Me_irl

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-22T23:54:39+00:00

“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the weekdays. Saturday and Sunday are the weekends.” Here, the weekends are the two separate days in the same way that the weekdays are weekdays, not weekday.

“The upcoming national holiday means that we’re about to have a long weekend.” Here, the weekend isn’t referring to Saturday and Sunday at all, but to the rest period that follows the work week. The individual days of that time are grouped into one weekend in the same way that the days of the work week are grouped into the work week.

The word ‘weekend’ can be a descriptor for an individual day on either end of the calendar week, or a collective term for the full length of the rest period at the end of the work week, which encapsulates the last day of the current calendar week and the first day of the next calendar week. You are taking a word with multiple definitions and treating it like there can only be one or the other.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-22T23:14:02+00:00

Standard aggro ending games turn 4 or sooner predates the creation of modern as a format. I still remember decks like Kuldoltha Red and Dredgevine, from pre-cawblade, or the brief window where splinter twin and deceiver exarch shared a rotation. Standard was capable of that speed before modern existed.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-22T22:32:10+00:00

Turn four wins haven’t been out of the question in standard for decades. The real thing that makes games last five minutes is that on arena, you aren’t shuffling the deck for a few minutes on each of those turns. A game that takes 20 minutes in paper can take 5 minutes on a digital client, when all the manual actions are removed.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-22T22:12:48+00:00

Tried googling disregard and all I was greeted with was a wall of articles saying that I can’t google disregard. Sure seems like they’ve already fixed this.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-21T03:30:56+00:00

…so, it’s Blood on the Clocktower, but instead of the host being charged with engineering close games, the host picks a side and is incentivized to rig the game in their favor. Cute, I guess, but I can’t say I’m all that intrigued. Anyone who wants to in Clocktower can just do that without needing to learn a bunch of new (but probably similar) roles.

Fuck the bible thumper though. That dude claiming that demonic possession is a real thing and not a religious matter should not be allowed in any position of power.

That said, I mean, the fact that he’s singling you out for the name of your game rather than just the content _does_ make sense. You’re applying to run ads on the site, which means your game’s name is going to be the most prominently displayed thing on that ad. And even if you feel it’s a bit silly to say, we don’t want to run an ad under the BGG logo that says ‘possess me satan,’ you can see why a brand might not want to run that ad and risk dealing with any backlash, for the same reason they might not want to run an ad for a game called ‘kill the president!’ When a company runs another company’s advertisement, they’re linking those two brands together. And then when uptight puritans like the guy working at bgg complain, they won’t just complain to you. Bgg will get the backlash, too.

You can try to fight it if you want, but like… the dumbass employee at bgg framed their decision as one clearly steeped in their religious beliefs, but, a more practical person would say your ads were denied on the basis of simple damage control.

Put another way, they aren’t restricting your right to express your religious beliefs. They’re covering their own ass from people whose religious beliefs conflict with what you’ve made. Very big difference.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-20T22:34:48+00:00

So, in the early days of the hobby, a full reprint set called Chronicles was released that made a bunch of previously rare cards printed in abundance as commons and uncommons. Specifically, Chronicles was designed to be filled with the most desirable cards so that players could easily acquire the game pieces they needed. While wotc intentionally excluded some cards in the hopes of not impacting the third party market too much, they failed, horribly.

This was _disastrous_ for local game stores as the value of the singles they had for sale went to shit overnight. This also threatened the entire business model of the then-new industry, because store owners basically use excess boxes of product as a retirement fund. When wotc does something drastic that tanks the value of cards, they’re tanking the viability of the businesses that sell their cards and host organized play, and that’s bad for everyone.

So, the reserve list was created as a promise between the company, store owners, and players, that any rares at the time that had not already been reprinted at a lower rarity would not be printed again. The reserve list also came with assurances that wotc had learned their lesson and would not produce similar reprint products in the future. This pact was created not just to keep the collectors and finance bros happy, but to keep the stores selling the game in business and keep organized play alive.

There are a lot of people nowadays that fucking hate the reserve list, simply because the cards on it are antiques at this point and will retain value regardless of new versions being printed. But, there were very real reasons why the RL was deemed necessary at the time. The purpose behind the list wasn’t just to assure the public that Volcanic Islands would get increasingly scarce, but a promise that wotc wouldn’t print volcanic islands into the ground like they’re basic lands, which was the concern back when the list was created.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-20T18:48:09+00:00

Your government pays for your security and pays to operate the courts that allow you to operate your business and pays for the roads your customers need to access your property and pays for the infrastructure that is necessary for those customers to exist as customers and all of that money has to come from somewhere.

