Nfl fantasy playoff rules

I have the 1st rookie pick this year. I was offered 2nd rookie pick and Breece Hall for my #1 rookie pick. Would y’all take this trade or hold onto Bijan?

Hello everyone.
The general premise is that Clan Battlebrew is in the middle of a leadership upheaval and recently sent out word for aid. A great evil has returned to their land and they need capable adventures to stop the Mother of Monsters and her spawn.
To that end Clan Battlebrew is offering rewards to the group that frees their land of the evil.
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The Out of Character stuff
Game runs for about 3-4 hours on Wednesdays starting at 6pm cst.
Starting level is 3rd.
This will only be a 4-6 session game. It's primarily for newer players and those you can't make campaign long commitments.
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I've been a DM/GM for about the last 20+ years. I've played Rifts, Gurps, D&D second edition to 5th. I've ran Pathfinder 1st Ed, Starfinder, DnD from 3.0 to 5. and Star Wars Edge of Empire.
First and foremost I am a full fledged geek and nerd and proud of it.
I run games with a mix of combat and role-play However if I'm honest I lean towards Roleplay. I like to run high-fantasy epic adventures that players can shape with their actions and decisions. I provide the canvas and your character get to paint it. If you're looking for high-adventure and high fun that's what I aim to provide.
I have a low tolerance for any kind of jerk behavior and a very strict D.B.A.D policy.
I do have a few requirements for anyone playing at my virtual table
These are a few out of character rules I have for all my games. Generally, these mostly fall into the category of stuff I refuse to deal with again.
No having fun at other player's expense. The humor of the game shouldn't come from the wizard dying in combat because the rogue stole their spellbook.
No violence against children. However obnoxious teenagers are fair game.
No out of character derogatory or demeaning comments about race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, or identity. And this is hard no on my end
All romantic situations involving NPCs are fade to black.
Any attempt to force a non-consensual sexual situation will immediately get your character erased from existence and the player removed from the group.
Feel free to message me if you're interested or respond to this post.

Howdy folks, these are the following games I have.
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Console
- Switch Lite, very good condition, comes with carrying case, no charger (unless I can find it prior to shipping)
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Switch Games
- Super Smash Bros Ultimate
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3/DS Games
- Donkey Kong Country Returns (3DS) (Loose)
- Littlest Pet Shop (DS) (Loose)
- Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force (DS) (Loose)
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N64 Games
- NFL Quarterback Club 99 (Loose)
- WCW vs nWo World Tour (Loose)
- International Superstar Soccer 64 (Loose)
- Madden Football 64 (Loose)
- Starfox 64 (Loose)
- Perfect Dark (CIB)
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NES Games
- Pac-Man (Loose)
- Super Mario Bros 3 (Loose)
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PS2 Games(ALL CIB)
-Final Fantasy XI + Chains of Promathia
- Final Fantasy X
- Final Fantasy X-2
- Final Fantasy XII
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PS4 Games
- Witcher 3 Wild Hunt
- GTA:V
- Diablo 3 Eternal Collection
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PS5 Games
- D&D Dark Alliance
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XBox 360 Games
- Perfect Dark Zero (CIB)
- Skyrim (CIB)
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Wants
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- Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
- Memorabilia for Animal Crossing, Legend of Zelda, Assassin's Creed, Red Dead Redemption, DOOM, Dishonored.
- Also open to offers of other things not listed.
​
Thank you for taking the time to read, have a good day!

Im doing a save with SK Beveren in Belgian 2nd tier and im losing it mentally.I just finished the 2nd season... -First season i finished 2nd with 1 pt difference after i had more loses the final like 5-6 games than all of the season beforehand -LITERALLY next season the rules change and 2nd gets promoted whilst 3rd-6th play playoff and then play with the 3rd worst team in the first League -WHAT DO YOU KNOW THE BOARD SELLS ALL OF MY PLAYERS AND GIVES ME NO BUDGET BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE FUCKING MONEY FOR SALARIES.They also let go of most of the backroom staff leaving me scraps -I resort to free loans to build a squad -We started the season very bad but then we got consistent and managed 4th place 3 pts and better goal difference than 2nd -Playoffs -Playoffs -Playoffs... -We win everything and go to play the final AT HOME -My playmaker gets injured, my starting winger gets injured, my reserve playmaker is with the narional team, my reserve striker is with the narional team -We fucking score a wonder goal in the start -They equalise -My frontline drops their worst performances OF THE SEASON -We lose 1-2 in ET In crying Thank you

Long story short, I just graduated from university and our group has moved on to different things. As a group we completed Lost Mine of Phandelver and a level 5-20 homebrew. I have a good grasp on the rules, and am most excited for dungeon crawling and friendly banteroleplay. I'm most interested in playing a caster but am more than happy to work into the party dynamic.
About me. I am a M(23). I studied Chemistry at Uottawa. Big One Piece and anime fan. Honestly just looking to make some friends with a love for fantasy
If you have space in your group and are open to getting to know each other you can pm me and I can add you on discord or another platform that works for you.

Here is a quote from Steve Kerr:
“Even if today’s players are incredibly gifted, they grow up in a basketball environment that can only be called counterproductive. AAU basketball has replaced high school ball as the dominant form of development in the teen years. I coached my son’s AAU team for three years; it’s a genuinely weird subculture. Like everywhere else, you have good coaches and bad coaches, or strong programs and weak ones, but what troubled me was how much winning is devalued in the AAU structure. Teams play game after game after game, sometimes winning or losing four times in one day. Very rarely do teams ever hold a practice. Some programs fly in top players from out of state for a single weekend to join their team. Certain players play for one team in the morning and another one in the afternoon. If mom and dad aren’t happy with their son’s playing time, they switch club teams and stick him on a different one the following week. The process of growing as a team basketball player — learning how to become part of a whole, how to fit into something bigger than oneself — becomes completely lost within the AAU fabric.”
The top ranked players now come from this broken system, to the g league where winning also doesn’t matter or one year in college and then to terrible franchises. That’s why european players now dominate the upper echelon of the nba. I think in 10 years the best players in the nba will be almost entirely European players, with a few American players sprinkled in.
The only way to change the trajectory would be to implement a 3 year college rule like in the nfl. Without that the nba‘s popularity in America will go the way of baseball.

