An essential step to becoming an adult is learning how to make salads that you genuinely enjoy eating.
Here’s my current favorite: toss small shrimp in your sauce or seasoning of choice, bake or airfry, and mix in with greens of your choice. (My preferred version under the cut)
Diced mango and salmon over greens (and I love to add diced Brie)
Diced kiwi over spinach, drizzled with honey (optional: and sriracha)
Watermelon and feta cheese over spring mix
Taco meat and cheese over shredded lettuce (add basically any taco toppings you like: tomato, onion, sour cream, etc.)
Mixing in pico de gallo to greens along with virtually any leftover fruits and veggies is great too! I like mango, corn, cucumber, or avocado to accompany pico de gallo.
Also: do NOT feel guilty about buying fruits, veggies, or even protein that’s prepackaged, canned, or frozen. Getting in your nutrients is more important than getting the most raw and “pure” version of an ingredient.
“DNI: freaks” do you realize how conservative you look
freaks please interact
this is the first time one of my posts has been tagged like this and out of all of them i think id be glad if this one got 100k. because firstly i need to find my fellow freaks but also we need to shame people who are anti-freak because like. why do you hate to live deliciously
Bisexuals, trisexuals, homo sapiens Carcinogens, hallucinogens, men, Pee Wee Herman German wine, turpetine, Gertrude Stein Antoniotti, Bertolucci, Kurosawa, Carmina Burana To apathy, to entropy, to empathy, ecstasy Vaclav Havel - The Sex Pistols, 8BC To no shame - never playing the fame game To marijuana To sodomy, it’s between God and me To S & M: Please interact!
47 more free and helpful things, that everyone can take advantage of
Music
Gnoosic is your place go for new music recommendations. It asks for three of your favourite bands, and based on them, spits out an artist that you might like. You can also “like”, “dislike”, or mark it as something you aren’t familiar with – which further refines the results.
NoCopyrightSounds is a copyright free / stream safe record label, providing free to use music to the content creator community. NCS Music is free to use for independent Creators and their UGC (User Generated Content) on YouTube & Twitch - always remember to credit the Artist, track and NCS and link back to our original NCS upload.
Radio Gardentake a trip ‘round the world’s airwaves! Just pick a city — literally any city — and Radio Garden will play you whatever its local radio station is broadcasting.
RadioooooRadio Garden walked so Radiooooo could run. This site adds a timeline function so you can listen to radio from not just anywhere, but anywhen. Get down to those 1910s Germany bops!
Art
Krita free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation.It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and Chrome OS
29a.chinteractive site that lets you color what looks to be a map of the cosmos, but I’m honestly not sure. Whatever it is, it’s mesmerizing.
Games
Patatapis an interactive website that responds to the keys on your keyboard with a sound and a brief animation. Now imagine hammering in entire sentences – and you got an explosion of sounds, colors, and movement! Once you start typing in random paragraphs, it becomes almost hypnotic, in a way.
Drench a very simple browser game, Drench gives you a board with different colored tiles, and you use the buttons to flip the colors around. Do this until your board is full of tiles of a single color only.
River Styx an interactive point-and-click game that takes you through the river Styx and the Underworld. You will meet many Greek Gods and Goddesses here, and you will also be learning a lot about their myths and legends.
2048this website lets you play a game called 2048, which is kinda like Tetris but with addition. Use your arrow keys to try to combine numbers until you reach 2048, or go ~beyond~ and try to reach 4096.
Little Alchemy 2fun little time killer. As its name suggests, the website deals with the process of transformation you achieve when you start mixing different things. You start with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. The goal is to create as many different materials or objects as possible. For example, earth and air will form dust. There are no rules just mix and match your creations to create new ones. You will not even know where your time went.
Akinatorwebsite is magic or rather feels like one. You can think of any character in this entire world and through a series of question, it will deduce the name. Don’t believe me, go try for yourself.
Find the Invisible CowYou’re going to want to make sure your sound is on in this fun finding game! Find the invisible cow in this laugh out loud version of hot and cold.
CookieClickerHow fast can you click for cookies? Level up and become a cookie pro with this fun time-wasting website!
Knowledge
ZooniverseA really neat website that brings people together to create one of the largest platforms for people-powered research. Volunteers come together to assist professional researchers. There is no need for a specialised background or training; all you have to do is to answer simple questions.