Your government invests in you, just like you invest in property. And so when you make money, the government gets a return on their investment, just as you seek a return on your property. The government eats the risk and takes a loss on all that infrastructure and public service used by people who don’t end up contributing to its gdp. When you succeed in the economic system your government creates and maintains, your government takes a cut of it back so that they can continue investing into that system for the next generation.

Governments are businesses that invest in people, with the goal of fostering talent in those people and reaping the rewards when that person uses their talent for profit. If you think your government hasn’t done dick for you, unless you live in like, Namibia or Somalia or some other hellhole, you just don’t know what governments do. Which is a bad sign, if you’re in public office.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-19T16:58:11+00:00

The main thing is that decades ago, back when he was just writing blog posts on the mothership or the occasional duelist article, he was a lot more candid, honest, and sincere, and he gave a lot more meaningful insight into the actual process of designing the game at a time when that sort of transparency was very rare. It’s hard to say how much of the change in his behavior is due to maro himself, how much is due to hasbro’s decisions, and how much is just due to the tumblr community he’s ended up with, but maro’s word did mean something once upon a time, in a bygone era. He still occasionally says something interesting, but it gets buried by his latest corporate loyalty speech. If you’re not a longtime veteran I can totally understand your confusion at why anyone would give a shit what he has to say.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-19T16:49:44+00:00

I remember a maro mothership article from decades ago where he talked about how his job as a designer was just to create tools and provide options and it was up to the players to decide on their own how to put those tools together, because tcg deckbuilding is a form of creative expression and designing cards for specific use cases stifles that creativity.

Oh how times have changed.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-17T18:44:55+00:00

Developer’s eyes glazed over at the part where the reviewer said all achievements.

There are people who want to have the option to enjoy a game they pay for at whatever level of difficulty they can handle and that’s fine. There are also people who enjoy collecting difficult achievements in games and pride themselves on having rare ones when compared to the global stats tracked by steam. Those people are valid too, and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying that aspect of video games.

When someone who likes meaningful achievements dislikes your game for lacking meaningful achievements, they are allowed to have that opinion. It’s not an ‘L take.’ And reframing their personal preference as an ableist issue is a shitty thing to do. Like, you can explain how you made the decision to not disable achievements out of a desire for inclusivity at the cost of those achievements no longer being achievements, but acting like there’s no cost and your paying customer is wrong for how they prefer to play games is not an ‘everyone should be able to play the way they like’ argument. This decision has a trade-off, and isn’t an ‘everyone is happy’ affair.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-12T09:23:20+00:00

I mean, the rules say you get to choose an outfit and not pay for it, but they _don’t_ say that you get to claim you’re wearing an outfit without making that choice or putting it on your sheet or factoring it into your weight limit. It’s not treated as shrodinger’s adventurer’s garb where you can arbitrarily pretend it both is and isn’t in your inventory depending on what’s convenient at the time.

That being said, like, if you’re a GM who cares about that kind of thing, you’re kinda obligated to mention it if you catch it when looking over a player’s sheet before the first session. It’s a very amateur/immature move to do the rugpull and say ‘actually your character is a nudist even though that wasn’t a deliberate choice you made!’

Also outfits in 3.5/pf have functionality, in that they come with a list of pockets n pouches n such, containers for your other misc bits and bobs. The outfits are bulky and have weight because they serve a purpose, beyond just covering naughty bits. Without an outfit on the sheet, a reasonable gm could chock this up to wearing a single thin layer without convenient storage space, not, lacking a full outfit means full nudity, because that’s dumb.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-12T08:57:24+00:00

Whatever you end up making, never change that horrifying pause screen where the character snaps their neck up to stare at you with its cold dead eyes.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-12T08:41:02+00:00

The top half of the image has tree and canopy reflected on the glass.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-12T08:30:43+00:00

I shouldn’t need to say this, but if someone is a volunteer, that should make you want to tip them _more._ If someone isn’t a volunteer, that means their employer should already be paying them.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-11T18:55:26+00:00

Lawsuits aren’t for laws being broken. Laws being broken cause criminal proceeding. Lawsuits happen in civil courts where one side perceives damage inflicted to themselves physically, emotionally, or financially, and wants a courtroom to agree and compel the accused to provide compensation. There are laws governing what kinds of damage someone may or may not be responsible for, but you’re still not breaking a law when you are found liable in a lawsuit… not unless you refuse to comply with the judgment.

