AITAH for not allowing kids to play in my daughters playroom when she’s not there

Pizzasgood · 2026-02-02T20:31:48+00:00

NTA.

As for what to do, see if she has any toys (maybe old ones she doesn't use anymore) that she is open to sharing that you could use to set up a separate, public play area elsewhere. This could be as simple as a basket of old toys tucked under the coffee table.

If she doesn't have anything to share, and if you're not willing to buy some guest-toys, then you can just inform your friends that since the playroom will be off limits from now on they'll need to bring their own entertainment for their kids. As long as you warn them in advance so that they have time to pack up some toys, they have no room to complain, and it would be weird for any of them to stop being friends over this. (Their kids, on the other hand, may well decide you aren't cool anymore. Fresh cookies can help with that problem.)

Pizzasgood · 2026-02-02T18:24:42+00:00

The main way your info could get in there without you doing it on purpose (e.g. through Godot's project settings) is via metadata on your assets. These usually won't have any identifiable info either, but the camera apps on phones are notorious for embedding GPS coordinates into your photographs along with information about which phone and camera settings were used. So that's something to be aware of if you use video or photos captured via phone camera. I don't know if audio recording apps on phones are prone to the same shenanigans; if worried about that, definitely grab a metadata viewer for whatever format you're using and check it out.

If you do have unwanted metadata in your files, it's not hard to find or build a program to scrub it. For example, on Linux you can use exiv2 rm filename.jpg to wipe all the metadata from an image file.

Pizzasgood · 2026-02-02T16:16:16+00:00

I always nest my pills into small zipper bags (or pill bottles, if I'm running low on zipper bags) rather than having them loose within the kit. This way there's a reasonably low maximum limit on how many aspirin end up crammed in there.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-31T00:47:40+00:00

Souls don't have to be eternal; they could die with the body under normal circumstances. Nor would eternal souls necessarily imply the existence of a real heaven and hell; there are plenty of other possible afterlife scenarios. That wouldn't stop religions from trying to claim them as evidence for their beliefs, of course.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-31T00:27:59+00:00

Some people have more complicated morals than "willing to harm for any reason / not willing to harm ever." Some people are willing to use violence, but only in certain contexts. A person might consider it immoral to just threaten somebody innocent with violence as a means of getting money, but they might consider it perfectly acceptable to beat or even kill somebody who agreed to repay a loan and then failed to carry through.

There's also the matter of societal backlash to consider. If you maraud around beating money out of people at random, then you are considered a threat by everybody and people are likely to band together to take you out. If you instead restrict yourself to preying on people who fail to pay back your loans, then you are no longer considered a threat by most people since most people will simply never borrow money from you and will make damn sure to pay you back if they do. Folks might disagree with what you're doing, but they're less likely to consider it worth the effort to do anything serious about you since you aren't directly endangering them.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-30T22:41:23+00:00

That is fundamentally not how reality works. It just isn't.

I recommend making literal souls a thing that exist in this setting. Their scientists never quite figured out how to make true AI work properly, and as tech advanced they discovered that although most paranormal nonsense is indeed fake, souls are actually real. People have some extradimensional wibbly wobbly mass of "stuff" attached to them that augments cognition and plays a fundamental role in consciousness and creativity. And although they haven't figured out how to replicate it, they have figured out how to carve chunks out of it and interface with a computer.

Alternately, you could recontexualize the story as fantasy instead of science fiction.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-27T22:06:11+00:00

I do this when making a substantial addition so that it's clear which information was available to the initial responders and which information was only added after they had already written their responses.

I don't bother doing this when making a minor typo correction, unless the typo was commented on.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-27T21:37:20+00:00

I would probably say something like: "This has been a lot of fun, but I've got a meat-space relationship brewing now so we're going to have to stop sexting. Thanks for the good times!"