Cool Huntingis a really cool publication platform that uncovers the latest in design, technology, style, travel, art and culture. If you are into art, architecture, and culture, then this website is perfect for you.
OCEARCH Shark TrackerThis one looks right on the money for the folks who can’t get enough of sharks! With OCEARCH Shark Tracker, you can keep a track of tagged sharks as they are busy swimming around the deep ocean. Moreover, the website also lets you zoom in on a particular location to check where sharks have been swimming for the past year.
Ad Astra-appAn essential tool for every astronomer. The star atlas and skyguide that makes it really easy to pick the best objects, make your own observation list and use it when you are outside
100,000 Stars is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen on the web. It shows a representation of galaxy with stars inside it. You can take a tour which starts from the Sun and takes you to the outer edges of the galaxy while teaching you valuable insights in between.
wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring how-to articles on a variety of topics. For example: How to make ginger ale, How change a lock or How to survive an encounter with an ostrich.
Cooking
Cooking for Engineersis a godsend for those who love to cook. This website has it all, from recipes, to kitchen gear, to cooking tests, down to a handy dictionary. The best part about this website is its classic 90’s layout, which makes accessing the recipes and files intuitive and easier.
My Fridge Food at this point, your fridge probs has, like, three random items in it, and you’re starting to panic about meal options. Enter My Fridge Food, which inputs everything you have in your kitchen and outputs a recipe. Bless.
Work, or relax
Da FontTired of your basic Times New Roman? You can spend hours downloading new fonts from typography artists to spice up your new document!
A Soft MurmurIf you’re looking to create your own ambient background music to listen to while you work or read, A Soft Murmur is the fun website for you! Create your own mix of white noise and other natural sounds to relax and waste some time.
Rainy MoodGet all the benefits of rain without getting caught in it with Rainy Mood! This is perfect for setting a relaxed and chilled out mood.
I Waste So Much TimeThe website is designed to literally allow you to waste your time. There are no long articles, just funny pictures with embedded texts. A very good time waster for short breaks.
This Is My Website NowThe website truly kills your time. It is just a collection of small games which you can play on your browser. Effective for less than 10 minutes of usage, it’s good for a short break.
InstructablesIf you’ve always wanted to learn how to DIY but didn’t know where to start, try Instructables. They have community posts with step-by-step instructions to help you become a DIY master in no time.
OBS Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers. only downside to it is that you have a power director watermark in the corner of your video, but its not very large.
Sleepytimeis your sleeping schedule out of whack? This fun website calculates exactly when you need to go to sleep and wake up in order to get a good night’s sleep.
Boredom
MapCrunchGo on an adventure without leaving your home — because you can’t! This site plops you down in a random location on the globe, and all that’s left to do is explore.
List of Conspiracy TheoriesGet sucked down the dark rabbit hole of the internet that will have you denying history and wearing tinfoil hats. Wikipedia’s list of conspiracy theories will have you scrolling for ages!
This Person Does Not ExistIf AI and deep-fakes fascinate you, this is a website that will either make you very excited, or give you nightmares about whether ‘The Matrix’ is real, and if you, at some point in your life, took the blue pill instead of the red one. Either way, the website generates fake people using GAN (or generative adversarial networks), and displays them to you. You can refresh the page to see a different face. Also, if this interests you, you might also like:
This Cat Does Not Exist. You know, because why stare at human faces when you can look at cats instead.
The Useless WebWant to see what the Internet truly has to offer? Take a peek at The Useless Web to see what truly is out there.
Not Always RightHad a bad day at work? Did that one annoying, pesky customer or client who just wouldn’t shut up tried to give you a hard time, and succeeded? Then this website is just perfect for you! It’s a collection of stories about customers who just don’t know when to shut up.
Zoom QuiltIf you’re looking to be hypnotized, then check out this site, which is basically a picture that infinitely zooms in to reveal new pictures.
Just for fun
Tickldis your go-to spot for anything humorous and funny, for anything that’s really cool and interesting, or stuff that’s just plain WTF.
Paper ToiletJust because stores are sold out of toilet paper doesn’t mean you have to live without. This site features some interactive TP that you can roll up or down.
CoolThingsis a collection of cool things. From entertainment, to gadgets, to even toys and inventions, there is bound to be something here that will interest you.
