Schadrach

…and he very, very carefully threaded the needle and chose his words to avoid perjury. It’s why he had questions like asking them to define “sexual relations” (the definition they gave didn’t include oral, so he did not have sexual relations with her by their definition) and what the definition of “is” was (specifically does it mean currently or does it include at any time in the past).

Detect Magic telling someone “it’s chowder” is a cop-out, same as a DM saying “you failed the skill check because you looked suspicious.” If a spell exists to reveal a magical aura, use it to reveal an aura, not to sass the player.

My answer in that case is “You detect no aura” from the non-magical chowder (or maybe they do detect one if it was flavored with prestidigitation), unless it’s an edition where the effect is a cone, and they are sitting across the table from their friend blinged out in magical gear, in which case they are definitely detecting an aura. Several of them. And they’re going to have to take time, focus, and make checks to recognize that none are coming from the chowder.

Paranoia, the game where every character is technically engaged in a crime punishable by death at basically all times, and you’re given a number of clones because you are expected to die…a lot. Also the R&D gadgets, like the personal disintegrator which does exactly what it says on the tin - disintegrates your person.

Like forcing the players into an encounter where all their toolkits are nerfed. Close quarters for casters, magical monsters that can’t be harmed by melee, or NPCs that are way OP for the group and they stick to the Monster Manual to the letter.

When I GM, it depends on just how narrow and just how powerful your particular toolkit is. I’m not going to ensure that you can do whatever your thing is at absolutely every opportunity, and if your schtick becomes well known, enemies capable of planning will plan around it when feasible. The more narrow your schtick is, the more scenarios you might encounter where it does not apply simply by chance (for example, if you’re a flying archer every room in a dungeon won’t gain a minimum 30’ high ceiling to maximize your use of that). The more disproportionately powerful your schtick is compared to other party members, the more likely I am to specifically come up with occasional scenarios meant to make it not apply so someone else gets to shine.

Sometimes I will signpost something is a very bad idea, and if you do it anyways (or do something else absurdly dangerously foolish) I’m not going to pop up a guard rail to save you at the last moment - retrieving your body from somewhere adrift on the astral and your soul from the gemstone the archdevil you pissed off is keeping in his treasury to try to save you is the next adventure hook.

You encounter a huge, elaborate tome, on a concealed lectern, in a library connected by a hidden door directly off the bedroom of a powerful wizard, you detect magic and get extremely powerful auras of conjuration, transmutation and evocation maybe “I flip it open to a random page and start reading aloud, I’ll sound out any words I don’t recognize” is not, in fact, a wise decision. The copy of “Words You Mispronounce And Die: A Primer For Apprentice Wizards” you saw on one of the shelves on the way there, the references to a cursed grimoire of terrible power, the book being bound in the skin of an angel covered in burns and scars, etc, etc should have maybe hinted at that.

Ah, FATE - it’s F.U.D.G.E. with extra icing!

Doesn’t need to be a sole cause to be a cause. See cancer, where smoking causes lung cancer, but not all lung cancer is caused by smoking. But again, needs more study.

Eh, it’s not totally baseless. Hell, there’s even a non-zero chance it’s true. It’s way too early to claim it as true though, since studies on the topic are few, have mixed conclusions and correlation is not causation. I refuse to give it any more credence than “not totally baseless” though.

“Where are my testicles, Summer?”

If i invite someone out to dinner I pay. If someone invites me out to dinner I expect them to pay.

expect the man to pay

…they’re the same picture. Seriously, given the general dynamics of how straight dating actually ends up working most of the time IRL, these are basically equivalent statements, because the man is also generally expected to be the one to do the asking.

This corny meme implies that philosophy majors become flat-earthers, etc.

No, most philosophy majors still believe in gravity. While flat-earthers cease to believe in gravity once they realize that a flat earth is incompatible with gravity. They replace it with this notion that the earth disc (and the rest of the system) is accelerating upwards through the void at 9.8 m/s^2.

Though I’ve come across some interdisciplinary studies types who would probably argue that gravity is a social construct because we describe it with language.

The set of all primes is the same size infinity as the set of all positive integers because you could create a way to map one to the other aka you can count to the nth prime. Reals are different in that there are an infinite number of real between any two reals which means there’s no possible way to map them.

Like, most kids in the US had Tylenol. Most kids don’t develop autism.

Except the claim being studied is that Tylenol might cause autism when administered to the mother while pregnant. There are a lot of drugs that will cause a problem to a fetus when administered to a pregnant woman, but do not cause that problem when administered to someone outside the womb. Building a human from scratch is a fiddly process.

Or they WANT them to feel pain.

In their myths, a woman explicitly incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong strayed from absolute mindless obedience to sky daddy, so all women have to suffer forever, and anything that reduces that suffering is inherently evil for opposing the will of sky daddy.

Not to defend RFK, but this argument is dumb.

People from everywhere it doesn’t natively grow developed cancer long before they had access to tobacco. That doesn’t prove tobacco use doesn’t cause cancer, it just means it isn’t the only potential cause.

Nobody has direct evidence of the shooter’s motivations or political affiliation today. Nobody.

From the texts between him and his roomate that have been publicly released. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/16/charlie-kirk-shooting-prosecutor-utah

“Roommate: ‘Why?’ Robinson: ‘Why did I do it?’ Roommate: ‘Yeah.“’ Robinson: ‘I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

So, we have his direct statement to his transwoman roommate as to his motive, either you can take that at face value or claim it’s some carefully crafted lie intentionally meant to deceive us as to his real motives. You do you.

Likely based on his texts with his transwoman roommate.

Now lie detectors don’t work at all…

Meh, they do work. They just measure stress response, not truthfulness. The idea being that you’ll have a heightened stress response to a question you are lying about the answer to, which may or may not be accurate depending on individual and situation.

This is in no way new. 20 years ago I used to refer to some job postings as H1Bait because they’d have requirements that were physically impossible (like having 5 years experience with a piece of software <2 years old) specifically so they could claim they couldn’t find anyone qualified (because anyone claiming to be qualified was definitely lying) to justify an H1B for which they would be suddenly way less thorough about checking qualifications.

Once read a forum thread on “how your state/region is depicted in media” and had to point out that aside from one movie about a college the biggest things I could point to were the Wrong Turn movies (slasher movies about inbred cannibal hillfolk) and the movie version of Silent Hill (which is set in WV but based on Centralia, PA while the game version of Silent Hill is in New England).

Centralia, PA is one of those places with less than a dozen residents and a neat history. It’s been on fire since 1962, the government tried to eminent domain all real estate in Centralia and a handful of extremely stubborn folks fought back leading to an agreement where they get to stay there for the rest of their lives after which the property reverts to the government via eminent domain. All seven of them. Five of which are still around as of 2020, having lived under that agreement for forty years. The church still holds services, and their graveyard are still maintained, even the one that’s in a perpetual haze as the ground releases smoke.

It appears like most of Appalachia is under “swamp racists” and the rest as “NYC”, which I strongly reject. Very little of Appalachia is swamp, it’s mostly forested mountains. And it’s far to rural to be compared to NYC.