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Jim McGarva

@jimbozig.bsky.social
106 followers 87 following 1.1K posts

I teach math and stats and make tabletop RPGs and have a house full of kids and pets. He/him. Find Tailfeathers, Strike!, and more jimbozig.itch.io and at strikerpg.com Chat about my games at discord.gg/SmxeetS

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Reposted by Jim McGarva
lumpley @lumpley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
15 years ago when Apocalypse World was new and people were beginning to understand and work with it, it was seductive to look at "acting under fire" and see, not one basic move of several, but the template underlying all the game's moves. Like @kierongillen.bsky.social 's classic gag:
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John C. Brady @jcbrady.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Literally the only visible form of energy, but, sure, whatever.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Very frustrated with Mississauga designing major arterial roads and then posting speed limits on them as if they are small residential streets. This four-lane divided highway has a posted speed limit of 40 km/hr. Yeah, right. Of course everyone on it drives 65!
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Second one just a couple hours behind! Time to pump up those wings and fly south!
A monarch in the act of emerging from its chrysalis. Its wings are very small, its abdomen dangling beneath.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
First one is out!
A brand new monarch outside its chrysalis. The remains of the chrysalis are pale white now. The butterfly is hanging upside down.A brand new monarch hanging upside down from a person's finger. Its wings are floppy.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
When my kid needs $20 to go to McDonald's with her friends...
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Talking to your friend who "doesn't know actors." Hey, they made a Wuthering Heights adaptation starring Barbie and Frankenstein's monster.
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Kamala Kara A 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @covok.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5... We have launched a Quickstart for the game, so people can get a taste before we go live! #TTRPG #Digimon #Tabletop #RPG #Roleplaying #Game #Pokemon #PbtA #Fate #SavageWorlds #Dungeons&Dragons #D&D #Kickstarter #Crowdfunding
drivethrurpg.com
DriveThruRPG - The Largest RPG Download Store!
Your one-stop online shop for new and vintage RPG products from the top publishers, delivered fresh to your desktop in electronic format.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The problem with a big tent is people want to vote for something. If your tent includes people for trans rights but also terfs and bigots, anti-zionists and zionists, people calling for a billionaire tax and others for tax cuts, what do you offer? Vote for us and we will squabble and do nothing?
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Matt Weiner @mattweiner19.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
If they broadened their science fiction reading list to include Ursula K. Le Guin, maybe they'd run across "The Matter of Seggri": How you play is what you win.
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TANG @kjredux.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"it's critical that I denounce this film without seeing it, but before you object, my reasoning is that I need to for the sake of propaganda."
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Almost there! We had to pull up some milkweed where we were doing work in our garden, so we saved all the caterpillars we found and took care of them until they pupated.
Close up: A monarch butterfly chrysalis attached to a piece of cardboard wedged in a jade plant.Zoomed out: 4 monarch butterfly chrysalises attached to pieces of cardboard wedged in a jade plant.
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paul @ptfen.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
the web sites have got worse
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Cole 🌈 @lilgay.club · 04/09/2026
This is what’s always bothered me about the lab leak conspiracy, it’s chastising scientists for having open intellectual curiosity while pretending it’s not. If they’re only able to debate the lab leak if they come to the conclusion it must exist that’s not actually a debate!
outlets such as the Free Press. Those messages revealed that, while writing the paper in February 2020, they'd expressed openness to the possibility of a leak. To Garry the shift proved nothing more than their intellectual honesty: He'd genuinely considered the lab-leak theory, scrutinized the genetic sequence and found no evidence that the virus had been engineered. As more data emerged over the following months and years, he became only more confident it had spilled over naturally.
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
You don't have to do the thing where you strip a situation of all of its specifics to make some abstract point. Cofnas didn't merely switch topics, he took up one of the worst ideas of the last two centuries. It's actually fine for universities not to employ people who are loudly wrong and bigoted!
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
I've been reading Pride and Prejudice and I can't help thinking "And this is what it was all for. They plundered the riches of entire continents just so they could host more dinner parties." Anyway, it's a good read. Seems silly to recommend a book so acclaimed, but I do recommend it.
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Freyja Valentine, Girl IRL Cat URL @freyjavalentine.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
People imagine medieval Europe as this isolated thing when the pope was writing letters in 1282 to the bishoprics of Iceland, Greenland and the Faroese islands that they need to pay tithe in money and not in walrus tusks and wool and that's why he's hired merchants to do money exchange for them
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
What happened to the good old days when you asked about a person's character and they said "Melf is a male elf"? This is not some "identity gradually moved to the character sheet" thing. It always was! These were game pieces from the start. And from the start some people liked to imagine more.
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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
In the Renaissance people theorized, since the Aeneid is great, if you wrote poems made only of words & phrases from the Aeneid rearranged they should be great too, since a great source regurgitated should yield greatness. They produced NOTHING we still read. Thinking about that a lot lately.
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My Name is Grant @mynameisgrant.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
“the things a tenant must do” is terminal landlord-brain. That list, for right-thinking people, should include having a cuddle, hanging with the boys, and dividing the snow clearance between your neighbors.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Nolan's Odyssey may be good or may be bad, but it means we won't get an obsessively authentic Robert Eggers Odyssey. And more than anything, I want to watch some dude cursing the Ahhiyawa in ancient Hittite while wearing period-accurate buckles.
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Minærva McJanda 🔜Metatopia @minahoneybat.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Hell yeah, added community copies to GlitchHeart Vermin and some have already been claimed ^^ I appreciate every purchase but I know $20 is a big ask for an in-development game. If you can't afford it but want to give the game a read, please claim one yourself: minahoneybat.itch.io/glitchheart-...
minahoneybat.itch.io
GlitchHeart Vermin by Minærva McJanda
Brain-breaking cyberpunk
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Gene Wolfe responds to "the curtains were blue" discourse. He did so 33 years before the meme's creation because Father Inire sent a vision of the meme back to 1980.
"The third is the transsubstantial meaning. Since all objects have their ultimate origin in the Pancreator, and all were set in motion by him, so all must express his will-which is the higher reality."

