Fiona Geist

The quasi-official Troika dungeon rules continue to expand. Your parents always told you "keep strict time records, you'll understand when you're older" and they were *right* :

dsell.me/dan-rulez/

We literally know now that anti-trans legislation was pushed by a pedophile ring to allow a pedophile ring to serve a pedophile ring’s interests, and legislators have decided the best course of action is to keep doing what the pedophile ring wants.

Gonna start calling life a "Persona-like experience simulator"

"someday they will actually make this into the insanely needed housing/SRO/hostel spaces with some nice apartments on the highest floors, maybe some live/work spaces and galleries" i say to myself realizing the average high school class would outperform RI leadership

i'm not telling anyone what to do but tbh even ironically engaging in the sudden onslaught of using terms like max and mog feels extremely astroturfed and i'm just not doing it, that shit's a tulpa, man all of it is tulpas you don't have to substantiate the tulpa man

my favorite was giving me that shitty blood pressure regulation med rather than benzos that basically just made all of my symptoms worse and made me lose control of my emotional composure enough i almost got a 72 hour stay for explaining roughly where i felt on a pain/anxiety/aggression scale

what works best for me is managing ADHD symptoms (highly restricted), severe anxiety (HAHAHAHA oh god they hate helping for that) and extremely high aggression (the old state psych cocktail works ok on me but it is less destructive to just smoke half an oz of weed a week instead)

part of why i left MA was the lack of availability of non 2nd generation anti psychotics to manage my constellation and the fact i was developing involuntary seizures

yeah i feel very out of depth talking about anything with a temporary duration with all respect for addressing that with talk therapy, for my constellation it is lifelong, irreversible and if i'm not on restricted category drugs the side effects are neurological decline into tardive

i'm a better pharmacologist than any prescriber i've ever seen and the best USAian mental health care i have received has been basically pill mills with no pretense this wasn't transactional and no one used the language of personal empowerment

Teletherapy getting desperate in ad pitches to me, a person who left psych as a field early on because i think clinical psych is a scam to sell dodgy pills that don't work rather than just legalize drugs

honestly turkish delight kinda whips but i think roses taste good

i love that i am both depending on perspective

Glass men front cover. Scratchy writing, and something indistinct in a high-contrast scan. donated by juniper h lark

the first page, outlining the situation. "The city tears out the old, filling the wound with cement and rebar and glass and steel. Locals call this wound The Med. Workers build towers for young professionals. They will never be able to afford to live in these buildings. The smiling face of a white man in a suit watches them from a billboard. Above him is the legend "NEVILLE DEVELOPMENTS". As the workers finish each day, the girls come out. Some hurry home to wives and girlfriends and children. Others do not, and trade a days wages for company and attention. Hannibal runs a string of eight girls out of the Cannae Tower. They stay in a pair of apartments he rents out to them. Both are filled with single mattresses. The rooms used for work are clean, and have double beds. These rooms are just opposite the apartments they live in. In addition to rent, Hannibal collects half of their take each week. He holds seven of their passports; the other two are citizens. In addition to paying rent, six use him as their dealer and illegal pharmacy. He has a cousin, Mago. Mago provides prescription pills and HRT for a free fuck once a week. There was a ninth girl. Everyone called her Honey. None of the girls use their real names. Two weeks ago, she vanished. She had not said anything about it to the other girls, and Hannibal has done nothing to look into it. This has all of them worried; when Sofia tried to flee, she returned bruised and shaking."

a new adventure for violence is now for sale. all proceeds are being donated to @cosmic-chill.bsky.social to help her relocation efforts. if you already donated, lmk and i'll hit you with the pdf.

it's a very horrible adventure.

lukegearing.itch.io/glass-men

24. i think being good at counting cards (i'm pretty good at piquet) and pretty good at engine building games (i really enjoy playing ForEx) is really unrelated to me being the sort of person who is supremely weird in adventure settings and has a tendency to start lots of fires

23. i think there is something fun about finding the limits of systems (ex. how can i maximize movement distance and how do i weaponize this) and getting skilled at systems (realizing where there is a maximal explosive potential) but i also think a fun thing about games is puzzles outside rules

To be clear, if you don't think MI2 is the best in series and the only time that Tom Cruise even vaguely acts convincingly human i don't know what to say to you (other than git gud)

22. honestly the Gazebo and pronunciation thing remains a wonderful case study of nerds, nerd culture and memes/how TTRPGs have a wildly magnetic hold on the popular consciousness despite being a widely considered uncool hobby for at least 4 editions

21. i think for there to be a sense of meaningful consequences there has to be a sense of meaningful scale and risk and ability to calculate odds, i think the generalized failures of math education are sometimes like... really distressing? like even watching Donald Duck in Math Magic Land may help

20. if in game actions have moral consequences it should have perverse rather than incentivized benefit structures

19. if you include "cheating to make a village with a problem quickly" i have run Scenic Dunnsmouth the most of pretty much anything in TTRPGs

18. keeping strict time tables and tracking encumbrance is what makes Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine something i've run at least a dozen times and yet, despite the fixed nature of the dungeon, i've never had a repeat experience.

17. i think about Wet Grandpa frequently as like an adventure that does everything that people claim they want and yet gets no goddamn love for it outside of people deep into adventure vinyl collecting or actually running games

16. a lot of my adventure design meta is taking moral theory meta questions (eg. shoot the cat save the bird) and connecting them weirdly with stuff and putting them in a box, i remain convinced this is more likely to make people get invested in and out of character in whatever is going on

adopting urban design and public housing solutions invented more than a century ago with some nice additions from materials science advances and urban farming/greening knowledge being increased feels depressing to say is "utopian"

15. i think there is something vital in making NPCs not exist at moral extremes but rather in the sorta make best and make due mindset of a person that manages to survive long enough to meet the weird excessive people

14. There is something deeply poisonous, in my mind, in the choice to try to make the imaginary world fair and good rather than interesting and dynamic but i realize i'm not a worshipper of the same gods as most people in my field

13. I think there is probably a Nietzsche style precis on the dislike of "luck" in the minds of designers since it interferes with the narrative they assume in designing such linear set pieces (i think thwarted director is a more apt description than failed writer)

12. i also think there probably is something about the concept that there *can* be something that is utterly alien (cannot be negotiated with to share/appoint resources), organized and dangerous to human life has transferred to sorta using monsters as stand ins for human tendencies + anthro-baggage

11. I think how much you like the old game's emphasis on wilderness survival and trekking about before you get to do anything (and emphasis on packing/organizing for expeditions) represents a set of skills more alien to modern young people than swinging a sword or infantry combat