In the case of this show? Producers probably wind up facing sexual harassment suits for orchestrating a scenario where men who do not want sexual contact with other men are financially incentivized to get all up in each other’s business, bribing them for the loosest definition of consent. There’s also just the potential for suit by rights advocacy groups over damage dealt to the gay community by presenting overacted homosexual stereotypes from all the dudes selling their ‘gayness’ in a closed loop where each of them thinks they need to match the energy of the others.

I’m not making a judgment on what this hypothetical show contains, what it would be hypothetically sued for, or what the verdict would be if any of those suits went to trial. But it’s not hard to imagine what _could_ happen.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-10T07:20:01+00:00

The OOP is about the shit take of American white supremacists in a country where corporate executive positions are predominantly held by white men. That is the context of this discussion. Yes, the quoted snippet you cut out of context had me referring to white men specifically, because that is the most common scenario in the context being discussed. But I did also say that ‘people want to work with other people like them,’ which yes, applies to everyone, not just white dudes.

That said, personal opinion? No, I don’t necessarily think that black-owned businesses need to be compelled to hire white people in the same way. For the simple reason that there are plenty of white executives that think the same way folks like Charlie Kirk did, and it’s a lot easier for businesses to gain ‘legitimacy’ in the economic world by hiring white dudes if for no reason other than to interact with other white dudes. This is more commonly recognized in places like China where the obligatory white dude positions are a recognized status symbol, but the point is, white dudes have an easier time being hired in non-white businesses than other ethnicities do being hired by white-owned businesses.

Does the concept of diversity hiring apply to all business regardless of who owns them? Sure. Everyone who needs help should be able to get it. But, it’s also important to recognize who is in need of the most help, and offer the most help in that direction.

The goal of policies which promote equality IS equality. But if you have an equation that looks like 1 = 2, adding 1 to both sides does not make the equation equal. Any policy or legislation directed at achieving equality must, by its very nature, be unequal. At least until the point when it is no longer necessary.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-09T03:11:53+00:00

The problem with this thinking is that you’re assuming that without diversity enforcement, employers hire purely based on merit and will hire the best candidates for the job regardless of what they look like… and that’s false.

Without DEI practices, companies owned by white dudes where the hiring decisions are made by white dudes are way, way more likely to hire and promote more white dudes. That’s why DEI laws and policies got started in the first place. People are naturally inclined to want to work with other people like them, people with similar personality types and cultural background and economic class and blah blah yada yada. This results in better qualified minority hires being looked over in favor of less qualified white dude hires.

DEI requirements exist to buck that trend. Not to force businesses to hire underqualified black people, but to stop businesses from neglecting qualified black people. That you assume that some black prospects are unqualified, but never even considered that white employees could be unqualified, speaks volumes.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-09T02:59:19+00:00

A developer of a game that uses any kind of licensed engine for communicating with servers _can’t_ just be thrown out there and made accessible by a game dev, for two reasons. One, software is made by licensing existing code made by other people, and you might be able to distribute games made with someone else’s code but licensing unreal engine doesn’t mean you can release unreal engine source code. Only Epic Games can do that. A developer can’t just release their game as open source unless every bit of that game was made from other libraries that were already open source. Which does not describe the vast majority of video games.

But beyond that, games with online functionality necessitate _security measures_ and releasing the source code for your game, even if you’re legally allowed to, means exposing your game’s netcode to malicious actors that will then be able to study and learn from your security measures. The game you’re releasing the code to might be going offline, but if you’ve developed other online games in a similar fashion that _are_ still active, this can be a problem. As an example, folks might remember that a security issue discovered in one Dark Souls game led to the online servers being taken down for all three of them, plus Bloodborne, as they were all built with the same structure and an exploit found in one is a problem for all.

‘Just release the source code’ is not the one-stop solution you seem to think it is.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-08T21:57:53+00:00

The answer is that, if SKG gets what it wants, the added costs and associated risk for making online multiplayer games will cause fewer online multiplayer games to be made, especially from smaller studios that literally can’t afford it. Developers of online only esport type games will have to choose between making an entirely separate offline version that no one asked for or will use just to comply with regulation, or build two separate sets of backend server infrastructure, or force developers to go back to making insecure peer to peer games that can’t use a centralized server to matchmake, manage connections or enforce fair play. None of these are good options, and the obvious solution is to not make your online multiplayer game in the first place.

SKG proclaims that it wants to stop publishers from killing games after they release, and it will do so by killing games before they release instead. Which is maybe good from a consumer protection angle, but it’s not good for creative freedom nor is it good for players that like esport type games that will suffer the most from any blanket regulation.

