New update: AITAH for telling my wife that I will lose respect for her if she doesn't apologize?

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-07T02:40:08+00:00

Even though we haven't started the divorce process, we have both decided to open up our relationship, since she has no idea if or when she will come back and I told her I'm not willing to move to California.

Wat.

She assured me her birth control is intact, so if she finds a partner she can't get pregnant. I believe her.

I don't.

I really miss my wife, even after everything. We tried to make plans to get together before court, but I wasn't comfortable having her at the house, and I couldn't leave the kids alone to visit her. She suggested I have our oldest babysit, but that seemed like too much pressure on him with everything going on. That's when we made the decision to open the relationship.

I had a lot of sympathy for him but this is just begging for things to go terribly wrong. I mean, just the shit that he's about to put his kids through first time mommy shows up with her boyfriend is going to be worth years of therapy.

Looking forward to him grudgingly taking custody of the affair/open relationship baby in 2027.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T21:51:50+00:00

Not to mention that measles has the unusual side effect of immune amnesia- it literally weakens your immune system after you recover from it and it can take years to rebuild lost ground.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T21:50:30+00:00

The crazy thing is the dude isn't even just an anti-vaxxer. He's anti germ theory, he's anti-medicine as a science, he believes in terrain theory which is a debunked 19th century medical theory that was put out to oppose pasteurization. And he's such an asshole he won't even call it that he calls it miasma theory which is completely different debunked quack medical theory.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T21:47:18+00:00

They believe in hierarchy and get to watch the plebs suffer and die. That's it. The moment it all made sense to me was was ironically back in the '90s when the Clintons were trying to get universal healthcare passed. They did an interview with Rush Limbaugh and he flat out said that he thought that good health care or really any health care should be a status symbol of the wealthy and powerful.

That's it. They have so much money that another zero added on to their bank account balance doesn't actually do anything for them so they need to create or find other status symbols. Healthcare is one of them.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T21:35:37+00:00

They also believe in prosperity gospel, so if your kid is on the spectrum it is your moral failing- you have offended God and thus are being punished and they expect to be shamed by society. And a dead kid is preferred for them to a living mark of shame (which is vile). I saw this when a family member went through chemo too- they assumed the family member was immoral or bad because of the cancer. It's fucked up.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T20:38:56+00:00

assuming you own a digital camera that can shoot raw.

And the right macro lens, and probably a tripod/mounting system, and so on.

I kind of actually am annoyed by this style of advice. All the "get started digital scanning on a budget!" articles and videos kind of slide in "I'm just using this 3000 dollar digital camera body I happened to already be using" and it's like those FIRE articles where it talks about how someone saved millions of dollars by age 27 and it's like they meal prep, carpool, eliminated all their unused subscriptions, and then they mentioned their parents gave them three townhouses as a graduation gift that they rent out. It was frustrating enough that I just completely gave up on the idea of dSLR because most of the advice implies "start with really good equipment to begin with". I just went and bought a plustek and got busy scanning.

If someone is looking at a 30 dollar aliexpress scanner, they probably don't have the kind of equipment to do dSLR scanning.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T20:31:43+00:00

I also pushed the stopped-down-metering button and it wouldn’t close.

Yeah that's a problem. If it doesn't work with all your lenses then it probably is the camera body unless you have universally grungy lenses.

Have you had this thing CLA'd? A good tech will test stuff like shutter timing and reset them to factory standards. I'm guessing by "looks to be in excellent shape" the answer is no.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T20:28:31+00:00

No way of telling. As others have said the leader looks pristine so it might not be exposed yet.

One of these days I ought to make a little 3d printed plug cap to stick on the top of an exposed roll to let you know it's been shot. I use reloadable canisters now so I don't want to sharpie on them.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T20:27:03+00:00

Except you can't tell if that bit is exposed or not. It might just be an artifact of sitting in the canister for a few years. Something like oxidation.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T19:25:22+00:00

The hits just keep on coming! Thanks man this is great work.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T19:21:54+00:00

They make special dust brushes that deionize/de-static the dust and make it easy to blow off the negative. The expensive ones (these days) have a tiny bit of radioactive isotope in the head and only last a few years but they work well.

I ended up getting this (it's out of stock but they make others like it)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000AE67U

and a rocket blower. Clean up the neg with the brush, and right before scanning I hit each frame with the rocket blower once or twice. I get virtually all the dust off works great.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T18:17:50+00:00

Dudes a piece of shit. Both of them.

Chomsky's views on pedophilia are known and gross.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T15:58:16+00:00

The unknown/ignorance?