"You're saying that what we saw was a sign."

I shook my head. "The book is saying that everything is a sign. The post of that fence is a sign, and so is the way the tree leans across it. Some signs may betray the third meaning more readily than others."
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Urticate, salpinx, bordereau...
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
How the fuck does this jar of pickles say "no preservatives"? What do you mean???
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Tuxedo Catfish @tuxedocatfish.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
hell yeah lol
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Marlies win!
A big scrum of hockey players hugging and punching
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Desperately wanting your stuff to be considered cool by the OSR specifically is a big fucking red flag. Wanting your stuff to find some audience? To be considered cool by all, maybe including OSR folks? Ok. You can't please everyone--but sure, be hopeful. Wanting to please these specific dudes? 😬
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
$7000 per American household. As a politician, you can promise every single household in the country $7000 if you'll just do a thing that nearly everyone would be happy to see you do even if they weren't getting $7000 for it.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
I don't think social media is any more harmful for kids than it is for anyone else. It's terrible for adults, too. But I think that politicians recognize that telling adults they can't use Facebook is a violation of our rights. They're just doing this because they don't believe kids have rights.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
I want a recalibration on what makes someone a crank. Being against universal free healthcare is just as much of a crank position as flat-tax or anti-vax. Oh, that guy is anti-nuclear? That's a little silly, but if you're pro-AI then you're doing way more to increase fossil fuel use.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Rereading Book of the New Sun.
"But Master," I said, "how can that be? By the same argument, the life must reside in each joint of every finger, and surely that is impossible."

"How big is a man's life?" asked Ultan.

"I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that?"

