Some time ago, I ran across “The Old Web” on Devon.lol, and was gobstruck by the memories.

tl;dr- I got tired of the commercial web, so I went looking for the Old Web. I found it through directories, blogrolls, webrings, and some weird search engines no one has heard of.

Unlike in the days of handbuilt HTML, MUDs, and BBSes, there are a number of reasons why you have to deliberately look for this today. A lack of monetization/capitalism and a relatively high bar to entry come to mind, but regardless of the reason, the end result was that the internet was not dominated by a few “superstores” or a row of cookie-cutter digital McMansions. It was organically grown; you were just as likely to find someone’s NeoPets fansite or collection of essays as you were to find an NFL team’s official web page.

And holy hell, has it just gotten worse and worse.

Whether through aggressive SEO optimization, thumbs on search results, TikTok’s algorithm, or how Meta has pretty successfully done what CompuServe and AOL had hoped to do, the internet has become… homogenized. Rather than a “marketplace of ideas,” it’s become dominated by siloed monocultures of both style and substance.

My delight with truly decentralized social media — Mastodon, Pixelfed, et al — has been with how gloriously strange it can be {1.} as opposed to the fascist midden heap of X and Meta. {2.}

There are folks who are resurrecting older tech forms such as gopher, or trying to craft new tech, to circumvent this problem, but… well, they’re workarounds.

But the old web — the strange and quirky web — is still out there. Accessible from your browser. Right. Now.

But let’s be honest: there’s a reason why the quirky web gets passed by. It can be hard as hell to find. An entire blog industry (such as boingboing grew up around simply finding other neat things to pass along. Some were bought by media conglomerates (see above about silos), some just shut down like StumbleUpon. And sometimes there’s simply linkrot where links or entire directories disappear.

But all is not lost.

There’s several onramps to being able to find the quirky web now. For a larger starting point, check out Onramps To The Old Web; they include blogrolls and obscure search engines. I’m going to focus on “stumblers,” or discovery engines.

WikiTok has gotten some press recently as an infinite-scroll kind of way to rabbithole into Wikipedia. Links open in a new tab, leaving the scroll page open.

Indieblog.page uses lists of blogs with RSS feeds to show you new, random posts that you might not have otherwise seen. Opens pages in a new tab, with no header bar.

Kagi’s Small Web also uses a hand-curated list of blogs with RSS feeds, and not only provides a completely free (and without login) site with a (small, useful, ad-free) toolbar with fediverse-friendly sharing options to let you keep exploring easily, but incorporates the results into their search engine. You can read about their methodology here.

The Forest’s methodology is opaque, and on purpose, as they’re wanting to bring back unpredictability. You are as likely to hit a home page as a blog with this site, which is opened in a new tab.

Cloudhiker does not require a login to use (though it does to submit a site); it uses cookies to select categories if you don’t have a free account. It has a topbar as well with single-line text advertising; it also has a premium version without advertising.

Mix was built (rather literally) using StumbleUpon’s code; it also requires a login, and is the “sleekest” of the bunch, with a strong emphasis on images and graphics. It appears that a lot of it is snagged from Tumblr and Reddit. In my experience, it is less a discovery engine any more than a summary of the Tumblr/Reddit/TikTok/Imgur pipeline.

Each of these six has their strengths and weaknesses, both in terms of user experience and the kinds of things you’ll be exposed to. I’m personally most partial to Kagi’s Small Web; the fediverse sharing options really make me happy, and it tends to offer up things that are eclectic without being utterly chaotic.

That said, all of them are a damn sight better than just doomscrolling.

Featured Image by GibetMoll from Pixabay

{1.} Currently this is somewhat skewed because of the trashfire of US politics, and how violently it attacks those who don’t “fit in”; St********@fa*************.com“>I’m definitely part of the problem there, though I’m making a solid effort to not just add to the doomscroll.
{2.} Seriously, why are you still on Meta/X? Are you really that comfortable with a place that thinks bigoted slurs are okay?

Science reporting (and research) had its flaws prior to the current ideological imposition being put on it; these four articles not only illustrate the problems, but give you some good ideas of what to watch out for.

Cause And Effect

When there’s breathless coverage about the dangers of something — particularly something that isn’t part of “polite” society — then you have to be particularly concerned about any implications about causation. The most recent is research out of Canada, and the reporting sure makes it seem like ingesting THC could lead to schizophrenia… but they quite likely have the causality of the thing backward.

The study itself notes at the end of the abstract that after weed legalization in Canada, the rates of schizophrenia remained stable. Instead, it’s saying that the percentage of people who developed schizophrenia and used marijuana to the extent that it counted as a “disorder” increased.

The most likely hypothesis? More people who were suffering from schizophrenia that was not yet addressed by the healthcare system self medicated in an attempt to control their own mental health. Self-medication — whether you’re using pot, booze, carbs, or something else — is not a good thing. But there is a huge difference between that and implying that THC use leads to an increased risk of developing schizophrenia. The two may be correlated, but that is very different than causation.

This is not just a bit of pedantry; the implications have real-world effects. To me, this study seems to indicate that the best intervention would outreach and increased availability of psychiatric services to those self-medicating.

Morning Happiness

Sample bias is still a real thing, as seen in this study that claims that “everyone is happiest in the morning.” A lot of psychological and sociological research already suffers from sample bias — including my own — because it uses a sample of convenience, often college students.

That problem is intensified when you realize that most studies of the general population do not take neurodivergence into account.

Neurodivergence — including, but not limited to, autism and ADHD — is frequently viewed through a “disease model,” rather than as a difference. It’s somewhat similar to the ways that homosexuality and handedness were treated (for just two examples of many) for a very long time. Autism and ADHD have components that can be very challenging, absolutely. An argument can be made that “neurotypical” makeups also have problematic elements. They’re differences, not diseases.

Sometimes those differences are minor, but significant.

In this case, getting up in the morning.

It’s fairly common for those with ADHD to be night owls. But with a prevalence estimated anywhere from nearly 15% to as low as 4% (and varying by gender), if you fail to separate out this confounding variable, your study results are trash and not generalizable.