Hi everybody!! I've made a character for an upcoming game that uses a dual-class method (i.e. you take 2 classes per level. Rules have been included in an extra goodle doc with the current spell list and details on the 3rd party feats from Valda's Spire of Secrets.
I'm looking for advice with the feats or ASI, as well as spell choices. Additionally, I'd like to hear input on any ideas I might be missing. We had session 1 last week so the char concept is set, but he'd let me switch out feats n spells before session 2 tonight.
Disclaimer: I understand I haven't optimized absolutely everything (for example, taking boots of striding instead of bloodvial)! I'm going to make this build as fun as possible. Also, because the spell list is so long, and we're using a special levelling system I included a google doc link with the additional rules, spells ad feat descriptions. BUY VALDA'S IT'S AMAZING.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hnfQkWVq_s7MPSkEUcg5SUGPi6ozbYYk9o3-aDKoGdU/edit?usp=sharing
The build: Lv 6 Horizon Walker Ranger / Lunar Sorcerer. I'm hoping to be able to get off as many free or cheap twinned spells as I can with Mind Sliver, Sacred Flame , Action (chronomancy - see below), hunter's mark, etc. etc. -- and yes I can twinspell concentration spells like psychic lance! Basically, my main idea with the build is to use a bunch of debilitating spells before jumping in to the fray with my guns and planar warrior to support the melee dudes. I have access to all spell slots combined from both of my classes. He gave me firearm proficiency for free to help me fulfill my fantasy! So I don't need gunner or gunmage adept (see below) to use guns, just for the other bonuses they give.
Stats:
8 Str 17 Dex (15+2) 14 Wis 12 Con 10 Int 18 cha (17+1) If I do go gunner, dex goes up to 18, which would benefit my firearm attacks but also jumping since he's letting me use acrobatics instead of athletics, and my build fantasy is a lot based around jumping and staying at range.
Second Feat:
He's allowed the chronomancy initiate and gunmage adept feats from Valda's Spire of Secrets.
My other party members feel like an ASI boost to get my charisma up to 20 is possibly more benefitial than getting an extra feat with some extra spells. I don't disagree, but Chronomancy is sooo fun and I love the idea of a character focused around space and time, so I'm 100% set on taking chronomancy initiate. So far I was planning on taking Gunner cause reload is annoying as hell, especially for the modern weapons that are available to buy without any upgrades or enhancements (which he said I will 100% have access to once I can afford it)
Other choices instead of Gunner:

• ASI (focusing on spells, taking an ASI boost to get my charisma up to 20 to help with not only spellcasting but also being the party face since they sorely need it.)
• Gunmage adept (valda's Spire)
• Other considerations:
  • Sharpshooter
  • Keen Mind (I'm going for a quick-witted and intelligent char character and am in Quandrix, although int is 10 so.... keen mind could help)
  • Metamagic (ofc this is just awesome for sorcerers.) Chronomancy because it just seems so cool, gives access to spells like Recall and Time's Arrow, and later on twinned spell evasiveness or the weirdass past scrying spell Impressions of the past. Gunmage is awesome, The only issue is that Gunmage adept also gives a spell that deals with the reloading part (jethro's instant reload), and I feel as though in some sessions down the line he will absolutely let me upgrade my weapon to one that needs less reloading. He gives out a LOT of fun stuff. And I don't even have enough money to buy a gun yet LOL.

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(alternate idea:) Ritual Caster + Gunmage Adept. Originally I wanted ritual caster so that I could just always have my phantom steed out (lunar sorcerer) and also Jethro's instant reload is a ritual spell. But taking a whole feat for ritual casting seems like a waste when I have two ritual casters in the party already, and it's only a 3-player party. But if we have three ritual casters we can all do rituals at the same time which sounds sooo cool thematically. Also we're facing so many people with firearms or projectiles so the lv 6 spell Antiballistics Field from gunmage seems like a no-brainer. I'd need Gunmage adept to get that one.
Ancestry: I'm going for a lightning from FFXIII feel with her floaty magic and gunblade. Her ancestry is mechanically air genasi, but she's basically a species of planar walking nomads that look like humanoid, and have multiple forms(lunar sorcerer) they can take that bring out different elements of their personality. Air genasi was chosen to accentuate a build based around jumping, using the jump spell, boots of striding, and high movement from from Ranger + Longstrider
lore/flavour: I've been going for a planar cowgirl type vibe, (no southern accent though,) travelling the cosmos with her dad until she's finally decided to go on her own path to study and enhance her magic, while joining the fight against the empire. (It's a scifi/fantasy set around strixhaven-ish and the big bad is the empire.) He also let me combine my common magic item (cloak of many fashions) with lunar sorcery's bonus action to switch between forms. So when I transform between the different forms my cloak does too!! Super badass.

Good day,
One of the ideas I most like in fantasies are the self-sufficient fighters. Those that can be weaponless and armorless in a room surrounded by enemies with assault rifles and still be the most dangerous thing in the room (probably a Dragon Ball influence).
So I wanted to make a Nudist Monk. A character that literally uses no items at all, not even tattoos, and see how far I could get with them, assuming I ever escape the Forever DM curse. In my games, I play with ABP, Free Archetype and Gradual Ability Boosts, so I'll use those when making this.
For the build, I was thinking:

• Ancestry - Ghoran - so I don't need to carry around food and just get nourishment from the sun
• Heritage - there aren't a lot of Ghoran feats that I feel strongly about for this, so I'd probably go Versatile, but don't know which
• Background - no preference at the moment
• Class - Monk - My favorite class and the obvious choice cause of AC. Either Crane or Reflective Ripple
• Free Archetype - A caster class just for utility. Not sure what spell list is better. At Level 8, I could go Golem Grafter cause it feels very thematic

My concerns at the moment are environmental heat and cold (not sure how common those are) and I don't know how much of an impact having no items will have with ABP and if there should be some house rule to balance that (extra skill or class feats, additional ability boost, etc).
Would appreciate any feedback on what choices to make and any issues I'm not taking into account.
Thank you.

Another Warhammer CYOA by me, though based on Warhammer Fantasy instead. If you need a refresher, you might need to check one of the wikis (or maybe the TV Trope pages). But maybe don't look too closely, because I fudged a lot of the lore for convenience. Even with the rules for character creation, you're probably going to make some really canon-breaking characters.
There's lots more I could add, but the only way to guarantee I don't update this is to promise I will update it, so let's see how it goes.
Album: Here
Individual images, if the link failed: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 or Part 4
If curious about my previous CYOAs: Goblins Galore (NSFW), Weird Waifu/Horrific Husbando (NSFW), Captain Anon in "Adventures in Space!", Your Waifu (Eats) Trash! (NSFW), Portal Storms: Unforeseen Consequences, Alien Abduction Aftermath (NSFW), Interspecies Exchange Program: Problem Cases (NSFW), Santa's (Former) Helpers (NSFW), Dinosaur CYOA, The Tower CYOA, It's Tough to be a God, Exploring the Endless Dusk, Colonizing a New World, Spreading the Greater Good or The Girl of your Dreams

I sub to most other NFL teams for news, fantasy, shit talking, etc. I’m seeing a lot of videos of OTAs but nothing from the colts. Is that normal?

TayaMillerFaps Rules!

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4. No promoting other subs or users such as yourself
   
5. Keep posts relevant
   
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10.Keep it STRAIGHT. Circle jerks and cum tributes are fine.

