_NetNomad

1974 D&D (OD&D) 1977 Basic Set (Holmes Basic) 1978 Advanced
1981 B/X (Moldvay Basic) 1983 BECMI (Mentzer Basic) 1989 Advanced 2e 1991 New Easy to Master 1991 Rules Cyclopedia 1994 Classic 1995 Advanced 2e Revised 2000 3e 2003 3.5e 2008 4e 2014 5e 2024 5.5e

Congratulations to D&D 5.5e, the 15th edition of D&D!

(I’m not familiar with New Easy to Master and Classic so if those are just variations of Cyclopedia then it’s 13. but also individual “rules editions” had different revised printings aside from 1995 2e- my copy of Holmes is the 3rd printing replacing Hobbits with Halflings- so if you include those who the hell knows)

to me, the Super Nintendo was the worst Nintendo console. so much of the library is games that either had better NES prequels or N64 sequels if not both. despite having a buttload more colors than the Mega Drive, so many of the games ended up looking bland and lifeless, with the notable exception of Super Mario World which looks like a Fisher Price product. the sound chip sounds like someone is sitting on it, and that washed out sound is admittedly nice for RPGs but it ruins everything else

and this isn’t me being a bitter SEGA fan! i think the NES and the GameCube were both signifigantly better than their SEGA contemporaries. just considering Nintendo consoles, i rank the Super well below the Wii U and Virtual Boy- those at least offered unique experiences

no because my external drive broke T_T i was flabberghasted when i got a new laptop and it didn’t have a disc drive. how am i supposed to rip CDs!?!? i still have a huge stack of 'em i still need to rip

aside from being a great episode of Academy, this episode was also a perfect coda to Discovery. Tilly got to be the person she needed back in the day

contemporary gnostics would accuse orthodox linuxians of using hannah montana linux, whilst they recognize her as the demiurge, the accidental creation of the fallen aeon of wisdom miley cyrus, who herself eminated from the ineffable monad billy ray cyrus and was redeemed back into the glory of the pleroma like a wrecking ball by the logos linus torvalds christos amen

that’s the opposite of the point he’s trying to make. he’s not critiquing TNG, he’s parodying bad faith critiques of modern trek by showing how easy it is to turn those criticisms on the show those same people claim to love. he gets especially meta when comparing TNG to TOS, claiming “TOS would never do that” but every single example is something the original series also did. turns out star trek was always about compassion and inclusivity!

ELO is an interesting case. Pinning down the original members is already a bit tricky, because the first album was really just a side project of The Move, before Roy Wood left to start Wizzard in the middle of doing their second album. If we’re generous and say their third album was really their first as a seperate band, we end up with a group that’s fairly static throughout the 70s and that most fans would call the classic lineup. the only two truly original members, though, were Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan, and everyone else in the and was technically considered an employee, which you can imagine led to all sorts of legal chaos

in the late 80s Jeff decided to shutter the band. Bev Bevan wanted to continue but Jeff considered himself synonymous with ELO being their writer, so eventually the two of them agreed to let Bev tour under the name ELO Part II with a lot of the members of the classic lineup. In the early 2000s, Jeff wanted in again but the “employees” thing and some legal trouble between him and Part II left him wanting to start fresh. No one knows the full story, but Bev, who was seemingly still enthusiastic about touring, suddenly decided to retire. Part II had to rebrand to The Orchestra, no longer having a The Move representative, but kept touring. Meanwhile Jeff did an album and a short tour with his new ELO, which had their classic keyboard player but The Orchestra had basically everyone else from the classic lineup. Jeff’s ELO went dormant until 2015 where it went by the literal name of Jeff Lynne’s ELO. Keyboard player Richard Tandy recently passed away, and with violinist Mik Kaminski retiring this year from the Orchestra, ELO has not one but two ships, one of which has been completely and thoroughly Theseused and the other just one plank away.

if your local music store lets you try before you buy, i’d try everything they let you. different instruments are more or less intuitive to different people, and it’s hard to know unless you try. in your case, digging languages, i would for sure also learn basic music theory so you know "what* you’re saying instead of just how. it’s not neccisary to know theory to play but it’s fun for it’s own sake and hey! you might be inspired to write something! back when i was in school, the free exercises on tonesavvy (used to be called emusictheory) were the recommended way to get started

for habit building, you just gotta carve out the time and do it. once the novelty wears off, there are gonna be days when you don’t want to practice, and a habit forms when you push through that. you don’t need to practice for a long time every day, ten minutes is plenty as long as you’re doing it consistently. a weird thing about playing music also is that it works kind of like muscle where you exercise to get stronger but you get actually get stronger when you’re resting. if you find yourself getting frustrated, you can just put it down, and you might be suprised to find whatever you were stuck on today is easy tomorrow. but that only happens if you play today and tomorrow. it’s also always better to practice slow and then speed things up once it’s under your fingers. that ensures you have good form and you’ll ironically get things up to speed faster than if you just tried to go fast from the start. the metronome is your friend

good luck and have fun!

