The Rise of Fascism; or: When It’s Time to Burn Sh*t Down!

Posted on 18 September, 2025 by patrickmspeaks

So we’re going to start this with Charlie Kirk, who’s still dead, we should all be glad he’s dead, just now how he got dead, because the fascist regime is going to use this to make our free country dead. But more dead fascists would be good. Starting with the pedo traitor trump.

The paragraph above is for Baby JD and all the other MAGAt twats that want to make this into a witch hunt for people on the “left”. So if there’s an ANTIFA out there, count me as in it, you couch-fucking coward.

This is not exaggeration. This is saying that the free(ish) (in theory) country natural-born American have lived in all their lives may not make it to 250 years. And that’s 2026. As a reminder, we’re in 20205, where dumpster fire memes retired before the 5-year anniversary of the COVID plague (mid-March, for those of you who don’t occasionally get to see customer emails from those days in 2020, because the history will only be there a while longer).

I really fucking hate to say it, but up until the right-wing(ish) Mormon gun nut that proved the best shooters and worst people come from the right, it was mostly just the fascist regime breaking laws and daring people to fight back (which leads the Democrats shitting out strongly worded letters for the most part). Now they got themselves a martyr who clearly would be just fine with getting shot in his fucking neck being the price to have more guns (and dead schoolkids).

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So the latest news as I type this is Jimmy Kimmel getting suspended because the fascist baby didn’t like something he said so he had his FCC goons lean on ABC, who folded like Charlie a second after the bullet hit. Of course, if you are in any way not a brainless MAGAt fuck, you know this is government-sponsored censorship and you shouldn’t be OK with it.

So that brings me back to what I said in my post last week. In that post, I deplored using violence, SPECIFICALLY ASSASSINATION, as a means to fight your political opponent. And I still mean that. Let me quote me from the last post:

POLITICAL VIOLENCE TOWARD PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY ASSASSINATION, IS NEVER AN ACCEPTABLE WAY TO ACHIEVE A POLITICAL GOAL! AT WORST, IT’S FUCKING TERRORISM!

So, are we clear on that? Yes? Good. Now let’s talk about when it is, or more specifically, when we can begin abolishing this fucking sad excuse for a “MAGA” country.

A side note on that though. Charlie Kirk was a little down the totem pole on the list of people to shoot, even if we ok the assassinations.

The first rule here is that in a country where free discourse is still possible and the ballot box is not just the tool of the strongman (who always wins with overwhelming support) or the Party (who surprisingly only puts people who will win on the ballot), WE DON’T ASSASSINATE PEOPLE!

Now forms of violence such as fucking with the ICE gestapo (who is literally doing secret police shit) is morally acceptable as long as you allow them to retreat back into their fucking hidey holes, and that’s only in defense of people they seek to kidnap. Vandalism of private property I have issues with, but going Banksy-style and slapping transgressive art where it means the most (or just have Superman punching (or Krypto pissing on) and ICE thug bastard in graffiti is perfectly acceptable, if you can avoid getting caught by cops, of course. As is flat out making cops arrest you if you rainbow up a crosswalk in the fascist state of Florida (and maybe Texas, but it’s too hot and shitty out there to walk outside).

So some of those things are definitely allowable things when it comes to violence in an oppressive but still somewhat free country like this one.

What’s not OK is doxxing people (even the fascists, because children are innocent even if their parents are shit). Attacking speakers, even the fascist ones like Charlie Kirk (send in counter-arguers who could shut his rhetorical shit down (no longer necessary)). Fight fire with fire, like the transphobic asshat Gavin Newsome, who’s counter to the gerrymandering in Texas is gerrymandering in California (suck it, Huntington Beach!), or his shit-tweeting like trump just to show how stupid trump really is.

I really fucking hope I don’t have to fucking vote for Gavin fucking Newsome in 2028. He sucks. Come on Dems, find at least a marginally good candidate. Also, not Kamala again.

So what does it take to declare open season on politicians, and hope they can get trump, Baby JD, and Mike Johnson all fast enough that none can assume the presidency (seriously, the president pro tempore of the Senate is the best option, because after him comes trump cabinet cunts)? I can assure you we’re not there yet, and the only way they should all die is together in a natural disaster or mechanical accident. It’s certainly not if someone loses an election (think that fucking traitorous insurrection on January 6th which should have landed trump in prison). It’s not where we are now where the fascists are trying to take all the power.

It’s when the ballot box no longer matters. It may be too late at that point and we may be comparing Baby JD to Putin (because I think trump will probably “die of natural causes” if the goddam fucking fascist christian nationalists have their way). It may be that the outspoken are either in prison or dead, and a bunch of ill-informed “patriots” are waving their flags as their “commie leftists” neighbors all get rounded up (I’m not going that way, I assure you). It’s on the day that the mere accusation is automatic guilt, and our justice system has become a kangaroo court (basically SCOTUS once the last three “un-American” justices are removed).

So I will give this as a warning to the MAGAts: There is a point where our 249-year-old government ceases to be the government of/by/for the people, at which point it becomes destructive to those ends, at which point some altering/abolishing is in order. Last time we got to that point, we shot a lot of people.

I don’t think we’re definitely going to reach that point (each month I become less optimistic). I’m thinking that there are still enough organizations and people on the right who actually believe in freedom in some way (ex. the fucking NRA actually came out AGAINST banning trans people from owning guns, showing at least moral consistency), and seeing blatant examples of rights being stripped to empower one party is starting to send some small alarm bells.

This is what we need. I disagree with conservative philosophy in large part, but the ground-level conservatives (not the fucking MAGAts) and the libertarians do at least have some things in common with the rest of us: They seek to allow people to pursue their own interest without undue burden by the government.

So I do have advice. Find your conservative friends, if you have any left. Show them what the fascist regime is doing, and find out if they would be okay with Dems doing it. If not, they should be on our side. Because the choice here is either totalitarians on the right (which we have NOW) or the threat of totalitarians on the left (think Obama/Biden, but they could close churches they disagree with or something).

My whole point is that the MAGAts are winning the war of ideas just by fucking lying. But showing people that what is going on is not okay, no matter who is in power, is the only way we avoid having to check sight lines for good sniper positions for our tyrant leaders. Though, at worst, at least Charlie Kirk (who is still dead and I am feeling fine about that) has given us the means to deal with the fascists if this country falls.

FYI: a neck shot bleeds them out quick so death is sure, but it’s a very precise shot. A head shot removes the brain case, but means a closed casket and good aim, and a heart/lung shot is absolutely the most effective because it also bleeds everything out, and is also the center of mass, and easiest to hit. I learned some of this from deer hunting, but it’s also why cops are trained to shoot people in the chest.

This is not a call to actually shoot someone (see the bold/caps quote above), but here because the MAGAts hate to have shit thrown in their faces. Also, Charlie Kirk is still dead, and more of the MAGAts should follow his example (but no one should help them by assassinating them).

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9/11, Another School Shooting, and a Dead Fascist

Posted on 11 September, 2025 by patrickmspeaks

So it’s been 24 years since the OG 9/11, when my father was alive, my grandmother was alive, and my kids were not yet born. By now, for me, most of that day is back in memory, from the aforementioned grandmother waking me to check out the news, to watching Fox News as the second plane hit, to everything we already know about the day. But what I want to think about is how we reacted. How I reacted.

Like many on the right (and left, and center and everywhere else), I was pissed. We all were. Here were thousands of people murdered while the nation watched in real time, and even the anti-Bush “selected note elected” crowd was generally in agreement that we needed to rally as a nation and fuck some shit up. I know I had a few slurs for those in the Middle East who had pulled this shit, and a desire to turn their fucking country into a sheet of glass. So off to Afghanistan, and then when the administration said Iraq was next, I was, like, ok, let’s get ’em.

We’re still living with the consequences of that unmitigated level of revenge, the worst we’ve been as a whole since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and we responded by going to war and dropping the first and last two atomic weapons ever used in war. I’m really hoping I don’t need the words “so far” in here, but it’s 2025 and we’ll get to that.

An attack of this nature tends to galvanize the “us vs them” mentality far too fast, and often leads to bad shit. In WW2, besides the nuking, we interred Americans who happened to also be of Japanese descent because of their racial makeup (not our first time we’d do this shit and not the last, importunately). Again, this is 2025. For 9/11, it was the perpetual war on terror, which every president has used to justify shit (I can’t blame the rapist trump alone for this) targeting whoever they decided to designate a terrorist. It justifies dehumanizing people.

The worst example of this is the October 7 attack on Israel. The apartheid government of Israel has used it as a pretext to turn it up to genocide in Gaza and attacks on other countries, to the point even some of the warmongers in this country are suggesting backing off a bit. Not that this would stop the Bibi the war criminal. Wonder what his version of the Final Solution will be?

Probably not the same as the current fascist regime here, who has taken calling people terrorists to new lows. Like people who traffic drugs. And immigrants. There’s a reason they love the phrase “criminal illegal aliens”, because who the fuck would want those cunts anywhere near our great country. After all, they come here to steal all the welfare, all the jobs, and kill Americans at unprecedented rates. Except all of that is a lie and you’re more likely to get shot at school now than get gutted by a latino criminal illegal alien from a shithole country.