The Game
Beyond The Omniverse is a Class-Based Rules-Medium Dark Science Fantasy game. For this play-test, the world has gone to hell. An cosmic entity known as the Red has infected the most of the living habitants on Earth. Now, it’s hard to tell from a friendly face and the evil entity. It’s up your friends (5-6 players) to navigate the land and reach the drop ship in time before the planet collapses in on itself.
The System
It takes the normal rolling system from d20 dice and twist it for your own bidding. But you roll damage (d6, d8, d10, and d12) first before you determine to hit. Your d20 is set up to be a fail as 1; miss as 2; hitting as 3-18 (17% to 100% of damage) and critical hits as 18 to 20 (Depends on the multiverse you’re in).
The Mechanics
Your main stats are: Wisdom, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Endurance and Charisma.
Wisdom- Recalls information, cast spells and represents sanity and awareness.
Strength- Navigating tough or inaccessible environments and morale
Dexterity- Dodging or countering attacks; and reaching high places
Intelligence- You use your limited knowledge to interpret information. But you capable to creating ideas.
Endurance- This helps resist damage; adds stat to health; and rolling d20 to determine healing points when a healing potion is inaccessible.
Charisma: You are trying to convince people (Or mind control people if you’re a spell-caster)
Your passive stats are: Awareness and Sanity
Awareness: It is like passive and normal perception in DnD combined together. But you get to roll once per sense (5 or 6 senses)
Sanity: When encountering stressful or shocking imagery, it decreases your sanity. The lower is becomes…you’re more likely to be infected by The Red.
The Archetypes (Classes)
The game is not finished with making all of the classes (22) and their subclasses (Schemas) between 4 and 9 each but currently, here are the viable options:
The Mystic Archetype w/ Schemas: Mage (Wizard), Occultist (Warlock/Witch), and Elemental Monk
The Warrior Archetype w/ Schemas: The Shaolin Monk, The Patron, The War-priest and The Savage
The Sage Archetype w/ Schemas: The Investigator
The Holy Archetype w/ Schemas: The Inquisitor (Ex-Occultist)
The Misfit Archetype w/ Schemas: The Fortune Teller and The Alchemist
Once, I have enough players. We can start the one-shot. The dates and times will be discussed if you’re not available for Sundays at 8pm.
The options of communication: Discord or Demiplane works either way. You do not have to show your faces but audio is required unless you can type really fast (I would be impressed).

1. Derrick Brooks (Linebacker): A cornerstone of the dominant Buccaneers defense in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Brooks was a key leader and the epitome of consistency. He was a 9-time Pro Bowler, 5-time First-Team All-Pro, and the NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 2002. Brooks played a crucial role in leading the Bucs to their Super Bowl victory in the 2002 season.
   
2. Warren Sapp (Defensive Tackle): A dominant force on the defensive line, Warren Sapp was an integral part of the Buccaneers' success. He combined power, speed, and relentless pursuit to disrupt opposing offenses. Sapp was a 7-time Pro Bowler, 4-time First-Team All-Pro, and played a significant role in the team's Super Bowl-winning season.
   
3. Ronde Barber (Cornerback): Barber spent his entire 16-year career with the Buccaneers and became the franchise's all-time leader in interceptions. Known for his exceptional football IQ and playmaking ability, Barber was a key contributor to the Buccaneers' defensive success. He earned 5 Pro Bowl selections, 3 First-Team All-Pro honors, and played a pivotal role in the Super Bowl victory.
   
4. Mike Alstott (Fullback): Alstott was a fan favorite and one of the most physical runners in Buccaneers history. His bruising running style and versatility as a blocker made him a valuable asset on offense. Alstott earned 6 Pro Bowl selections and played a significant role in the team's success during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
   
5. Lee Roy Selmon (Defensive End): Selmon was the first-ever draft pick in Buccaneers history and quickly became the face of the franchise. A dominant force on the defensive line, Selmon earned 6 Pro Bowl selections, was named the NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1979, and played a vital role in the Buccaneers' playoff runs during the late 1970s.
   
6. John Lynch (Safety): Lynch was a hard-hitting safety known for his physicality and leadership on the field. He played a significant role in the Buccaneers' dominant defense, earning 5 Pro Bowl selections and helping the team win their first Super Bowl in franchise history.
   
7. Paul Gruber (Offensive Tackle): Gruber was a stalwart on the Buccaneers' offensive line for over a decade. He was a reliable and consistent player, protecting the quarterback's blind side and paving the way for the running game. Gruber was named to 3 Pro Bowls and is widely regarded as one of the best offensive linemen in franchise history.
   
8. Doug Williams (Quarterback): Williams was the first African-American quarterback to win a Super Bowl and had a significant impact on the Buccaneers. His leadership and strong arm guided the team to their first-ever playoff appearance and an NFC Championship Game appearance in the 1979 season.
   
9. Jameis Winston (Quarterback): Winston holds several Buccaneers franchise records and had a productive career with the team. Despite some inconsistency, he showcased his talent by becoming the franchise leader in passing yards and passing touchdowns. Winston's ability to stretch the field and his playmaking skills make him worthy of this list.
   
10. Lavonte David (Linebacker): David has been a consistent force on the Buccaneers' defense since his arrival in 2012. He is known for his sideline-to-sideline speed, exceptional tackling ability, and versatility in coverage. David has been named to multiple Pro Bowls and played a vital
    

Public opinion of TriMet's decisions have been pretty mixed, mostly because TriMet's decisions are so convoluted that they can be a real challenge to understand. In reality, Metro and Portlanders need to have a bigger civic conversation about the future of TriMet, looking at the big picture. We have 3 looming existential crises of TriMet to be concerned about that are bigger than revenue dips, crime, or homeless people.
Civic leaders and the public are focused on a quick "fix" for TriMet revenue drops - even though we've seen this coming for a long time, it's very predictable that TriMet's Board of Directors acts at the last minute. Also, very predictably, TriMet's Board opted for a fare increase because over the previous 20 years that's been a go-to answer to every problem (except for that one time they killed Fareless Square). The politically appointed boards of TriMet and Metro lack the unique specialized knowledge of the issues I'll bring up here. If TriMet knows about these larger issues, they're obviously burring it from public view. In the short term, increasing fares is like putting fresh paint on a house that's on fire; in this situation, that paint is HIGHLY flammable.
First - fare hikes as a tactic is a brain-dead move. Just the most utterly stupid and self-sabotaging response to a looming budget shortfall. I'm dwelling on this because it illustrates their terrible decision-making, which is functional proof they have no idea what they're doing. Some of the core reasons for this:

• Increasing fares reduces utilization. Higher cost means fewer people ride, which will decrease the ridership revenue. It will also marginally increase the number of people who won't pay (funny story, some of those who don't pay actually can't afford to). TriMet isn't a monopoly or inelastic service, and plenty of other choices exist that didn't exist 20 years ago: an actual bike share, scooters, electric bikes, UbeLyft, shared vehicles, and more bike paths. Before the pandemic, it was common that I would bus into downtown for work and then take a Lyft home because it wasn't all that expensive, like $8 more than a bus ride - TriMet's price increases make a system that wasn't very competitive simply less compelling.
  
