Also the campground at any Phish show.

Pretty much yeah. I was going to say an episode of Fear Factor but same thing.

Strong “the meeting will continue until I have broken you” energy.

This whole thread makes me so mad. Well done.

If you read it the right way, the book of Jonah reads like a really weird episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Yeah. Also, superficially good looking people can still be sketchy weirdos. Vibe, context, and prior relationship are much more important than looks. Of course, some people can’t get their head around this and start blaming literally anything else: their height, their bone structure, a worldwide conspiracy against them. It’s crazy.

Or, like, make mana fall from heaven or give the pastors the occasional plague of quail to handle food requirements.

Oh good it’s not just me.

Yeah that’s actually funny. Calling it FRAGS is just the icing.

Now that it’s less broken, I’ve been playing Cyberpunk a lot and it feels like edgy shit done correctly. All the big tough guys are actually just weirdos enamored with the sound of their own voice, the ads are ludicrously over the top, it’s bloody, and everyone’s a human being. I haven’t felt gross with any of the content in it so far and it has at least as many strippers as Duke 3D had. I think the loud edgelords keep trying to paint it as free speech vs censorship but it’s really about not making players complicit in whatever infantile world view the director has.

Lol that’s awful. 2009?!

Nah this is still corpo bullshit. It’s also one of the tamer specimens of that era. The only difference is, the corpos in charge of advertising at that time were all sentient hardons who heard stories about how drugs are and peaked at 14. None of them lived in the real world and they just churned out knee-jerk sexist bullshit because they wanted to appeal to boys going through puberty and men that never left that headspace.

<rant> A lot of the ads from that era are uncomfortable. Hell, a lot of the games were. It was rare to see a female character that wasn’t ditzy and helpless, a thinly-veiled copy of the writer’s mom, or exactly like a dude but hot. Those were the options. I’m not saying I needed every game to be a work of great literature with complex and tormented characters and copious backstory; I just wanted female characters in games that didn’t like someone doing a ventriloquism act with their fleshlight.

I ended up chasing gameplay and trying to ignore how fucking awkward and immature most of the shooters were in that era and I don’t think I was alone. I think a lot of gamers grew up and drove the market in a slightly more mature direction. Some people blame woke bullshit, but for me it was just being utterly sick of how fucking juvenile everything was and voting with my money. There’s still a vocal minority out there that wants the good old days back, but I’d stop playing if the industry went back to exclusively 3xtr33m l33t 4ct10n d00d bullshit.

Sidenote: I played the demo for some Cliffy B game a decade ago on my XBox and hard-quit and deleted when the guy on my comms told me to “fire a rocket directly up the bad guy’s poop chute.” I was in my 30s and Cliff was probably pushing 40 at the time. What the hell? Are we nine years old again? Then again, he was the guy that threw his cat into his scanner and posted a picture of it every day until the internet told him to stop. Ugh. Let’s never go back there. </rant>

I became a dad late (around middle age) and was telling dad jokes way before that. My theory is it’s less about becoming a father and more about getting older and just wanting to annoy people for my own amusement.

👍

Can do.

Oh man yeah. I’d have to dig out the PS2 but I’d love a sequel to that. Mojo King Bee’s theme is still stuck in my head.

Weird. I just got done beating Link’s Awakening it sounds like they’re making a new tiny Zelda game. I’m in the middle of playing Superstar Saga and just watched this. I should go play Earthbound next.

He found it in the wilderness? That seems easy to narrow down and verify.

A very long time ago I was on psychedelics at a Phish show. I had a blast at the show, but the venue also had an upcoming Guy Fieri event and I ended up confronted with massive posters that were just Guy Fieri’s weird head everywhere. I had a really bad time for a while until I got out of there. Just frosted tips and flames as far as the eye could see. I had welcome to flavortown on loop in my head and in that moment I experienced true cosmic horror at the idea that Guy Fieri existed in our universe and we were powerless to stop it.

This picture is like that.

This reminds me of the time my group played a kobold campaign. We found a halfling scout and dealt with him. Then we made an improvised catapult and launched his corpse into the middle of his camp. And then we snuck in and wiped the rest of the halfling party while they were trying to figure out what was happening.

One of the guys in our party put skills in cooking and rolled a nat 20 making halfling jerky. A few sessions later a wizard or whatever granted us a wish, and we wished for our supply of nat 20 halfling jerky to never run out.

So now we’re rolling around the countryside raising hell and handing out halfling jerky to everyone because it is now the most powerful diplomatic tool in our arsenal. We never told anyone what it was made out of and pretty much any NPC who didn’t want to kill us on sight got a piece.

I don’t remember what happened to the party. I think our GM gave up in disgust after a while. Good times.

This is pretty coherent for an ambien post. I had a friend that used to hang out on groupchat after he took an ambien and at a certain point he’d just start sending random strings of text, but really emphatically.