For example, while we were dealing with the inevitable shooting that occurred yesterday, there was a also another inevitable school shooting at Evergreen High School. Luckily, only three students were injured, no one was killed, and the shooter chose the suicide solution. This was close to the best outcome. The trauma is the same, but everybody (except maybe a permanently injured student (unknown at this time)) gets to walk away relatively unscathed. But despite the need for this to fucking never become normal. It’s become fucking normal. Fuck.

For the family and personal friends of Charlie Kirk, however, their notion of normal became part of the price for having guns (as Charlie would have said). However, I’m going to say very little about Charlie Kirk himself, as he was a Nazi piece of shit whose words and actions hurt people, and the world is better off without him in it. The only silver lining is that the shooter was a sniper, and he hit and killed his target without collateral damage. Assassinations are bad enough without indiscriminate killing making it worse.

Instead, I want to focus on the act of assassination itself. Since I’ve been rambling, I’m going to make this its own paragraph, in all caps and in bold. If anything said about what I write here disagrees with the following statement, the person who says it is a lying and dishonest fuck:

POLITICAL VIOLENCE TOWARD PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY ASSASSINATION, IS NEVER AN ACCEPTABLE WAY TO ACHIEVE A POLITICAL GOAL! AT WORST, IT’S FUCKING TERRORISM!

Okay, back to nuance. I know that the fascist regime is trying to erase a free country to secure one-party rule, to the point they’re kidnapping people, going on vindictive criminal prosecution, branding people terrorists to justify anything (and so far, that’s just Kilmar Abrego-Garcia), quashing free speech where they can, outright murdering suspected criminals (that boat in the Gulf of Mexico), laying the groundwork for a trans genocide, dismantling the medical apparatus that has been working to save us from all the pandemics (hi, measles), and way too many shitty horrible things to list here (though Charlie Kirk supported all of these and added “fuck empathy” for good measure. And that’s all before we get to the “normal” conservative playbook, of which I find much I disagree with, but it’s within their purview to do since they won.

As a result, the polarization of people in this country has been turned up to 11 (I wonder if the Spinal Tap sequel will top 11 for a joke. Maybe 11 1/2?), and what happened to Charlie yesterday was inevitable. That someone with an ax to grind and a screw loose would find a soft target and take a shot (note, we don’t positively know the identity of the shooter or his motives as I write this, so I have to speculate, though looking at the recently released picture, the suspect looks kinda like a Charlie Kirk follower). And in this case, it was an organizer and speaker on the right.

And as long as we continue on the path we’re on, there will be more shootings, more violence, and more death. And with it being one of theirs, I suspect the fascists will be using it as a reason to escalate things.

I even saw, today, a post from a local small-town politician (and trans woman) who commented about the fallout from the assassination (where every notable Democrat showed up to condemn the Nazi getting shot), only to be met with a death threat:

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So back to my boilerplate above, this is still a free country (more or less). We should condemn any attack on politicians and political figures of any kind of affiliation. Even fucking Nazis. You don’t shoot them. You don’t initiate violence against them. You can curse them all you want, or maybe hope they slide under a gas truck and taste their own blood. You can find a bit of joy that you never have to look at their punchable faces or listen to their condescension if they die.

But we can’t keep escalating the violent rhetoric. I don’t care how trump leaves office. I assume it’s feet first because he’s dead and I will consider how hard it would be to organize a national pissing on his grave. If trump takes after a man he admires (Hitler, specifically or Jeffrey Epstein since he and trump were good pedo rape-mates) and goes for a Beretta blowjob, I won’t mind. If his rotten and diseased heart decides to explode like a blood sausage in his chest, sure. If he decides to try out that 747 he grifted in his Middle East Deal-a-thon and it malfunctions and slams into the side of a fucking mountain, cool. But I don’t want it to be from an assassin’s bullet because no one wins. Even if it gets rid of the execrable monster.

As for the shooter, they need to be found, brought to justice, and prosecuted like the murdering bastard they are. Period. EVEN IF I sympathized with the reason they did it, they’re still a murderer, and that doesn’t change what should happen.

But let’s bring this rambling home, we have choice now. And we all have to agree (even the fascists). We can either take steps to cool things on each side and try to bring this back to just hating each other in the normal political way, or we can spiral this into a real civil war, with no clear lines and bloodshed everywhere. We can choose to find common ground (though that’s a stretch with the current fascist regime), or we can all exercise our second amendment rights until the shooting starts.

Back in 2024, Heritage Foundation (the fuckbags that put out Project 2025) President Kevin Roberts said that the so-called “Second American Revolution” would be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” He knew when he said it, and everyone knows, that you don’t overthrow a free (ish) country without spilling blood. No one left of the fascists wants an actual war. Unless they bring the war to us. Then it will be a fight.

I am not optimistic about this country’s chances.

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Thoughts on Francis

Posted on 27 April, 2025 by patrickmspeaks

So due to my first cold in a while, and a busy schedule when I wasn’t sick, I started this post the day the news broke, but then got stalled (because the cold kicked into gear on the same day). And I think that helped, because it let me hear what others were saying, and also allowed me to congeal my thoughts a little better. So let’s go:

The world woke the Monday after Easter to find that Pope Francis (the only Francis so far) had died, a day after making an appearance for the holiday the day prior, at 88. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, he was the first pope from the Americas, first from the Southern Hemisphere, and first pope not from Europe since the 8th century.

He died not too long after Baby JD (Vance) met with him, so the conspiracy theory is that Baby JD killed him. Let’s go with that, because fuck that couch-fucking moron.

Needless to say, a really big chunk of the world is mourning. From faithful Catholics, to other denominations, and people in many places. Even the FOTUS managed a restrained and respectable “lie” on Lie Social, and generally not too much bad rambling (just stupid rambling).

For clarification, I refer to the liar trump’s lie-infested social media lies site as Lie Social, therefor every post on it (a so-called “truth”) is a lie. Also, he probably fucking lied when he posted that lie. But this post ain’t about that liar, so….

Being a former Catholic, I don’t exactly feel the loss as I did many years ago when the pope that I was raised on died (that was John Paul II, who was a goddam rock star during my 8 FUCKING YEARS!!! of Catholic school). I won’t judge Francis by how he led the church, from a faith point of view (that always is going to be bad from my viewpoint), because that’s left to the Catholics to decide. But I can judge him oh how his papacy affected the world. But first, a pic of a young, kinda cute Jorge, before he fully got his priest on:

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Overall, as far a a pope goes Francis was good for the world (especially after the relative assholery of the scapegoat pope Benedict). Being the child of immigrants fleeing from fascism, he’s was an ally to the poor and oppressed overall. And he strove to be humble, even to his relatively understated funeral and burial in a church that ministered to more poor people. Considering the usual snapshot of any papal gathering reads as “celibate cunts in big hats”, this is a little refreshing.

On immigrants, he generally supported treating them as Jesus would, accepting and helping them. He condemned actions that targeted immigrants. including his line of “Build bridges, not walls’ (which got flung into the FOTUS’s fucking face freshly at Francis’ funeral).

My Glob, I love alliteration. Especially when the letter F is involved.

Beyond the ecumenical movement of the church, he reached out to non-Christian faiths to find common ground. This generally leads to peace, because finding common ground (even through the stupid interfaith noise) leads to more understanding, which allows you to see the other as people. This was something I believed in very much as a young Catholic. And the outpouring from across faiths at the funeral shows this made the world smaller and closer. And everyone recognizing their religion is less unique can only benefit those of us who think it’s pretty much all bullshit.

On a side note I’d like to thank the non-ecumenical christians I met in my college days who shat on my Catholicism. Just to be clear, you planted atheist seeds in me. I’m sure your fucking god would be pissed.

He pushed for more action on climate change, recognizing this is going to impact the poorest countries and people. No real notes here. The science is pretty solid, and only an idiot denies it’s a problem that must be addressed.

He generally was against war. That played well in terms of Israel’s genocide of Gaza, and is a mixed bag with Ukraine. I don’t know enough to speak to any other wars he may have addressed.

As for the LGBTQIA+ community… he was an “improvement”. While church doctrine didn’t substantially change concerning queer folk, he at least made an verbal effort to push the needle in the right direction by being nicer to the community as people. A little support for trans folk would have been helpful though, because they are getting fucked by multiple transphobic governments this year.

Take the above paragraph above replace anything generally queer with women, and it was pretty much the same. I’ll reiterate the trans issue here , since it’s mainly trans women that are the particular victims of the aforementioned government bullshittery.

As for sexual abuse by rapey priests and the most important thing the church ever teaches about (fucking weekly when I still went to church), abortion; it’s the Catholic Church, so you know what . One is the usual CYA/pay cash state the church has been in, except with a few more apologies (and being forced to comply more by law). The other is the result of tying your doctrine to the false claim that “life begins at conception”, which is what the conservative interpretation of the bible generally boils down to). Neither of these are changing unless the church is metaphorically burning down due to internal pressure. So meh on this.