This Is Why I Am BrokeThis is a great website for discovering new gift ideas which are distinct. The products range from a few dollars to a few thousand. There’s something for everyone here.
PostSecret is a very interesting website. Visitors are encouraged to send in anonymous postcards on which they write their secrets. There are all sorts of secrets on all kinds of postcards, and the variations make this a really interesting project. However, be warned – these secrets are very real… and very heavy.
NOIYS – Post, read, forget is a place to post an anonymous note to be viewed by many people, only to be deleted within 24 hours. It’s the perfect website for venting anonymously and not worry about the consequences, as it will be deleted within a day. The best part (or maybe worst) is that strangers can reply to your note, too. That way, you can have a running conversation with a complete stranger.
Scream Into the Void Take your outrage about our current situation (or any problem in your life) and throw it into the void. Just type out your feels and then click the “Scream” button, which does exactly what you think it does.
And lastly…
Dildo GeneratorWelcome, good citizens of the web, to my favorite site of all time. It’s right in the name: You can generate a custom dildo by length, width, base, contours, and so many more variables. Things get wild pretty fast.
EyebleachDid you see something on the internet that was just too scary? Or just need to get it out of your head? Click on Eyebleach to be fed adorable pictures of puppies, kitties, or babies!
Still feels weird that the same band made “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid” and “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”
It’s like if Smash Mouth and Fall Out Boy were one band.
The Offspring are honestly a contender for the funniest punk band ever, made even funnier by the fact that Dexter Holland is pushing 60 now and has a PhD in virology.
Like imagine being on an academic committee and reviewing a dissertation on HIV protein-encoding genomes and it’s from a guy with frosted tips whose greatest legacy is the Crazy Taxi soundtrack.
Since birth you could see a counter above people’s heads. It doesn’t count down to their death. It goes up and down randomly. You’re desperate to find out what it means.
You learn that other people can’t see the counter when you’re around five, and ask your mother what it means because hers just dropped suddenly to three and you don’t know why.
She looks confused, the number slowly ticking up and down, and asks what game you’re playing. She seems distracted, and now you’re confused too, because you’ve been telling people their numbers for years.
You can’t see your own, not even in a mirror, and the fact that everyone gave you different answers wasn’t all that odd since you couldn’t see a pattern in how their numbers changed.
It does explain why you sometimes got answers in the millions though, when you never saw anyone else with a number higher than a few hundred. And here you’d thought you were special.
You’re more circumspect when asking if other people see them after that year, because while your mom was nice, the kids on the playground weren’t. You had to pretend it was a game, and they were stupid for not playing along.
You reach your teen years, get really into all those romantic ideas about a countdown to death, and it makes you scared of watching the counters drop for a few years.
But you comfort yourself that it’s clearly not a countdown, every time a friend hits one, or zero. It goes up and down, by jumps and starts, and seems so random.
Of course you become obsessed with math. You watch your one friend, a girl with yellow hair whose number jumps more and faster than anyone you’ve ever met. You track the numbers, log them for days and weeks, and try to find an equation to explain them.
There’s nothing, of course. Even when you think you see a pattern, it breaks in a matter of hours.
You look for the slowest changer instead, factor in the time between switches, and it’s still no good. You’re an irredeemable nerd now, but you need to know.
You get yourself a scholarship, pursue calculus and theoretical math, and your fellow students are almost as passionate as you. But none of them can see the numbers, none of them have the mystery you’ve never solved.
The scholarship doesn’t fully cover the cost of textbooks, so you take a job as a barista nearby. That’s interesting, because you see so many people all at once and can do more little studies of the numbers.
The answer definitely isn’t “time since last meal”, or “last cup of coffee”.
The presence of such a large and diverse sample lets you spot new things you hadn’t considered before too; you always knew most peoples’ counters changed at different speeds, but you’ve never seen anyone consistent before.
There’s a kid with green hair and piercings all up both ears and brows, and their number is never lower than twenty. They’re never rude, but they’re loud in spite of themselves, and you find yourself liking to see them.
A control for your experiments, a regular and reliable face.
There’s an old man who sits in the back whose number never changes and who never speaks. He hands you a napkin with a coffee order every time, and some of your coworkers are scared touching the napkins will make you sick.