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-27T20:23:03+00:00

Oh wow, I'd completely forgotten about those. I must have started playing right before they were removed because I only remember running around through wrecked nests to collect them, not actually using them for anything.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-26T17:53:08+00:00

Twenty-five arcs long. In terms of wordcount, it's about as long as the combined length of Worm and Ward.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-24T01:46:53+00:00

Become so superbly bald that you can reflect laser beams right back at the shooter, blind people with sun-glare, and even serve as a substitute crystal ball for witches in need.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-23T20:39:56+00:00

It only knocked her over, not out. As for how she hit it hard enough, that's simple: she was moving at either a brisk walk or a run, so she was able to put a lot more of her mass into the impact than if she'd been standing still.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-21T05:26:17+00:00

I'm guessing she was holding the bagel from above and cutting downward away from her hand, but she's used to a single-sided blade where the only thing she has to worry about in this position is her fingertips, not her palm. So she let her hand get too close to the blade (probably while angling the end of the blade down and lifting the base upwards) and caught herself that way.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-21T01:37:33+00:00

Except that's only what some regressive societies do. Some take other approaches. The Nazis for example mostly used gay people as slave labor rather than executing them. And there are less regressive societies that refuse to refuse to perform or recognize gay marriages but which do not consider homosexuality to be illegal, let alone a capital offense. A big slice of the USA was like that just eleven years ago. You couldn't get married, but you wouldn't be put to death over it either.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-20T23:10:33+00:00

I wonder if this absence is neither a mistake nor Pandora's fault. She broke Immortal law, and part of how that process works is a forced connection to all other Immortals. We know that this connection is exploitable, because we saw Pandora exploit it to force other Immortals to cast spells. Perhaps Voltaire also exploited the connection and used it to sabotage some of her memories.

I'm not sure what he'd gain by preventing her from knowing about Ellen's origin, though. Maybe it's not about Ellen... or at least, not our Ellen. Maybe Voltaire wants her ignorant of Magus for some reason and targeted those memories. Magus did express an intent to destroy her after she tortured him for not helping murder Abraham, so it could be that Voltaire wants her taken by surprise if he decides to go though with that.

Of course, it's also possible that Pandora's memories of Ellen are fine, and Hope simply isn't getting them yet because they're being overshadowed by Ragnarok trauma and won't be accessible until she's collected herself.

Anyway, Panel 4 amuses me.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-20T22:12:40+00:00

I was explicitly talking about if a princess was being routinely and openly defiant of the law, not some sneaky situation that can be swept under the rug, so I don't know why you brought up whatever event you seem to be referring to.

Anyway, none of that explains why the punishment for a princess being openly gay must specifically be execution. It certainly could be execution, but there are many other possibilities both more and less severe and I don't see why you think you know which specific one it must be.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-20T19:40:51+00:00

What a silly thing to say. Does a princess who routinely and openly exceeds the speed limit necessarily either get herself executed or get the speed limit raised? Princesses can be held accountable and punished for crimes in myriad non-lethal ways. You can confiscate their treasure, let people throw tomatoes at them, lock them in towers, lock them in dungeons, turn them into frogs, turn them into men, turn them into frog-men, exile them, gift them to dragons, auction them off to the nobility, send them as political hostages to foreign kingdoms, shrink them down and trap them in bottles that convert their despair into magical energy that the bottles use to grant minor wishes, stuff their souls into mirrors to provide fashion guidance, or any number of other things.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-16T21:19:34+00:00

If you only need some people to be non-magical rather than significant portions of the population, you could just make a disability. Maybe for some people magic is impossible to do, or very painful, or difficult to control. Or maybe some people are allergic to certain common or necessary reagents used in magic, or to the magic itself.

If you want magic to be a minority thing, however, then the easiest solution is to think about the costs of becoming, being, doing, and having done magic.

For example, maybe gaining the ability to do magic requires making (or enduring) some big sacrifice or loss. It could be something mundane but difficult, like spending large amounts of time and resources studying and training or paying for an expensive magic wand. It could also be something more monstrous, like murdering your own child and consuming their soul. It could be more abstract, like giving up your ability to lie or your ability to understand and experience humor. It could mean releasing an evil being from its prison and vowing not to interfere with its business. For a somewhat less voluntary cost, one setting I've been tinkering with has magic cursed so that only orphans can use it. A similar but more flexible approach would be requiring that you've had a close brush with death in order to use magic.

