Patrick J.B. Simmons

Roman Catholic, dad, Eagle Scout, IT guy, tea junkie, board gamer, dungeon master, skier, podcaster, and sort of an ass.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

This pu'er is like ink, but tastes way smoother and less better than the color would make you expect. Thanks to @mandelaefectype!

[Apogee Entertainment @Apogee_Ent]

Bobby Prince, the legendary composer behind the music of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake, has sadly passed away.

His work helped define an era of PC gaming.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

@random_eddie A strong argument, but I am convinced there is something about the hotel ones - how long they've sat, cleaning products they've been around, or possibly even some ancient magics attached to hospitality chain logos, that makes them write inexplicably better.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

@random_eddie Now, if I'm sitting down specifically to write, I like a fountain pen. Screw fill type so I can use a well but don't need to keep dipping.

But being left-handed means my ink and paper choices are limited to "dries fast" and "absorbs well" or I just smudge everything.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

@random_eddie I like to carry a metal cased pen in my pocket (usually promotional ones I get for free) because it is harder to break, but the actual best ballpoint pens are the ones you steal from hotels.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

@owenbroadcast IT GETS WORSE.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

@LaFluteSki Nailed it.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

This is a solid laugh, but the easiest penance I ever got was from a TLM parish (the priest was exceptionally concerned with the Traddy crowd's tendency towards scrupulosity) and the hardest was from an Irish Novus Ordo priest.

[Otto Von Tweetmarck @OVTweetmarck]

Actually: I should have realized something was up when my penance was just two Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. A TLM parish with that light of a penance?

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

Before anyone over thinks it, no, it wasn't remotely related to what I was confessing in terms of proportion of penance.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

I've noticed one of the oddest giveaways to these is they always have a note somewhere to let you know they don't follow Fr. Feeney, whereas regular Roman Catholic churches (including places like FSSP ones) just assume you'll know that.

[Otto Von Tweetmarck @OVTweetmarck]

Accidentally went to an invalid church, ffs

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

If the player in question can stand up and, acting in character, beat the ever loving hell out of me, then I will let them skip their combat roll.

I DM fully armed.

[Keelow Sierra @KeelowSierra]

@SandyofCthulhu @Nerdcognito I'm not critiquing GMs.

Why do we roll dice in combat, yet allow social repartee to bypass the rules with a good pitch?

If I describe my attack with technical perfection, can I avoid the dice?

And we all know someone with no social skills. Why handicap them?

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

This is the way.

[Fennec_Radar @RadarFennec]

@SandyofCthulhu @Nerdcognito I always prefer to use hidden roles, because then the GM has the option of fudging a roll to a desired result that benefits the players without them knowing.

I also like just rolling dice in secret without players knowing what I am rolling for, just to make them paranoid.

[Mason @webdevMason]

I am genuinely frightened to share public spaces with people like yourself, and I consider it very fortunate that this degree of narcissistic self-righteousness is incapable of hiding itself.

The extent to which people in your life have rejected you to protect themselves and their loved ones is wholly justified, and I hope you get whatever help is required to remediate what's broken in you.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

@webdevMason @berrysweetmum As a guy who would like to think I bonded with our first baby before she was born, I fully admit this is likely true (and even likely was for me, whether or not I fully accept(ed)/realize(d) it).

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

@theblessedsalt @AldiUSA @amazon @AmazonMGMStudio IF IT ISN'T ORANGE IT ISN'T A PROPER JAFFA CAKE.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

@ShimmysTopGuy @ScottRoberts People keep giving us them and I wish they'd stop because while I don't have an issue with the sentiment they're very much the size where when I can't find one I assume a child ate it.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Today, we remember a legend.

On this day in history, Harambe would have celebrated another birthday. An icon that became part of internet history, American culture, and an entire generation’s timeline.

Tomorrow marks 10 years since we lost him. Ten years since the moment the world stopped scrolling and collectively mourned something bigger than a meme.

He became a symbol of loyalty, strength, chaos, unity, and the strange beauty of the internet bringing millions of people together for one cause: never forgetting Harambe.

Everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. And somehow, a decade later, his legacy still lives on.