So I look at him overall with some positivity, as much as you’d expect for the leader of the richest church in the world. So let me give you a nice listen to someone who just think he sucked much ass, on much of what I covered. The Friendly Atheist Podcast assessment is much harsher. And they’re hilarious to listen to this time.

It’s hilarious when one of them yells “Don’t interrupt me; I will murder you” in “defense” of Francis. Considering they’re friends sitting at a kitchen table recording this, it’s delicious.

In the end, the pope is essentially the leader of a really big, really hierarchical, moderately conservative fucking church, which if you remove all the mysticism, he’s the generally celibate old cunt with the biggest goddam hat. He is the reflection of what the college of cardinals (more generally celibate old cunts with big hats) are thinking. Ultimately, the legacy of Francis will be determined by the choice of the next generally celibate big-hatted cunt. If they swing to a conservative choice who turns away from the social justice leanings of Francis, he’ll be remembered as a relative outlier (but not a hardcore reformer like John XXIII, who made the last significant changes within the church). If the cardinals (most of whom were appointed by Francis) go with another Francis, then maybe the church will start sucking less long-term.

I’m not expecting the church to suck less though.

If you’re offended by anything I said about the dead and buried pope, remember, we’re talking about a person. And people are all fucked up. Even the so-called saints. Stop revering them to the point you can’t find some fault. It’s culty.

A Postscript: In preparing to write this, I decided to look up the popes in general. There were a lot of popes, some good, some bad, some flat out fucking evil. It never hurts to learn, so here’s the Wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popes. I even had to look up all the ones responsible for the murderous crusades, the bastards who ordered the torture and murder of the inquisitions, the horny popes who liked to get some (pussy, dick, and/or prepubescent), the popes that got snuffed, and even the last bad guy from Assassin’s Creed II (it was Alexander VI, though the wikipedia article on him doesn’t mention the fictional version). It’s worth a look so you can see how interesting, decent (relatively speaking), and sometimes shitty, the popes can be.

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After the (D&D) Campaign Ended… (Not a Post-Mortem)

Posted on 18 February, 2025 by patrickmspeaks

I’ve been holding off writing this a while, partially because of the insane and deafening bullshit going on in the news (which is NOT what this post is about), and partially because I just procrastinate the shit out of all my shit. But I finished my last D&D campaign in January, and a new DM is spooling up a new game (with a session zero on Saturday 2/8 as I started this). And before I completely forget the details, I want to talk about it, my successes, my failures, and what I learned.

Also, this is a long one….

The Backstory

The following story takes place in my homebrew world of Adraeon. This was fairly early in development, but I had only had two games, and a reboot of the second on the way, but when you have a world that has several millennia to explore, you have to pick something. Now that second campaign is the important one here, because it eventually filled in the backstory for my BBEG in the campaign. The second campaign was set during the Rise of Draytan era in my world, where the first of the reborn dragons (the titular Draytan) came to the world. On the way to the beginning in that campaign, the biggest big bad they have to face is this meta-eldritch entity called the Void: based on your stock eldritch horror, but outside the multiverse, and even the metaverse (see the next paragraph), and it had a foothold in Adraeon. The legendary Aryn Moonsong (also explained below) pulled out all the stops to end the threat, pulling from across the multiverse to end it. And the aftermath became the story behind the campaign.

Quick note on Aryn. She was my first D&D character after returning to D&D over a decade ago. Since her initial appearance, she has become the glue that holds most of the stories in my world together. She’s never the most powerful character, but has something (from the first Adraeon campaign) called Bardic Metaknowledge. Think Deadpool, but more me. She is aware of the multiverse (all the D&D worlds, and all the non-D&D worlds too, in my head), which is inside the metaverse, which is how I see all these worlds, and she is aware she is played by me, in a game, and of the other players. So she’ll give me shit mid-game sometimes. It’s fun to play.

The Premise

So for this game, I started with the idea of going low-magic. I enforced this in two ways. I banned all full spellcasters (Bard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard) at character creation (though I left it as an option later in the campaign). And my BBEG group, the Order, specialized in counterspell (basically a nope card for anyone casting spells), though I generally only used it against spells targeting enemies (because noping a healing spell is bullshit). I also pushed the party toward making mostly human or near-human characters because the Order was a bunch of controlling species-ist fucks (no real-world analog intended this time) that wanted to impose their order (thus the uncreative names) over all of the Island as they looted it for its resources (they’re a lawful evil organization).

My in-game explanation was that the party was recruited from another world (Faerun, specifically), by Aryn Moonsong (of course) and she was looking for more martial characters and humans for this reason. The recruiting from another world was also so I could eliminate backstories, which was good considering how big the group got.

The other element I stressed was that this would also be partially a wilderness survival game. This is where the party explores an area and discovers what is there, with me often writing it just before they get there, or in one case, literally making it up from a few ideas on the spot (whole lotta lore invented there).

As it developed, I worked on the design of the Order, shaping their backstory. Specifically, Aryn brought them to Adraeon a century earlier to fight the Void. The trade for this was allowing them to create a place of power on the Island (the setting for the campaign). It turned out they were more evil than she anticipated, and they were proving to be a problem to the non-human inhabitants of the Island.

Now the non-caster human-ish angle and the Order’s general disposition was there from the beginning, but the rest came organically, like a good campaign should. Part of the fun of writing the campaign is discovering the world.

Session Zero/One

So as usual, I over-planned, over-stocked, and utterly forgot some things. But there was some intro, it took too long to get to the adventure, too long to play through things, and the final fight was a fucking slog. Not unusual, but it started too late and ran away too long.

The worst part was that the party tried to interrogate one of the bad guys. I hadn’t planned, so I had to give him a suicide pill, which worked out to give them the proper fanaticism.

The Size of the Party

So I pulled up D&D Beyond to confirm. There are 10. 10 characters. 10 fucking characters. Fucking hell.

Normal D&D parties are 4-5 players, plus the DM. And there were a couple more that were only around for a single session or so. But the sessions where I was at 8 or more, especially in my tiny game room, were hard as shit to manage.

And we got up to a total of 4 kids. And by that, specifically teenagers. And on the other end of the spectrum, the oldest player is touching his 50s (I’m 51). And that means a broad range of experience and expectations and attitudes.

I will say, dealing with a party that large, and with such a variation of numbers, it made play a bitch. As I said above, fucking hell.

…after a week of pausing because life, I continue..

The Early Campaign

After starting the party by dropping them into the world, they traipsed through the villages, with one party member dying because the party kept hitting the monster grabbing her, and that damage filtered through. I had built in a way to resurrect a party member, but it made it chonky.

Soon, I had them teleported out to a compound, had a 1-shot because my hetero-lifemate was in Ohio, and that ended poorly and late. But after those rocky sessions, we got to my goal, which was wilderness exploration.

This worked out better until they got to the Tower.

The Tower

This was several sessions, a giant sunken tower that had partially collapsed and was filled with ancient civilization shit. Robots, bio experiments, horrible traps, a circus of shit. They got lots of stuff, got to explore at a snail’s pace, and the 4 floors took 4-5 sessions. This was a fun thing because there was always a chance someone would die (I had a method to resurrect someone here too).

This was a solid group of sessions. Even the mines that tried to collapse on them, and the basement full of gelatinous cubes (which they sniped easily).

Into the West

From the tower, there was more exploring, with some prep and some 99% improvising, and also some visions to the Paladin to give them a compass).

They found a mountain where another tower had been shorn off by a spaceship. There were remains and a hint of Aryn? Also, there was this globe that brought the death (as it charged up on the cataclysm that wiped my ancient people out). One of the kids’ characters licked it. It was not tasty (necrotic damage). Not tasty at all. I made this entire session up on the spot, because all I had was a mountain and another fucking tower, and nothing else figured out.

They found the temple of the god of the dead. The traipse into the swamp around it was supposed to be a zombie-thon, but I didn’t plan for a new player, playing a druid, and I let him have an item that gave him the pass without trace spell.It made the party almost undetectable. Then there was another new player, who brought an Ameri-kocra gunslinger to the party. All his actions are (were, now) free actions!

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I did actually let them find a dead Aryn there (not the one they would meet), and the Book of Metaknowledge (even if you don’t understand D&D, it’s worth reading the block I created). But they blew through that way too fast.

They skipped the cooled lava river that might have been fun, but no, no risking shit….

They found the halfling village, where an ancient version of another character from another campaign was waiting to basically give them an Easter egg not give them much info.

They ran into the bad guys, for a fun wooded ambush.

Then they found a path into the mountains, that let them toward the airship (which I had teased to them earlier).

The Airship

Like any good Final Fantasy game, I wanted an airship (and fuck, making that joke, I just realized I forgot to include a Cyd reference). They had to go through a tunnel (with a giant monster that scared them with its first devastating attack but petered out quickly), then a museum (with a closed gift shop) and an uneventful desert. Then they found the airship facility. The majority of ships were blown up (in that world-murdering cataclysm), but there was one that survived. There were a lot of rolls and roleplay getting it operational, and I designed it for the artificers to do a lot. And I custom-built the airship. So then they took flight,which got us moving toward the endgame.

