Uncanny Kate Kirby

Not a USA citizen?

Don't come to the USA as a tourist.
Don't come to the USA for a conference.
Don't come tot he USA to watch football.

Visit Canada. Go to Europe. But avoid the USA. It's not worth the risk. We have the dumbest fascists in charge here. You don't want to be subject to their whims.

Yeah, with a few exceptions I’d rather just have my main books than crossovers, but that’s the life of a comics reader. I’m enjoying DCKO a lot more than the X-Men Age of Revelation event for sure, that one was rough.

To be fair, both Marvel and DC have Godzilla fighting everyone for some reason.

But DC KO has been really fun. Marvel put out a Battleworld book that was half-baked and required specific nostalgia for the New Universe that died in the 80s.

Marvel has some books I’m enjoying (Fantastic Four, Uncanny X-Men, Black Cat), but they don’t seem to have the consistency and focus of DC right now. It’s been mostly the other way for the last 40 years, so this is weird as hell, but I keep adding DCs and dropping Marvels.

I’ve been reading comics since the mid-90s. Not since the rise of the original Vertigo has DC been in a better spot in terms of producing quality books. The Absolute line, the return of Vertigo, great regular books (e.g. Batman, Poison Ivy), the Gunn movies, they’re creatively crushing it.

2026 details coming soon but planting a seed hopefully! There’s nothing like an intimate convention of nerds playing games, and small cons hit in a way big cons can’t, if they’re done right.

They very rarely are, but this one is.

D8 Summit Charities Inc When you game for charity, everyone wins!

Want to come to a small D&D convention (with a few other games mixed in) where everyone there is really a wonderful human being? Willing to get to Chicago and then drive an hour or so? Want literally all the profit to go to charity?

Come to d8summit.org!

I'd love to see more friends!

If you want to shake off some rust with an online game at some point, give me a hoot! :D

Also congrats not being dependent on ill-advised self-medication any more! It’s still a big deal!

Yeah, for sure, 4e is not a game that’s going to play as well if people are, for one reason or another, not focused. This is a valid complaint for the way a lot of people play, that they never realized explicitly but colored a lot of commentary.

I mostly played LFR at the game store, but everyone knew their characters very well and knew there was a hard time limiit, so I never really experienced the 4E Slowdown Problems that plagued a lot of groups. It was culturally expected to know what your turn would be in advance.

4E was the only game I enjoyed GMing ever. I’ve tried many other systems, but the programmeryness of 4e Monsters just was fun for me.

Yeah, I’ve tried to be a rules-light, roleplay heavy player my whole life, but the truth is my autistic brain just wants to play D&D 4E or whatever is closest to that.

Also why the era of Let’s All Attack 4E felt so personal and demoralizing.

Forget butch, femme, whatever. I’m a homogoblin.

And why is she sort of holding a shield and there’s ANOTHER shield right in front of her?

Why did someone look at this and not notice anything and spend presumably a non-trivial amount of money to make a print of it?

I’m pretty sure the actual Democratic Party secret plan is: These idiots keep voting for these monsters. Fine. Let’s let them do what they keep trying to do, and if people suffer enough, maybe they’ll learn their lesson and stop voting like that.

Which, oof. No thank you.

Spent most of the day wondering why my code didn’t work. I based it on a snippet that was in production.

Eventually realized, and you already figured this out, there was a bug in the existing code.

So I fixed not only my problem but a prod bug, yay! I guess.

In the last decade, I spent 5 years working at a company called Vindicia and 3 at a company that changed its name to Veradigm, and it’s been less than a year since I worked there, but I already have to stop and really think to rememer which one was fintech and which one was healthtech.

Yup. I transitioned circa 2012 and the overwhelmingly most common response, from conservatives and liberals alike, was “I don’t really get it but if it makes you happy, I’m happy for you.”

It really sucks now seeing horrible, uninformed opinions about you and your friends every single day.

That’s really unfortunate, because good automatic alt-text would be useful, and it seems like something a computer could be good at, but I guess right now it is not.

That’s the trouble with AI, even when there’s a positive use case it still just sucks.

Nena tried to warn us, but she was right. Everyone is a Captain Kirk.

I don’t understand why we have AI that’s taking our jobs but still don’t have a solo vs. AI mode for Magic Arena.

One thing I never knew until I moved to Chicagoland is the joy of Melt Day. When the temperatures finally rise up and snow that’s been on the ground for weeks or months finally starts to clear out. It’s amazing.

Yeah. D&D sometimes has Group Checks (like for stealth) and sometimes everyone has to make a roll (like Survival for the blizzard), but mostly it’s a Put Your Best PC Forward game.

It just doesn’t reward anything else enough to invest resources in it. (And I’ve tried!)

The problem in my mind with breadth in a 4-6 party based RPG, is that you end up never getting to do the thing you are second best at. And if you do, you’re stepping on someone else’s role. It’s a very game-y concern, but too much breadth feeds Main Character Syndrome players. Specialization works.

I’m always relieved on Monday morning when my work login still works.

I’ve never been stealth fired and all indications are that I’m doing well at my job and the company is healthy, but there’s a baseline of anxiety that I won’t lose until I’m retired.

Correct.

Yay, congrats to Seattle! Dominant performance, enjoy your accolades!

Now, I think about baseball.

The SuperBowl MVP should be (but won’t be) the Seattle Punter.

If some guy walked by and squirted mayo on my lunch I would very probably punch them in the dick. And make them buy me a new lunch because I can’t eat that stuff.