The Chronicles of Crosarth – A Steampunk Adventure

This week Discord announced that to continue to have full access to their platform, all users will be required to verify their ages using either a face scan or a photo of their government ID. This massively intrusive policy goes into effect in March, and if you trust Discord with this kind of data… please remember that in October 2025 there was a massive data breach of over 70,000 records from one of their former vendors.

This is bad. Very, very bad.

Over the last decade, Discord has risen to prominence as a place where people can build niche communities. Both companies and individuals have used the service to build their own “servers” for niche discussions and direct interactions. It’s effectively been used to emulate the features of old school forums and chat rooms because people have gotten sick of the toxicity of centralized social media.

But for all of its perceived privacy and siloing, Discord is still just another central company controlling the platform. They own every “server,” and you’re just using their space. So when a policy decision like this happens, it means we’re all screwed.

To me this is just another example of how we need to decentralize the web again. Because we used to have siloed, independent online communities where people could talk about their niche thing and connect in private. We called them forums. Someone would just pay for a little webhosting, install PHPBB, and then boom — there you go. You might make it so only logged in users can read them, but anyone can get them off the ground. Now can they handle everything Discord does? No. Sadly with the death of Skype there are very few good, free options for voice chat out there. But that’s not what 90% of Discord communities are used for.

I mentioned this almost a year ago (and touched on it again in November), but modern forum software has come a long way since PHPBB2. We run a Flarum install for Nerd&Tie[dot]Social (the official Nerd & Tie forums), and that works amazingly on mobile. There are other options like Discourse and MyBB too. But you just need one person in the community to get some shared hosting, do the install, and then bob’s your uncle. Setting up independent forums is the only way to ensure that our communities are no longer at the whims of corporations that fundamentally do not care about us or our online safety. Use fake names. Hide your personal information. Only share what you want to share.

Use the internet like it’s 2006.

I call it being an internet cockroach, some call it the “Indie Web,” but either way the only reason that we’re at the whims of these companies is because we let ourselves be. There’s a simple solution to that problem, and it’s just to go do stuff on our own.

Seems like the best option, really.

(Also the old forums for my site still exist. No one’s used them in years, but they’re technically still up as of 2/2026)

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So one of the most annoying phenomena you’ll find on social media is the way that ideas will get passed around like a game of telephone until they’re virtually unrecognizable. The “anti-intellectualism in booktok” conversation is probably one of the more frustrating examples.

It all began in earnest, really. Often when someone would critique a book in the romance or romantasy genre, fans of the book would respond with things like “it’s not that deep” or “it’s just entertainment.” But these genres are just as deserving of criticism as any other, and people pointed out that dismissing legitimate media criticism like this was anti-intellectual.

And that’s not an incorrect assessment.

But there are a lot of factors that we have to consider with the romance genre, including that it has often been the target of derision for a lot of misogynistic reasons. It’s why fans get so defensive when any criticism is lobbed — because most of the time it’s not in good faith. I think that anchors a lot of pushback against the legitimate critism too. It gets looked at as a lesser form of literature, but people need to discern the real critique from the bad faith snark if that’s every going to change.

At this point, it’s not a great situation. It can one hundred percent get worse though.

You see, social media is full of people who just echo ideas without really understanding them, and with that lack of understanding just sort of turn a thing on its head. And this is where the “discourse” kicked in, because if social media does anything it’s flatten any nuance out of anything. Every discussion gets turned into an “us vs. them,” and the worst kind of people jump into the fray. Suddenly, the people who looked down on romance as a genre started to call romance books themselves and anyone who enjoyed them “anti-intellectual” — that somehow any book they thought was “dumb” fell into that category.

That is, of course, not what “anti-intellectual” fucking means.

The entire thing is frustrating. It opens the door to some rando making weird rants about how if romance readers don’t read other genres that somehow publishers will stop producing those other books. As if romance buyers haven’t been the backbone of the publishing industry for decades. As if romance sales weren’t what kept the book stores open. As if romance sales weren’t what kept every other genre in print to begin with.

And don’t even get me started on the people dismissing romance novels as “porn,” as if there’s something wrong with adult readers enjoying adult content. The rise of moral puritanism is a wider topic that deserves its own post.

In the end though, we’re stuck with what started as a legitimate conversation turning into nonsense, and the people trying to have the original conversation just get buried under all of the flotsam, their points lost.

It just kind of sucks.

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If I told you that a Kevin James/Alan Ritchson buddy comedy ended with our leads purposefully killing dozens of children in a fiery explosion, you’d probably look at me sideways. If I told you they were the heroes, and this was supposed to be a “cool and funny’ moment, you’d think I’ve lost my god damned mind. But the movie Playdate is real, it’s been out for two months, and you can watch the scene unfold with your own eyes if you want to.

Not sure why you’d want to, but you’re an adult. You can make your own choices.

I’m going to spoil the movie here, so if for some reason you cared about the plot of this thing, you might want to stop reading here. The basic setup of the movie is that Kevin James plays a stepdad whose socially awkward kid befriends the apparent child of Alan Ritchson’s character at the park. Ritchson invites James and his son over to their house (which they’ve recently moved into), and chaos ensues because people are coming to kill Ritchson.

CJ, the character we’ve been told is Ritchson’s son is in fact not his son, but actually a genetically modified clone of Ritchson created to be a super soldier that Ritchson freed from a lab. Occasionally fun (and occasionally dumb) comedic action scenes follow. And frankly, I found myself mildly enjoying the film. It wasn’t deep, and Ritchson is funny (and James manages to not get in his way). I wouldn’t describe it as a good movie, but I was enjoying myself.

And then the last scene happened, and I just went “What the fuck?”

You see, at one point it’s revealed that CJ isn’t the only clone. There are, in fact, a couple dozen, but Ritchson and James just weren’t aware of the rest. Apparently all the clones (including CJ) have had their empathy and emotions removed from them, but the film establishes that CJ genuinely cares for Ritchson.

And then they blow up all the other clones.

In a massive fireball as our heroes walk away.

And I’m like… did no one think about this? The only difference between CJ and the rest of the clones is the short amount of time CJ spent with Ritchson’s character. That means every single one of those kids could be easily rehabilitated just by someone giving a shit about them. But, like, why think about that when you can murder them. It’s clear that literally no one making this movie thought for more than two seconds about the scene, but what a weird message to end your action buddy comedy on. It’s just… it’s just weird.

What a weird way to end that fucking movie.

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