They flew north, and found my mines (but skipped the political intrigue of all the villages below). I hadn’t planned on the mines, so I had to make up some shit with mind flayers (who were fighting the big bads, and willing to not just eat the party). Luckily, they went back to the airship.

They flew over the mountains to find the temple to my most powerful gods (thanks to the visions I had been giving the paladin to give them breadcrumbs to follow). They also had encounters with them. One person got a limited wish (had to be used on healing), and the rest got other things (and that one character that died earlier got to meet the god she met earlier).

And then they encountered the bad guys flying, which led them to meeting Draytan (I had a place to intro her her earlier, but this was the if-all-else-fails point), who then guided them to Aryn.

Aryn Fucking Moonsong, and the Endgame

So the Aryn time was some lore dump, mixed with meta-references. for example, these are some examples from my notes, actual shit that occurred during the lore dump:

  • One shelf appears to carry a large array of books, most bearing the odd name of “Dungeons & Dragons” There are at least 5 rows. In the middle of the third row, highlighted, is a book entitled “Book of Erotic Fantasy”.
  • At some point while explaining the tactical situation, Aryn will work this Star Wars cut dialogue in: “But we can’t turn back, fear is their greatest defense. I doubt if the actual security there is any greater than it was on Aquilae or Sullust and what there is is most likely directed towards a large-scale assault.” Then she questions who wrote this fucking dialogue before yelling at George Lucas and the DM.
  • Aryn has music playing in the background. [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/39iqkcUwJNMkxih7nOfJlS?si=81f920f8c2c84e66 running in the background on the TV speaker]

I had a whole page of this kind of shit.

After that, they find out the big bad is in a temple. They fly there, endure a couple more metareferences, and have a whole-session fight with the BBEG, who I have to cut short because the fight was going on for almost 4 hours. Then we wrapped with postscripts, who stayed, who flew off the island, and who returned to Faerun. It wasn’t the perfect ending, but it was epic enough. At least I didn’t Game of Thrones season 8 it.

Final Thoughts

I love running RPGs, because I like world building, then watching people break my shit, and then I have to figure out how to make it work next week/month.

But that brings me to problem number one. We could only play this game once a month, and with a sometimes-rotating cast of characters. And I get fucking bored. This left me looking to wrap up the campaign rather than just letting it meander forever.

And that was a thing, since I had a somewhat open world (with some gentle guardrails pointing them in the right direction). I think I left out a couple things I wanted to do, but I was able to use that to repackage things.

And I got better with my flexibility in fighting situation (and accumulated a list of things I’ll probably ban so as not to utterly fuck myself over next time).

But in the end, I think the party mostly enjoyed the game, and they’ll want to play again. Although I may want to go with something a little more freeform so I’m not having to run the chonk of D&D rules again (I have lots of candidate game systems). But I will run D&D again, just with a smaller and more frequent group.

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Ayn Rand Was Right (and the GOP is the Party of Looters)

Posted on 6 February, 2025 by patrickmspeaks

I know that people who read this lean across the political spectrum, so let me lay out this case before you react. I know that Ayn Rand is lauded in some circles, damned in others, and wholly misinterpreted in still others. And the rest, including my daughter, just think she sucked as a writer (and I can agree with that to a point). But you can read any person, and if they put thought and care into what they wrote, you can often find truth about the human condition.

For clarification, I’m specifically talking about the story from the book Atlas Shrugged. This was a book that I only read for the first time in my 40s, and its ideas and archetypes (I hesitate to call them characters, because that’s not what Ayn was going for) fascinated me for their clarity of purpose, and a different way to draw the lines of good and evil. It helped that I was reaching peak libertarian at that point in my political evolution, and I probably wouldn’t be where I am today unless I had taken the libertarian swing out of the liberal/conservative bullshit that counts for discourse in politics since Reagan (who, according to one YouTuber I watch often, ruined everything).

In fact, let’s take a quick detour into my politics. I was raised in conservative America, lots of bible stuff, nuclear family, all that shit. I wasn’t into the politics in time to enjoy the 80s satanic panic though, or maybe I would have turned sooner. My first steps into thinking about politics came during the rise of Rush Limbaugh, when he broke out of radio, hit TV, and churned out a few books, which are still on my bookshelf 30 years later (one of my greatest joys was watching my daughter, who’s so progressive it almost hurts, react to that book). But on the social issues, conservatism always bothered me a bit, because I was always more accepting of queer lifestyles specifically, and most lifestyles that didn’t impact my life directly (what would become my right libertarianism).

But conservatism dominated my line of thought to the latter years of George W Bush, where I had begun swinging libertarian after getting into the blogging world (this blog being the successor to that original blog). This was partially because of interacting with people who I wholly disagreed with (some of whom I keep in touch with and agree with a lot more nowadays), and with others who I had dissimilar agreement with (and one who had a similar journey out of conservatism). 2008 and the bipartisan efforts to prop up the economy took me into the weird, wild world of libertarianism, Ron Paul, and all that fun stuff. This carried me through Obama, and the inevitable crap of Hillary before that turned into the awful first trump administration.

But then came our old friend COVID, and the turning point was the understanding that fighting a pandemic HAS TO be a collective action. And while I still oppose forcing people to be vaccinated (though mandates are not unjustified in many cases), understanding the science of how vaccines work, and how viruses spread, and how many people fucking ignored clear science for their goddam agenda, caused me to realize that the libertarian philosophy had its flaws as well.

But that brings us to why I, more of a left libertarian with a focus on protecting natural rights and human rights, am saying Ayn Rand was right. And why she would fucking despise and abhor the GOP today.

So a quick synopsis of Atlas Shrugged: The story revolves around several pure capitalist characters, who follow a philosophy of making the best product or service, charging as much as they can get for it, and beating their competition by doing so. These people have worked their asses off from the bottom and have risen to the top purely on merit, and sometimes in spite of incompetence from the people above them. They are opposed by shady businessmen who want to use the government to empower themselves with laws and government bullshit (the looters and moochers). Underpinning this is the mysterious John Galt, who is the paragon of individualism. As the looters and moochers gain more power and the people of value disappear, the looters and moochers change, get more brazen, and sound more like gangsters than politicians. It’s eventually revealed the capitalists and good workers are quitting (in the ludicrously long John Galt Speech), until the looters and moochers are purged and the value of individual work is rewarded again. Eventually society collapses as the last of the good capitalists withdraw. The end is them preparing to reemerge from their private utopia to rebuild society better than it was.

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“Fuck, this fucking thing is heavy. Oh shit, my toga just fell off. Whelp, I guess my dick’s coming out” – Atlas, if he had me writing his dialogue

The overall message was anti-communist, and somewhat anti-socialist (but also from a misunderstanding of socialism). It was also infused with anti-fasicst statements, but mainly because both fascism and communism are both authoritarian philosophies, whereas the pure free-market capitalism, put forward in the book, and socialism embrace the value of the individual working (but from opposing views).

To be fair, I’ll admit the above analysis is not perfect, and more off the top of my head than fully researched. And I’m sure there are people who may argue I have something seriously wrong. But it’s clear that, even if my analysis is not perfect, Ayn Rand would not be cool with authoritarian fucks and big business inbreeding like JD Vance and his couch’s offspring (because you know if that was real, the’d be DTF each other).

So that brings us to the fuckery of 2025….

It starts at the top with the (insert the litany of stuff) Felon, trump, who is essentially a grifter and snake oil salesman who embodies the looter mentality: Using the government to achieve their goals, because success is not about working hard, it’s about power over others. This is something he’s been doing since the 80s, building his brand about being seen and not worrying about whether the shit he produces is any good (see anything with the trump name on it).

Then there’s president Leon and his nazi dogs (I refuse to use their acronym), literally the world’s richest person, gallivanting through the government and taking over anything with money, with the power to remake anything as trump (or he if trump don’t give a fuck) envisions. This is a person whose wealth is dependent on a shitload of government handouts (his electric Swasticars and most of SpaceX get a cubic buttload of money each second). [Quick aside, I’m not opposed to all of the money his companies earn (especially SapceX, since it’s fee-for-service), but it’s important to note.] He has less governmental experience than trump (4 years less, specifically), and it shows.

From there, the parade of billionaires and CEOs paying tribute at the altar of trump should indicate not that there’s a new administration, but that someone with no hesitation to sell power for adulation (and probably fellatio) is IN THE ((very) White) HOOOOOUUUUUUSE!

And even companies who aren’t necessarily DTF America with trump are kowtowing. CBS, whose “flagship” news show 60 Minutes is under attack for allegedly editing the Kamala Harris interview to make her appear less stupid (a charge they deny, with the raw footage), is considering settling because they have a deal that trump’s FCC can kill.

So there are the co-conspirators like president Leon, the spineless cunts like Zuck the Fuck, and many companies who just want to survive the next 2-4 years (pretty much most of the rest). So with two years of free reign and no real opposition (because the Democratic Party is largely a bunch of fucking losers), and a history of both parties looting for the moocher class of companies, we have no real help in getting the fuck out of this mess unscathed.