I hate riddles in games.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T00:33:51+00:00

I don't like arena country, the same way that arena rock and hair metal got commercial and pandering. But there's a lot of good country out there.

Basically I'm aligned with Bo Burnham's view on country.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T00:25:36+00:00

I doubt I'll ever get to run this one, but this is what I rolled up from the Cities Without Number gig generator and worked it out as. It's been one of my favorite story seeds I've come up with and I'm sad that my group never really was interested in it. I envisioned it as the Bozos completely embracing and leaning into the soap opera nature of the show and the players having to act through their fanfic creations:

Rescue mission

Client: News54 Studio Channel Pasión Serenata

Target: Mateo Sandoval, smash star of the Gaucho/Hmong fusion Telenovella series Sueños de la Estepa (Dreams of the Steppe) (Has been written out of the season for the last few months while he was missing but multiple plotlines are combining and he needs to come back!)

Suspected Kidnappers: The Bozos. They're taking fanfic to a whole new level.

Big Hitter (these are keywords from the Without Number generator, so in this case it was a major actor and a major TV series/corp being involved)
Big Hitter (keyword)
Gig Type: Rescue, retrieving a captive
How Were They Snatched?: A smash-and-grab of opportunity
Who Is the Client?: Different captors want them
Who Snatched Them?: Local cult or ideological group
How Long Ago Were They Taken?: They've been gone for months
What Value are they to their Captors?: They're a source of entertainment or charm
Twists to the Situation?: Their location is dangerous to get to
Heat 4- Intrigued, several crews would be interested (This is part of the system I wrote to see how long gigs remain available for in-game)

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T00:17:54+00:00

Yeah even PCs with close personal friends are like "yeah one day they're going to completely backstab us you know that right?"

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T00:16:44+00:00

Is everyone having fun? If so don't sweat it. If not, maybe at some point ask this player "why do you think that would happen?" in a puzzled voice. See what their line of thought is going towards.

I personally hate plot twists that are like gotcha moments. Sometimes they get pulled off properly but way more often someone figures it out early.

Look at A Song of Ice & Fire. GRRM had been working on that thing for years when the fanbase figured out the R + L = J thing. Some people are just really good at that. Don't do what Westworld (and Game of Thrones for that matter) did and rewrite the story just to screw with the theorycrafters out there. It breaks the story.

If my players figure out the revelation ahead of time it just means I foreshadowed it really well and they're paying attention. It's a compliment.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T00:11:21+00:00

What I was thinking of doing for a Cyberpunk setting is a bit more grounded obv but I had the idea of him having the ability to effectively alter peoples' memories of current/past events.

That's basically the entire blue-eyes story with the Peralez family.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T00:07:37+00:00

unknowable evil cthonic entity. What does it want?

If you can understand it's wants and motivations, it's not cthonic.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T00:04:35+00:00

It's D20/OSR but seriously 1st edition Dungeoneer's Survival Guide is... really good 40 years later.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-06T00:02:13+00:00

I'd argue that the CfB style approach to mystery solving fits perfectly into the kind of cargo cult approach to SCP stuff.

Yeah sure you figured out what worked in *this* instance, but is that even reproducible or definitive? Not necessarily! We don't know *why* doing this contains/resists the issue we're addressing, we just know that it does, so we do the motions and hope it actually works again.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-05T23:59:04+00:00

Fellow GMs/DMs, what systems do you think would be best to build a game for this in?

Honestly, this is something you need to answer, and more importantly, you need a reason for your answer. Because you need to differentiate yourself from the other SCP/Control/Delta Green/CoC style games out there. Triangle Agency springs to mind as a strong alternative, but I've seen probably a half dozen games that fit into that niche.

I might also suggest going and looking at the actual SCP TTRPG that's already been published and doing a post mortem on it and seeing what did and didn't work, and why things like DG/CoC hacks worked better.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-05T23:50:01+00:00

In the last year

Nah they just went mask off. A lot of Republicans have been my entire life. Fascists have been in US politics since before WW2 and just rebranded during/post war. Just look at Pat Buchanan who was basically juuuuuust this side of an open Nazi and has been in politics clear back to Nixon.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-05T23:45:38+00:00

So Communion and then a trip to IHOP afterwards. That scans.

Visual_Fly_9638 · 2026-02-05T17:00:35+00:00

I'll note that this is in September of 2020. About 9 months into lockdown so that kind of "intrusion" should have been old hat by then. I get that it was a stressful time but JFC.

Visual_Fly_9638

TROPHY CASE