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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • People have been complaining about WotC’s executive meddling in D&D and MTG for as long as I can remember, since before the 1999 Hasbro purchase. D&D 3e, mostly written after WotC acquired TSR but published shortly after Hasbro acquired WotC, was panned so badly that they dropped 3.5 just a couple years later. And 4e (including the first OGL fiasco) happened when Hasbro didn’t care about WotC because they were all-in on the Michael Bay Transformers movie. In fact, up until Stranger Things and Critical Role, Hasbro seems to have considered WotC the “Magic: The Gathering Money Printer” and done most of their meddling on that side of the house.









  • I don’t know if that’s really true anymore. Or, maybe more accurately, I think we’re in between when that was true in the pre-social media age and when it’ll be true again after the social web breathes its last. There are just too many ways that megacorps, bad actors, and foreign agents can manipulate offline activity with online action.

    Some of those things are manipulating small groups into large-scale action (see: Qanon), but misinformation and meme warfare also have a measurable effect on election, direct action, etc. Not to mention that local organization is best done online, and that has a very real effect.

    Now, is offline action more important than online action? Absolutely, and if you’re saying that being an “online leftist” (as an identity) is a distraction, I think I agree with you. But online action is more than just a distraction, and to ignore it is probably counterproductive.