So the choices are to quit (Canada is a really nice country, you know), go to ground (I think think a girl names Anne wrote about this), or to fight the goddam fascists and their corporate allies in any way we can.

But whichever way you decide to go, Ayn was right: “We are all the more totally fucking fucked as a result.”*

*May not be an actual quote, because Ayn Rand sucked at writing dialogue even more than George Lucas.

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The United States is a Sh***y G****m F*****g Country

Posted on 21 January, 2025 by patrickmspeaks

(On principle, I generally don’t use curse words in titles, and I self-censor when I do. Why do I feel the need to censor? It’s mainly for accessibility, because I don’t want the title to get noped due to its content. But it’s a lot of bullshit, really, that people have problems with words more than ideas. That’s kinda how we got here)

So I managed to make it to about 7pm on MLK day before I got on Facebook and immediately found trump’s whiniest pick-me girl, my idiot fuck representative Jim Jordan, cheering because his felon leader won. So I started making Nazi jokes, because the current administration is basically the equivalent of Nazis, and boy they are fucking joke. Unless you’re the scapegoats. Then it’s not a goddam joke.

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But I don’t want to make this post about the traitor’s fascist administration. I’m sure we’ll get to that soon enough (especially since President Leon was doing a Nazi salute within 3 hours of the rapist lying his presidential oath (see President Leon above)). But that brings me to why I’m writing this post.

I want to talk about why my country, the United States of America, is absolutely a shitty goddam fucking country.

Now this is not a new phenomenon that just rolled into Washington with the First Felon. In the wider view, he’s the inevitable symptom of the larger problem. And it’s not solely a problem here. But in Orange Hitler we see all of it. The callous cruelty, the casual racism, division for the sake of power (the Nazis loved that one), creating an enemy to persecute (all fucking dictators love this). It’s all on full display, and all in under a day. I’m really hoping the Nazi party in power takes a rest so the rest of us can catch up on the evil.

The greater problem is twofold. First, there’s the idea of unchecked power, and the empowering of people who will use it. One of the principles this nation was founded on (that we’ve never lived up to) is the idea that all people are equal, and endowed with natural rights: rights that are considered inherent by simply existing, and that government’s only job is to protect those rights. Both major parties claim to do this, and both have failed in various ways. And how they’ve failed has changed over the years. But both parties used to give it a try, and lip service when they were falling short. That ended with the return of the Rapist to the White House. For the first time in my memory, we have a president who ran on using power to get retribution, to go after enemies, to empower the people he claimed were “good” and “decent” or whatever adjectives he was lying. And there are two groups he empowered: Billionaires who simply want to use the government to enrich themselves (basically Ayn Rand villains), and goddam fucking fascist christian nationalists, who want give trump power so they can enact their religious bullshit as law (think American Taliban). These are not people who give a fuck about the rights of anyone that’s not them.

The second part of this is the rejection of knowledge, science, intellectual pursuits, or anything that stands in the way of their power. Basically, this is what you get in Orwell’s 1984: A class in power that changes the facts to suit their agenda. The rise of the internet gave us access to almost all the information. It also led to the conspiracy kooks getting an audience and worldwide community. How else do you get a group of people that disbelieve the idea we’re on a globe, which was first proven millennia ago (see Eratosthenes, somewhere around 200 BCE), instead, favoring a goddam pizza planet. I could go on listing conspiracy theories, but there are so damn many, and so damn many people who believe utterly false shit even when proof of the actual facts can be provided.

We have always had some of this, and people of all political persuasions have their dumb shit they believe. But usually, there was a desire to learn shit. The Enlightenment of the mid-to-late 18th century was the driving force behind the formation of this country. And baked into this was a desire to educate. Sometimes, it was to improve understanding, creating a more intellectual populace who could think through ideas. Sometimes it was more cynical, to educate people enough to be productive. But learning was generally prized, and through this, various minorities gained their natural rights, despite our leaders in many cases. It’s the reason that ignorance breeds a group of people willing to be led.

Politicians, in general, want power. If that means appealing to the best of us, they’ll do it. If that means appealing to the worst of us, yeah. But the key is to get as many good people as possible. Being politicians, they’re probably not that good, but do what you can with what you’ve got. Then replace them sooner, especially if they suck.

So now, let’s talk about the lying, fascist, lying, rapey, lying, traitorous, lying felon named trump that has become the 47th President of the United States. I’m going to limit calling him all this, because that gets fucking tedious. I’m not capitalizing his name or using his title, because I’m showing him the same goddam level of goddam respect respect he shows any-goddam-body he considers a goddam enemy.

As a disclaimer, I haven’t really liked him for decades. This is not a recommendation, but the book The O’Reilly Factor nails it on who trump is. In short, he’s a narcissist of the highest order, who craves only to be in the spotlight as much as possible. It’s why he started getting into politics, with his promoting of the whole Obama birth certificate non-controversy getting him unprecedented air time and a big in with the GOP (who were playing the foreigner card hard).

Most absurd example of this was back when I was watching Fox News (yeah, I was a lot more conservative back in the day) and they characterized Obama fist-bumping people (you know, the handshake of the Pandemic) as, and I quote: “Terrorist Fist Jab.” What the serious literal actual fucking fuck?!?!?!

So come 2015, trump flops down the escalator and gives his anti-immigrant speech where he throws his hat in the ring. Most of us in politics don’t take him seriously, even when he somehow starts winning states, because there’s no way people are going to not figure out he’s a snake oil salesman. Because people aren’t that dumb, are they? And then he got the nomination, and anyone not really watching numbers said “Fuck, looks like we’re stuck with that corrupt bitch Hillary for four years.” I voted for Gary Johnson, and trump defied expectation by winning.

I should have predicted it, since he was playing to the lowest common denominator. But I believed that this country was good at heart, and we were continuing to get better, even though the political class was always disappointing us (in general we shouldn’t be led by them, except where necessary). And trump’s first term was not the worst thing ever. It wasn’t good, but the GOP and the civil servants blunted his worst impulses, letting say ridiculous shit while not letting things go straight to hell.

Then came COVID. Dr Fauci and the rest of the medical apparatus in the government did their best to keep us on a mostly firm path (though they fucked up a few times), despite Democrats being over the top (but then being hypocritical as Jefferson) and Republicans doing stupid shit because it was the opposite of an intelligent response. And of course trump was no help, grabbing on whatever he heard on Fox News, whether true or not (or suggesting that people might drink fucking bleach). And despite the Democrats nominating Joe (94 crime bill) Biden during uprisings over systemic racism-driven policing , Biden won and the ignorant slut party, led by trump was defeated. Yay, people have learned from their mistake.

January 6th should have unified the overwhelming majority of the country behind the idea that trump should never be let near the halls of power ever again, except as part of the ex-presidents club (though I think Carter, Clinton, Bush, and Obama would have just quietly told him to fuck off). But the number of people that believed the lie, even when the Republicans in charge of the elections said it was bullshit, should have been an indicator of how fucking stupid people have become.

I should have fucking better known better. I work in internet tech support.

So here we are, four years after, where one of the two major parties has increasingly fallen under the sway of this one monster. He has never demonstrated any morals or principles in his life, yet is venerated by goddam fucking fascist christian nationalists as “ChOsEn By GoTt!!!”. He’s convinced people that billionaires, who have wholly given up the pretense they care about making the world a better place, and have demonstrated the exact opposite, are going to help them. He has run the Nazi playbook step-by-step for more power and people nod their heads in excitement for a “strong” leader. He has brazenly lied incessantly, and when presented with refutation of his lying lies, he just repeats the lies, only louder, and people fucking believes him.

So that brings me back to my thesis statement: the United States of America is a shitty goddam fucking country. And it’s not because of trump. It’s because of what he represents. And what he represents is the idea that people can ignore all the bad shit and believe whatever is politically expedient, even if it kills people and destroys us long term. That enough people prize ignorance to let this country burn. That the idea of helping others only extends to your immediate group and not the “other.” That hypocrisy is perfectly ok, and that principles and morals don’t mean a fucking thing if it gets you power.

To be clear, there will never not be people like that. But that this country is this full of these people means that any progress we have made can be wiped out by some charismatic lying sack of shit when enough people believe it.

I haven’t given up on this country forever. I’m still gonna fight. I’m still gonna resist. And the pendulum is bound to eventually swing back toward sanity. But I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to says this with our current situation:

Fuck this shitty goddam fucking country.

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Thanks, Biden?

Posted on 17 January, 2025 by patrickmspeaks

So… (pauses and sighs heavily)

What I want to do here is try to look back at the Biden administration, catalog the good, the bad, and the fugly, and try to get a sense of how good his presidency will be viewed in history. This is always a tricky thing, because shit is still happening and until we see the long-term effects it’s hard to judge.

An example would be one of the great state of Ohio’s presidents, Woodrow Wilson. His stock has continually dropped for his rampant racism (ex. his praise for the racist film Birth of a Nation). It’s more complicated than that, of course, and historians always disagree. Except for James Buchannan. He is clearly the worst President we ever had.

Maybe our incoming First Felon can knock him out of the bottom spot, but that is a few decades away, because I can’t honestly place the first trump administration yet (it’s down there, but he has four more years now to get that non-coveted bottom slot).