• Across Portland we need to go through a process of austerity and downsizing government. I absolutely support Wheeler putting a pause on rate increases, but for God's sake, we have far too much largesse in every layer of government. If you need to learn what I'm talking about, read my old article on Parks & Rec. So many divisions/agencies have doubled their staff while reducing service levels. It's bonkers. Cutting throats needs to be an imperative. This is because the great majority of public sector employees in Oregon and Portland are incompetent, redundant, and only exist because Oregon and Portland have been reluctant to use automation. And I don't mean the cutting-edge AI stuff, I'm talking about people who still handle business processes as if they're paper forms. I could tell so many stories from my professional experience - but you'll have to take my word for it for now: culling this bureaucracy is the right move, and until there's a significant downsizing, the political class is taking none of the financial crisis or cost of living situation seriously.
  
• TriMet's operating budget/revenue is primarily Payroll Taxes, not passenger revenue. About 20-30% of TriMet's budget comes from people buying fares, whereas the bulk of money TriMet needs comes from payroll taxes that businesses pay directly. Because of this, transit activists (including myself) have been proponents of increasing the payroll taxes marginally to make TriMet free for riders. Of course, fareless transit comes with a wide variety of new and different problems (that's an article for another time). Still, when you understand that only a sliver of revenue comes from fares, increasing the fare simply results in a marginal increase in revenue. The much bigger problem is going to businesses investing outside of Metro, and changing workforces that 1) won't pay payroll taxes reliably, 2) don't need people to go into the office. Think about the longer-term game here: is TriMet's board going to increase fares as utilization drops and payroll taxes continually diminish? (See my point above about how their default answer is "yes" because it's the only politically expedient answer.)
  

Reading comments about the fare hikes, most of the public thinks TriMet is dealing with a safety or utilization issue. Both of these are 100% true: soft-on-crime progressives have wholly obliterated the working class perception of TriMet safety - there are so many different ways this has happened, but we should thank so many people in the media and political class: Ana del Rocio's crying wolf about racism in fare inspections (and the media entertaining it), or Mike Schmidt deinstitutionalizing of the justice system, or Legislature's inability to act on the massive mental health crisis and drug addiction crisis in Oregon. No matter the underlying cause, we have a system where deranged violent mentally ill tweakers can be disruptive on the train, but working-class people face a $250 fine if they can't afford a $2.50 ($2.80) ticket. TriMet is less safe, especially the light rail and bus lines. We could hypothetically talk about various policy and infrastructure changes, such as turnstiles and security guards - but pragmatically, this won't do shit when our society has adopted a philosophy of transforming the urban core into an open-air insane asylum and opened the doors to the prisons. This safety issue is well beyond TriMet's scope, and even if there was consensus among TriMet and Metro to solve this, the entire justice system and Legislature is still broken.

Fare Hikes and Utilization is the Red Herring - Let's talk about TriMet's future

In reality, multiple design choices made decades ago set us up for failure. But we also have to thank brain-dead progressive lunatics and corrupt politicos who have steered our transit decision-making into the ground.
There are three specific issues I'm going to talk about, with each becoming more consequential and disastrous for TriMet:

• Hub and Spoke Design and the need for a redesign of the entire system to fit new commuting/transit patterns
  
• Portland Light Rail's short cars are a capacity problem not worth the price tag to fix
  
• Autonomous vehicles are here, and it's just going to get worse for TriMet
  

The strategic design of TriMet's system is broken, and it's been broken before.

If you looked at a map of TriMet's bus and rail system, you'd see a design pattern often referred to as a "Radial Design" or sometimes a "Hub And Spoke" design. The Hub and Spoke strategy is building our transit system around centralized locations to connect to other routes. For Portland the idea is to go downtown (or sometimes a Park and Ride) where you can connect to your next destination. This is why the majority of bus routes and all the max routes go downtown, to our Transit Mall and Pioneer Square.
Downtown planning was a smart idea in the 1960s when it was coupled with Main Street economic theory and prototype urban development zones - all of this wrapped up in the 1972 Downtown Plan policy. During these decades, the primary economic idea of urban revitalization was that downtown cores could provide better business climates and shopping districts that amplify economic activity synergistically. In other words, packing all the office jobs and luxury shopping in one area is good for workers, business, and civic planning.
All very smart ideas in yester-year, so TriMet became focused on serving the downtown business community myopically. This myopia became so paramount that it was considered illegitimate (actually taboo, borderline illegal) if you used a Park & Ride facility to park and NOT ride downtown. Amanda Fritz once explained that we couldn't expand Barbur Transit Center because that would result in students parking at Barbur Transit Center and riding the bus to PCC Sylvania. This view implies that TriMet exists only to service downtown workers, not the students, not the impoverished mom needing to go to a grocery store.
How does TriMet's hub and spoke design represent its purpose?
Portland's unspoken rule of transit philosophy is that jobs pay for the system (remember, business payroll taxes pay for most of it), so TriMet should be focused on serving people utilizing it for their job - employers pay for it, and they get value out of it. But this is both unspoken (never said aloud) and largely unobserved. The whole idea of TriMet as a social service to serve low-income people, to help impoverished people - well, those ideas were just lukewarm political rhetoric that is tossed out as soon as some Undesirable with tattered clothing reeking of cigarettes gets aboard - then Portlanders jump right back "this is for workers only!" Sadly, there hasn't ever been a public consensus of why TriMet exists because I could equally argue that TriMet's purpose isn't serving the working class; it's actually vehicle emissions reductions - but here, too, reality contradicts that this is the purpose for why we operate TriMet. TriMet's real purpose seems to be "Spend money on lofty capital projects" and if we want to be cynical about it, we can elaborate "…because large capital projects enable grift, embezzlement, and inflating property values for developers."
We haven't always depended upon a hub and spoke design. A great article from Jarrett Walker written in 2010 on his Human Transit blog explains in "The Power and Pleasure of Grids"

Why aren't all frequent networks grids? The competing impulse is the radial network impulse, which says: "We have one downtown. Everyone is going there, so just run everything to there." Most networks start out radial, but some later transition to more of a grid form, often with compromises in which a grid pattern of routes is distorted around downtown so that many parallel routes converge there. You can see this pattern in many cities, Portland for example. Many of the lines extending north and east out of the city center form elements of a grid, but converge on the downtown. Many other major routes (numbered in the 70s in Portland's system) do not go downtown, but instead complete the grid pattern. This balance between grid and radial patterns was carefully constructed in 1982, replacing an old network in which almost all routes went downtown.