"You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been.
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Euthyphro @euthyphro.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Do you like constant background noise? Repeatedly cleaning up messes you didn’t make? And things being randomly broken or lost? Kids might be for you!
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
I just went to pay for something online and the part of the form that wanted an email address would not accept input that had a . or an @. It said "use english characters." Obviously it wouldn't accept an email address without those either. Love living in the age of vibe coding!
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Tuxedo Catfish @tuxedocatfish.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
OP means well and I don't want to single them out, but also, fascists lying and/or being ignoramuses about the past does not mean we should cede the ground to them, even aesthetically. The strangeness of the ancient world is a fantastic antidote for "Victorian morals are timeless and eternal."
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Foucault's Pudendum @kaitave.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
I remember people sincerely and unironically declaring that a flaw with 4E was that people actually looked forward to and enjoyed combats, and thus had no incentive to try and avoid them, something something combat as sport versus combat as war
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
How Green Was My Valley and Grogu
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Nick @nickjustageek.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Probably to nobody surprised, I run a lot of #OpenSource apps on my #Android phone Why should Google be able to impose a tax on every app written?
keepandroidopen.org
Keep Android Open
Your phone is about to stop being yours. In September 2026, Google will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with them.
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alix e. harrow @alixeharrow.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
when we mourn le guin, we mourn one of our greatest writers & thinkers. but we also mourn one of our all-time greatest haters
All you do is take all the sex out, and use little short words, and little dumb ideas, and don't be too scary, and be sure there's a happy ending. Right? Nothing to it. Write down. Right on.

If you do all that, you might even write Jonathan Livingston Seagull and make twenty billion dollars and have every adult in America reading your book.

But you won't have every kid in America reading your book. They will look at it, and they will see straight through it, with their clear, cold, beady little eyes, and they will put it down, and they will go away. Kids will devour vast amounts of garbage (and it is good for them) but they are not like adults: they have not yet learned to eat plastic.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
We need to start using this excuse ourselves. "Woke went too far!" "Sorry, the wokes had no choice - they were alienated by conservatives and centrists." "They called sushi cultural appropriation!" "Yeah, they did that because you are so obnoxious."
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Wife sick again. :( So many viruses going through my family this year! Yuck!
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
I just watched Perfect Blue and hell yeah, that's a movie. Fucking gross and weird and also empathetic and scathing. The heights of its unreality and the depths of its realism come together so well.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
In December I looked up a Pottery studio on Google maps. It turned out to be a guy's house. It's nearly May and every time I open maps in my car, the top of the list is "home" and second is this Potter guy's house as a "recent" option. I've probably looked up 200 things more recently than that.
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Dr. Jens Foell @jensfoell.de · 15/04/2026
OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse Media and universities: AI is here to stay
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alyssa || lovelandisle @lovelandisle.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
i don’t want my appliances to be smart or connect to the internet. i want them to do one mechanical task for 100 years
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
I have been writing my games. Making progress. I should post about it! But I log on here and everything is so fucked. Having to post about your silly imaginary elves alongside reports of torture and mass killing is fucked. We need to go back to forums where you could silo these things.
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Gale Galligan @galegalligan.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
parents, I beg: love your kids’ ideas as they are
Diary comic. Purple ink in sketchbook.

PANEL 1
A kid holds up a drawing of a round fish-looking shark with a little police hat. 

Kid: I made this character. It’s a shark that’s a cop.

PANEL 2
The kid talks to Gale, who’s sitting at a signing table.

Kid:I’ve drawn a bunch of stories about it. Shark Cop. It fights with its teeth and electricity.
Gale: oh!!

PANEL 3
Gale leans in.
Gale: you must love drawing.
Kid: yeah!!

PANEL 4
The kid looks down at his Apple Watch.
Kid: oh also I told my dad about Shark Cop and he got AI to make a picture.

PANEL 5
Close on the watch, which is showing an image of a very rendered muscly anthropomorphic shark (as attempted by me).

Kid: here it is!

PA 6
Gale looks at the watch.

PANEL 7
Gale looks at the kid, who brightens.
Gale: you know, I like yours way better.
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
RPGs are best when played goofy and/or gonzo. But RPG books should not have goofy or gonzo stuff in them. That's just stealing opportunities out of the mouths of the players.
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Wes Burdine @wesburdine.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
BREAKING: Following the American threat of an “Avignon Papacy,” Robert Kennedy has begun a Diet of Worms
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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
When a government is collapsing, everything staggers along for a time. Often a long time. But at some point there is a moment of crisis and whoever is there in the moment gets to be in the fight for what comes next. Bolsheviks were not the most numerous socialist group in Russia. They were small.
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