i didn’t know u were a lebanese

I know nothing about plants.

Honestly bright light in the face is pretty fantastic nonlethal self-defense. Most people just can’t push through a bright light in the face for some reason, you just do the full-body flinch and are stuck there. Gives you a bit of time to get to your pepper spray or baton or Grenade Launcher or whatever you use

I like stamets@startrek.website explanation, but he neglected to explain why Bahamut does this and what exactly the canaries are

Each of the canaries is a dragon cleric, one for each color of the metallic dragons. So they not only are high-level monsters, they also can each throw high-level spells at you. Here’s the important thing for DM use: its only tradition that they are canaries. I usually have then be pidgeons or chickadees.

Bahamut essentially does this because he is bored. You see, he is a God of dragons, but dragons don’t actually worship their God in the way mortals do, so he doesn’t have a lot of duties. So, when he is bored and wants something to do, he goes to the mortal plane in the guise of a pathetic old man, and whenever someone helps him he returns the favor by giving them a blessing.

The problem with using Bahamut as a stick for your munchkins is that he really doesn’t need to defend himself. The dragons, of course, will be revealed if their polymorphed form is destroyed, but do you really think some random adventurers can even slightly harm the God of Metallic Dragons? Think about what could happen. Imagine some little kid stepping up to defend the old man, a bunch of other little kids back him up, the party kills them, and then Bahamut brings them all back and offers to make them clerics or paladins so they can actually do something about all the evil people in the world.

We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight . These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.

I believe that the consensus on this is that the originator of this post has taken up smoking. Ash is sticky.

Extreme/insane positions on everything. Not just one or two insane positions, not just political extremism; when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING. No nuance allowed. And it has to be fully sincere, otherwise you are dealing with a Jreg.

There are milder versions of this, but I have rarely met a child that didn’t have a strongly held insane belief formed from their limited experiences. My favorite was a kid who told me that eating pasta supports fascism because it comes from Italy, so loving Italian products means you support Mussolini. Pizza is fine, though, because that’s American.

What in the actual fuck does he think is going to happen

The main thing is that prom didn’t start to become big until the 1950s. This was a high water mark for conservatism in the U.S., and in order to go on any date at least one parent, usually the girl’s dad, had to be present I have been corrected that this is reductive. Chaperoning was still commonish in this time period, depending on your area, but the 50s dating scene was beginning to look somewhat similar to what we have today with a guy picking up a girl in his car to go somewhere. Dancing would have been an uncommon activity because of how “adult” it was seen to be, so for horny teens Homecoming and Prom were a big deal. The biggest thing you notice looking at the dances of this time period is that the dresses are relatively simple, because it really wasn’t that big of a deal back then. It was literally just a school dance, organized and overseen by the teachers and school staff.

Then, those kids grew up, had kids of their own, started making movies, and on doing so impressed on the following generation that homecoming and prom were the most fun nights in all of high school. This created pressure to make your proms and homecomings be as cool as the ones your parents told you about. This led to a lot more effort being put in. Dresses got way more expensive, tuxes became pretty much mandatory, guys began doing elaborate prom-posals.

This created a big economic opening in the market. Somebody needs to make colorful dresses for the girls and tuxes for the guys. The wedding industry immediately took over this area, and homecoming and prom became rush time for that industry. Somebody needs to play music. Back in the 50s they would hire bands, but by the 70s and 80 we started getting disc jockeys and now the party dj industry is fully enmeshed in high school dances. Then there’s the decorations, which became themeing, which feeds into the party industry.

Now you have the cultural snowball rolling downhill, building up speed, slowly getting bigger. It is encouraged by a growing industry that advertises to teens how cool their prom will be if they just wear this dress, and then social media happened. Now teens are advertising prom to each other, and feeling they need to be better than that TikTok they saw earlier, so the social pressure to have the coolest prom ever is more ubiquitous that it has ever been.

It works. Well, it works about as well as your average LLM