Gone, but never forgotten.
Rest easy to a true patriot. 🕊️🇺🇸

May 27, 1999 — May 28, 2016
Forever in our hearts.

[James Anderson White @jamesawhiite]

It’s imperative that we revert to STANDARD, not Daylight time, for two reasons, one of which you may have never considered.

You know the first: solar noon is closest to 12 o’clock all year. That means an equal number of hours before and after noon each day.

This also means earlier sunrises which are significantly better for establishing a healthy circadian rhythm.

The second reason is that nearly ONE THIRD of US counties are in the wrong timezone.

A significant swath of the country isn’t only an artificial hour ahead because of daylight time… but TWO HOURS ahead of true solar time.

Year-round daylight time, especially without recalibrating time zones, would establish this error permanently, affecting millions of Americans.

We should be letting the Sun dictate the day the way God made it. Arbitrary, artificial tampering would be worse for us all.

Fix the time zones and affix standard time.

[The Blessed Salt ❤️‍🔥🇻🇦 @theblessedsalt]

@TLM_Ryan Oh, I didn’t realize the goal was to have better rates than the normies. I thought the goal was to have all your kids become saints. My bad.

[Patrick J.B. Simmons @HobBramble]

I miss when most Trads believed the internet was evil and so didn't have access to it.

[Megha @megha_lilly]

@Eowyn_the_Fair @theblessedsalt No. Art is not your opinion. This is objectively trash.

[JD™ @LostMyHats]

Total Retard, here. Yes, I am threatened significantly more by $5 gas than Islamic Terror, hands down. And that can be proven objectively with proveable facts and arithmetic.

So let's forget for a moment that what you're really doing is shame-scolding working-class Americans who are busting their backs to squeeze every last penny in an already-inflated economy into their gas tanks for complaining that the president they voted for on the promise of lowering gas prices has skyrocketed them by a war he also promised them he would not have. Wanting the people who voted for Trump over egg prices to suddenly not care about commodity prices skyrocketing is an unreasonable demand.

Let's just look at the facts...

FIRST, we need to set the scenario. This isn't a situation where Muslim hordes are literally crossing the Mediterranean to kill us, like when the Jews opened the gates of Toledo in 711 AD, so Tariq ibn Ziya could waltz right in. So for this thought experiment, it has to be me, in 2026 AD, Mid-East America, just like you said, and not Middle Ages Europe. We are talking apples-and-apples.

SECONDLY, the math says $5 gas is WAY worse a threat than Islamic terror. Since 2010, Islamic terror has actually killed 147 people on American soil. That's an average of 9 per year. You are statistically more likely to be killed by a cow (22 deaths), struck by lightning (27 deaths), or by bees (56 deaths) . Your own furniture kills more Americans than jihad does. That's FBI vs CDC data. I know it gets in the way of the incessant NeoCon war propaganda, but those are facts. Just because it makes a more impressive movie trailer doesn't mean it's a worse threat.

Meanwhile, your lack of comprehension of the consequences of $5 gas on the world economy is unfathomable, considering fuel price is the single greatest lever in the global economy, the one variable that moves everything else at once. There's a reason that's the first variable every economic forecaster in the world wakes up to look at. This isn't some kind of trite inconvenience we all have to feel like extended car warranty solicitations or ending Pride Month in June. Out-of-control fuel prices are an End of the World As We Know It situation with compounding economic disasters that ultimately are statistically and measurably way more deadly than isolated acts of Islamic terror.

There is one thing above anything else that keeps the U.S. atop the junk heap of world order, that enshrines our place as #1 Global Top Dog: the petrodollar, used as the world's reserve currency. Maintaining that global hegemony is entirely dependent on the dollar, and it's the #1 thing the U.S. needs to avoid being toppled by emerging threats like China. The petrodollar is the ONLY thing that gives us any leverage in world affairs; it's why we can sanction nations we don't like, and it's the only alternative to constant war.