Because the researchers did not distinguish between neurotypes, this study claiming that “everyone” is happiest in the mornings is equivalent to a 1950’s researcher saying that “children are happiest with right-handed writing materials.” Sure, that’s true for right-handed people, but for the 10%-12% of lefties, that’s absolutely wrong.

Burying The Most Important Part

Likewise, this study which claims that oral contraceptives protect against ovarian cancer does not separate out between the types of oral hormonal birth control. While I’ve never taken any, I know lots of women who have shared with me that different brands and formulations have very different effects on their bodies. Does that affect the results of this study? We cannot know because the researchers didn’t bother to check.

More concerningly to me is how the reporting buried the most stunning and useful bit of incidental findings I’ve seen in a long time: “We also identified blood biomarkers associated with ovarian cancer years before diagnoses, warranting further investigation.”

THEY IDENTIFIED BIOMARKERS THAT COULD LEAD TO A BLOOD TEST FOR OVARIAN CANCER. That’s huge! I’d say they should get a NIH grant, except… well.

That SOUNDS Like A Lot…

Speaking of the current political climate, that brings us finally to context. With the anti-trans bigots pumping their hatred into the public discourse, you’ve probably heard mention of transgender people who have “decision regret” after receiving gender-affirming care. This does happen, though it’s pretty rare. Measuring that rate is difficult, as different researchers used different metrics for what “counted” as “regret” (and after what kinds of procedures), leading to estimates ranging somewhere between 1% and 8%.

This figure has been weaponized by politicians and political opportunists (looking at you, Chloe Cole) as a reason to halt gender-affirming care.

Before you wring your hands too much about it or think they’re making a good point, it’s worth noting that studies of women who were treated for early breast cancer found rates of decision regret about their treatment as high as 69%.

The researchers — as reported by Oncology Nurse Advisor — found that “decision regret was influenced by multiple factors, including patient demographics, decision-making processes, and mental health, necessitating targeted interventions to mitigate its impact.”

If you’re wondering why that statistic isn’t getting the same kind of press, or why the suggested solution isn’t more and better support for transgender people like it is for women being treated for breast cancer, or why a political party isn’t making it a giant talking point,the answer is simple.

It’s bigotry, my friends.

What’s The Point?

The point?

For those doing the research: Do better with your research questions and conclusions. Communicate your findings clearly — including the nuance — to reporters, don’t trust them to understand.

For the rest of us: Think about what you read. Dig a little further, even if it seems to support your point of view. While reporters will misunderstand and (unintentionally) misrepresent findings, while politicians will deliberately lie, there is truth out there.

But it’s rarely as simple as a soundbite.

Featured Image by Pexels from Pixabay

And now, for something completely different for over the weekend, here’s some cool music I’ve run across over the last few months.

Castle Rat is… well, they’re good heavy metal that reminds me of the most camp (and awesome) bits of the height of Black Sabbath’s career. “Fresh Fur” is one of my favorite tracks off their current album, Into The Realm, and really showcases this band’s sound. They recently completed a Kickstarter to develop a second, and I’m quite excited.​

I became aware of Electric Callboy a bit earlier when they did RATATATA with BABYMETAL I liked, but “Elevator Operator” is if you slammed Little Big’s “Skibidi” into a metalcore band and hit blend, and I’m here for it.

​Little Cecil formed out of a friendship on Imgur, of all places. Their debut EP, Jagged Transmissions (Spotify, Apple Music), is a bit uneven, but when they hit — like with the narrative and haunting lyrics over a strong synthwave beat of “Blood and Gold,” it hits.

While YouTube’s recommendations have notoriously been shown to be awful, Nova Twins was a rare gem to pop out of that sidebar. From the blast of the opening to the thumping beat of the choruses, “Monsters” really grabs a hold and doesn’t let go.

The Warning — three sisters from Mexico — began on the public stage from a YouTube video when they were teens. Now, they’re adults and playing solid rock. Most of their songs are in English, but “Qué Más Quieres” is one of my favorites. Note: there does not seem to be a way to legally purchase digital versions of their music (at least that I saw). I ordered the CD from their website, I enjoy this band that much.

ALT BLK ERA just released their album Rave Immortal last month, and while “Come On Outside” is perhaps my favorite track for a lot of reasons, “Run Rabbit” is just catchy and full of energy as anything.

Bloodywood has come so far, from doing metal covers of pop songs to making “Tadka,” which I have determined by scientific process to be The Most Metal Song About Food EVER. It’ll be on their next album, Nu Delhi, which comes out in March, and you can pre-order now. And now I want a curry.

I know absolutely nothing about Lucy Dacus other than this song and video, but it was sent to me, I saw it, and I loved both the song and the video. Musically, “Best Guess” sounds like the best of a particular type of 90’s alternative that would be on the soundtrack of Buffy or The Crow. Visually, this video is just gorgeous in its simple, elegant cinematography. It’s a bunch of people being happy together, and that makes me happy. There’s an album coming out in March — Forever is a Feeling — which I’m now quite interested in.

And that brings us to our last entry, Dax Riggs. Dax Riggs is … blues and rock and swamp and smoked cigarettes and cheap black coffee and rich whiskey and humid nights where your soul is bared to the world, whether you like it or not. And like all of those things, Riggs’ music demands your attention and a palate that can appreciate something more complex and textured. 7 Songs For Spiders is his most recent album after a seven year hiatus, and if you like “deceiver,” just go ahead and start enjoying his discography.

I hope that at least one of these artists has caught your attention and given you something new to explore this weekend!

Featured Image by Rahul Yadav from Pixabay

Yesterday I became aware (privately, from a reputable source) that the Dayton Metro Library is removing “permanent displays of flags and other cultural symbols from the interior and exterior facing rooms and offices of all DML branches.” The specific examples given were of the Pride Progress flag and the Juneteenth flag. Particularly when the header image above (“Pride is 365“) was featured in their blog post “Celebrating Pride” (archive.org, archive.is) from just last year.

However, I’m well aware that “white” is often seen as a “default”, and not considered a “cultural” group. I wondered if the same rules would be applied there.

