ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling

I second this notion that Bowser is sexy as hell

I bet I could waste funds by getting hired and then doing absolutely nothing

I don't like talking about it because what is there to do? Not buy something I wasn't going to buy anyway? Throw money at a creator who stopped making stuff after his passion project got labeled "cringe" and was turned into a perpetual punching bag for the forseeable future?

BTW if I'm wrong and he's still active, that's pretty cool and I'd like to see what he's up to. Also the One Punch Man tcg is great, which was actually the reason I posted this at all. I figured normalizing it would be helpful.

Okay, I want to start by saying that I do appreciate that WotC is trying really hard to treat the playable races as people. However, they haven't been sticking the landing well. For example, i do understand why they changed all instances of the word Race with Species, but making all the playable races canonically separate species just trades one yikes for a new yikes. As a player, sometimes I want to settle down with an Orc and make a bunch of Half-Orc Babies, but seeing the word "species" gives me pause. I know in real life cross-breeding different species of animals rarely goes well and the children are as a rule sterile, so can i ethically bring a baby into the world that I know is going to be sterile and is probably doing to have serious health problems?

Anyway, most people aren't mad about that anymore, and decent people aren't generally mad about the Mexican orcs or whatever. What has been a problem is that they are trying to get rid of the concept of Monsterous Races, which would make the average D&D setting a generally more pleasant place to live in. Here's the game-design issue with this: D&D is fundamentally about combat, and 5.5's design leans into the more crunchy aspect of that. A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with. Goblins and orcs and the like fill this role of being sentient pincushions. In addition, rp-wise players often like being special, and an easy way to do this is being a Good Drow or a Forgiving Kobold or a Pacifist Orc.

The specific way they are going about this is retconning the lore to make the societies of the Monsterous Races less Evil or outright just normal human-ish societies. Personally, as a DM I do not like this. I like to make my orcs and goblins distinct from mainstream D&D by doing pretty much exactly this, because it's a low-effort way to make my setting look Nuanced or Morally Grey. The point is more to do something that pops out of the wider dnd culture more than to actually say anything about, say, how indigenous people tend to be treated as speed-bumps to "progress" throughout history, because I dont usually run games where colonialism happens anywhere near the players. So not only does this make WotC's writers look incredibly lazy (and more importantly, spineless) to me, but now the laziest way to make a DnD setting pop is to have goblins and orcs be non-persons that are there to be treated as Rome treated the Gauls or sent to Oklahoma.

And what's sad is that if they had just put in any amount of effort into the worldbuilding, we could have the nice pleasant world full of non-evil cannon fodder without this problem. Unfortunately, in order to do that the setting has to actually make a statement about something. Here, I'll do some right here:

• Let's start with the obvious. Goblins specifically parallel Native Americans in the way that from the perspective of "civilized" races they seem to just exist out there in the land we want. Let's lean into that. Maybe the reason Maglubiyet is their only God isn't that he killed all the others but that when left alone Goblin religion is more like hero-worship. Each tribe has their own little pantheon on local saints and heroes, and Maglubiyet is distinct in that he is recognized globally.
• Drow are pretty clearly fascist. I am sure they don't see themselves as evil, though. However, most of their lore doesn't go much into how their society functions day-to-day. Fleshing them out would allow them to point out how just existing in a fascist country does in fact mean that you almost certainly have blood on your hands. We could see drow that try to oppose their regime by running a literal underground railroad or by just passively not complying with obviously evil laws, and we could see drow that are completely oblivious to how a seemingly harmless beaurocratic rule can result in people being enslaved or killed.
• Orcs in fiction stem from a long line of faceless evil raiders inspired by the Mongols invasion of Europe. People alive at that time had wild ideas about why the Mongols were here and where they came from, and the general consensus was that they came from some lifeless wasteland like Mordor where crops couldn't grow, so they had to pillage and plunder to get basic food and water. This is obviously not true, but it makes sense. All they had to do is make the orcs frigging steppe people! Actual Caucausians! Just copy and blend Mongolian and Georgian culture and traditions, give them cloth with colorful beading to wear instead of scraps of untanned leather, and let them be people in their homeland while the rest of the world cowers in fear of these incomprehensible alien raiders who like horsies and dressing up nice.

See, it's not hard! But saying something, anything at all, might offend some customers and make their profits go down. So they go with the safe, bland option of "everyone is basically a normal human like you, the player, so you can plop yourself into any race and not have too much cultural dissonace."

Anyway. That was a wall of text. I'm going to log off now.

Honestly I really like the skibidi toilet series. I dont think the creator is seeing any profits from these cash-grabs, though

Like everyone else said, assholes will be assholes. What you will get more of is sexual harassment and people assuming you are flirting with them.

Yep. That one.

Amtrak does the train equivalent of a cruise liner, where you spend about half a month on a sleeper car travelling all over America. It's cheaper than an actual cruise line, and more importantly I think trains are cool.

Edit: forgot about the unlimited money. I guess I would pay to replace all the rails in north america first so I have a smooth ride the whole time.

The career path for a Democrat is

1. Get into national politics
2. Don't offend the corpos so you can build connections with them for Step 4
3. Don't rock the boat so you keep your political connections for Step 4
4. When its time to retire, join a lobbying firm and use your political and corporate connections for a nice cushy paycheck.

Which is why they hate any democrat that rocks the boat: they're endangering their retirement.

Technically they prefer to poop in clean-smelling litterboxes, like cats, so predators won't be able to find them. But they also tend to stop giving a shit about that at some point once they realize their human will clean up after them anyway.

At least they don't pee on each other to establish dominance lol

Uploading converts to webp, sorry

Does that shirt say "I ❤️ Midieval Torture"