Hmm! Or maybe the opposite. 
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Now you have me worried about my assumptions. I assumed it was pretty old given the ju-ju bees which I think are the same thing as in I am the Walrus by the Beatles and I have no idea what they are and haven’t even see the word except in really old stuff when I was a kid….
Has it in a book from 1996. The DFW collection I think…
And the story was originally published in 2000 I think.
So I’m pretty sure DFW was responding to this as a prompt and I also think it is a good bit earlier than 1996, perhaps 70s early 80s?
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Makes sense, good sleuthing!
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Since everyone is all about Sword Lesbians thanks to Chappell
Go read BLADE MAIDENS! @valentinemsmith.bsky.social and I make it, and it stars a bunch of rowdy fantasy queers of varying flavors trying to get by as a band of mercenaries with a price on their head!
It’s all free! https://www.blademaidens.com
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I love this so far, but it’s making my already substantial yearning to play some D&D almost unbearable.
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There were a number of early criticisms about changes made leading up to this release. Is anything raising alarm bells right now, or does everything seem like a reasonable update?
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So far the only thing that I’ve picked up on that I really dislike is the limited Wizard/Cleric subclasses. They went with 4 subclasses for each major class and the PHB Wizard only has Abjurer, Evoker, Illusionist and Diviner. IMO, those are four of the better classes from the original 5E PHB, but it’s still a bummer. The Storm Cleric is also missing, which is sad. I’m sure WoTC will make up for it by selling more books later. 
The psionic subclasses for Fighter and Rogue both looks pretty cool, though. Oh, they made the Warlock Pacts into Invocations. It’s kind of cool that you can have more than one pact, but taking up an invocation selection is a high price to pay.
As far as changes to character creation I noticed they moved ability score adjustments away from species to background and made starting gold the same across background. That all seems fine.
I like the additional weapon mastery options. The main difference among spells that I noticed so far is that they nerfed Animate Objects, which needed nerfing. I haven’t played 5E for a few years, though, and I haven’t done any side-by-side comparisons with the old PHB, so I don’t know what has changed in the rules. There is a rules glossary which looks super handy, though.
It all seems reasonable, and nothing seems totally incompatible with earlier 5E that I’ve noticed. So no alarm bells for me so far.
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So isn’t a big part of the whole D&D thing making shit up as you go along? If you want a character that can do specific stuff, create it and get the ok from the group to play with it.
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Yes absolutely, as long as everyone is having fun. And I’m sure the old Wizard/Cleric classes can still be used with some mild adjustments to fit in with the newer rules, so that’s really not a huge deal. I just experienced some initial disappointment when most every class had new and fun-looking published options, and then the Wizard and Cleric had fewer.
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Well this really sucks. It seems likely that Neil Gaiman may be among the club of great authors who also turn out to be terrible people.
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Good Omens I didn’t know there was a 3rd season - I think they should have just done the one anyway. Dead Boys I didn’t get into.
But if this fallout kills The Sandman I’m gonna be pissed!
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In light of the nature of the allegations, I don’t really give a shit about his tv shows. He’s accused of nonconsensual sex, aka rape. If true, he, and everything he created, can die in a fire and I won’t be mad.
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Anyway… These allegations came to light this summer… If people are interested in the details, Council of Geeks did a deep dive into what the allegations are, the podcast that made them public, it’s sometimes problematic nature, but also the fact that there seems to be a great deal of there there…
It’s enraging and upsetting for someone that so many fans of fantasy adore seems to have done some awful shit. I feel for the women he’s hurt and I hope they’re doing okay. All he’s seem to done so far is just deny it all, and claim all the encounters were consensual (and all seemed to have been within the context of otherwise consensual relationships)…
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A Perfect Vacuum Stanislaw Lem. Book reviews of books that have never been written, and probably should never be written. I only wish I had read some of the books he’s parodying.
“It was on the Babylonian cycle, then, that Patrick Hannahan decided to spread his epic canvas—a curious enough canvas, let us note, because his Gigamesh is a story extremely limited in time and space. The notorious gangster, hired killer, and American soldier (of the time of the last world war) “GI Joe” Maesch, unmasked in his criminal activity by an informer, one N. Kiddy, is to be hanged—by sentence of the military tribunal—in a small town in Norfolk County, where his unit is stationed. The whole action takes thirty-six minutes, the time required to transport the condemned man from his cell to the place of execution. The story ends with the image of the noose, whose black loop, seen against the sky, falls upon the neck of the calmly standing Maesch. This Maesch is of course Gilgamesh, the semidivine hero of the Babylonian epos, and the one who sends him to the gallows—his old buddy N. Kiddy—is Gilgamesh’s closest friend, Enkidu, created by the gods in order to bring about the hero’s downfall. When we present it thus, the similarity in creative method between Ulysses and Gigamesh becomes immediately apparent. But justice demands that we concentrate on the differences between these two works. Our task is made easier in that Hannahan—unlike Joyce!—provided his book with a commentary, which is twice the size of the novel itself (to be exact, Gigamesh runs 395 pages, the Commentary 847). We learn at once how Hannahan’s method works: the first, seventy-page chapter of the Commentary explains to us all the divergent allusions that emanate from a single, solitary word—namely, the title. Gigamesh derives first, obviously, from Gilgamesh: with this is revealed the mythic prototype, just as in Joyce, for his Ulysses also supplies the classical referent before the reader comes to the first word of the text. The omission of the letter L in the name Gigamesh is no accident; L is Lucifer, Lucipherus, the Prince of Darkness, present in the work although he puts in no personal appearance. Thus the letter (L) is to the name (Gigamesh) as Lucifer is to the events of the novel: he is there, but invisibly. Through “Logos” L indicates the Beginning (the Causative Word of Genesis); through Laocoon, the End (for Laocoon’s end is brought about by serpents: he was strangled, as will be strangled—by the rope—the hero of Gigamesh). L has ninety-seven further connections, but we cannot expound them here.”
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One of Lem’s best works, translated by his best translator, Micheal Kandel.
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Gaiman has long left me feeling uncomfortable with who he is thanks to an interview (or behind-the-scenes things) he did following “The Doctor’s Wife” episode of Doctor Who. He lamented that budgetary restrictions meant they couldn’t have a scene with the TARDIS’s swimming pool. Then he went on to explain it was because he wanted to see Karen Gillan swimming and she has very long legs…
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Only one I’ve read is Everett’s James, which I considered excellent.
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So, it’s indisputably the perfect time of year for reading horror fiction, and I’m super happy that I recently picked up House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I’m not far in (page 85), but a lot of the novel is footnotes and appendixes (appendices? appendipodes?) so it involves a good bit of flipping around. And the flipping back and forth between the beginning and ending pages offers glimpses of how much weirder the book is going to get. It’s pretty exciting. And maybe better as a physical book than an e-book.
I came to the book from the video game Alan Wake, which includes the song Haunted by Poe at the end of an episode. I really liked the song, then really liked the album, then found out that the album and House of Leaves are companion works (Poe and Mark are siblings, she helped to edit the book while he was writing it). And then I found out that the book was a big inspiration for the Remedy Connected Universe (includes Alan Wake). I’m hoping to finish the book and maybe start playing Alan Wake 2 in time for Halloween (and Poe wrote a new song for AW2!).
https://bookshop.org/p/books/house-of-leaves-mark-z-danielewski/8494487?ean=9780375703768
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