whatdoiknowjr.bsky.social
Indigenous People are still here. Genocide is not self-defence. Black lives matter. Protect trans kids, and adults.
WhatDoIKnowJR.com
GnomeStew.com
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But the garlic twist does mean that you can't "solve the mystery" of who the vampire is with something simple like putting garlic on their food. Plus this gives me a chance to tell you to watch The Lost Boys and/or Fright Night.
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You can still honor what players would know, and still introduce enough of a tweak to a monster that will create a surprise. PCs trying to detect a vampire by feeding them garlic isn't going to negate knowing they burn in sunlight or are hurt by holy water.
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Another thing I like about those movies is that there are little moments where you find out that maybe 90% of the vampire lore that the people think is true is actually true, and that 10% comes up and creates some tension.
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There are two great examples of what modern knowledge of vampires can work that came out of the 80s, the absolutely great movies The Lost Boys and the original Fright Night. There are people that know about vampire legends in those stories. The trick is thinking that vampires actually exist.
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Six months from now I really don't want to see how discussions of ADHD meds have aged.
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I guess when the only successful aspect of your business is having exclusive government contracts for things the government should be doing, and not needing to actually be very good at it, you may not want to have them toss all your exclusive contracts.
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Someone with 0% introspection consuming media they can't internalize . . . the recurring theme of everything for way too long.
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Absolutely agree with everything in this.
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"Government official consults Magic 8-Ball to make daily decisions."
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Lots of people very sure that RSBN wouldn't amp any applause that was present.
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This isn't about "you should read novels to supplement what filmakers don't manage to convey on screen." That's whatever it is. This is about people consuming media being terrible at internalizing messages that are very unsubtle and right there in front of their faces.
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A lot of it came down to the fact that the Core Worlds, where most of the New Republic's wealth (and the Empire's, and the Old Republic's) was concentrated didn't feel immediately threatened, so why make waves? Its not like the Empire's coming back.
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You had one political party that was ready to throw out any Rebellion related leverage they had and was racing to tell people to govern themselves because there wasn't an Empire any more. The other part was saying, "maybe we should do an empire but without the emperor and the Sith stuff."
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Me a few years ago: "I understand that some people get burned out and quit doing something they love, but writing these articles is part of who I am."
Me, in January of 2025: "Fine. I give up. Nothing I write will make the world a better place, so what's the point."
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Nixon flaunted the law. Reagan flaunted the law. But it took decades of "um, actually" conservatism to get the Supreme Court and half of congress to agree that laws only count when you really want them to.
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If people already broke the wonderful economy of the United States by letting unqualified people run everything because of DEI, something you never heard of when you were young, surely we can weather whatever economic upheavals happen when the president STANDS UP TO other countries on our behalf.
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If people can be seized and sent to a slave labor camp in another country, if you're not in danger of it, and nobody you care about is, that's just part of what needs to be done so we can get back to that time in your mind when you don't remember brown people around you speaking another language.
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Bush taught us to be afraid of a change in the status quo, so much, that we could fundamentally change how we interacted with the rules that underpin society, which is the most drastic, but largely invisible, change of status quo there is.
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You weren't ignorant of reality. If you didn't see it, it wasn't there. And it can go away again, if you just resist these people that are definitely changing things, and not just being vocal about things that have always existed.
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Did you live somewhere that was too isolated to see a diverse range of people? Did you grow up in an era where you could ignore the news if it was only on for a half hour a night? Did your parents lie to you about the nature of the relationship of relatives? Maybe even their own relationship?
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The beautiful trick of it all is that when America is perfect is whenever you remember enough about life to remember being happen, but not enough about everything that was actually going on. You can hook Boomers by promising a 50s that never existed and Gen X with an 80s that never did.
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The enemy is fear, and specifically, fear of change. Any change is bad. The enemy says we need to change. The goal is to get back to that one point in time that you remember where America was perfect and everything was good. To roll back everything between where we are and where that is.
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There are tons of people living unexamined lives that were raised to fear a shift in the status quo, but were intentionally oblivious enough to let change happen gradually. And then someone showed up to yell in their faces that change was happening, you have to stop it right now!
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There were tons of people that saw the status quo as not publically being racist or misogynist. They just needed someone to remind them that when they were young, it wasn't the status quo. Someone made you change from that, and you forgot about it!
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The people telling us that life has to fundamentally change are the enemies. They're the ones using fear to challenge the status quo. They want America to change. That's terrorism. We're at war with them. We've had two decades of America being at war with the concept that change is scary.
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What happens if the status quo is challenged when it comes to working in person, sending kids to school, wearing masks in public? Its rediculous to blame a disease, to declare war on a disease. Its not a country. Or a concept. The disease isn't making us stay home, wear masks, get vaccines . . .
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The fear of mass death on American soil didn't need to remain to fundamentally change everything. Everyone felt like there was a change in the status quo due to 9/11. What if the real thing to be scared of was changing what you thought couldn't be changed.
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And what do you need to be afraid of? Do you need to be afraid to die, or do you just need to be afraid of noticeable change? What if someone tries to use trade to convince the US that they aren't the greatest nation in the world? That's using fear to threaten us, isn't it?
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Terrorism is causing great harm to non-combatants in order to break the will of an opponent. What's harm? Yeah, blowing up a plane and killing people is harm, but maybe messing with the US economy is also causing harm. What about economic terrorism?
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If you get to declare war against that concept, you will forever have permission to wage war, as long as the concept is in opposition to you. A concept can't tell you what their grievances are or send diplomats. And what if you play with the definition of the concept you declared war against?
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If we're fighting a concept, then we can't violate the concepts rights to advocate for their citizens. By letting Bush declare war against a concept, everything broke. You can win a war againt a concept unless the concept no longer exists.
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Bush left a legacy of doing things that were "technically" not illegal. "Technically" not a war crime. There are rules for engaging enemy troops . . . but . . . if they don't wear uniforms, it doesn't count. There are rules for how to treat prisoners of war, what if we could have against a concept.
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But the real poison at the heart of everything is . . . preemption. We can't wait to see if something is a real threat. Everything is so dire, we have to act BEFORE something happens. Even if we don't want to deploy troops, we need to do something BEFORE anything happens.
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There were wiser heads saying that being consumed by fear was going to cause massive damage to the US, but I think a lot of people assumed that would come from constant external war, fracturing allegiances by taking unilateral military action. And none of that was good.
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We went from border patrol, who weren't great, to ICE, who were HOMELAND SECURITY, saving us from EVIL TERRORISTS! Don't feel bad for the disproportional show of force, any ONE of them could killl THOUSANDS!
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Racists will be racist, but a lot of our modern racists need to feel justified, and suddenly they didn't just hate people from the outside because they were different, non-white. They could pretend they hated them because they could be a threat.
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This Helldecade won't die easy. "Oh yeah, you don't want another Republican? Bwa ha ha ha ha!"
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Conversely, I grew up in a town of 600 people where I had multiple stories of people getting dismembered in fireworks fights or firearm incidents.
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It's so ingrained, I don't even know how to dislodge the impressions that people have. I work in a town with 89,000 people, and people in the outlying area treat it like even a town that size is some kind of urban hellscape.