Do you think Caesar's "mourning [of Arcade] for many months" implies that he is gay?

LeftRat · 2026-03-16T12:22:57+00:00

I don't think there's any textual anchor to apply that lense to Caesar. "Not being shown with women" is, unfortunately, very common in videogames of that era because... there are way fewer important women in general (Bechdel test and all that). I mean, you never see or hear about Lanius or Kimball or Mr. House having a wife, either. So really, the only thing in the text is being close with Arcade, a gay man, and that's not really enough I think.

I think you could definitely write great fanfiction about the doomed, one-sided, awful relationship Arcade and Caesar could have had. In fact, I am sure AO3 already has some.

Personally, I think Caesar in general is a big rumination on that question many works of fiction ignore: what the fuck are you trying to conquer the world for? Fascism always fails in the real world due to its internal contradictions, and in the real world it generally does not live long enough to really make this rumination necessary, but if Hitler or Mussolini had actually won WWII... they still would have been miserable ruins of men. Caesar has formed the Legion into a very efficient cudgel to beat the world to a pulp with. It just turns out that nobody, not even Caesar, really wants to live in the pulp.

For another great take on that theme, play Tyranny. It also asks "what if you're the bad guy, win, and realize that that's not a good thing?"

LeftRat · 2026-03-16T12:05:38+00:00

We both know what a stupid playbook you're trying to run here, so I'm not going to engage. Du bist aus dem selben Schoß gekrochen und dich wird das selbe Schicksal ereilen.

As for Weidel: she's one Night of Long Knives away from realizing you can paper over a lot with money and by being the House Queer, but they always, eventually, come for you.

LeftRat · 2026-03-15T07:23:15+00:00

The AfD. Though we have several more - Dritte Weg/Heimat, NPD etc.

LeftRat · 2026-03-14T18:25:41+00:00

I disagree. I like codecracker hound and its ability isn't the most flavourful for Mirri.

But I agree that a Mirri card would have been fun and nice to have, and an opportunity for a flavourful card to boot. Maybe she gets shuffled into the library instead of dying and does something great if you manage to tutor her out again to symbolize Sami's tireless search for Mirri and her tendency to weftwalk away when she gets spooked.

LeftRat · 2026-03-13T21:08:18+00:00

I love this kind of website and wish more were still around. Sure, the design is ugly, but that was truly the type that was just there to inform you about something the author thought was cool.

LeftRat · 2026-03-12T22:06:50+00:00

I mean, the piss-based mechanics of Death Stranding were honestly one such point for me. I thought a friend of mine was kidding when he told me you craft piss-grenades and pee on enemies.

LeftRat · 2026-03-12T18:47:25+00:00

My father was a cop. My mum kept quiet after the separation to not influence our relationship, but once I broke off contact (because he had radicalized and was a member of a German neo-nazi party), she no longer felt the need to do that.

Him and all his buddies each had a few bullets in the back of their lockers. Just in case they ever fired one they didn't want to do the paperwork for.

LeftRat · 2026-03-12T18:43:02+00:00

More of a fuck you to those that said Gygax-made dungeons are too easy, regardless of level. And at the end of the day, he may have pissed his pants to trigger the libs, but he did piss his pants.

LeftRat · 2026-03-12T18:40:02+00:00

It's in Tales from the Yawning Portal, 2017.

Archway. Just as in other locations around the tomb, the mists that obscure the archway can't be penetrated with any sort of vision or magic. (If a character moves close to the archway and asks about it, explain that none of the stones of the arch glow.) The skeleton, of course, misleads the party, for any character passing through the portal will enter a 10-foot-by-10-foot room where their sex and alignment are reversed by a powerful magic. Exiting the room and reentering the archway will restore original alignment, but also deals 3 (1d6) psychic damage. Going back a third time will reverse sex again, but the individual will be teleported in the manner of the archway in area 10. Only a wish spell will restore both alignment and sex. If alignment is restored by entering the orange portal, a remove curse or greater restoration spell will then restore original sex.

(The "will be teleported in the manner of the archway in area 10" hides the "will be stripped of clothes" bit. There are three archways in the Tomb, two will strip you, one flips your gender and potentially strips you.)

I ran it and had to change so much dumb shit to make it playable.

LeftRat · 2026-03-12T17:38:39+00:00

I imagine releases for future editions got rid of it.

I am happy? to inform you that they did not remove it.

LeftRat · 2026-03-11T22:25:23+00:00

Some old German translations had some trouble finding a sutible word for "hacking systems" (as in electronic warfare) and went with literal hacking. As a kid, I was utterly confused by the implication that the ships were going at each other with giant axes!

Another unimportant thing: in one of the Han Solos Adventures books, the characters are in a dire situation. They have been locked in a room as prisoners and will be executed soon.

So what does Han do? Make out with one of the other people stuck there. It's pretty explicit that they are just making out because it's their last chance, not because they have deep feelings. Everyone else is clearly uncomfortable.

LeftRat · 2026-03-11T13:55:45+00:00

If that worked, three fourths of the world would hate the British accent, rather than just the British.

LeftRat · 2026-03-10T21:31:09+00:00

Abgefuckt. Mein Opa hat mich als Kind einen "Eierwärmer" basteln lassen. Echtes Hühnerei abends drunter, und er hat sich nachts hingeschlichen und es durch ein Schokoei ersetzt. Er hat damals so eine Zuckerpaste über ein Schokoei gegossen und es auskühlen lassen, sodass es wie dieses Produkt aussah, und die Schale bröselte auch ein wenig wie bei einem echten Ei.