You aren’t. The old man might be homeless or might not be; none of you actually know. He sits bundled in coats all through the summer, always has the same red scarf, always has the same seven sat above his head.
You’ve never seen him sat or napping in the street, but he’s never pulled out a key and you haven’t followed him to see if he goes to a home.
Whether he’s unhoused or not, you’re not about to treat him like a plague rat. He’s just quiet, and for all you know he’s fully mute.
You talk slowly and clearly back, making sure your mouth is easy to follow because you can’t be sure he can hear you in the first place. He watches your lips instead of your eyes, never replies, but always pays in exact change, and then puts the exact same tip in the jar.
One day, on a whim, you join a sign language club at university. It takes some practice to get the signs down, and you have to ask for some specific phrases, but a week later you try wishing him a good day in ASL.
His eyes light up, a tremulous smile half hidden in the scarf. He doesn’t sign back, but you know the secret now. He just doesn’t have much to say, but he was happy you made the effort.
His number is eight now.
You wondered if it might have been changing all along and you just didn’t notice, but it doesn’t go back down. Or up any further.
You have the strongest feeling you are that number eight, but you can’t prove it. It didn’t change while you were watching, or while he was in the store.
You take statistics class, get permission from your manager to run out a few projects at work. Things like two tip jars, each with a different sign and a note behind them explaining the project.
That gets much more results than a single tip jar, as you expected, people are firm in their opinions and pick sides quickly.
The other baristas insist on keeping the two jar method even once you’ve gotten an A on your findings. They’re for competing sports teams on game days, music genres over the summer when the concerts come through, silly things like “cake or pie” when nothing more serious is going on.
There’s no correlation between the counters and how much people donate, or which side they choose.
You don’t realize that other people don’t have your memory for numbers and faces until you comment that your dear regular always donates to the jar on the left. Your coworker looks surprised and asks how you know.
Apparently other people don’t really keep numbers in their heads, but it’s second nature to you by now. You don’t always have time to grab the notepad you used to track them in.
University is interesting, and you find your way to chaos theory, which is fun in so many ways. One thing you do notice is that the numbers of your professors are almost always in motion, ticking up and down by tens at a time.
It doesn’t match the attendance sheets, you checked, with some excuses from your statistics class. You’re taking a seemingly random array of math specialties, but they all help each other.
The puzzle continues, all through your degrees (two full masters, and neither of them help). You learn to think of the world, of numbers, in a different way. You leave the cafe, move on to a couple of think tank positions.
You’ve never found anyone else who can see the numbers either. That’s okay though; you don’t want to just be given the answer anymore. This is a challenge now, a test of your worth, a constant companion.
Crunching numbers, applying analytics for work is good practice and keeps you sharp, but it isn’t your passion. Your passion is the mystery, but now you have access to the kinds of computers you can start running a broader analysis on.
You have decades of data now, and you feed it all in after work. Set the machines analyzing, using as much information about each person as you have, looking for variables.
It runs for months, but you’re not exactly surprised by the results; you need more data. No correlation detected.
It’s still a disappointment, and for a few days you feel down. You stop thinking about the counters. Just focus on your work, doing your job, making a play at socializing and reminding yourself you have a life outside your quest.
Kind of.
And then one day you’re in a coffee shop, grabbing a hit on your way to morning classes, and the cashier is a real sweet looking kid with earnest brown eyes and neatly tied back cornrows.
He looks conflicted as you make your order, you’ve been coming here since he started but you’ve never really talked. He takes your order, takes your money, and you move back.
You’re expecting someone else to bring you the drink, but he switches out and leans over the counter to give you the cup and cookie you definitely didn’t order. You’re confused; you didn’t pay for it, there’s no promotion.
He gives you a small empathetic smile.
“You look like you need it. Your…. Uh…. Your colour’s washed out,” he says in a hurry, clearly expecting you to think nothing of it, but your heart stops.
He doesn’t mean your face. You know that. If anything, your natural tan has gotten darker now that you spend more time outside. Just. Sitting in the park. Pretending you’re not thinking about the numbers.
But the way he says it, the furtive glances, the way you suddenly realize he’s been looking just a little above your face almost every time you see him.
You don’t grab his hand, even though you desperately want to. He’s already turning, rushing back to work, and you need to know.
