Pedant Party

Um, actually, it's pronounced 'PEE-dunt'. This is the slightly grating but technically correct energy that Caelyn and Chase bring to Episode 20 of the Rascal Radio Hour. After discussing more tariff nonsense, the pair discover that most of the news is a huge bummer and they'd rather delve into their experience creating characters for the Cosmere RPG. Caelyn talks about hidden information and futzing about in Foundry, while Chase feels trapped by the combat assumptions of D20 systems.

Later, both of them fondly remember a certain green box full of mutants while traversing the Question Dungeon. Someone has asked about trad RPGs that should (or are currently) making comebacks – why don't we see more of that? Elsewhere, jokes about French pronunciation and what exactly it means to have the academic juice. Sounds gross, tbh. Or horny? Probably both.

You can find Rascal Radio Hour on Apple, Spotify, and all the other various podcatchers. Leaving a five-star review helps new listeners find our show and website. Since we eschew traditional advertising, these reviews and any word-of-mouth are genuinely a massive help — thank you!

Here's an exceprt:

Chase: I got in touch with Ghost to ask them about this, and they said they haven't heard anything about it. But also, they're not looking to switch payment processors. Stripe is saying one thing, their call center employees are saying another, the message is mixed, and the communication within the company seems unclear and frenetic. So, like a lot of other queer artists out there, we also have to worry about our work being deplatformed at a certain point. We are probably way down the line as far as targets go because we are not directly selling smut, but we are writing about queer content. We're writing about sex and sex work in games. Rowan has written about this. Brandon O'Brien wrote about horny art. We put explicit images in our in our stories sometimes because we have editorial fiat to do so. Is that going to get us the ban hammer from payment processors? Probably not. But the fact that I can't unequivocally say no is troubling.

We are forced to trust the wording of a corporation, which is never the situation you want to be in. But increasingly, we exist at the best and privilege of payment processors.

Caelyn: It's more evidence that we live in the worst dystopia. You'd think you could trust payment processors to do anything for money. Like, I hate capitalism. However, at least you'd want it to be reliable. That people are gonna be greedy and people who make their money from payment processing would be like, yeah, keep it coming. Just keep those payments coming. But the fact that they're turning around and going, have our moral standards that we have decided to impose. It's just exhausting.

Chase: If we have to live in crass capitalism, I would like to have a motherfucker so greedy holding the reins that they will take money for anything. But we don't even have that. Instead, this puritanical, alt-right industrial complex has fully captured capitalism and is using it as a weapon to bludgeon minorities and sex workers and anything that they deem transgressive. And that sucks.

I guess that is late stage capitalism, right? It's gone so long, and it's become such an entrenched machine that the people at the bottom, the bodies being crushed underneath, don't even get to have un petit horny game anymore. Bread and circuses have stopped. The circuses have closed down, and we're all out of fucking bread. Everyone go home, and suffer until you die.

I like Ghost as like a content management system. It's been really good to use. I don't really have any complaints with Ghost as a platform. In fact, we have recommended it to other websites looking to start up similar stuff. But we do have to contend with the fact that we are reliant on Stripe to run our business and that your money has to go through Stripe. And if that is something that crosses a morally objectionable line, I understand. We are trying to find some other ways to do this. We have had some questions from folks about whether they can pay for a Rassel subscription a different way. We're working on that. But much like itch.io and other companies, there's only so much that we can do. But that's the point, right?

Caelyn: So that is why we are introducing Rascal Coin.

Chase: Oh my fucking God, I knew it. When you interjected, I was like, she's going to make a Bitcoin reference.

Caelyn: We put the crypt in cryptocurrency!