Over the years the grid pattern was neglected in favor of a downtown-focused investment strategy. To a real degree it made practical sense: that's where the jobs were. But again, this is the presumption that TriMet and Mass Transit ought to service workers first, and there's not much consensus on that. But while we can't decide on TriMet's purpose, we can absolutely agree on one important thing: Downtown is dead.
No 5-star hotel is going to fix it. (As of writing, I'm not even convinced that this mafia-connected bamboozle of public fraud will open.) No "tough-on-crime" DA to replace Mike Schmidt, like Nathan Vasquez, will fix downtown. It's not JUST a crime problem: most of the problems we deal with today mirror the problems facing Portland in the 1960s, especially our inability to invest in good infrastructure people actually want to use. That's on top of crime, vandalism, and an unhealthy business ecosystem.
IF we want to maintain TriMet (and that's a big IF, for reasons I'll explain below), then it will be focused on something other than downtown. We need to move back to a grid-design transit system, as this is a much easier way to use transit to get around the city, no matter your destination. If TriMet continues to exist and operate fleets in 20-30 years, this is the only way it exists - because it will just be too inconvenient to ride downtown as a side quest to your destination, especially as we look at 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now.
Of course, we can only transform some parts of the transit infrastructure this way, and there are no uplifting and moving train tracks here. So light rail doesn't have a future in the grid system - but even without the grid system, light rail is doomed.

The fatal flaws of light rail in Portland.

I want to preface this by saying I like light rail as a strategy, it's not a bad system or bad civic investment. I could write another 5,000-word essay on why Seattle did an excellent job with light rail and the specific decisions Portland made wildly incorrectly. In transit advocacy the wacktavists inappropriately categorized skeptics of Portland's light rail as some soft bigotry - as if you're racist if you don't like Portland's light rail - even though, ironically, most light rail systems tend to be built for the preference of white culture and white workers, precisely what happened here in Portland and most cities (but this is all a story for another time).
Portland's light rail system has a capacity problem and has dealt with this capacity problem quietly for the last 20+ years. When you see the capacity problem, you can quickly understand this light rail system won't work in the future. All the other smart cities in the world that designed light rail realized they needed big long trains to move many people. Portland decided to limit the train car length to the size of our city blocks to save construction costs - and this has always been a fatal flaw.
Portland's highest capacity train car is our Type 5, according to Wikipedia it has a seating capacity of 72 and an overall capacity of 186 per train car, meaning each train can accommodate up to 372, but even these numbers seem unreliable (*edit). Let's compare:

• Washington DC has 6-car trains capable of carrying 120 passengers per car, or 720 per train.
  
• Salt Lake City has a 4-car train capable of carrying 230 passengers per car, or 920 per train.
  
• Seattle's Link system has a 3 or 4-car train, each capable of carrying approximately 200 passengers per car, so 600 to 800 per train.
  

Portland's light rail lines have roughly the same people moving capacity as a single lane of a highway, maybe marginally more, maybe marginally less. These other cities have a light rail system that can move the same amount of people as an entire 3-lane highway.
You might suspect that Portland could simply run trains more frequently - but nah, that's impossible because the trains run through the central core of downtown Portland, and they're blocked by the real interfaces with road traffic and bottlenecks. TriMet/PBOT/Metro has offered rosy ideas that we could hypothetically run cars every 90 seconds, 2 minutes, 4 minutes, or 6 minutes (depending upon who you ask) - but these are garbage numbers invented out of thin air. For example, you could stand at Pioneer Courthouse Square at 4:50pm on a Wednesday in 2016 - there was a train opening doors to load passengers, and you could visibly see the next train at Pioneer Place Mall pulling into the station behind. Trains were running at approximately a 3 to 4 minute at peak - but on paper, TriMet will claim anything, as they don't give a shit about lying to the public. But the bigger problem is that trains were full. You might have to wait 90 minutes to find a train that offers a seat. And god forbid you had a bike.
I'm not making this very real capacity problem, Metro even acknowledges:

At the busiest hours of the day, 40 light rail trains must cross the river and traverse downtown – one train every 90 seconds. As the region grows and the demand for light rail increases, the region will need at least 64 MAX trains through downtown every hour, more than one train each minute. Our current system can't support that change.

Suppose you're silly enough to trust government propaganda. In that case, you can read the details of Metro study on this in 2019. If we assumed their numbers added up, it's just fucking impossible to run 62 trains per hour, because passenger loading and unloading can take a full minute (sometimes longer). So unless we want to apply substantial g-forces onto the passengers, the train isn't accelerating out of the stops fast enough. Not to mention how unreliable this whole system would be if a sole tweaker, bike rider, or person with a stroller held up the system for 2 minutes.
This is why the bottom line needs to be upfront about capacity - quoting Metro's study here:

Today MAX is limited to 2-car trains because of the length of downtown city blocks. A tunnel could allow for longer trains if the stations outside the downtown core are retrofitted. In the long-term, this could greatly increase MAX capacity.

Do you see that trick? Build a tunnel, yes - but the entire system has to be retrofitted. Literally every light rail station would need to be redesigned, the lines themselves recalculated for larger heavier trains - and extending platforms at Willow Creek might be simple enough, but how in the living fuck is Metro going to afford to expand the Zoo stop? Doubling the size of that platform would cost $500 million alone.
If the city weren't full of cheap dipshits, we would have elevated or buried our light rail lines in the 1980s or 90s, enabling longer train cars to run. Yes, we all knew back then that it was the best practice not to have light rail running on the street - it's less safe, less reliable, runs slower, and limits train car size. Oops.
Just to keep TriMet's own bullshit inflated utopian vision, it would mean spending another billion dollars just to unfuck downtown, bypass an aging bridge, and potentially allow a marginally higher volume of trains - which again is a band-aid on a mortal wound.
The real buried lede is that to add extra train cars means retrofitting all the stops in the system - that's tens of billions of dollars. You can argue costs, but Metro knows we need to do this. It means shutting down the system for a year or years while construction and retrofits happen. It's fucking outrageous. Is this system worth of people per line worth 20, 30, or 40 billion dollars? Fuck no, it ain't. Again, if we had a raging metropolis of industry and commerce downtown, we could reasonably entertain the idea for a moment - but we don't and never will again.
Some folks might argue that if we kill off the light rail system we'd lose out on all those lucrative Transit Oriented Developments. Originally the public was told that Transit Oriented Development strategy would cause a massive infusion of private investment because the light rail was so damn lucrative and desirable for Richard Florida's Creative Class. Turns out the Creative Class is now called today the Laptop Class, and they don't give a flying fuck about street cars, light rail, or walking scores - because most can't be bothered to put pants on during their "commute" from bed to desk. TOD was all a fantasy illusion from the beginning, as multiple studies about Portland commuters showed that college-educated white folks riding Max were equally comfortable riding their bike as a substitute for the same commute. All of these billions of dollars was to accommodate white fare-weather bikers. So here's my hot take on transit: pave over the rail lines and put in bike lanes, and boy, then you'd have a bike system to give folks like Maus a hardon. But of course, Bike Portland would complain because their focus isn't biking; they exist only to favor all poorly thought utopian transit ideas.
Another group of Max/TOD advocates would claim that TOD is better for disabled and impoverished people. And yeah, there's truth there, but see my entire argument above about the Hub & Spoke design of TriMet being the antithesis of transit as a social service. If you believe that TriMet should serve low-income people, you must advocate for a bus-centric grid design.
But even if you're a die-hard believer in light rail - there's another inevitable reality coming that is the nail in the coffin.

