Watching the end of Star Wars 2, Attack of the Clones and the Imperial March is playing all ominous and loud. And my son starts singing: “makes the medicine go down, makes the medicine go down” and now I can’t unhear it.

@DunderMoose got me infatuated with another niche hobby community. First the Brosr this times its pegships. No clue when I fan wargame with my warring fleet, but maybe its time for the #FrenlyClubhouse to start #BroStellar?

>Plot centers entirely around fighting extreme government taxation and overreach >The Sheriff of Nottingham literally collects taxes from the church poor box >Friar Tuck gets so fed up with the state disrespecting the Church that he physically throws hands with the Sheriff >Casts the Crusades in a positive light >Male protagonist who risks his life for his people >Unapologetically traditional romance with Maid Marian without any modern subversion >Climax is literally a raid to break political prisoners out of a corrupt jail >Story resolves when the rightful, divinely-appointed monarch returns from the Holy Land to crush the corrupt politicians >Ends with a beautiful church wedding and a happily ever after We need to make Kid's stories based again

“Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.” — Thomas Sowell

The year is 1949. The Nobel Prize in Medicine has just gone to the man who invented the lobotomy. Your doctor suggests one for your sister, who has not been herself since the baby came. It is the most celebrated advance in psychiatry of the age, and he is simply current. By the time the prize curdles into an embarrassment, close to twenty thousand Americans have had the operation, and proportionally more here in Britain. The year is 1956. Lay the baby down on his front, the doctor says. So does the most trusted childcare book ever written, the one on every new mother's shelf. On his back he might choke, the reasoning goes. Millions obey. The advice holds for nearly thirty years, long after the evidence has quietly turned, and a generation of cot deaths is counted before anyone thinks to roll the babies over. The year is 1966. A bestselling book informs your wife that menopause is a disease, that she is, in the author's word, a castrate, and that a small daily pill will keep her youthful and tolerable to live with. Her doctor agrees. The drug becomes one of the most prescribed in the country. Nobody mentions that the author sat on the payroll of the company that made it. That detail surfaces decades later, in the same year the landmark trial is halted early for raising rates of breast cancer, stroke and clots. The year is 1979. Your ulcer is caused by stress and sharp food, the doctor explains. Calm down, drink milk, take the antacid that happens to be the best-selling medicine on earth. Two Australians are about to prove that most ulcers are caused by a bacterium and cured by a fortnight of antibiotics. The profession laughs. One of them eventually drinks a beaker of the stuff to settle the matter. The establishment takes the better part of twenty years to stop laughing. The Nobel lands in 2005. The year is 1985. Butter is dangerous, the doctor says. Switch to margarine, it is modern, it is heart-healthy, the experts are united. The spread he nudges you toward is loaded with trans fats, which the next decade will identify as the genuinely dangerous one, and which will eventually be banned outright. The butter goes quietly back in the fridge. No correction is ever printed at the volume of the original warning. The year is 1992. There is a pyramid on the surgery wall, and the very same one in your grandchild's classroom. Bread, cereal, rice and pasta form the broad virtuous base, up to eleven servings a day. Fat is exiled to the tiny tip. The chart was reportedly held back a year while the relevant industries had their say. It is wrong at the bottom and wrong at the top. Now it is today. Your doctor has new guidelines, new studies, a fresh consensus, delivered with precisely the steady confidence of every guideline above. He believes it, and he has good reason to. So did every doctor in this thread. None of them were villains. Each was sincere, most were kind, and all were certain, reading from a map that somebody else had drawn and handed them. That is the part worth sitting with. So when the man in the white coat tells you what to eat, what to fear, and what to swallow every morning for the rest of your life, you are allowed to ask. Who paid for the study. What the evidence says beneath the headline. What he was just as certain about thirty years ago, and where that advice sits now. Then make up your own mind. Call it scepticism, or call it whatever your grandmother called it when she ignored the advert, kept the butter where it was, and lived to ninety-one. It has outlasted every consensus on this list. It will outlast this one too.

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, [...] those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Galatians 5:19-21

This book has been the inciting incident for two Battle Braunsteins. The one coming up on the 19th is because some idiot in my campaign wished upon malchimpus’s paw. Now it’s civil war.

Not sure if it’s me, but every time I play MOTHERSHIP RPG, the players turn on each other. It’s got PvP baked into its DNA.

The further we redevelop the term Campaign, the more relevant my essays on Characters and Combat Orders will become.

Next week, I’m hosting an in person Braunstein. Recording everything with a confessional. 3 of the 5 are brand new to D&D and it’s still going to be better than 90% of “games” being played.

Flashy’s first duel in #Engarde

Tonight I was a PC adventurer in the module I wrote: #UMBROS No #osr dm has ever done this but the #BROSR is built different (better). Azkin the Elf (T1/F1) was the greatest and most successful adventure in this 20 sessions long #dnd campaign so far. Hes ofc working for Chaz.

I was NOT in this first session of #Trollopulous and, when I read the session report back in 2020 I could only feel FOMO. Looking now… this is hysterical. No wonder the #BROSR is going strong and #WinningSecrets is the most important #dnd book of the last decade.

Banger thread…

Thomas Sowell: "I was just doing some research on Detroit and it's decline, as they kept raising the city income tax, the revenues kept falling. Barack Obama was asked by Charles Gibson in 2008, why he wanted to raise the tax rate because he will raise more revenue if he does the opposite, and his response was that, 'it's a matter of social justice'. He didn't care about the consequences. If he can get people to be mad at the rich and vote for him, it's a political success. He doesn't care whether the government collects more revenues or not."

How to Zero Prep a #dnd campaign: Show up with a map with a few kingdom names on it. Bring your rulebooks and know how to use them. Don't prep. I did this is 2023 and blogged about it, find it below.

Charisma checks were invented to codify and stratify leadership ability. People forget that D&D was a wargame first and that charisma was later bastardized as part of the folk-D&D revolution.

C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is the second best supplement for RPGs, second only to the bible. jonmollison.com/2026/06/06/s…