So I called the Dayton Metro Library and spoke to Deputy Executive Director, Rachel Gut.

I asked, “I was wondering if [due to the new policy] you were going to be removing all cultural displays for white folks as well, or just Black and queer folx?”

Ms. Gut and I then had a pleasant conversation for several minutes. She was professional, listened to what I had to say, and answered my questions and comments straightforwardly. For that, I wish to publicly thank her.

Ms. Gut wanted to emphasize that the Juneteenth flag would be displayed during the month of June, and that the Pride flag would be displayed during June and October. She also expressed that they were wanting to have additional cultural displays, such as “a flag during Hispanic Heritage Month and Asian Pacific Islander Month.”

When asked if this new policy would apply to “displays about, say, the Founding Fathers, for example, that [are] inherently celebrating white culture, and specifically a white landowning culture and male culture,” she said she was not aware of any such displays that “is solely representative of white [culture],” but that they would also be subject to the same policy.

Which is nice, I guess?

Still, issuing this policy, with those particular examples, at this time and place in history, certainly gives an impression. Saying they want to “cultivat[e] a safe and welcoming environment for all patrons, staff, and volunteers” immediately after saying that those previously permanent displays were to be taken down, sends a message that patrons who identify with those displays are less welcomed than the “default” white patron, whether that was the intended message or not. Ms. Gut assured me that was not the message they intended to send.

I also shared that after hearing about this policy change, the folx I spoke had told me they were not going to call and let library leadership know how they felt; they simply said they wouldn’t be patronizing the library any longer.

However, I hope that I am wrong on both counts.

Again, Ms. Gut was very polite and took time out of her day to speak to me. We agreed that this country, for all its faults, is a heterogeneous stew of cultures and traditions, and that feeling unsafe or unwelcome due to the mere fact of other culture’s existence in this country was deeply against what the US is supposed to stand for.

If you would like to contact the Dayton Metro Library leadership and ask similar questions to the ones I asked, or to let them know about white-centric displays (again, such as anything about the Founding Fathers) that have been missed as part of this policy, or that instead of removing more of our culture and history, you would like to see these kinds of multicultural displays — including new ones reflecting our Native, AAPI, Hispanic, Latinx, African, and Turkish communities (among others) in the Dayton area — continue to be on permanent display as a celebration of our true heritage, please politely contact them at (937)463-2665 or through the form at https://www.daytonmetrolibrary.org/ask-me/admin.

And if you’re one of those people who feels threatened by the existence of other cultures or orientations, with all due respect, fuck off, bigot. {1}

{1} Why yes, I am aware of Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance. And now you are too. We’ve already let too many Nazis into the bar.

As protests continue — and hopefully, continue to grow — there are some things to take into consideration.

First, it’s possible to quickly get striking, good looking signs inexpensively. I outlined how I made these superhero-themed signs back into 2018 in a blog post for about $5 each in this blog post: https://ideatrash.net/2018/03/howto-get-striking-and-inexpensive-foa.html

However, the other thing to consider is digital security. ActivistChecklist and The Markup have good resources; I did something slightly different though, and I thought I’d outline that as well.

I had purchased an old Android phone a while back to serve as a barometric pressure sensor off of eBay; I’d won that bid for about $30. It doesn’t have a SIM card, which means that it can only use wifi, but also isn’t tied to me in any way through the cell modem. That wasn’t a problem for my original use for it, but also meant that the guidelines above had to be modified somewhat.

The basic guidelines — turning off biometric unlocking and a lengthy PIN — still hold. I also put my emergency contact phone numbers as the “owner information” on the Android lock screen, so that the numbers are visible without unlocking the phone. (The process may vary from model to model, but some guides and examples are here and here, or you can create a lockscreen photo that has the appropriate information. This is an adjunct to writing those numbers on your arm with a permanent marker.

I installed Organic Maps for directions (because I suck at land navigation). It works completely offline without any problems whatsoever, including looking up points of interest that are already on the map. It’s good enough for regular use as well, in my opinion.

The biggest problem/hurdle is communication. Without a SIM card, you’re reliant on bluetooth or wifi to send or receive data. I did not install Bridgefy — partially because of the required Google login, but more importantly, because it kept crashing. I also tried Briar, but while it installed fine, and even was able to add contacts between this phone and my regular one, no messages got back and forth either via wifi or bluetooth. Signal, my normal go-to, was unfortunately out of the question, because it seemed very unhappy trying to link a second phone as a device. So I ended up putting DeltaChat on this secondary phone, which while meaning I’d be reliant on wifi, does have encryption and can also just use email as a back end as well. Worst case scenario, it’s like I’m back in the 1990s, oh well.

I also have an XMPP server running that could also provide encryption via Conversations. I also have a Matrix server on a homelab that can bridge connections to other networks (including SMS and Signal) as well. While there’s a small break in the E2E encryption with that setup, that break happens entirely and only on a computer entirely under my control that’s sitting in a reasonably secure location. (Also, I think I can enable it, but I haven’t, since it’s literally just me on there.)

After doing all of that, I disabled and deactivated and force-stopped every other bit of Samsung and Google installed on the phone that I could.

I’m perfectly aware that this is not a perfect or impenetrable setup. Ultimately, the best digital security here is to not take your phone at all and rely on paper maps if needed. I made compromises based on my technical ability and how much inconvenience I am willing to accept in the name of security. I’d compare this to locking your doors at night instead of leaving the front door wide open. Someone can still break in, but it’s not trivial for them to do so.

Your security requirements, technical ability, and resources will vary from mine. Mine may change as the environment in the US becomes worse.

But take the time to consider what you are able to do and are comfortable with doing instead of walking to a protest or other action with your digital front door entirely open.

Featured Image by Darwin Laganzon from Pixabay

When you’re dealing with a narcissist {1} or otherwise manipulative person, it’s… exhausting, to put it mildly.

Trying to process the constant lying, the shifting of blame, and the gaslighting is really time and energy intensive, because what they say and do just doesn’t quite add up.

The good news is, there’s a way to lessen that impact.