Autonomous vehicles will replace mass transit faster than the automobile replaced the horse.

I work in advanced technology, and the thing about tech is that the public and politicians deny that it's going to be there until the majority of the public finally experiences it. You could say this about personal computers, internet, cloud compute, electric cars, smartphones, distributed ledger (cryptocurrency), AI, and driverless vehicles.
Schrodinger's technology doesn't exist until it's measured in an Apple store or your mother asks you for tech support.
No one thought AI was really real until ChatGPT did their kid's homework, and today most people are coming to terms with the fact that ChatGPT 3.5 could do most people's jobs. And that's not even the most advanced AI, that's the freeware put out by Microsoft, they have paywalls to access the real deal.
In 2018 I rode in my colleague's Tesla in self-driving mode from downtown Portland to Top Golf in Hillsboro. We started our journey at the surface parking lot on the west side of the Morrison Bridge. He used his phone to tell the car to pull out of the parking spot and to pick us up. Then he gave the car the address, and it drove us the entire way without any human input necessary. The only time he provided feedback was to touch the turn signal to pass a slow car on the highway. People think self-driving isn't here - but it is - and it's gotten exponentially better and will continue to do so. People will complain and moan about idealized, utopian, pedantic "level 5" full self-driving, how none of it exists or could exist, as a Tesla passes them on the road and the driver is half asleep.
Of course, Portland and every major city have also thought deeply about self-driving technology, and a few places have implemented self-driving solutions - but so far, none of these are really at scale. Though it will be a short time before cost-conscious cities go all-in.
TriMet kicked around the idea of using an autonomous bus for a leg of the trip of the Southwest Corridor project, connecting a segment of the light rail route to the community college. It was bafflingly stupid and short-sighted to think they could use it in this niche application but that it wouldn't open the floodgates for a hundred different applications that eviscerate TriMet's labor model. The simplest example of autonomous operation would be to operate the light rail systems - because they don't make turns, all we need is an AI vision service to slam on the breaks if necessary - that technology has existed for 20+ years. We could retrofit the entire train system in about 3 to 6 months - replace every Max operator with a security guard, and maybe people would ride the Max again? But I digress.
Let's speculate about the far-future, some 5, 10, or 20 years from now: your transit options will expand significantly. The cost will decrease considerably for services using automated vehicles.
You'll look at your options as:

• Drive to work: fastest, takes $100+ worth of gas a month, but you also need $50+ for insurance and $500+ for the monthly car payment, plus those surprise maintenance and broken windows. Also, do you pay for parking? Pick a number for how much it costs to drive your personally owned and manually operated vehicle to work each month.
  
• Autonomous vehicle service: price TBA, but think of how much an Uber costs when you don't have to pay the driver, you don't have to pay for gas. An Uber that runs for $20 today would likely be $10 or less. So, to and from work 20 times a month, $200. $300? Ok, let's just say it's $400 a month. It's still all cheaper than owning a car and driving it to work. No parking fees, and it picks you up quickly enough that it's not a nuisance.
  
• Mass Transit: $150 per month, but ugghhh it's slow, it smells like piss, a guy jacked off in your hair, and you can't schedule a meeting for the first 30 minutes of your anticipated workday in case you miss a connection - and it breaks so often the government actively hides the reliability data from the public and media.
  

Just a few years into this future we'll see a brand new trend, one that already exists: a shared autonomous vehicle like a privately operated bus. For example, Uber Bus - it already exists as a commuter option in some cities, it's just not autonomous yet. The significant benefit of an autonomous bus is that these shared vehicles will utilize HOV lanes very commonly, and commuting in an autonomous vehicle will be as fast as driving to work in your manually operated car while also being less expensive.
Simultaneously automobile accidents in autonomous vehicles will be virtually non-existent, and insurance companies will start to increase prices on vehicles that lack AI/smart assisted safety driving features. Public leaders will see the value of creating lanes of traffic on highways dedicated explicitly to autonomous vehicles so that they can drive at much higher speeds than manually operated traffic. Oregon won't lead the way here, but wait until Texas or one of the Crazy States greenlights a speed limit differential, and self-driving vehicles have a speed limit of 90, 120, or 150 miles per hour. You might think "accidents would be terrible and deadly" but there will be fewer accidents in the autonomous lane than in manual lanes. At this point, it will be WAY faster to take an autonomous vehicle to your work.
Purchasing power of consumers will decrease while the cost of vehicles will increase (especially autonomous vehicles), making ownership of any vehicle less likely. Frankly, the great majority of people won't know how to drive and will never learn to - just like how young people today don't know how to use manual transmission. However, fleets of autonomous vehicles owned by companies like Tesla, Uber, and Lyft will benefit from scale and keep their autonomous bus fleets operating at low cost. This will lead to a trend where fewer and fewer people will own an automobile, and fewer people even bother learning how to drive or paying the enormous insurance cost.... while also depending upon automobiles more than we do today.
Eventually, in the distant future, manually driven vehicles will be prohibited in urban areas as some reckless relic from a bygone era.
Cities and public bodies don't have to be cut out of this system if they act responsibly. For example, cities could start a data brokering exchange where commuters provide their commuting data (i.e., pick-up point, destination, arrival time). The government uses either a privatized fleet or a publicly owned fleet of autonomous vehicles to move as many people as possible as often as possible. Sort of a publicly run car-pool list - or a hyper-responsive bus fleet that runs for the exact passengers going to exact locations. A big problem companies like Uber, Lyft, and Tesla will have is that they'll lack market saturation to optimize commuting routes - they'll be able to win unique rides, but the best way they can achieve the lowest cost service model is these super predictable and timely commuter riders. The more data points and riders, the more optimization they can achieve. These companies can look at the data for as many people as possible and bid for as many routes as possible - optimizing for convenience, time, energy usage, emissions, etc. The public will voluntarily participate if this is optimized to get the cheapest ride possible. If the government doesn't do this, the private sector will eventually.
As a parallel, no one today even considers how Metro runs garbage collection. No one cares. And if you didn't like Metro's trash service, if you needed a better service for unique needs, you go procure that on your own. Likewise, you wouldn't care about the quality of the commuting trip as long as it's up to some minimal standards of your class expectations, it's reliable, nearly as quick as driving your own vehicle, and it seems reasonably affordable.
If the public ran this data exchange, fees could subsidize lower-income riders. This is a theory on what a TriMet like system or mass transit system could look like in a primarily autonomous world where most people don't own their own or drive an automobile.
This system would be far from perfect, opening up all sorts of problems around mobility. However, it's hard to see how autonomous vehicles will not obliterate the value proposition of mass transit.

