T w e n t y S i d e d
-Shamus, Wednesday Jan 8, 2007
Man, “The dice are trying to kill me”. I always got a little sad he never made official merch for that. He was always so worried people would think he was money grubbing that he ignored people asking for it.
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Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Yeah, I’d buy a “the dice are trying to kill me” t-shirt. I feel like most TTRPG players would, it’s about the most universally relatable feeling we’ve got
I have one with a D20 showing a 1 with some stuff like a skull, explosion and blood spatter scattered around and the words “well okay then, guess I’ll die”.
To this day my favourite piece of TTRPG merch, and the one that gets me the most compliments at cons and the like, is one of your Dad’s ideas – the d4 and d20 design from the shortlived post-DMoTR project with Shawn Gaston, Chainmail Bikini. (Like a lot of people, I started following this site during the run of DMoTR, and was excited to not have to wait long for another project, and wish things had worked out more functionally so we’d have gotten more).
Given the absolute grifters who make bank off the most deadbrained and AI-generated algorithm bait designs, it’s both totally understandable and a real shame that someone as smart and funny as Shamus held himself back from releasing most of the ideas he came up with.
I really enjoyed this comic the first time I read it, but the more I read it the less I enjoy “I rolled a 1” style humor. I’m not sure why, aside from me having a stick up my ass.
That said, I enjoy the actual punchline even more, because it is both A Mood, and it’s probably the genesis for my own sense of humor about characters in a game talking about the mechanics.
This is one of a number of things where now I can’t go back to the original work without being reminded of the line. Every time I watch that scene I always replace the “horse lord” with this line.
Literal tears of laughter!
Childish but hilarious.
Gimli’s speech bubbles are a little ambiguous in the 7th panel. At first I read the “Tell me your name…” line as coming from someone off-panel, with Gimli responding with “And I’ll tell ye mine”. Maybe joining that bubble to the other like was done with the “Ahem” would help readers like myself.
Yeah I was a bit confused at first sight, as well!
Uhhh, yes he did. Way back in 2007. There’s even a sale going on right now :D
In 2020 he even made a post where he asked people if they were interested in merchandising and what kind of merch they wanted (although the focus of that post was whether people wanted merch through Patreon). I’d post a link, but I’m afraid of the spam filter. Just search for a post called “Merch Madness”.
Ohh my god that’s hilarious.
You: Being helpful and correcting a clear mistake.
Me: Minding my own business and commenting on something I found rightly strange.
My dad, apparently, sometime in 2008 trying to spare his ten year old’s feelings: Uhh yeah kid, that’s really sweet. I’d let you design me some merch if I was going to make any, but I’m not, and I don’t, and I won’t ever. People would just think I want their money, so, can’t do it, morals. Sorry.
I’m so sorry, that’s hilarious, my bad.
Also, I may want to go back and revisit that idea and make some new stuff. Zazzle takes something like 95% and Peters been selling T-shirts on Etsy for ages with a much better company that actually gives a real cut to the creator. I’ve sold on Zazzle before and you get something like $1.50 for a $20 sale. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
That takes me back almost more than the comic does. Shamus may have made merch but it was such a prevalent opinion on the internet in those days that asking for money from people who read your website was the most gauche, money-grubbing thing you could do.
I guess it was a holdover from the Gen-X credo that “Selling Out” was the gravest sin, but now it just seems weird that we expected people to keep making webcomics and flash videos that we enjoyed the hell out of for virtually free.
At least all those flash artists are now feeding their families off “exposure” and internet points.
I remember those days. I think the idea of not being a grifter stems from the hacker culture that influenced so much of the early internet. I’m still influenced by much of it. But, now, I often fear typing even ideas into the internet for fear of them being stolen and me not getting credit. I instead hold them all back into books awaiting publication.
Guilting people into spending so much time and effort into free entertainment I’m glad is gone. The internet has now found ways for those people to both give free entertainment while earning money off it, fortunately.
Oh yeah I totally had that shirt for a while. It’s not in my closet any longer so I’m assuming it got some holes or irreparably stained. But I definitely wore it a lot. It was a fun design.
Man, ‘The dice are trying to kill me”.
You opened a quote with a single quote and finished with a double quote. Please fix this, I won’t be able to sleep.
He started just a little quote, and ended a whole man quote. I can’t help when a quotation mark is going to hit puberty. ¯\_(?)_/¯
Ha, this reminds me of when I did a presentation about learning LilyPond to the rest of the astronomy department back in grad school. LilyPond is a markup language a bit like LaTeX, but for generating sheet music rather than mathematics. It’s made to use standard ASCII for input, which leads to a lot of symbol co-opting for new uses, including symbols like parentheses, square brackets, and apostrophes. You can get some fantastic stuff like (to pick an arbitrary bar):
The mismatching of parentheses and square brackets in particular nearly made a few heads in the room explode. XD
Oh man I understand why they would set it up like that, but seeing all those mismatches is causing me physical pain, I can’t even imagine trying to write something with that syntax.
I bought a “Help, my dice are trying to kill me!” t-shirt way back when Shamus first offered it.
I don’t know what happened to it, but now I think I should buy another one!