There are a number of models/variants — “Observe don’t absorb,” “FOG (fear, obligation, and guilt)“, and “greyrocking” for three examples — but they all have a similar central concept:

• You do not take what they’re saying personally. You observe it, but you do not absorb it. Instead, you think about how they’re using their words to manipulate you, and, if safe to do so {2}, you may call them on it.

The point of their words is not to convey information and to increase understanding, but instead to elicit a response from you.

The beautiful thing is that these techniques also help you separate out those with ill intent.

Shortly after meeting a new friend, I recommended the Murderbot series to them.

They said: “Okay, so you used my name to get my attention, identified the common difficulty of having people sometimes recommend inappropriate things to you, then gave me two details that you thought would help show how your recommendation is different and that you really think I’d enjoy them.”

I was a little surprised, but just replied, “Yup, that’s correct!”

Because it was. End of story.

In contrast to, say, lying your face off to blame someone else for disasters and actions that were directly your fault.

If you take that kind of communication at face value, it’s difficult to respond. The words are sort of right, but are also very obviously wrong at the same time in a way that’s hard to articulate.

If you use one of the techniques above, though, it’s much easier to deal with emotionally. You don’t waste your time and energy trying to make sense of language that is meant to be hard to parse and deal with.

And once you’re no longer spinning your wheels trying to make sense of their nonsense, you are able to stop being shocked and start being able to do something about it.

{1} Or someone who does narcissistic behaviors; I’m using the term just for brevity.
{2} I cannot stress enough the safety note on that last one; narcissistic and manipulative people will react badly to being called out on it, no matter how kind or inoffensive you are about it.

Featured Image by Sammy-Sander from Pixabay

When I was in high school, I was made to read “Profiles In Courage” by JFK. It’s really the only thing I remember from yet another Civics class that was as un-woke as you might expect in 1980’s West Virginia. It largely struck me as corny and irrelevant, stories of people long dead who did what was obviously the right thing… at least, from my vantage point in history. Of course those people did the right thing — it was obviously the right thing to do.

I didn’t like it for the same reason that I didn’t like “The Emperor’s New Clothes“. It seemed too silly, too obvious. Of course he wasn’t wearing clothes. I could almost buy the Emperor being conned by the grift, but the crowds who reinforced the ruse just seemed unbelievable to me.

I was wrong. On both counts. The GOP has turned into a fascist regime. Their appointments and executive orders have been have been unequivocally bad for this country and the people living in it — unless your goal is to destroy this country.

Not the government. The country and every ideal of equality and opportunity it stood for.

The GOP is wearing the clothes of fascism.

It is up to you, and me, each of us individually, to stop pretending they’re wearing anything else… and to not tolerate the ongoing excuses for their behavior.

So what do you do?

Anything. Everything. Every little thing you do helps a little bit.

Every time you support a queer kid.

Every time you point out the DHS is calling 770,000 kids “criminals” because they don’t have the right paperwork.

Every phone call or email or letter to an editor and elected officials up and down the line.

Every time you support a small business owned by a person who is a minority.

Every time you call out casual bigotry, sexism, and racism.

Every dollar you send to an organization supporting equality, justice, and human rights.

Every time you reach out to a friend and reassure them that yes, this is not normal.

Every time you are kind.

The things that you’ll be most effective at doing may not be the same as the things I would be, so do what works with your skill set.

When I was in the military, they told us that a wounded enemy was more “costly” than a dead one. A wounded enemy tied up far more resources than killing one, along with the demoralizing effects of seeing comrades injured.

There are already those hurt and wounded — perhaps emotionally, perhaps physically — from the actions of the GOP.

As much as we need people actively “fighting” on the “front lines” we also need people who are taking care of those who are wounded and helping them take care of themselves.

The important thing is that you do not do nothing.

One common thing that is suggested is speaking up, by making phone calls and writing letters (such as through 5 Calls or Progressive Secretary, among a host of others). I’ve also had people tell me that those don’t “do anything.”

And if you’re thinking that your phone call or your letter is going to be the one that suddenly convinces them cruelty isn’t a good idea, then yes, you’re right. At best, you might introduce a seed of doubt into a staffer.

But those numbers are counted. The disconnect is that thinking that there’s some kind of “hero” moment that is going to happen.

There is not a single big heroic action that will change the tide of everything, no matter what Star Wars or the MCU has taught us. This isn’t that kind of story. Maybe it never has been.

It is a “clap for Tinkerbell” kind of story. One where it is all of us — together individually — clapping and shouting and laughing and yelling and singing in such a cacophony that it simply cannot be ignored.

We aren’t working to preserve the existing inequal structures, the baked-in racism, the rampant sexism and bigotry. This is to preserve the ideals and demand that we, both individually and as a nation, work to live up to them instead of sinking into narcissistic cruelty.

And if phone calls and letters and emails aren’t loud enough to stop the senseless cruelty, then it is the responsibility of each of us to make sure our voices are heard by whatever means necessary.

Featured Photo by Corey Young on Unsplash

Preface: This is addressed specifically to those who are just now realizing how bad tariffs are, that Project 2025 wasn’t a joke, are horrified at a Nazi salute during the inauguration ceremonies {1}, or some other new horror that’s happened since.

So you’ve suddenly realized what’s going on. Maybe you’re just realizing that the MAGA/GOP oligarchy lied to you and are just realizing what those “leopard eating faces” memes are about. Maybe you somehow avoided anything political — or that would potentially upset a family member. Maybe you didn’t think that people would really actually do whatever line was crossed for you to finally realize that things were not going to just go back to normal.

I’m sorry. That’s an awful feeling.

Strap in. It’s going to keep get worse, quickly, and there simply is not the opportunity for you to process all this leisurely .

Like I said, I’m sorry. Regardless of how you got here, it’s a horrible feeling when you begin to realize exactly how bad things (and quite a lot of people) are.

However, you’re eight years behind, and you don’t have time to keep saying “but surely that can’t happen here,” because it’s already happening. The Nazis weren’t kicked out of the bar, and now it’s a Nazi bar.

Yes, it’s awful. Yes, it’s overwhelming — that’s on purpose, to overwhelm you. Yes, they shouldn’t be doing … well, most of that. Yes, they’re hypocritical and don’t follow the rules they swore to protect just hours earlier, but they still expect you to follow every bit of the rules, even while they’re blatantly cheating.