“Wait,” you call as quietly as you can, and he stops. Glances back.
There’s something in those brown eyes now, a wariness and a kind of squashed down hope you know you’re showing too.
Wetting your lips you try and work out how to ask. What to say. It isn’t numbers, clearly. But you’ve never known your own number, always desperately wondered, and if there’s even a tiny chance…
“What… what colour was I?” You ask quietly, and he takes a quick glance around.
It’s not busy. You came after the rush, not wanting to be overwhelmed by counters you just can’t figure out.
He gives you a thoughtful look, from that spot on your forehead down to your eyes, still guarded but hoping.
“Blue,” he says softly, coming back to lean on the counter, “but it was very bright. Cyan, almost glowing. You’re… more grey now. Powder blue.”
You take a moment trying to think about the difference, then pull your phone up to look. He stifles a chuckle, then pulls himself up. Looks at you cautiously, hopefully.
“You don’t see them, do you?” He asks softly, watching you examine the two colours. It snaps you back and you look up, a small smile on your face.
“Not colours. I see counters. Not like, death counters,” you add quickly when he looks suddenly alarmed, wondering how to make it seem reassuring. “They go up and down and I’ve spent my whole life trying to work out what they’re for, but it’s definitely not that.”
You pause for a moment, looking at him with a slight frown on your face. His isn’t especially high or low, and he did tell you what he saw.
“Yours is forty-six,” you tell him softly, and stifle a laugh when it promptly changes. “Fifty-two.”
It seems to settle him a little, his eyes tracking your face, noting where you’re looking. You meet his eyes again.
“Do you know what the colours mean?” You ask softly, and he gives an awkward shrug.
“Not really. Just… never seems to be a good thing when they’re fading. Most people stay in one colour but change hue and saturation.”
They’re not terms you’re super familiar with, you’re not an artist, but you know in your heart that this is it. Your big break. A second data point.
All you have to do is not scare him away.
“I finally finished running a full computer analysis on all the counters I’ve seen,” you admit softly, gaze slipping down to the free cookie. “It didn’t find anything.”
He makes a soft, sympathetic noise, and the first smile you’ve actually felt since tugs at your lips. You give him a hopeful look.
“If you wouldn’t mind… you could email me the colours you see, and I could add them to the dataset? No names or anything, just…” and suddenly you realize that this project is creepy as hell, and super invasive, and he looks surprised and you should definitely leave.
This time he calls you back, glancing around the mostly empty store. And he quietly tells you the colours he sees above each head, and you note that along with their counters.
You’re already thinking of possible connections, maybe something in the precise wavelength of light, it’s wonderful that he’s so specific and knows so many colour names.
He’s an art student. Of course he is. And he agrees to help, if you come in at the end of the day he can finish out his shift and tell you all the colours he sees of the people still there.
Finally, finally, you have some help. Someone who understands, even if they don’t see what you do. And sure, you’ve got about fifteen years of life over him, but you always wanted a little brother.
He gawks at your work laptop when you bring it in; it’s big enough that it looks a century out of date, but that’s because you built it yourself to run like a supercomputer. Its fans roar like engines when you boot it up, and you have a whole gaggle of fascinated baristas by the time closing comes.
It can’t handle the full scope of the data set, but it connects on a private VPN to the big computer at work and can handle chunks at a time.
And convert video to 3D, but that was just to see if you could.
Your friend’s name is Dillan, and you give him yours because it’s not his fault you don’t wear a name tag. He’s got a good head for data analysis, and you know if his art doesn’t pan out he’ll do well anyway.
His art is wonderful though; reminiscent of time-lapses of cityscapes lit in blurred headlights and neon, but you know each soft line of colour is a person. He does smaller spaces too, a room, a corner of the park.
Portraits sometimes, peoples faces painted in the shades of their colour as it changes. It’s almost perfectly photorealistic, and you know he’s a prodigy in the same way you are.
You hope he can make the art he loves forever, even when he’s frustrated that a piece isn’t coming out quite right.
There isn’t an easy answer, even with his help and your new data sets. It takes years, with monthly meetings first in his coffee shop, and then at the library when he moves on.
You help with any homework that involves math, and once with a sympathetic shoulder and gentle advice when a TA is trying to drive his grades down. You know first hand how unforgiving the education system is to kids of colour, but you also remember how older students protected you.