Another narrative on the same story.

As the working class moves to autonomous vehicles, transit agencies will collect fewer and fewer fares - prices and taxes will rise, creating a cycle of failure. As a result, some cities will make buses self-driving to cut costs. It could start with Tokyo, Shanghai, Oslo, et al. Again, it's unlikely that Portland or Oregon will be the first movers on this, but when cities start laying off hundreds of mass transit operators and cutting fares to practically nothing, there will be substantial public pressure to mimic locally. It will be inhumane, it will be illiberal, to make those impoverished bus-riding single mothers pay premiums. As most of the fleet becomes autonomous, responsive, and disconnected from labor costs, the next question arises: why do we still operate bus routes? Why big buses instead of smaller and nimble vehicles?
This alternative story/perspective leads to the same outcome: we figure out where people are going and when they need to get there - then dispatch the appropriate amount of vehicles to move that exact number of people as efficiently as possible.
But our local government getting its act together on all this is outside the world of possibility.
In a practical sense, we're going to see history repeat itself. Portland's mass transit history is about private and public entities over-extending themselves, getting too deep in debt on a flawed and outdated idea. As a result, the system collapses into consolidation or liquidation. Following this historical pattern, TriMet/Metro won't respond to changing conditions fast enough, and laughably stupid ideas like cranking up taxes or increasing ridership fares will continue to be the only option until the media finally acknowledges these groups are insolvent. I just hope we don't spend tens of billions of dollars propping up this zombie system before we can soberly realize that we made some mistakes and these vanity-laden projects 20 and 30 years ago need to die.
You see, the biggest flaw with TriMet isn't the design, it needs to be outpaced by technology, it's that the people making decisions at TriMet and Metro are going to make the politically expedient decisions, not the right decisions. They won't redesign, and they won't leverage technology for cost savings, so this charade will just get going along until the media simply declares they're insolvent.
Back to fares for a second - the media happily reprints TriMet's horseshit take about "The higher fares will bring in an estimated $4.9 million in annual revenue starting next year, the report says." Just sort of amazing to me there's no skepticism about this number - but most spectacular is no media considerations about alternative solutions. For example, I could tell TriMet how to save $9,548,091 next year - a useless program primarily utilized by white middle-class folks who own alternative methods of transport - and this would inconvenience way less transit-dependent people than raising fares. But, that's off the table - we're not even developing a decision matrix for when we kill the blackhole of money known as WES.

https://beforewegoblog.com/audiobook-review-dragon-heist-by-alexander-c-kane/
DRAGON HEIST by Alexander C. Kane is a urban fantasy novel that goes the road less traveled of not being about vampires, werewolves, or witches. Instead, it is about dragons taking over the world and proceeding to have the vast majority of humankind not really care. It’s a humorous novel akin to his excellent Andrea Vernon series where the protagonist was a secretary working at a superhero corporation. In this case, our protagonist, Birdie Binkowitz, t is a washed-up voice actress living in Tuskaloosa, Alabama as a feed and seed stock clerk.
Birdie’s life changes dramatically when she makes a pact with a dragon fleeing from the dragons of Tennessee and Georgia to become his “Vox.” This results in the dragon gaining the ability to speak (as a Southern hick she names Jim) as well as Birdie becoming ensnared in Jim’s plot to rob the other dragons of the country. The dragons rule the world and since they aren’t interested in anything other than gold or jewels, most people are content to let them remain rulers of the world.
Jim the Dragon is something of a quirky patron and easily distracted by the trivialities of Southern living. His plan is also to assemble a Dungeons and Dragons-esque heroes with a Fighter, Thief, Giant, Mage, and Archer. All of them are oddball Southerners and people that Birdie more or less recruits through sheer dumb luck. I came to like all of them through the story and Birdie dealing with them is a source of constant humor.
Birdie, herself, is a great character that was an incredibly snobby and spoiled child star before circumstances meant her career ended before it began. She’s been basically stewing in her own resentment for the better part of ten years. Listening to everyone’s opinions about her drunken antics and mayhem is hilarious. It’s also fun when we find out her hidden depths like her immense love of roller skating.
The narration and writing is really well-done. Both managed to capture the peculiarities of Southern living. As a lifelong resident of the South, the quirkiness of rural living is properly captured. Things like the oddball characters, interrelationship of characters, constant gossip, and struggle against other more prosperous states is all true to my experience.
If you’re looking for a fun and hilarious audiobook that involves dragons as well as quirky townsfolk then this is an excellent purchase. Alexander C. Kane never makes his world too dangerous or too serious. This is a great book and you won’t regret listening.

https://beforewegoblog.com/audiobook-review-dragon-heist-by-alexander-c-kane/
DRAGON HEIST by Alexander C. Kane is a urban fantasy novel that goes the road less traveled of not being about vampires, werewolves, or witches. Instead, it is about dragons taking over the world and proceeding to have the vast majority of humankind not really care. It’s a humorous novel akin to his excellent Andrea Vernon series where the protagonist was a secretary working at a superhero corporation. In this case, our protagonist, Birdie Binkowitz, t is a washed-up voice actress living in Tuskaloosa, Alabama as a feed and seed stock clerk.
Birdie’s life changes dramatically when she makes a pact with a dragon fleeing from the dragons of Tennessee and Georgia to become his “Vox.” This results in the dragon gaining the ability to speak (as a Southern hick she names Jim) as well as Birdie becoming ensnared in Jim’s plot to rob the other dragons of the country. The dragons rule the world and since they aren’t interested in anything other than gold or jewels, most people are content to let them remain rulers of the world.
Jim the Dragon is something of a quirky patron and easily distracted by the trivialities of Southern living. His plan is also to assemble a Dungeons and Dragons-esque heroes with a Fighter, Thief, Giant, Mage, and Archer. All of them are oddball Southerners and people that Birdie more or less recruits through sheer dumb luck. I came to like all of them through the story and Birdie dealing with them is a source of constant humor.
Birdie, herself, is a great character that was an incredibly snobby and spoiled child star before circumstances meant her career ended before it began. She’s been basically stewing in her own resentment for the better part of ten years. Listening to everyone’s opinions about her drunken antics and mayhem is hilarious. It’s also fun when we find out her hidden depths like her immense love of roller skating.
The narration and writing is really well-done. Both managed to capture the peculiarities of Southern living. As a lifelong resident of the South, the quirkiness of rural living is properly captured. Things like the oddball characters, interrelationship of characters, constant gossip, and struggle against other more prosperous states is all true to my experience.
If you’re looking for a fun and hilarious audiobook that involves dragons as well as quirky townsfolk then this is an excellent purchase. Alexander C. Kane never makes his world too dangerous or too serious. This is a great book and you won’t regret listening.