The time for shocked polite hand-wringing passed years ago. I’m sorry. You missed it. It is time to do something before you cannot.

Before you let that “oh, it can’t be that bad” thought get too far, remember, you thought we were exaggerating before , remember? Expecting other people — or institutions — to speak up, to do something is how it got this bad already.

The house is on fire; simply pretending everything is fine will just result in the house burning down with you in it.

Here’s some things to get you started.

Begin by reading the Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide at https://verfassungsblog.de/the-authoritarian-regime-survival-guide/ or the PDF version.

Then switch to Signal (at least), and learn how to encrypt your email and take other privacy-related steps about your online presence.

To the extent you can safely {2} — even if it makes you feel uncomfortable — do not let the bigotry and fascism go unchallenged around you. Publicly stand up for the rights of all others, especially when the comments sections are filled with bigoted trash.

Consume as much or little news as you can {2} from a variety of sources, including several overseas, such as the BBC or Al-Jazeera.

Quit passively giving money to Zuck (and being fed a right-wing non-fact-checked version of truth) by leaving Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. Not just “I’ll enjoy the groups I’m part of;” that still counts for traffic metrics and lets Musk keep making money. Instead, help get those groups off Facebook too. {3} Do the same with things controlled by Bezos, Musk, and the Waltons to the extent you’re able {4}. Use an alternate privacy-respecting search engine like DuckDuckGo or Kagi.

Read other’s suggestions of how to fight fascism, like the ones from George Lakoff and Gil Duran, The Battleground, Timothy Snyder, It’s Going Down, Mothers For Democracy (pdf), or The Trevor Project, for starters. Search for and fine some others on your own, too. Some of the suggestions are direct opposition and resistance, others are about creating whimsy and art and joy and friendship where you can. Some suggestions will be more suited to your skills than others; do the ones that make sense given your skills and abilities.

I’m not telling you the “right” thing to do, because I don’t know your situation or abilities. There is no one right thing to do, nor is there only one right way to do it. {5}

Actually, I take that back.

There is one thing you should do.

Apologize to the relatives and neighbors and friends who have been telling you this was coming for years.

Then get to work.

{1} His response of saying the accusation is “so tired” instead of simply saying “Oh, no, Nazis are bad,” clearly puts Musk on the “asshole” side of the “autistic or asshole” test. Also, you know who popularized the “Roman salute” in modern times? Mussolini, the person who literally coined the term “fascism.”
{2} This includes your mental health and safety. Use the block button extensively.
{3} And whenever possible, choose federated and decentralized social media to avoid the exact same situation happening in the future. BlueSky is nice; it’s also just as centralized, which makes it susceptible to enshittification. (Same with most of the TikTok wannabes, unfortunately. Loops needs to get out of beta yesterday.)
{4} I’ve lived in very small towns; I know this is very difficult for some people. Do what you can.
{5} The same people who pardoned those who shat in the halls of Congress complained about respectfully taking a knee during the national anthem. They will object to any opposition, no matter how hypocritical that is.

You simply can’t make this stuff up.

The sheriff of Butler County, Ohio, one Richard K. Jones, who gives “Yosemite Sam meets diabeetus,” legit wrote a letter to DJT — cc’d to Elon, no less — saying that immigration visas were “too confusing” for local law enforcement.

Then held a Facebook Live/press conference to… apparently brag about how unintelligent he thinks law enforcement is.

“Sheriff Richard K. Jones reports a letter has been written to President Donald J. Trump imploring him to modify the current language on immigration visas to make them more comprehensible to law enforcement personnel. “There’s roughly one-hundred and eighty-five different visas in this country, and too many interpretations of which one means what. Just too confusing,” states Sheriff Jones.”

Butler County Sherrif’s Office Press Release

I really, really thought this was satire.

Dear Mr. President, In the recent months I have grown concerned with the substantial number of visas that are being disseminated in our country and the perplexity that these visas may have on our law enforcement. With roughly one hundred and eighty-five different visas in this country the verbiage in these documents may be confusing to ICE agents as well as our law enforcement as a whole. While ICE enforces immigration laws within the United States, as you know, the process of issuing visas fall under the U.S. Department of State. ICE agents or local law enforcement may not always have the knowledge concerning the specific nuances of different visa types. As a six term Sheriff, voted in by the citizens of Butler County, Ohio, I implore you to modify these visas to more simplified, comprehensible categories to alleviate any confusion moving forward.

Of course, behind the cringe is the simple fact that we’re looking at a bully who is so unintelligent that he has to ask who the “bad guys” are. A bully who knows who the bigger bullies are, and thinks that there is absolutely nothing wrong with displaying both his lack of intelligence and his willingness to bully others to the public at large.

And judging by the comments on his post, he’s sadly right.

There is a dreaded moment in tabletop RPGs, more feared than a total party kill, more dreaded than the phrase “but that’s what my character would do!”

It’s that moment when all the players look at each other and realize they’ve spent the entirety of yet another game session doing nothing but going back and forth about what they might do… without having actually done anything.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine recently, and he passed along a concept I’d not thought about before: introducing a mechanic from the real world into the game.

“You tell the players the bad guys are going to show up in a day in game-time. Their characters can do anything they’d reasonably be able to do within a day. But the players have no more than an hour of time in the real world to tell you what preparations they’re going to make. So if they waste their time, that’s on them.”

The simplicity of it — as well as how it both moves things along but provides the freedom and space for people to think — struck me as a wonderful mechanic.

So, of course, I had to take it a step further.

I was planning to run an in-person one-shot over the holidays for a full table of friends, and wanted to run something new for them. I really liked the idea of Troy McConnell’s “Monster Chef” encounter on 2 Minute Tabletop, but I knew that pacing it to fit in a four-hour timeframe as the encounter is written would be challenging. I didn’t want the players to feel like they were entirely on rails for the entire session, so there had to be a way of moving things along. There are a lot of fun sub-encounters in the module, but as written they’re combat encounters, which tend to take longer with larger groups. And this holiday season, I thought we needed something more light-hearted than a bunch of fighting.