The ability to sanction is why most nations avoid making WMDs, and it's why we can usually talk tough to nations instead of only invading them. In fact, sanctions are the only "Pre-War Activity" that's actually effective more times than not. It's also why we can run deficits and export inflation to the rest of the world without economically collapsing. Meanwhile, the global fuel price is the pin in that grenade, so when gas prices spike, every cost in the physical economy grows with it, from groceries to freight to manufacturing to agriculture. $5 gas is therefore not a gas problem. It is a tax on the entire economy, hitting 330 million Americans at once, in which small businesses collapse, truckers go under, farmers get crushed between fuel costs and fertilizer costs, food prices rise, wages shrink and the price of everything goes up. That's significantly a greater threat than Iranians chanting mean things about us in Tehran.

And while that economic murder domestically, the high price gives every BRICS nation the argument they need to ditch the petro-dollar. Saudi Arabia is already accepting yuan. The post-petro-dollar energy market is being built right now, and $5 gas is the justification for finishing it. So when the petrodollar dies, the dollar loses its reserve status, America loses its ability to export inflation, and the entire debt-financed American economic order collapses simultaneously. No Islamic terror attack in human history approaches that damage.

The other insanity of your "accept $5 fuel and stop whining about the economy being destroyed OR be free from Islamic Terror" false dichotomy ignores the fact that the $5 fuel is caused by the same thing that exacerbates Islamic Terror. Every single time there's a war in the Middle East, Muslim Mass migration skyrockets like one giant, predictable immigration bomb. That's literally why there's Muslim refugees to begin with. This is why a 29 year-old Afghan national who had resettled under Operation Allies Welcome, drove 2,800 miles from Bellingham, Washington to Washington D.C., approached two National Guard members two blocks from the White House, and shot both in the head at close range while yelling "Allahu Akbar." We bomb a country, then we let in their refugees. Rinse. Repeat. Every freaking time.

Afghanistan created 5.3 Muslim refugees. Iraq made 6 million Muslim refugees. Syrian made 7.1 million refugees. Libya made 1.2 million refugees. Somalia made 4.2 million refugees. In total, U.S. wars in the Middle East caused 37 million refugees that all fled to Western Civilization. The thing causing the higher gas prices also caused this. See the problem? Going over to Iran and kicking the hornets' nest doesn't get rid of the hornets , they just make the hornets angry and more dangerous.

Meanwhile, Islamic terrorism in the U.S. has a simple solution:. Stop importing it. Unfortunately, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act of 1965 abolished the national-origins quota system that had favored Northern and Western European immigration, and opened us up to Muslim migration. We would have liked to have stopped it from passing, but the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress shoved it right down our throats (it was sponsored by Senator Jacob Javits, the Jewish Senator from New York, and Emmanuel Celler, a Jewish Congressman from Brooklyn).

Also, it's the Jewish NGOs that are the ones paying for Muslim mass migration and resettlement in both the U.S. and Euorope (HIAS, American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Jewish Federations of North America, Union for Reform Judaism, National Council of Jewish Women, European Jewish Congress, Jews for Refugee Welcome, Rabbis for Human Rights). So maybe talk to your boys and ask them to stop settling Muslim extremists in Western nations, and we'd have a lot less Islamic extremism to worry about.

It's intellectually vapid from the start to act as though someone cannot be against BOTH destroying the petro-dollar economy AND Islamic terror. That would require whatever is raising the gas prices to help the problem with Islamic terror. There's nothing in the equation that would make that true. It just makes terror worse. What's happening is, NeoCon War Pigs have to make us all terrified of this very manageable threat so that we happily endure the economic consequences of a war economy and don't get livid at our politicians who lie to us every time we go to the pump. They want us not to notice that war in the Middle East increases world terror exponentially, every time.

And if you want to lose every single electon until Jesus comes back, keep your finger-wagging shame-mongering at average ordinary Americans genuinely struggling in an economy that Trump promised would make better, and hasn't. The level of contempt a blue-collar American feels when some political talking head alleges they're nothing but a bunch of selfish whine-tits for not wanting to be bled dry at the gas pump is palpable. We are the ones who are raising families in this garbage economy and don't appreciate being scolded for wanting lower gas prices, just because we don't believe the endless Neocon blathering about this giant bugbear of Islamic terror that's about as dangerous to us right now as falling vending machines.