There’s channels to report, if you know for sure they won’t take the TA’s side. There’s evidence gathering, witnesses, making sure you aren’t alone with them.
His family is far away, his parents unable to stand in his corner, so you pose as a distant cousin when he decides to make the complaint. Having an adult there, especially one with your qualifications, cuts the whole process off at the knees.
Seeing the TA’s eyes widen as you walk in in your best suit sends a little thrill through the kid in you who once sat in Dillan’s seat. Their counter jumps three times during the meeting, and this time you’re certain it’s not a good sign for them.
With the evidence Dillan and his friends have collected, the TA loses their position and gets a month of mandatory bias training. It might not change them, but you don’t care.
Dillan bounces like he’s walking on the moon as you leave, his own counter ticking steadily higher in a way you’re just as sure can’t be bad. His counter ticks up and down for the next few days, seemingly at random, and while he doesn’t know his own colour any more than you can see your counter, something in your heart tells you he’s a bright sunshine yellow.
His parents are a little concerned, of course. You meet at Dillan’s graduation, especially since you’ve got him an intern position at your work to keep him on his feet while he looks for work he actually loves.
They’re grateful, a pair of large Black men whose whole stance is a challenge for you to comment. You’re half expecting a shovel talk of some kind, and ready for it, when Dillan leans in eagerly and whispers that you’re the one who sees the numbers.
His father’s eyes soften, though his dad is still wary. You tell them both their own numbers, the only way you can try and prove it.
His father’s younger sister saw the numbers, you learn, and your heart stops all over again.
Someone else. A third person.
But she died long ago, and you’re startled to learn that she saw decimals. You never thought about it, never really wondered, but your counters are always whole numbers.
Dillan’s father doesn’t know all of the details, but he seems to feel better speaking about her. She never knew what the numbers were either, and he doesn’t know if she ever recorded them, but it fills you with relief.
You’d stopped looking for anyone else.
Told yourself you didn’t want to just be given the answer.
Liked being the only one to solve the puzzle.
But now that it’s possible, that you really know there are other people, first one and now two and who knows how many more?
It settles around your shoulders like a blanket, and Dillan is grinning at you in a way that tells you something has happened to your colour. You’ll add it to the dataset later.
No one else in Dillan’s family really see anything, on either side, but that’s okay. You have a goal now, and Dillan finally convinces you to do the one thing you’ve always avoided.
His dad’s a web designer. You spend about a month together, the two of you and occasionally Dillan when he isn’t painting, working out how to pose the invitation. What to show, how to format the site, how to filter out the false replies that always kept you from trying before.
Dillan does a bunch of art for the site too, pictures of what he sees that you can hardly believe aren’t just photos of people with a small circle of colour just around the hairline.
Pictures of what you see, the plain white numbers floating just above their heads. Gifs that show the way they change, the number ticking up and down like those old fashioned flap cards they used to roll through at ballgames before LED screens replaced the analog.
It’s always been funny to you, how archaic your counters are. Outdated before you were born, and the only reason you know the flip cards existed is because your mother showed you when you tried to explain what you saw.
But the white numbers fold themselves in half to show the new number unfolding down just like that, and Dillan laughs about it with you while you make the gif.
You spend long minutes with Dillan and his dad once it’s all ready, just looking at the button that’ll send the whole thing live.
Are you ready?
There’s a new email address just for this, but you know it’ll keep all three of you busy if enough people find the site. There’ll be people making fun of you, just like when you were little, and people pretending to feel special.
But there might be someone else too, someone as lost and confused as you were. What else might others see? Shapes? Scribbly lines that get more and more jagged like your counter climbs?
You can’t even imagine it, and it steals the breath from your lungs.
Dillan steals the mouse and hits the button for you, then runs away with it so you can’t panic and undo it. His dad laughs until tears run down his cheeks as you do indeed panic, leaping up to chase your little brother.
But it’s done now, and you can breathe again.
You still don’t know the answer. You know that at the end of it all, Dillan’s colours may have nothing at all to do with your counters.
But you’re not alone.
You saw your shadow in this sweet, funny kid, reached out the way you wish someone had reached for you, and now you’ve both reached out to the whole world.
It’ll be a pain in the ass sorting it all out, but you have work friends who can make you a program to filter the openly aggressive messages.