In the month after the election, I’d been clinging to Junior Taskmaster as a source of distilled joy and wonder. The delight in play was the antidote to the ugliness of the world outside.

And that’s when it hit me: I could get my players to do Taskmaster-style tasks by having the characters working to catch the animals instead of just killing them.

Designing And Choosing The Tasks

There were a few design principles that I had to keep in mind:

• Nobody was required to do the tasks; I wasn’t going to make a mistake like the one I described in this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zBYeLuIliKo. So to give the players an incentive to do the tasks, they got bonuses to the relevant die roll to catch the critter in question. Nobody would be penalized, so there was no way that participating in the task would hurt a player’s chances in the game.
• The tasks should have some kind of relationship to the in-game fiction.
• The tasks should cover a couple of different areas of skill — art, memory, words, etc.
• I found that three “tasks” per session/module seems to be the sweet spot; more than that and it starts to feel cumbersome.
• Everyone — including the GM — should have a chance to be silly and participate

I drew inspiration from Taskmaster itself, the Taskmaster wiki, and a number of wikis and forum posts discussing tasks to do at home, as well as old kid’s games from when I ran a scout pack. I also ended up running a variant of this scenario with my online campaign, which required a slightly different selection of tasks.

For example, one of the creatures in the module is a “spiderfish”. {1} I figured these creatures were ambush predators, so they’d be hiding away and would have to be tracked down or lured out.

For the in-person table, I printed out a little sketch of a spiderfish for each player on a 2″ (~4cm) square. They put their initials on the back of their spiderfish. I left the room for a few minutes, and they could hide the spiderfish on any flat surface, uncovered, and accessible. Then I had two minutes to find as many as I could. The first one found got a +1, the second +2, and any I couldn’t find (which was the rest of them) got a +5 to their survival roll to track the spiderfish to their hiding spot.

For the online group — which is audio-only — I told them they’d have to lure the spiderfish out of their hidey-holes with a certain strange call… which we represented by having the players say “Super Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity” as for as long as possible in the angriest voice possible without laughing. The person who kept at it the longest got the highest bonus, and so on. {2}

It was a blast for everyone involved.

Incorporating these kinds of real-world mechanics helped elevate a good session into a really fun and unique session for my players, both in-person and remotely.

{1} If you decide to run this adventure, check with your players about phobias. A player in one of my sessions has a bad snake phobia, so the venom chicken was replaced by a different kind of chimeric animal. If someone has a spider phobia, then the spiderfish would have to be replaced. Which is also why the example image of the spiderfish I used for the task is here: https://imgur.com/a/n4P8GGq to avoid triggering phobias of those reading this.

{2} Yeah, sometimes the “connection” between the task and what was happening in-game was somewhat tenuous, but there was enough of a link that it still felt like it was part of the session.

The shirts and stickers I have in my merch shop are ones that I — or someone else — want to see in the world. That very much goes for these two designs.

This first one is inspired by more than a few neurospicy people I know, who are almost more impressed if you show up with coloring books than if you show up with flowers.

The second parody was created by specific request. After all, if laying on a beach can be someone’s whole personality, then why not this? This PARODY design is a parody that is made for the proudly sex-positive person in your life — including yourself!

You can get these (and other designs) as shirts, stickers, and other accessories at my Spreadshop store, currently offering free shipping for a few more days!

Featured Image by Ranjat M from Pixabay

There’s a New York Times article (here’s a similar article not behind a paywall) about some people complaining about the new inclusive rules in Dungeons & Dragons.

Unlike these right-wing complainers, the new inclusive rules are doing a lot to sell me on the new edition. {1}

Because the two rules they mention are things I already do in the games that I run.

The overarching thing here is simple: You don’t have to use the rules-as-written. You never have. Every session I have ever been in or ran has their own table rules. If your table doesn’t want to use some portion of these rules, then don’t. You want to use other rules, fine. The supremely ironic thing is that the complainers say this limits their choice, when they are absolutely free to keep playing exactly as they are now, or modify the 2024 rules to fit their playstyle. The changes are to explicitly allow — or encourage — different ways of playing. That is what they’re complaining about.

I’m reminded of someone who complained that a different game had a transgender character as one of the “example” characters in the back. You do not have to use the example characters in the back; I’ve only played in one game in my life where we did use them. They’re meant to be examples. There were plenty of cisgender example characters, but the existence of a type of character they didn’t personally want to play offended them.

Those complaining about the new inclusive D&D rules are not being limited in any way. They’re just not happy that others are playing the game differently, and that it’s been approved by the “official” source. Insisting that someone should have to endure an unpleasant experience as part of their recreation is just childish and selfish.

So what are they actually complaining about?

The first one mentioned (and making the headline) is that some players are frustrated because of the name change of “race” to “species” and claim that not assigning game statistics to that choice is a problem. They, of course, weren’t paying attention, since many of the “races” in D&D had to be the same biological species.

Another person in the NYT piece complains that without the word “race” in play, every character is just a “human with variations,” somehow ignoring the fact that all of these characters are completely make-believe and are already abstracted representations that bear little resemblance to a “real-world” simulation anyway. Every character is just a set of numbers with variations.

The complaint also shows a massive lack of imagination. Humans are only one species, and there’s huge physical and social variation between populations, and lots of conflict for all sorts of reasons. Eliminating the casual “default” racism makes things more interesting, not less. You aren’t getting rid of bands of orc raiders — they just have a motivation besides “they’re orcs”. And that means there may be other orcs who aren’t raiders and follow other ways of life, or are just another part of “civilization”.

There is plenty of room for the same sorts of stories and adventures, you just can’t be lazy about it.

The second rule they complain about regards safety guidelines:

The company now suggests that extended Dungeons & Dragons campaigns begin with a session in which players discuss their expectations and list topics to avoid, which could include sexual assault or drug use. Dungeon masters are encouraged to establish a signal that allows players to articulate their distress with any subject matter and automatically overrule the dungeon master’s own story line.