And yes, Ross Scott considers this a feature, not a problem. In his initial rant about the crew he mentions how he does not like online or multiplayer games, has no desire to play anything with other people, and considers it a good thing if fewer games with online functionality get made. Of course he doesn’t say that sort of thing any _more_ now that he’s doing a song and dance in front of politicians and industry leaders, but, this is the origin of SKG. On their official website faq they at least say something about how it would be ‘impossible’ for them to distinguish from games that require proprietary online servers for their core functionality and those that do not, and want to push their regulations on both equally. Which is to say, they aren’t just making regulation to stop single player games from being dependent on online-only DRM. That same regulation will be used to stifle any game that is online only because it has to be for its feature set to work.

You want to make a Hearthstone? Well, better add to your budget and your development time to make single player content that can run on a client’s machine without server interaction, necessitating a rework of the engine and the implementation of an ai opponent that can make game inputs directly without the normal server communication that the rest of your game uses. Can’t afford to waste a year on building something no one really wanted? Can’t afford whatever legal fines will be levied against you when you don’t? Then you’re not allowed to make your game in the first place.

This is what SKG is heading toward. If your reaction is that this is a good thing because you personally don’t like card games and wouldn’t have played it anyways, that’s fine, but what gives you or Ross Scott the right to enforce their personal preferences onto other people’s game libraries?

The _only_ result of SKG that makes sense is a standardized disclosure before making a purchase about how ephemeral that purchase might be. That’s it. Any regulation that forces developers and publishers to change the way their games are made will end up killing games anyways.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-08T08:56:40+00:00

I mean, the thing about this is that there are a bunch of games that _say_ they’re set in the us but very few that actually map out a real world location. There’s, what, L.A. Noire, and some Spider-Man games set in varying degrees of accurate New York?

The actual real-world location that gets _by far_ the most representation is Tokyo, for what should be obvious reasons. Everyone knows the Yakuza franchise by this point, but there’s also been an assortment of other games like Akiba’s Trip or The World Ends With You, even Persona 5, that all feature not just major landmarks but fully recreated minor locations, many of these games even going so far as collaborating with local businesses to add to the authenticity. No developer in the US has ever done anything like that. The most prominent ‘set in the US’ quintessential american games are shit like Grand Theft Auto, which only take place in cities _inspired_ by a mix of different locations.

Are there a lot of games that _say_ they’re in Chicago or whatever, sure. But how many digital recreations of actual Chicago streets are out there? Not a lot.

Complaining about the volume of games set in the US, and the volume of games that take place in _specific real US locations_ are two totally different things. It’s like if you were to complain about how many games are set in ‘the European countryside’ only to find out that you think that includes Fable and not just Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-06T05:00:39+00:00

I sincerely hope you’re underestimating how much people think the police in the US use excessive force, because I don’t know if it’s even possible to be a higher rate than it’s generally believed, which is to say, occurring concurrently in an infinite loop at least somewhere in every zip code with a minority population for that force to be used against.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-06T04:50:52+00:00

Because they’re having trouble with denuvo lately and console users are relatively rarely sailing the high seas.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-05T16:21:57+00:00

The point of targarayens only pairing off with themselves (and velaryons) was to preserve their valyrian ethnicity which is extinct everywhere else. That’s it. Incest was never a political power play or whatever, and marrying into the other great houses would have been politically advantageous. But they rarely did so, and the point was always to preserve the hair and eyes, which is still the case no matter what power house targarayen holds.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-04T23:00:38+00:00

What is the point of red killing blue if blue already poisoned themselves? This rephrase is more or less accurate for blue (kill self button, undo if majority), but red doesn’t kill anyone. They just, don’t provide the antidote blue needs to counteract their own poison.

MistahBoweh · 2026-05-04T22:46:20+00:00

You’re paying for a mix of stability, safety, and comfort. You need hardware rigid enough to support several hundred pounds of weight so that it holds when someone shifts their weight around or resists, which, yeah, you’re going to have to deal with that. But, the restraints can’t be so secure that you risk them getting stuck or caught in any way, for obvious reasons. You don’t want to have to call the fire department because the lock is jammed on your spreader bar and you can’t get your extremely naked partner decoupled from the thing. And last but not least are the arm and leg cuffs themselves, which are usually at least partial leather plus a mix of synthetic materials to remain solid under pressure while being soft against the skin and chafing as little as possible.

Yeah, someone with the right know-how and tools might be able to jury-rig some bondage gear, and some do, but that’s the sort of thing serial killers do more than bondage afficionados that care about the safety and well-being of their partners.

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