In celebration of 30 years of Pokémon, we thought it would be fun to return to the ultimate versions of the original Pokémon adventures in the Kanto region with these special releases.

Interesting that they consider these to be the ultimate versions and not LGPE. Not that I disagree, but considering LGPE is more expensive and more in line with the Pokémon company’s modern design philosophy, you’d think they’d be pushing a special edition of those instead

also interesting that these are completely devoid of online trading and battling. could be neat for the kids today to experience things the old way- I remember it was so much fun when a new game came out and everyone had their handheld on them down to battle or trade- but for the genwunners who would otherwise predominantly be buying this, there goes it’s main selling point

Meanwhile I’ll never stop hearing about how perfect Michael Burnham apparently was, even if her series showed her to be a perennial fuck up.

THANK YOU. putting aside how many people weren’t engaging with the show in good faith in the first place, you had to have been watching a completely different show to walk away with that impression. the whole point of her character in the early show is that she thought she was an infallible protagonist but learned over and over and over and over that she isn’t. spock more or less looks into the camera and says as much in S2!

would you rather fight 100 tribble-sized sehlats or one sehlat-sized tribble?

i used to be a voracious reader, but as i grew up i slowed down. getting books and then lugging them around was less feasible with Stuff To Do, and this is gonna sound super stupid but i have a hard time getting comfortable reading a physical book. for whatever reason I hold it wildly different depending on if i’m reading the right or left page so i’m constantly moving around

i’ve started using libby and now i’m reading multiple books a month again. you need a physical library card but once you have it you havd access to all of your library’s digital stuff. in the US you can also get a state library card in some states online, giving you access to even more books. you can also find lots of classics online for free through project gutenberg, and the internet archive has a mix of free and rental books. the latter needs a special app to open them, though, and the only one i could seem to get to work was in italian

unfortunately age verification is now required to touch grass

i personally find bananna audio the most appealing

i am very happy with mbin. a lot of people are insisting there are no other alternatives in this thread but i am literally posting here from mbin lmao. the UI is very slick and it can also reply to microblog posts on platforms like mastodon, givinf you a full viee of the fedi. there are also non-federated alternatives like lobste.rs and i think digg is trying to stage a comeback

there’s a saying that goes something like “democracy is a fresh challenge for each generation.” any trek show that shows what we can be without also exploring how we can (or can fail to) stay there is being overly optimistic at best and dishonest at worst. i agree that the execution often fails, especially in Picard and early Discovery, but later Discovery and Academy are shows not about a distopian future but about carving out a utopia within one. Discovery starts out in the SNW era and even in universe everyone can tell how messed up this crew is- note how Pike treats Disco with kid gloves versus how he treats the Enterprise like a ship of adults- but something very interesting happens when they make the jump to the post-Burn future, where suddenly the worst Starfleet has to offer are the best just because they remember how things could be. That offers them and the fallen federation (and the show) a mutual chance at redemption, and Academy is building off of that without Disco’s baggage. Academy sees the same problems you do with the post-Burn galaxy and are working to turn it back into the one you remember. you could argue about the execution still, but the heart is there

it’s funny to think that all of dax’s hosts were mild-mannered before they were joined and then five minutes stuck with dax they start breaking any and every rule. their first thought together after joining is “aren’t you tired of being nice? don’t you just want to go apeshit?”

i didn’t even realize illa meant to be cardassian. but i also didn’t realize that was tawny newsome despite being very excited she was one of the writers so i might just be stupid

hard to say for now other than they both coexisted for a bit, but out of fiction i have a feeling they’re just going to ignore the last two seasons of Picard altogether until a hypothetical Lower Decks spiritual successor where they’ll somehow fix it with a throwaway line. speaking of Lower Decks, that’s probably how they’ll handle it’s finale too considering the multiverse wormhole thing is conspiciously absent from the 32nd century

i can get behind this if and only if we also rename the band to Bill Eilmer and His Comets