But since this the last day before my long, D&D-filled weekend (3 games), and the fuckery comes Monday, let’s talk aboot President Biden. And yes, this will be shaded by my political leanings, but if it wasn’t it would be boring as another one of my exes (not the one I usually make whore jokes about, but one I won’t talk about further because I hope she’s found happiness). I may also miss things, but I’m not a professional historian.

South Park was right: The choice has almost always been between a shit sandwich and a giant douche.

A Bit of Rambly Backstory – Joe Biden was a longtime senator, VP under Obama, and the most tone deaf choice for a nominee in the 2020 election. He had plenty of flipflops over the years, was a major supporter of the horrid 1994 crime bill. He said stupid shit, like calling his running mate (and future president) Obama things like “clean” and “articulate”. He came up from nothing in Scranton PA, and seemed overall focused on representing his district (and helping pass a mixed bag of bipartisan bullshit). The story is overall good, but like every politician, he eventually has the integrity sucked out of him like cum out of a trump nominee visiting a high school.

Also, his middle name is Robinette. I just learned this today. Fuck me sideways with my own dick.

For clarification, one of the worst things about his nomination in 2020 was that crime bill from 1994, which was part of the systemic racism that lead to the death of George Floyd by police officers in 2020. That would have been a bigger issue, except for the fact it was 2020.

Goddam COVID – Let’s start with the Reason He Got Elected. Long story short, after trump’s mixed bag of policies on the virus (vaccine good, drinking bleach bad (except for MAGA diehards, who should drink more)), the lockdowns, the deaths, the insanity of a national election during a pandemic, people voted for a sane candidate, putting the oldest president ever elected into office.

For the most part, Biden’s leadership in COVID was fairly solid, in that he guided the fractured and stupid-acting country through the vaccination process and mostly kept things stable until COVID finally became endemic. So this is a win, mostly.

The exception: the pressure put on social media companies to tamp down on COVID misinformation, Facebook being the worst example. Of course all this came out this year, and was one of the things that drove a lot of the tech bros into the open arms of the fascist felon, who promised an easing of the Biden stuff (more below) in exchange for them not fact-checking his incessant fucking lies.

The first 100 – He signed a lot of executive orders undoing shit trump had done. I’m sure that shit is going to happen in the next 100 too, so this is mostly partisan, though I’d score this a win on the diplomacy front.

The DEI Administration – I’m of mixed thoughts on this. It’s good to get a diverse set of people with representation in the government. Better than a conventions of dudebros with a few tokens so they can say “we have a [insert minority], so we’re not [insert minority]-ist”. But Biden may have made it into a bingo game. But generally, outside of partisan circles, there was no real problem with his cabinet and appointed officials.

Climate change – Generally moved the country toward addressing it. A chunk of this was restored after trump, and trump will undo a good chunk. But the bar has been moved further, and we’re better off than we were four years ago (despite the polygon nightmare tesla truck). Long-term win if we survive.

The Transeseses – The LGBTQIA+ community, in general, did not get fucked over by the Biden administration, though their steps ad defending trans folks was weak. I understand that this is a small demographic, not even universally supported within the queer community, and that they were never going to vote for trump in numbers. But goddam, the GOP made them the ‘enemy’ and the Biden administration didn’t fight that. Probably won’t be the gamechanger for historians, but it’s in my sphere of things I look at, so there it is.

Abort to End Prayer (explanation below) – The Biden administration has an easy win here as they fought for women’s bodily autonomy as hard as they could, despite the goddam fucking fascist christian nationalist (GFFcN) push to end abortion led to the supreme court gutting women’s rights. It’s often that the worst parts of our history come from a religious fervor to ban shit (see Prohibition). Unless history ends up being written by the aforementioned GFFcN’s, history will judge him well.

So, the whole Abort to End Prayer is a play on all the goddam “Pray to End Abortion” signs that have popped up all around me. And these are good wooden-framed signs too. It’s a testament to how the wholly misnamed “right to life” movement has brainwashed the living fuck out of people. Trust me, when I was still a Catholic attending Mass, they fucking harped on that shit every goddam week.

Slava Ukraini! – Thank glob it was Biden in office, and not Putin’s cock-holster. Biden has maintained a balance, pushing for the defense of Ukraine as best as possible without getting our WWIII on. Easy win, unless it’s the Russians writing the history.

Gaza Genocide – Considering Biden’s approach is “Please, Mr Netanyahu, please don’t genocide Gaza too hard”, he comes across as ineffective here. He has pushed to get the humanitarian aid through, but that’s not enough when even the aid workers are being slaughtered by the Israeli death squads soldiers. I know this is harsh, but this pathological need to support Israel beyond defense, and the resulting widening of a war that may end on January 19th, unless the murderers of Israel kill the deal, is a significant stain on the Biden administration, though he was a goddam saint compared to the evil the GOP pushed.

Side note: This is one of the issues Kamala Harris tied herself to when she took over the nomination, and dissatisfaction over this was part of the reason that the Biden/Harris agenda got voted out in favor of a goddam fascist liar.

Why We [shouldn’t] Build the Wall (Hadestown reference) – Number two on the “Things That Made Biden/Harris Lose the Election” list is the border situation. First up was the fact that we had for years of “Build the wall” bullshit from the inhuman trump administratration, followed by the pandemic. So by the time Biden got the worst of trumps monstrous shit ended, the number of the people swarming over the border to find customers people to surrender to so they can claim asylum. Fucking hell, why are we not taking advantage of these people coming in? Instead, Biden (partially hamstrung by xenophobic republicans) is playing trump-light. He only gets credit for not being a xenophobic political cartoon from a century ago.

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It’s Still the Economy, Stupid – Now we get to the economy. I think Biden will come out well in the long term, as the economy slowly crawled out of the mess caused by COVID, and what he inherited. It meant a lot of inflation after it came back from the brink. And now the economy is finally pulling out of the abyss, just a little late. So while, in the short term, the result of higher egg and milk prices was a bit of a (blood of victims of the GOP) red wave that assured this country would be utterly fucked by goddam tariffs and shit (and still pay high egg prices, no matter what trump lied, he will not suffer the malaise stank of the late President Carter as we look, long-term at what the economy does before trump probably wrecks it (though to be fair, COVID was a large part of what tanked things during the first trump administration).

Regulation, Regulation, Regulation – Biden overall added to regulation. Some of this was good (anything environmental, consumer protections), some of it was debatable (AI, crypto currency, big tech in general, which also lost the privileged tech bro bloc to the naziz (see President Leon)), and some of it was shit (the TikTok ban). I think he’ll come out long term on the positive side, but the light hand is almost always better when it comes to regulating the relentlessly fast tech market.

Pardons, Commutations, and Un-Fuckery – Continuing the end-of-term tradition, Biden pardoned or commuted the sentences of record numbers of people. While this is a drop in the bucket for the Amrerican prison system, some of it was addressing things like the racist sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine. He also commuted the sentences 37 of the 40 federal inmates on death row (3 short of doing it right). As we move away from capital punishment except in the barbaric states, this will be a small happy coda to much of that. On the other hand, there’s the whole Hunter Biden pardon, which will probably be forgotten.

Set That Pussy Free – some of this is covered here, but because I wanted to get a link for NOBRO in here, and because I get to make another pussy joke, it seems Biden finally learned not to be too creepy with women. Or at least his handlers slap his hand when he gets grabby with the ladies (probably was still considered OK when he got into congress). But overall, on issues concerning women, he was a net positive.

Let’s Do Drugs – See the above, only substitute drugs for women. He did less here though.

I’m Too Old for This Shit – The last thing was something that will be looked on warmly, similar to Washington fucking off after two terms (required Hamilton reference). It’s hard to voluntarily put down the reigns of power. You don’t get the presidency by refusing it. But after a disastrous showing in a debate against the raving fucking lunatic trump (HOW!?!?!?), a follow-up interview where he repeated his impersonation of a cadaver, and then the calls for him to fuck of on out of the race, he did so, and probably secured a bit of his legacy in saying goodbye.

Now begins the killing, followed by light salad… – The Gamemaster, The Gamers

So fuck it. The oldest president is out, followed by the next oldest president. And Biden will likely end up somewhere in the middle as presidents go. Not the worst by a long shot, but not in those upper levels where he’s lauded as greatness. Not bad for a senile one-termer who should not have been nominated, much less elected. Thank the fictional murder god of the bible for COVID I guess?

Now all we can do is hope for an aneurysm from fast food or maybe a stroke from getting slapped after he grabs a pussy too hard, or the secret service to step away and he goes flying down a staircase, doing no damage to is brain but snapping his goddam neck, to spare us the utter bullshit of the next four fucking years. Or maybe a nice gas leak that blows up the new president, VP, and Speaker of the House (because Chuck Grassley is the least horrible option available until 2027).

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Notes on the Lack of Calm Before….

Posted on 14 January, 2025 by patrickmspeaks

I realized I started this blog up to talk through the upcoming reign of the First Felon (and President Musk), to share bits of my world, and generally just write what I want to write. Of course I flopped.