“The signal shouldn’t trigger a debate or discussion: Thank the player for being honest about their needs, set the scene right and move on,” states the “2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide.”

Rightwingers were Not Pleased, and equally unreflective and unimaginative. For example:

[Robert J. Kuntz, an award-winning game designer who frequently collaborated with Gary Gygax] said that while some topics ought to be considered off-limits, it was a mistake to interfere with the implicit social contract that has sustained Dungeons & Dragons for decades.

That’s not interfering with the social contract, it’s merely making it explicit rather than implicit.

I know that I’ve accidentally crossed that line with a player while running a game. Unfortunately, we hadn’t set that expectation clearly ahead of time — which is my fault — and I only realized my mistake by them dropping out of the game shortly thereafter. Because that social contract wasn’t made explicit, because those issues were not discussed, that implicit social contract was broken. Having such a discussion has been a front-and-center feature of all my games since. That doesn’t mean I pull punches or go “easy” on my players — it just means that I have to change it up.

Once again, it’s a failure of imagination by those complaining. I have run scenarios with a circus theme; there’s a version that is completely free of clowns. I know players who have snake phobias and others who have spider phobias; I swap out critters and monsters as needed when running adventures for those groups of players. It’s not hard.

Finally, this isn’t a tool to limit people. There are — and will continue to be — roleplayers who have different desires for what they want out of their games. Sometimes a player won’t fit into a particular table’s style, and that’s okay. You want to run an evil campaign? You want to run a game with “races” and no content warnings and no way for players to signal that something is uncomfortable? I don’t care. Run it however you want to.

I hope you have fun, but I won’t be joining you.

And that’s fine.

Insisting that someone should have to endure an unpleasant experience as part of their recreation is just childish and selfish.

{1} My issues are with how Hasbro has been treating its employees lately. Funny how they don’t seem to care about that?

Featured image from Pixabay

“See how he treats the waiter.”

It’s common dating advice. Of course your date is going to treat you well. But how do they treat those they think they don’t have to? That’s how they will most likely treat you once they’re no longer on their best behavior.

Right now, with the incoming GOP administration ready to begin dismantling all sorts of regulatory requirements — and particularly DEI requirements — the ways that companies are treating their DEI initiatives is the equivalent of how they treat the waiter.

DEI initiatives — while a net good for both society and the companies that have them {1} — take time to show a return on investment. They typically do not show returns in a single revenue cycle. While they are good for profits in the long run, they are an investment in a company’s culture and productivity. They rarely turn short-run profits, making them less attractive to investors that are focused on the next quarter’s profits. {2}

The about-face on DEI initiatives from some companies is the equivalent of screaming at the wait staff.

The moment these companies felt that they could get away with cutting corners to increase their short-term profit — no matter what harm it does to real people or even their own company — they did it.

What do you think is going to happen when the GOP and “DOGE” relaxes other regulations?

The regulations about your safety at work?

The regulations that keep our food supply safe? {3}

The regulations protecting your bank account and investments?

The regulations keeping products from being dangerous to children?

The regulations that ensure your medications actually contain what they claim to?

When you hear claims that industry will “regulate itself” and that we should rely on “market forces”, remember.

Sooner or later, you will be standing on one of those corners that gets cut.

{1} If you want to argue with that statement, you’re reading the wrong author and the wrong article. Try this one or this one.
{2} This is also why relying on “market forces” to do the right thing unless it’s immediately profitable is a fool’s bet.
{3} Yes, there have been a lot of failures of this system lately; the FDA is already stretched to the breaking point. See John Oliver’s breakdown of the issue.

Featured Image by LEEROY Agency from Pixabay

As I’ve been running tabletop RPGs online over the last year, there are some resources that I’ve been introduced to that I simply wished I’d known about sooner. These are them. Two are Discord-specific, the rest are system and platform agnostic.

Maps and Mapping

There are so many sites and places to get tokens and map-making tools. The one I keep coming back to, time and time again, is 2 Minute Tabletop. Not only are there are good selection of free and pay-what-you-want assets and finished maps, but a whole mess of tokens which you can customize to your heart’s content. Their weekly promotional email is actually useful, introducing quickly what the new stuff is, why it’s cool, and often including freebies as well.

I’ve only recently discovered InnScribe Maps, but if there’s a thing that immediately caught my attention it’s the standalone rooms and buildings. Whether used within dungeon building software, as just graphics, or print cut-outs, simply having stand-alone buildings alone makes it easy to just drop them into whatever setting you need and worth supporting.

Calendars

Fantasy Calendar is what you need. The degree of customization is staggering … but it’s also still simple to use. Want to have a calendar that has five months of 20 days, three moons with different cycles, two seasons, and holidays dictated by the interplay of the moons and seasons? It can handle that. Want a 12-month calendar that is just the same as ours now with slightly different names? Done in a click.

The free tier is enough if you just want to keep track of things yourself; the paid tier allows Discord integration and also to let your players add their own events on the same calendar.

Discord Music And Soundboard

You want Kenku. I’ve tried several other solutions, but if you want actual control over what is playing, from your library, plus a soundboard, this is it.

Downsides: It’s an electron app, and I’d like the interface to be a bit more compact.

Upsides: It works, and easily. It joins your voice channel as a separate user, so everyone on the call can adjust its volume to their own preferences. It can handle tracklists of background music (just drag and drop) while also handling sound effects separately. Pay what you can, but I strongly urge you to take that seriously and give them some cash; this thing is worth it.

Discord Recording

I’ve never really tried to record Discord calls before, and thankfully I was introduced to Craig before I did. Craig also joins your voice channel and will record multi-channel audio, one channel per speaker, and allow you to download it for up to 7 days in a variety of formats for free. One of those formats is a ready-to-go Audacity project. Need it retained longer? Need a specialized format? Normalization to be done on their server? That’s what the paid patreon levels are for.

None of these tools or resources are absolutely essential to running a tabletop RPG online. But they definitely make the experience a lot easier and more fun for everyone.