Disclaimer up front: I'm not saying the Yakuza games or RGG are hateful or that you should stop playing them. I love these games. But they have... problems.
Kind of springing off this post here, I wanted to talk about how LGBTQ+ representation is in these games, because I think some people on this sub and elsewhere kind of misrepresent the series - they ether say the games are super progressive and noble, or they claim that queer people aren't really that represented, even though there are loads.
I think the reality is more complicated: the series is pretty pro-LGBTQ+ in general, but at the same time it can't resist painting almost gay, lesbian and trans people as "other", usually by treating them as a bit of a joke.
Like, Mama-san is the most frequently appearing trans character in the series, and she gets a couple of decent substories in the earlier games, in which she's presented sympathetically. But she's also got a ton of stubble, and her persistent flirting with Kiryu (despite his mild discomfort) is played as a gag.
There are other trans characters who get a similarly confused treatment: Yoko in Yakuza 5 is portrayed as an ally of Haruka's and a stand-up gal, but it's hard not to assume there's a joke in her makeup and clothing stylist being a trans woman. And when the Department of Commerce guy is revealed to have been a twink drag performer, Haruka acts like it's a really weird thing.
Saki, the trans ex-cop in 4, is another good ally, but her first appearance is played as a "WTF?" moment, and in the chase that follows, Tanimura is able to use the same physical attacks that he can use on male characters.
And then there's the sistebrother duo in Yakuza 1, although it's not clear whether they're trans, cross dressing or just pulling off a weird con. Kiryu beats up both of them, and beats up the (trans?) woman after he learns that she was born a man. The implication there - and in Tanimura kicking Saki in the chase - is that trans women aren't really women, and therefore not subject to the "no beating up" rule that Kiryu/the designers apply to cis women.
And there's the terrible cross-dresser story from 3, of course. At least that was cut in later re-releases. That game also has Ayaka, who probably gets the only entirely wholesome trans representation in the series - but she's based on (and voiced by) a real Japanese trans celebrity, Ayana Tsubaki, so that's not surprising.
Oh, and there's Goromi, but as rad as Majima is, I don't think he's exactly a poster child for the nonbinary/genderfluid community. And it's easy to just write him (and therefore genderfluid/nonbinary people in general) off as crazy or real-life shitposters.
Gay men better, but not perfectly. There's Yoko's friend in Yakuza 5 - a doctor, I think? - who tells Haruka waaaaay too much about his sex life and is played like a giggling perv. In Yakuza 3, there's (arguably) Rikiya, who... yeah.
Mine gets it a little better, in that his villainy is down to his fucked up childhood abandonment issues rather than his homosexuality, but then as soon as he comes out, he leaps off a building, so that's not GREAT.
Nick Ogata is a total fucking dude and I love him, but even though in the story he's portrayed as a smart and loyal friend, he's described in the character index as "shady", and Ichiban (or maybe one of the others) also describes him as such, which I don't really get from the way he's written, unless they're using that as a synonym for "gay as a window". I wonder strongly if Akiyama would get that treatment, even though he genuinely is shady as fuck around women.
And the only lesbians I can think of are Rina, who you can date in Yakuza 1 (and who apparently puts aside her lesbianism to shag Kiryu in Kiwami, as you get one of those FMV clips) after completing her substory), and that air hockey girl in 5, who is kind of predatory and harrassing towards Haruka.
Oh, and there's Haruka herself, who might be bi, given that she can build heat by staring down her opponents' tops in the air hockey minigame. That latter point might seem positive, except that it kind of plays into the idealised straight dude fantasy of hot bisexual teenage girls.
I guess it's important to remember that these games are largely written by Japanese boomers (or at least older Gen Xers), and by that standard they are genuinely progressive. Most games might ignore trans people and gay men altogether, and it's remarkable that they're so prevalent that they outnumber the hot teenage lesbians.
That said, I think the series still has some way to go in terms of queer representation. RGG has already grown in terms of the ways it depicts women (Saeko in particular is a great character, and Judgment's Saori is brilliant, even if they find an excuse to squeeze her into a tight hostess dress every time), and I hope it can continue that with its LGBTQ+ characters too.

Hello Everyone,
I am an experienced DM (10 years or so, multiple 3-20 campaigns) running a weekly D&D 5e campaign that usually takes place on Sat or Sun, PST (time can vary). The game is run via a mix of Roll20, D&DBeyond, and Discord. There are currently 3 players and we're 4 sessions into the campaign, I'd like to fill the game out with 1-2 more players. New or experienced players are welcome (we have 2 new players in the game currently).
A bit about the campaign:

• The setting is homebrew high fantasy with a bit of steampunk, sci-fi, and weird fiction. The game style is sandbox with a heavy emphasis on party agency. There are certainly rails that can be followed, but the onus is on the party to decide to do so. Feel free to check out some of the starting player lore to get a better sense.
• Many of the stories, characters, and settings within the world will be morally grey. Sometimes there will be clear lines between "good" and "bad," but I enjoy what's in-between and often the morality will have to be determined by your character's views. Mature themes are also present (slavery, genocide, racism), but will not be described in some cases (I.E. anything involving children, torture, or sex).
• I try to run a fairly balanced game combat-wise, however, a lot factors into encounter difficulty. Playeparty choice prior to and during an encounter can affect difficulty as well as things like the total amount of encounters the party is likely to see between long rests. PC death can occur. That being said, I do not run a DM vs. PC game and will not be trying to purposefully kill your characters or "win" encounters. A death will usually rooted in player agency/choice if it happens.
• I enjoy running a fairly RAW game. Most characteNPC abilities, spells, etc. will be ruled RAW or in line with Sage Advice. However, there are a few house rules like more impactful crits, +1/+2 flanking, bonus action potions, and standing from prone AoO.

My expectations for players:

• No Lone Wolves. D&D is a team game and I expect players to play with the party, not separate from it or against it. That includes no PVP, no stealing from other players, or other undue antagonism. Players will be expected to create a character that can work with other characters.
• No Hate Speech. Racism, sexism, phobia, etc are not allowed in any form and will not be tolerated. Mature themes will be present in-game, but do not represent anything out-of-game.
• No Sexual/Inappropriate Behavior. Some sexual themes (I.E. brothels, prostitution, etc.) will be present as part of the world and your characters can explore romantic relationships with each other or NPCs, but nothing explicitly sexual will be described. Trigger themes like rape, sexual violence/harassment, etc. will not be present or tolerated.
• Attendance. We run weekly and I expect players to make it to 75% of sessions (to the best of their ability). Life does happen though, so it's expected that we will have occasional absences or session delays and it's generally nbd as long as there is some heads up.

If you're interested, leave a comment here and I'll DM you. I will be talking with prospective new players via discord and choosing whoever seems like they'll fit best.
Thanks
EDIT: Lots of replies, so it'll take a bit to get to everyone. Just a heads up!