And this is how you get a rambling post…..

To be fair, it was the holiday season (I finally got my tree pulled down only last week), and that is always a drain on literally everything in the universe. It’s no wonder my sister (whose political situation is complicated right now) wholly banned political discussions from our Xmas gathering (probably because every said discussion for me starts with the word “fascist” in the first sentence, for good reasons) just to avoid more shit.

But the day was good overall, and I didn’t veer into a depressive ditch (a common thing for me). It may be that between work and the fascist hellscape laid out, starting officially next week, I just didn’t have the fucking energy to be overly bothered. Maybe even my tree was a bit lacking too.

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Looking at it, I notice there’s a lot less blue. Probably the cubic buttload of silver icicles. THAT is the reason it took so long to pull the tree. Because I’d have to remove all those icicles.

So the new year was a disappointment, as my internet went out around 10:30 and I watched the ball drop on my phone. I hate using my phone, except as a last resort, or because it’s the only practical option. I think phones are one of the reasons blogging died a little.

But January is here. The cold and snow are here in Ohio. California (specifically LA, where my hetero-lifemate Lars is currently living) is literally on fire. which will eventually bring me back to politics, because literally everything does anymore.

We’re less than a week away from Orange Hitler taking over and showing the world how fucking stupid America can be. So far this year, he (and his dickbag allies) shit-talked Cali for catching fire, talked about invading Greenland and annexing Canada (both of which have effectively told him to fuck right the fucking fuck off), bitched incessantly about his felony sentencing (where he basically got NOT A GODDAM THING for punishment, other than a felony conviction, which that rapist bastard treats like a badge of honor.

Today specifically is bearing day for his Defense Department nominee, Fox News host, drunkard, war-criminal promoter, and Goddam Fucking Fascist Christian Nationalist™ Pete Hegseth. The only positive thing that may come out of this is that he’ll fuck up the military enough that they can’t invade Greenland effectively.

I’m making “Goddam Fucking Fascist Christian Nationalist™” a thing, because I don’t think just saying “christian nationalist” enough for these monstrous, anti-American twats. They basically want the christian equivalent of sharia law, and think the Taliban may have some good ideas.

On the plus, between the kids not being at home and winter stripping most of the joy of going outside away, I have time. Of course, I’m at the library typing this, because the house is way too fucking empty. But that’s okay, because I have shit to do when I get back.

I have my D&D campaign to wrap up in under 2 weeks (the monster is a 5-stage bit of insanity that I hope will kill at least a few PCs). I’ve got 2 D&D campaigns that are active and chugging along that I’m playing in this week, in addition to the Friday night game which is wrapping up soon. And that means I’m building characters for 2 new campaigns. For the Friday game, I’m thinking magic user of some kind, but I have a rogue in my pocket I will play. And the other (a 3.5 edition game) will be a ranger (which I’ve been trying to play for several years, but the rules kinda fucked me over).

So now I’ll just drop this post into the ether, and let people question what the shit is wrong with me. And it’s not the drugs. After our local pharmacy died, taking my prescriptions down with it, I finally got all my meds restocked yesterday, so I’m not going to have my blood pressure stroke me out after all.

Fuck, I keep rambling,and I have no idea how to end this. I’m not going to explode this Game of Thrones style, I can’t stick the landing with anything good, so I’ll dig into TV history, and take a page from the Sopranos and end this shit in the middle of….

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Of Dungeons and Dragons, and Airships and Starships

Posted on 19 November, 2024 by patrickmspeaks

I started this post last week as I was prepping to run D&D on Saturday. Well, I got busy and/or distracted. But to be fair, I ran one game and played in two, a week after a gaming convention, and have three more games on tap this weekend. And also, since the game I’m running is nearing its end, everybody’s in the build stages for new characters on a new campaign (more on that later).\

So right now I’m in a D&D game on Friday nights (late, weekly game, and another D&D game that runs every other Friday. Then there’s the Saturday games, both D&D, one of which I run. Then there’s the Star Trek Adventures game I’m in on every other Sunday. It averages to about 2 1/2 games a week. Now depending on schedule, some of those sessions get missed (both Friday games went away while I was at Acadecon (one missed, one cancelled). So it’s only when they all coincide that it gets hard on me. So let’s talk aboot them.

Let’s get the weekly Friday night game out of the way. D&D 5e, and we’re playing through the Tomb of Annihilation book (a sequel to the infamous meat grinder, Tomb of Horrors). This is my online D&D game, with a group that was predominantly west coast, so that’s an 11pm-3am slog. I’m playing Zeldyn, my gnome artificer, with a repeating crossbow and an adamantine raptor (because the book is full of dinosaurs) that sometimes try to eat you. We are crawling through the tomb itself, which is the endgame. Our last session, the obvious trap got triggered, and a few of our number about got drowned by wine. We still have to finish turning off the flood of wine, but we didn’t all die this last week. Maybe next week.

Saturday, we played the game I’m running. Also 5e, and we’re playing in my homebrew setting of Adraeon. This was the party’s first session with the airship, and they flew a little was before getting off and delving into a mine. The part of the world I had built out the least. Luckily, I built a couple charts to roll on, and started drawing a dungeon on the fly. I had a little backstory, so they wandered into a trap-ridden nightmare, ran into a not-hostile mind flayer who took them to a camp full of the brain-eating monstrosities. There, they were given the chance to fight against some drow elves, with a small chance of success and the promise of a reward if they lived (and if not, the flayers had a weakened enemy to attack). They chose to leave, satisfying me because the airship is to get them to the endgame. They then made it to the temples of my world’s highest gods, met them, and got some nice gifts. Then try continued flying along until they got attacked by the BBEGs of the campaign (where I had them try air combat the first time). We ended with a brass dragon playing cleanup on the fleeing guys, then landing in girl form on the stern of the airship….

Then came Star Trek Adventures ( my other online game) on Sunday. My hetero lifemate Lars introduced his long-running character of Savon as a Starfleet Marine and the first officer. And I swapped out my last science officer for the oldest character I have, Eddie McPherson. He’s known for drinking, and engineering, although I have shifted him to a little more of a scientist (since we have a chief engineer). This should have paid off as aliens captured the ship in some kind of field and started attacking. Sounds like Ed and Savon get to kick some ass… and the other characters did some negotiating while Ed got to run scans. So there was some disappointment, exacerbated by the fact that after working every day and being short sleep Saturday and Sunday as a result. I really need to get my groove back on this one.

So that’s the past weekend. Let’s get to the upcoming.

Friday is a two-game night (all 5e). Two of my DMs are brothers, and they have a shared world called Zyrune. The Friday game is set in the north, where my young human paladin, Maira will heading with the party north to an apple orchard to find out who’s messing with the produce (it’ll be more fun than it sounds). I honestly can’t remember more than that, because we haven’t played in a month due to scheduling issues. And after we finish, I head home, get online and play the ToA campaign again). Luckily, this is my last day of work after a 10-day run, so sleep!

Finally, the last game is Saturday, also 5e, also Zyrune, different DM. Here I break out my human dancer monk, Elliara, who has some interesting secrets (which I won’t put here, since I don’t want to spoil it for any other player), but generally punches or stabs her way through anything. I know our last session was planned around the characters whose players were not present last time, so I’m not sure where we’re going at all. I’ll remember once I start reading notes and getting my character.

Roll for a pain in my ass….

Now, I mentioned the Saturday group (which accounts for the two monthly games) was in the process of builds for characters they’ll start playing next year. This is because it’s a game that might (like mine) have 8-10 players (the normal is 4-6). And we’re playing D&D 3.5. Of all the versions of the game since 1974, this version is the most rules-heavy version. It is a well-designed game, especially considering the grabtastic clusterfuck of rules that preceded it. The best example of how overbuilt this edition is would be to explain about feats. Feats are these small abilities you can add to your character to customize them. And you can eliminate a lot of them as your build proceeds. However, with at least 2000, you can see the problem. and a lot of them are dead ends that suboptimize the character, which makes a shit character, which makes 3.5 much less fun.

So my build is going to be an archery-focused ranger. I already have most of it built, or at least notes on what I’ll do as I level up. But it’s primarily going to be about putting arrows in monsters until they’re pincushioned to death. Maybe I’ll pick up some cool trick arrows.And maybe I already know the character I’m going to bring. But we still have some discussion before I unleash that.

So November has been front loaded with a lot of gaming. And I plan to keep these joyous escapes going, no matter how utterly fucking dark the real world gets….

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Decades of Deconstruction

Posted on 14 November, 2024 by patrickmspeaks

So if you missed it somehow, I’m an agnostic atheist, with somewhat of an anti-christian bent (especially in the face of fascist christian nationalism rearing it’s taliban-y head). I’ll detail it later, but Suffice it to say, christianity itself has been the driving force in helping me deconstruct my christianity, to the point I don’t capitalize it anymore, because it deserves contempt in my world (like a certain president that just got elected (…not going there…). But this is an accounting of how I slowly, over so many years, slowly deconstructed from full-on Catholicism to the the goddam god-free person I am now.