Featured Image by Ana Carolina Franco from Pixabay

TL;DR: Without touching a penny of their existing wealth, while still leaving $500,000 per year income each, the top 1% in America could raise everyone above the poverty line 3,781 times over. Bezos could do it himself for less than the sales tax rate in most states. Musk could do it himself for less than one percent of his annual income. But instead, Musk is guiding a department that will have to cut benefits to those who need them.

Note: US dollars used throughout. I do not distinguish between "income" in the sense that wage-earners think of it and "annual revenue" any more than the sources I cite do; the point being that I’m talking about money they get every year, not counting amassed wealth.

As a particular kind of nerd, I adore pop-culture alignment charts.

They riff off the alignment system from Dungeons & Dragons, which uses a two-dimensional axis of "good-evil" and "law-chaos" to cover people’s attitudes. It’s a pretty blunt instrument; I personally expand it by including switching the order of labels to mark small differences. For example, I think MCU Steve Rogers is probably more "Good Lawful" instead of "Lawful Good", to reflect how he’ll break a law in order to do the "good" or "right" thing.

But the very existence of the chart begs a question: What, exactly, are we calling "evil"? Are there behaviors we can say are always evil? {1}

Is it the motives? A number of pop culture villains — particularly in the MCU (Killmonger, The Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) — have had at least understandable motivations, even if the actions they took based on those motivations were monstrous.

Is it the actions taken, then? But what about monstrous actions taken in order to create a greater good? (Ozymandias from Watchmen, the Operative from Serenity) At what point does an action become unjustifiable if it creates good?

Any kind of definition of "evil" has to be able to deal with both of these types of scenarios without breaking.

As far as I can tell, that leaves us with one working metric: greed.

I don’t simply mean the amassing of resources; specifically both a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed {2} and that also deprives others of needed resources.

What counts as "needed"?

In 2010, some economists did a study suggesting that incomes above $75K (or $109K in 2024 dollars) did not improve happiness]. There’s a more recent study that indicates that effect may go all the way up to $500K, although it plateaus somewhere around $200K, particularly if the person is already unhappy for other reasons.

So let’s pretend that "needed" is what will increase someone’s happiness. While we can argue that isn’t what need actually means, I think we can safely say that going beyond what will increase your happiness will also go beyond what counts as a "need".

If we use the plateau of $200K as our low mark, then it’s worth noting that only 14.4% of Americans made over $200K in 2023. But that’s a plateau, not a high point, so let’s go with themuch higher number of half a million dollars of income per year.

The idea of having a half-million dollars, let alone getting that every year is well out of my reach, as it is for nearly all Americans.

Interestingly, many of the summaries of income distribution in the US lumped all incomes above $200K into one big group. Still, I wanted to find something that separated out those above $500K a year, and finally found one.

Those who make over $500K a year — those who without question have more than they need — are literally the 1%. A tiny group that literally holds more wealth than the entire middle class in the United States.

In 2023, just over 50 percent of Americans had an annual household income that was less than $75,000.

The median household income — that is, halfway between the lowest and highest — was $80,610 in 2023. The average is a bit higher — $106K — but that is even more subject than the median to being shifted by the extremely high outliers of the 1%. I couldn’t find a good modal distribution or frequency distribution for 2023 data, but the chart below (using 2005 data) really hammers home the differences between "median" and "average" and how those numbers only give a very, very partial picture.

In 2023, there were 36.8 million people in poverty in the United States. With a current single-individual poverty income threshold of $12,880 per year, the amount needed to bring every single person in the United States above the poverty threshold is $497,168,000. {3}

So we have a group of people who are well and truly out of the "more can make their life better," while we have right here a whole bunch of people who objectively don’t have enough to pay their medical bills, afford a place to live, or enough to eat.

But still, that $500 million sounds like a lot to ask, even of the top 1%.

That’s because you’re still thinking of money at the kind of scale that the rest of us have to use.

Half a billion dollars is only 5.2% of Jeff Bezos’ estimated annual income of $9,600,000,000.

Half a billion dollars is only 0.35% of Elon Musk’s annual income of $141,535,081,983. {4}

For less — and in Musk’s case, far less — than the average sales tax rate in the US, either one of these two could literally and single-handedly lift every American above the poverty line, without touching their existing assets. And definitely without bringing them below that $500K line.

And that’s just two of them. Individually. The literal top 1% — the ones above that $500K a year mark — make up 18% of all annual income in the US. According to the CBO, that’s $2,520,000,000,000 a year.

The average income among the 1.28 million households in the top 1% of the distribution was about $2.0 million for a total of $2.6 trillion or about 18% of all pre-tax, pre-transfer income. The average income among the approximately 11,000 households in the top 0.01 percent of the distribution was about $48.5 million.

For those 1.28 million households to all have $500K per year is $640,000,000,000. Which again, seems like a lot of money.

In comparison to the annual income of the 1%, it’s not. It’s just over a quarter of their annual income. That leaves $1,880,000,000,000 in income per year above the $500K mark for the top 1%.

Without touching a penny of their existing wealth, while still leaving $500,000 per year income each, the top 1% in America could raise everyone above the poverty line 3,781 times over.

Without touching a penny of their existing wealth, while still leaving $500,000 per year income, the top 1% in America could literally give the 8.08 billion people living in the world over $230 each and every year. Or they could end extreme poverty for the 700 million people living on less than $1.90 a day worldwide nearly four times over.

There are some wealthy people who understand this. There’s a whole crop of young rich people who are dedicated to giving it away.

But the rest?

Well, I know where they go on the alignment chart.

{1} If your first thought is "violence", there are plenty of times that violence is not always automatically considered "evil." Intimate partner violence, because of the selfish power motivations behind it, does fall under this rubric for me (we are not forgetting you Brock Turner). For reasons, I’m not focusing on that particular class of behavior here, but yeah, totally in the "evil" camp.
{2} This first part is straight out of Merriam-Webster.
{3} This is obviously oversimplified; if you’d like to run the math for different size households and the like, feel free, but the point remains the same.
{4} You read that right — less than 1% of his annual income. Percentage wise, for a household making the US median income of $80K a year, that’s equivalent to only $283. Adjust for your own income, and see if you would pay that to literally raise everyone in the US above the poverty line.

Featured Photo by fikry anshor on Unsplash