Because, seriously, fuck that guy and his sycophants.

I did not get a lot else done today, but I did not melt from being in the sun or die of datastarve from leaving my phone behind, so I guess it was somewhat successful? Also apparently there is someone known as “Batman of San Jose”, who is an advocate for the unhoused, which comes as news to me.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.1: MI5 agents who fuck up get sent to Slough House to do meaningless busywork until they give up and quit. Our hero is of course not quitting or even keeping his nose out of trouble. Plus he was totally framed.

Read (novel): Afterlove (Tanya Byrne): It’s hard being a high-school lesbian, and even harder finding true love and then dying. Fortunately(?) the story doesn’t end there.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 5 (Yoshimurakana): Serial killer of the week, no match for Kuroko. It probably was actually smart of the police to suspend her sentence as long as they can keep her on a leash, horrible though she is.

Written (game design): 234:

Race in/near D&D is complicated along a lot of axes. At least without
stats, we don’t have “orcs are dumb” or “elves are naturally criminal”,
but without stats, do we even need predefined ancestries? Why not go
full anti-canon and let players make up their own ancestries? You want
to play an elf, great! Tell the table what elves are like! Pick a couple
of feats from this list, and explain them as being from your
ancestry, or not, as you find appropriate. (Do you have the Strong feat
because you’re a dwarf and all dwarves are strong, or are you just
swole?)

Tangentially, no darkvision! Seeing by starlight, okay. Navigating caves
by feeling the airflow around walls and obstacles okay. But no casually
ignoring darkness. (This goes back to the bad ideas about combat.)

The downside to this is that making a character takes more effort when
you can’t just pick from three lists and slam them together, but of
course there can be a list of examples, with multiple types of elves
(Tolkien, D&D, Elfquest, …) and GMs that have a world already designed
can make the list for their players to choose from.

(This is far beyond any planning horizon, but an idea I’ve seen is
to have a selection of pregens with good character art for first-time
players instead of making them engage with character creation, so
they can go “that one looks cool” and dive in.)