And to those of you who have gone through deconstruction but still hold some form of faith, I encourage you to keep questioning everything. Even if you never get to where I am, you are probably in a better place than before. And welcome to a freer life.

So before I get ball deep in this, let me set out a few key things about where I am now:

  • The bible – We’re not playing edition wars here. I don’t care what flavor of holy book you’re using. I believe there is still value in the book, but only in a context of the people that wrote it, what they faced, and how and why they codified their moral precepts this way. Even in many faith tradition, the bible is considered inspired by god, and not absolutely literal. If you can’t realizing what you’re reading can also be described with some accuracy as a “goat herder’s sex manual”, then you’ve lost perspective and skepticism.
  • Agnostic Atheist – I generally call myself an atheist, but what that means specifically is that I see no reason to accept any of the faith claims I’ve been presented with, and thus operate as though there’s no goddam god. I don’t wholly rule out the existence of some deity or higher power or force of creation, but nothing presented has evidence, so it can be dismissed as quickly. There are some versions of faiths I have been presented with that are logically inconsistent, and I will assert those are fucking bullshit and positively not true. A lot of these are in the christian tradition.
  • Sin – a fake illness from fake faith traditions. I don’t believe in sin, therefore I’m not a sinner, and I don’t fucking need Jesus to save me from shit. If the logically impossible all-knowing, all-powerful, AND all-loving god exists, then I’m going to his hell, because he can’t be all three.
  • People who believe – I’m not here to shit on your beliefs, if your beliefs help you be a better human. If your beliefs condemn others for any other reason than for their actions that hurt others (ex. anyone queer), you can fuck right on off with that shit.
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So to start, I was born Catholic. Raised Catholic. Spent 8 fucking years in Catholic school (and literally have to say fuck every time I reference it). I was an altar boy (but my only clergy molestation joke is that I couldn’t even get any from the priest). As I got older, eventually sang in the choir (3 different churches overall over the years). Did usher work and didn’t dip my hand into the collection plate (and yeah, even at the early mass, there were some bucks in there. And I was a Catholic in some way until around 2010-ish, when I posted on a prior blog why I was leaving. So I was a Catholic until almost 40.

Now an interesting thing about the human mind and sexuality/gender is that some of your sexuality and gender is learned behavior. And since we’re learning that these things are also on a spectrum, you can “learn” that you’re straight and cisgendered if you’re somewhere between that and fully gay and transgender. Discovering my queerness has been a really slow process that denied me some good sexy time as a result, because I was in christianity fantasyland, where boys grow up to be men, marry girls who have grown up to be women, and then they pop out kids, who repeat the process. I got far enough to pop out a couple kids, who aren’t living in said fantasyland.

On a side note, this is where I think the otherwise vile conversion therapy can be “successful”: when the “homosexual” is actually bisexual or pansexual, and is more into the hetero relationships. You find that relationship, and you can ignore the queer urges. Fully gay, it’s psychological torture. Which is why it’s not fucking science.

Even this young, there were indications I may not be as straight and cisgendered as I thought I was. But this goes back to learned behavior, what I saw on TV and movies (it was the fucking 80s), what I was taught, and what language was available to me (sexuality was still largely a gay/straight binary). This is why that helping queer youth find language that describes what they feel is important, letting them discover and explore what they feel and think. Some know, others don’t fully understand. And ignorance (and even more, hostility) in the face of this puts kids in the grave. Thankfully, that wasn’t me, because I thought I knew.

I also have a really fucked-up sense of humor and a mind that thrives when there are no restrictions. It got me in trouble. A lot. Still gets me in a little trouble now and then, because I have gotten blunter as I have gotten older.

So a few things early on started me on this journey. The first is a Great Books class in college, specifically on the bible. Now, contrary to expectation, this actually helped keep me believing. Mainly because I got to learn contextual information about how and why the bible existed, and could appreciate what it brought to the table as a written document of history, genealogy, law, and poetry, with no arguments that this was literally true. Being given information that helps reconcile and/or rationalize the inconsistencies with reality makes it easier to continue believing when you you have a questioning mind. Information is how I’ve changed on a lot of positions over the years, and this changed how I engaged with my faith.

The second thing (and first thing that really started me in deconstruction (a running theme here)), was the fucking christians. In this case, the Pentecostal friends of my Catholic girlfriend (found her due to her parents who I was in my second church choir with). It’s probably the first time I talked with others outside of Catholicism about their faith, and their attacks on Catholicism (when I had already developed a more ecumenical stance) was an instant turn-off for this fanatical tradition.

I don’t think I thought hard on religion during most of this time (I was too busy with other shit, and the Catholic church is famous for its lapsed category of believers). I still went to church, sang in my third choir (in a loft, with the organ behind me!). That first relationship (which blew up sometime after I proposed marriage, because That’s What You Do) ended, and I continued (pretty much unsuccessfully) searching for the WoMaN i WaS dEsTiNeD tO mArRy!!! (/s).

I was still running in the conservative sphere of thought (Rush came on at noon, most every weekday), but one thing was clearly incongruous: the growing presence of the (now) LGBTQIA+ community. Every time conservatives went after them, I simply couldn’t agree, especially as I was beginning to understand that this was how they were. And in that case, could who you are be a sin that you go to hell for? Is god that much of a fucking cunt (this eventually led me to answering this with yes)? I was still “against” gay marriage, as the option of a civil union was still on the table, which was a compromise. And compromise was rational to me at the time (ex: Clinton’s flawed but better than before “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy). But I never felt an overt hostility to anyone in the queer community, even though my language (fucking 80’s edition) led me to sound otherwise.

Somewhere in 2007 or so (where I found another Catholic girl as a result of a choir (this time a secular one)), I got into blogging. Partially, this was because I wanted to mix it up in politics. And I needed an outlet, because at this time, I had two kids with my now ex, who in my blogging was generally identified as the Succubus (I’m not going into details, but this was an abusive relationship that took me time to extricate myself from). And I found a community across a swath of opinions. Four of them are still on my friends list on Facebook, with one agreeing with me then, but all of us being in some degree of agreement now (thanks, trump?).

And while I fumbled in the beginning just parroting Rush talking points, I still couldn’t go there on some of the more hard right positions. This led me deconstructing my faith further, because between the Catholic obsession with abortion, the anti-gay shit of the hard right, the increasing misogyny I was seeing, and the fact that I was moving to a more libertarian political view, those tenets I had never really questioned were getting questioned.

And dominoes continued to fall. The Succubus (and her laziness and abuse) and the added burden of two kids, then being a single father meant that church was basically out. And that meant I wasn’t getting the weekly dose of reinforcement. This made it easier, with my evolving belief to declare on the blog that I was no longer a Catholic. The fact was, I just couldn’t believe all the bullshit required to stay. So I noped out.

That left me with a belief in god, and some fuzzy beliefs ties to that. And no matter what christian tradition I’d hear, it came with beliefs that had no justification based on the lack of evidence. Also, any belief in the importance of marriage was shattered as every experience of me trying to get marries (yeah, I proposed to the Succubus too, because children and [insert christian marriage bullshit]). So with no demonstrable or personal evidence of the existence of this god, I got to deism, the nebulous idea that there was a god, but it was an impersonal deity not involved in this world.

Meanwhile, the march of religious anti-science continued. I discovered the Noodly Grace of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, originally bourn from a satirical letter to the Kansas School Board over their plan to teach the fake “theory” of intelligent design as science next to evolution. I can go on, but trying to substitute religion for science has never been something I accepted. Even way back in my 8 fucking years of catholic school, I learned science, and had the god of the gaps to fill in the rest. Again, fanaticism turned me away from tradition after tradition, because people lying really pissed me off by that point (I don’t take betrayal lightly).

Also, there was the whole anti-science religious bullshit that came with COVID, which also showed me the dangers of pure libertarian philosophy in a real-world situation .

I think I really only started understanding more about my sexuality over the last five or so years, slowly coming out in bits and pieces as I finally was free enough to explore it. I also finally started actually started looking at atheist content. This was an eye-opener, as I found out that this was what I actually believed (or more accurately didn’t believe). I think I’m still in my angry atheist phase (or bullshit makes me angry, so I’ll always be in that phase.

Which brings me to today. I have a couple gaming buddies who are hardcore christianity. The “I’d like to bring you to church so Jesus can change your life” Kind. The problem is that they bring the anti-queer, subservient woman, puritanical morality to it. You know, the mentality that, at worst, is the driving force of fascist christian nationalism (and the even worse virulent shit that comes with it due to the election of trump). So yeah, fuck any god that would choose that lying rapist to “save” the country.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. – Richard Dawkins

So this is where I am: I have one life, and I want to make the most of it from a creative standpoint. And I want to help as many people as possible, so as many people as possible can live their best life. And where people are being bastards, I want to get in the way of that bullshit. So my politics and my atheism and my moral principles (basically the libertarian non-aggression principle as a moral precept) inform each other.

So I think, unlike my political posts, I want to hear from everyone on this. What do you believe and why? I’m going to do my best not to actively challenge your belief, but I may ask questions to narrow what you believe. And if you come without hostility, I will respond in kind.

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