Because somewhere in the world, there’s a five year old kid who was just told no one else sees the world the way they do, and they’ll be able to see that it’s not true. They’re not alone. Someone will help them solve the mystery.
You’re no closer to the answer than you were as a fresh graduate yourself, can’t imagine what it could be.
But it turns out you were wrong, back when you were the fresh graduate who wanted to solve the world all alone. Answers aren’t as important as not being alone.
Idk even as someone who likes 5e some stuff like this is just kinda silly
Like if you dislike so many things about the way 5e is made just try a different game, there’s SO many ttrpgs out there now I’m sure you can find another one that fits what you want
You can tell who doesn’t have a full time job and/or kids cause they’re like “simply learn an entirely new system and also convince a handful of your friends to make time to do the same, what’s the big deal”
The massive idle couch potato privilege of *checks notes* having the time to read 20-ish pages of text.
I think a lot of people get intimidated to learn a new RPG because they think it’s always going to be as intense as learning DnD.
DnD is a lot. There are other RPGs that can fit in a png.
Here is Swords & Scrolls
This is 100% of the game. Every piece of published material is right here. It is also entirely free. If you do not have time to try other, bigger RPGs, but you have the general grasp of how the flow of play works (DM describes a thing, you respond in character, etc.), then Start Here.
Scrolls & Swords is going to fit very well with the same kind of classic fantasy settings that you see in DnD, but it’s going to be much more flexible to your group. If you really like homebrewing DnD (which it sounds like you do), Scrolls & Swords is robust yet small enough to be an excellent starting point for that. It lends itself well to Rule of Cool styles of play, but also a focus on common sense play (“Of course you know how to saddle a horse, you used to be a stablehand,” and so on), depending on which your group leans into more. Additionally, these rules don’t just apply to combat, but anything your DM decides would be an interesting challenge. That means you use exactly the same rules for combat as you do for seducing a guard or haggling a better price or riding in a horse race.
If you decide to download that image, you now own a copy of a full RPG system to the fullest extent that you can own anything and can then use it to run your next campaign.
Learning DnD can be an expensive and genuinely massive undertaking, especially if it’s your first RPG (which it sounds like it is). What a lot of people don’t realize is that most RPGs aren’t like that. The majority of them are going to be a single novel sized book for half the price of one DnD book. And I mean that novel is everything: rules, character stuff, GM reference, and even a few starting adventures, for less than the price of the Player’s Handbook.
The thing is, if you currently have time to play DnD, you have the chance to pause it for two sessions and spend that time reading a new game. Keep in mind, if you do pick a novel-sized game, that includes everything that the three core books of DnD covers, so you will not even need to read the whole book (your GM will, or will at least need to read a bit more than other folks in your group). I know that DnD is huge, but the majority of these other games simply are not that; you really can get everything in the same time as two DnD sessions.
I’ll list some that I really like, and I’ll make sure to only include shorter rulebooks with a low-ish price point.
Mouse Guard
Play as a little mouse protecting an entire frontier of mice! It uses the Burning Wheel system, which means you’re going to still be defining your characters’ skills very clearly, but you do so by outlining their life experience and family. Very clear about the roles of the GM and the players, so it’s hard to feel “railroaded” or lost.
Monster of the Week
If Buffy, The Dresden Files, or Supernatural were an RPG. Uses Powered by the Apocalypse, so you’ll still have a “class” but it’s really going to fill out your narrative role and relationship to other characters really well (like if you rolled your background, class, and character bonds and flaws into one neat package). It’s going to be good if you don’t like the grid combat of DnD and wish it focused on the drama of a fight more, or if interacting with NPCs or solving mysteries is your favourite thing to do in a game.
Crash Pandas
Play as a band of raccoons in an illegal street race, all trying to drive the car at the same time. Made by the same person who did Honey Heist (which I also recommend), so you can expect the same kind of goofy, easy-to-learn style. It’s another one-page game like Scrolls & Swords up there (albeit a bigger page) and is equally free. You can own it for $0 and a quick google search if you wanted.
I hope these can get you started. DnD is massive so if it’s the first RPG you’ve played, it can make all RPGs seem equally daunting. If you take nothing else from this, know that other RPGs are far more accessible than DnD might make them seem.