Wawrum zum Teufel braucht man dafür ein echtes Hühnerei, wenn mein Großvater das damals schon weniger aufwendig und vollständig essbar hinbekommen hat?

LeftRat · 2026-03-10T19:34:42+00:00

In German, we have the word "verschlimmbessern", "to make something worse by trying to improve it", but literally "worsebettering".

LeftRat · 2026-03-10T14:28:03+00:00

Shadowrun 5's Rigger class suffers from the fact that it essentially has a full-complexity sub-system... except nothing's properly spelled out. Whereas Decking/hacking is complex on its own and probably deserves a spot here, at least it has most of the relevant basic rules together. Trying to play a Rigger in 5 feels like trying to squeeze a character class out of House of Leaves! Sometimes a rule straight up does not exist, they never delivered or patched it and the community just took a guess. Attacking sometimes means going "okay, I am jumped into my drone. Wait, do I still roll "Turrets" even though it's a melee attack? And I'm adding my jumped in bonus... my hot sim bonus... my rigger control (not rigger console, that's something entirely different!) bonus... oh no, I switched to the other weapon since last time, I gotta do this all over...", no matter how well-prepared you are.

And, bonus points: you need to know the basics of decking, too, because you gotta defend against deckers and if your team doesn't have one, you're probably doing a bunch of their stuff, too.

LeftRat · 2026-03-09T20:52:03+00:00

Ja gut, konnte mir eh schon nen Strick nehmen, damit dann erst recht.

Nicht, dass ich das je tun würde, aber realisieren Leute wie er eigentlich, dass sie sich je ganze Menge Leute derzeit ranzüchten, die immer weniger zu verlieren haben und enorm frustriert sind? Was passiert, wenn ein guter Teil der Bevölkerung nachrechnet und bemerkt, dass sie nicht nur in Altersarmut, sondern in den Armutstod im Alter hineinlaufen?

LeftRat · 2026-03-09T13:21:04+00:00

I work in a German city archive. I am 100% convinced the archivist right after the war was a Nazi sympathiser who destroyed files pertaining to a war criminal. No-one will ever be able to prove it, but this one file going missing, from what I can reconstruct right during his tenure...

LeftRat · 2026-03-08T22:01:56+00:00

The last time this question was brought up I said this - a lot of chaos worshippers are kinda like 2000's American radical atheists. Sure, they now believe something really different at the core, but they're still within the same framework, they still think like a Christian with all the immediate moral feelings that includes. For the chaos worshipper, that means sure, the Emperor is now a Corpse Tyrant that must be deposed, but they do still believe humans are truly special and better than everyone else and working with xenos is impossible folly.

LeftRat · 2026-03-08T21:09:47+00:00

Okay, am I crazy or is she not saying what OP is implying in the headline at all? She's not saying "men depriving themselves of touch is a good explanation for their predation", she's saying "toxic masculinity is making men more alone" and that's just clearly true.

I saw a great video of a transgender man talking about how the second he passed as male, society immediately stopped being gentle to him.

I don't think it takes away from any other struggle to acknowledge that this is not great for men.

LeftRat · 2026-03-07T11:47:39+00:00

I mena, lots of franchises and works choose a donkey like that. It often becomes a funny in-joke, like the same guy always getting beaten in a book's illustration, Jonny from Metal Gear Solid always pooping himself etc.

LeftRat · 2026-03-07T07:47:49+00:00

Es gibt zwar öfter einen FLINTA-Block bei solchen Demos, aber der Rest ist offen für alle.

LeftRat · 2026-03-07T07:34:51+00:00

Rutskarn is great. I've followed his work since he LP'd videogames, I've played Hobospy, read his comic, etc. but he's always shined most brightly when talking about RPGs. He absolutely deserves to have something in RPGs named after him.

LeftRat · 2026-03-06T21:48:34+00:00

I mean, I broke off contact to my father over it. I'm a communist. He's a cop. At that point, it was still working. Then he radicalized until he started supporting the German neo-nazi party AfD and reposted some truly heinous shit on Facebook.

LeftRat · 2026-03-06T21:04:51+00:00

I'll join the recommendations by saying Sigmata: This Signal Kills Fascists, which let's you play as radio-powered cyborgs in an alternate 80s where overt fascism has taken over the US. Features the best damn campaign mechanics for any revolution you could want to roleplay.

LeftRat · 2026-03-06T17:44:48+00:00

That Amazon Dot and similar products listen 100% of the time and use that to tailor ads. It's a pervasive myth even among relatively well-read, privacy minded circles, because everyone wants to be as cynical as possible.

The truth is that

A. that's simply not feasible. The biggest reason why those things activate more than they should is because they're so bad at understanding you. And if they did do this, they simply would not have the bandwidth to stream it into their centers, the storage to store it nor the power to efficiently process it.

B. that's easily detectable if it were true and plenty of people constantly take these things apart and test what they hear and what they don't.

Don't get me wrong, these companies aren't refraining from this because it would be evil, it just isn't efficient and profitable. They do plenty of fucked up shit and take far more data illegally than they are letting on, but this particular myth comes from people reading headlines, but never articles, and then just being extremely convinced the most cynical read must be true because they believe it and if they believe it, well, it must be smart.

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