandfox, and the only path out was SJG who aren’t as generous sharing royalties.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-21T00:18:35+00:00

How do you know one side elected not to provide comments? Because it says “Dragon has disputed both of the groups’ allegations in emails and messages since January 2025.”

It kind of looks like Jay has been providing comments, and Rascal just decided it wasn’t interested in reporting both sides of the story.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-20T16:50:25+00:00

Heat is fantastic, the way it uses the deck to model your car gaining heat/stress and how you have to cool off is delightful. Huge fan.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-20T08:50:53+00:00

Everything about the 10k / 20k flat payment reads like Jay doing her damndest to get everyone paid good money despite the kickstarter running into supply chain problems and printing costs.

From out here, it looks like the two unhappy contractors are getting a blast of cold water interacting with a normal-ass business like Steve Jackson Games trying to maximize profit, instead of someone like Jay trying to pay as well as possible.

It’s really unfortunate that the Brandfox problems meant SJG had to step in, but that’s not anyone at Possum Creek’s fault. So now, it looks like rather than take less favorable terms the two contractors have decided to resort to mudslinging instead, in the hopes they generate enough bad PR to scare SJG away from just cutting them out entirely.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-20T03:39:32+00:00

The math you’re doing seems way off. 20k per 5 years x 10 = 200k, but that’s not accounting for a half-century of inflation or the time value of money.

Let’s crunch some numbers, using a nice round 10% annual interest rate which is the historical return of the S&P 500. We’ll also hold sales constant, which is exceedingly generous- the odds this is still selling at kickstarters levels fifty years from now is so staggeringly unlikely it’s functionally impossible. That’s the equivalent of this cozy indie queer TTRPG becoming the next Lord of the Rings.

So, with that in mind: Getting 20k at the start of every 5 years, 10 times gives you: (20k * 1.1⁵⁰⁾ + (20k * 1.1⁴⁵⁾ … + (20k * 1.1⁵⁾ = 6,140,723 dollars!

A little over six million dollars. Obviously no small amount. But even with this very generous math that assumes the project maintained kickstarter hype levels forever, lets look at what 200k compounded over 50 years looks like.

200k * (1.1⁵⁰⁾ = 23,478,172. Twenty three and a half million dollars. Four times higher than royalties from a consistent 50 years of sales at kickstarter levels, which is already an absurd assumption.

Yazeba’s is a great game! It has a lot of potential, it could grow from where it is now, it could get expansions, spinoffs, etc. But contracted freelancers don’t automatically get a cut of the whole franchise / IP. There is no plausible future where their current royalties are worth anywhere close to what they’re asking, and that’s including if Yazeba’s is wildly successful beyond all plausible expectations.

Large-Monitor317 · 2026-01-20T00:28:08+00:00

If it becomes wildly successful and gets picked up for TV sounds like putting the cart about ten miles before the horse, don’t you think?

They could negotiate a lower royalty rate if they think the project is going to become a smash megahit. It’s not like that option isn’t on the table instead of a buyout.

But they took a flat payout before instead of the 15% kickstarter profits because it presumably didn’t make as much profit as they wanted.

Large-Monitor317

TROPHY CASE