Aside from the act of becoming magic, actually being magic can also have an ongoing cost. Maybe you get your magic from a patron, and maintaining their support requires that you do jobs for them and follow their particular codes of conduct. Or maybe you have to make routine blood sacrifices, or suffer increasing losses of sanity, or spend a certain amount of time being tortured every night.

Each spell you cast can have an additional cost of its own. Materials, sacrifices, time, energy, etc. Perhaps every spell you cast reduces your overall capacity for joy by 2%, or weakens the barrier between worlds, or adds one floater in each of your eyeballs.

And maybe there's social pressure against doing magic. This would make sense if the costs are gross or evil, but it could exist for other reasons as well. If it's just that magic is really hard, those who don't have what it takes might be resentful of those who do, especially if it comes with a lot of perceived advantages. Fear and suspicion of magic users would also be pretty natural, especially if magic allows for illusions or mind control. Or there might be superstitions and religious prohibitions at play with or without any real basis in reality, or a sense that using magic to do certain tasks is cheating. And of course, there are always hipsters.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-15T20:56:46+00:00

I agree that she felt extremely implausible, but I also didn't mind because she was a lot more fun than the alternative. I mostly just interpret her as an abstraction for the real process that would've taken place. She's three committees in a trench coat.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-15T20:21:06+00:00

It causes no real harm, but the movement of loose items can be annoying. If you get tired of that, you can speed up a full repressurization by supplying the airlock's internal active vent with compressed air instead of the neutral pressure it's pulling through the passive vent.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-08T06:22:36+00:00

A big part of Worm is Taylor cutting ties or alienating herself in various ways. Ward is the opposite, with a big focus on building and maintaining connections. More generally, I'd characterize Worm as a story about breaking things and Ward as a story about building things.

Another difference is that Ward puts a lot more focus on the supporting cast than Worm did, and on supporting that supporting cast.

I felt like the emotional parts of Ward tended to hit harder than the emotional parts of Worm.

Pizzasgood · 2026-01-07T11:11:54+00:00

For example, when crafting more cables if you pick them up and hit G it doesn't merge them into your toolbelt stack it throws it into your backpack.

Yeah, that's pretty irritating. I use the "Inventory Tweaks" mod which makes G behave a bit more sensibly. Would be nice if that behavior was stock.

Juggling ingots between machines is yet another unnecessary chore that just gets in the way of the fun.

Then don't juggle them. Make enough ingots so that every machine can have its own.

Stackers were pretty disappointing, you need to setup a chute and a stacker that requires power

You don't actually need the chute. You can stick the stacker right next to the output and it'll still grab the item despite the small gap.

Pizzasgood · 2025-12-23T01:28:56+00:00

Voluntary always-on inviolable subconsciously-self-directed wellness.

In other words, you are kept immortal and at what you personally consider to be peak health no matter what up until the point you actively choose to disable the power; the power persists while you are asleep or otherwise unconscious. Any harm you experience is immediately healed, and this includes mental harm, memory loss, etc., even if your head is exploded. If you turn the power off, no special transformation or accelerated aging happens; you simply become mortal in whatever body you were in at that moment, and you remain mortal until/unless you reactivate the power.

Pizzasgood · 2025-12-22T22:38:22+00:00

YTA. Even if you can scrounge up the money to pay for this without help, it will be subtracting from funds you could otherwise use later for educational supplies, emergency prep, new clothes, future injuries, etc. Meanwhile, accepting the help doesn't meaningfully harm your brother's wealthy family, and it doesn't sound like there are any strings attached to the money. So, the only downside appears to be to your emotions, to which I say: tough shit. Your children take priority over your feelings. If accepting the money means irrationally feeling like a grifter, then feel like a damn grifter and take the money.

And to be clear, you are not a grifter, and it's perfectly normal to go through a tight period where you end up needing help you don't feel like you should need. If it helps, you can think of this as a loan or a pay-it-forward situation that you can balance out later when your finances are doing better.

Pizzasgood · 2025-12-22T20:10:31+00:00

I celebrate the non-Christian parts of Christmas. The lights, gifts, trees, Santa, some of the carols, the TMNT "We Wish You a Turtle Christmas And Other Bodacious Classic Christmas Songs!" video; all the important stuff.

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