at some point i got so surrounded with people who say things i fully just do not have any context for, who seem sort of happy to be posting increasingly insular stuff, that i just completely stopped trying to relate to other humans

this place has become a sort of pruning ground for me and i do just sort of snip people out when i don't understand or like most of what they are saying, so here it's not such a problem anymore.

it was harder for me to do that in other places i think because there existed the distant hope that i might, you know, leapfrog from person to person and eventually escape this mire of ironic injoke jargon people

like yk, in theory if you don't like your friend circle, maybe one of those people has a friend who is like 2% less exhibiting whatever qualities you don't like, and so you can kind of move outward that way and try to escape the pit, but idk. i fully don't have the social skills to just somehow discover people who are in no way related to me socially, i feel like i have to learn of people through people i already know

the entire culture of saying things that are mildly funny and then acting like you said something bad and everyone hates it, and everyone who likes it is also like "i hate this" which means they like it, and

i understand why people post like that, i understand play antagonism, i just find that to be too many layers for me, i can't keep up with it. it's like pretending i enjoy parties

i feel like always i should be reminding myself that all things in my life are in context of like, the current arc i'm in

the current arc i'm in is like, i've been chaining bad situations since i was 5, with endless phoenix-like burnout periodically incinerating my attempts to gain skills and make stuff, and now things are sort of okay and i'm like 5ish years into discovering what that's like and repairing damage and stuff

i spent a while noticing the sheer difference in my ability to think, and then i spent a while tweaking my personality to be less bristly and defensive, less fawning and hypercompetant, etc. ongoing work, but enough of that is done now that i could start other things

running d&d games while trying to fit them into my grand vision for a variant on 5e d&d that hits all the classic notes without any of the classic bigotry, that's like a sort of repair project upon my executive function and creative followthrough

breadmaking is about being more physical in a way that doesn't have the baggage of "exercise," being more connected to housework so i can pitch in more, and having a palpable Thing I Make that people can Receive from me if i so choose

taking a bunch of distance socially was a reaction to letting go of so much of the like. yk, personality stuff that i developed while trying to make shit situations more survivable, because simply saying no to those situations wasn't a strategic possibility for me back then but hopefully now it will be

like oh, this person makes me feel bad? this person makes me feel bad? this other person makes me feel bad? maybe these aren't projects i need to solve, maybe this is a thing where i just play zelda and brainstorm ideas for who lives in this cavern system coming up in my home game

i always had it impressed upon me that people need other people, that's normal. the intense maladaptive responses i felt seemed like an expression of the normal need for other people. i think i've been sort of learning that, like, no, you don't actually need other people THAT much

any more than 6 people and d&d really slows the hell down during combat, for one

although i saw an interesting idea somewhere that you can get players with adjacent initiatives to pair up and they can take their turns simultaneously and it promotes a bit of pre-turn strategising, that was interesting to me

like if your initiative order is like

20 roberta the rogue
21 patricia the paladin
17 sally the sorceror
15 several royal guards
14 bella the berzerker
7 the captain of the royal guard

you can fudge it so that the royal guards go after roberta and patricia, thjen put sally and bella together, and then whenever you're doing your boring dm stuff that nobody cares about like rolling to hit the invincible bastard player characters, there can be some strategising between the pairs

d&d to me is like, whatever you can say about it as a system is secondary to what you can say about it as a cultural onboarding point for ttrpgs in general

the vast majority of people have not played ttrpgs, yk? it requires a group of adults to be reasonably punctual, organised, and capable of having structured fun where sometimes only one person gets to talk. imo it's sort of a miracle anyone plays them at all

i think of designing a homebrew set of rules to sit on top of d&d 5e like um, like it's when you have a cupboard full of shit and you want to organise it, and right now i'm at the point where the shit is no longer in the cupboard, it's everywhere and the whole house is a mess now

and it's kind of hard, i think, to get other people to understand how ORGANISED it's going to be when i'm done

the big problem area for me is the character race bit, it's a huge sticking point for a million reasons. a lot of people probably flick open that player's hand book to the half-elf bit and it just turns them off the entire genre, the entire tabletop thing

conceptually it's a missed opportunity because d&d as a brand is about like, trying to cash in on that big tolkien stranger things critical role zone where it's like, zhwooosh i'm a cool elf archer whom is aloof... fakoooom i'm a wizard with a big hat.... swooosh im a copy of Men's Health wearing 50lbs of steel

it could so easily just be okay so your character class is wizard? what did you do before you were a wizard? pick three of these or whatever

oh and you have a prehensile cat tail? coz your dad had one? cool okay here's the cat tail rules

that's IT! that's all i'm really doing

it's kind of wild that anyone ever treated me like all i'm doing is overcomplicating d&d when i'm fixing the biggest most glaringest issue with it

i'd like to think someday i could maybe make friends with some of the various queer cousins i apparently have, and maybe since i rule at running d&d they might want a game, and it'd be good to be able to say yes without having to run a bigotry calculus, like when you want to show someone any clip from the mighty boosh or spaced or whatever

"hah, mighty boosh was hilarious wasn't it." -puts on mighty boosh- "..oh right, yes."