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i cant get over the king charles portrait. they made that thing to age in his place. that painting hangs in the house of a too-friendly family you find in the post apocalyptic wasteland who inexplicably has a ready supply of fresh meat. if mario jumped into that painting he wouldn't find a charming platformer he would be flayed and hanged like a medieval criminal by an unseeable force in a droning red void. that painting is a color blindness test for people who work in IT but believe in the divine right of kings. that painting is going to weep the sequel to blood. after he dies charles is gonna crawl outta that thing like sadako.

#dw guys I've got a solution to make the horrible old man seem cool and masculine #the painting needs to evoke Blood Explosion

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Honestly it's weird that roleplaying as we know it evolved from historical wargaming.

Like for example DBA rules contain some suggestions for running campaigns with narrative and "propaganda" so I wouldn't say that it's something incompatible, and 0E looks way more like wargames than say PbtA games do, but storytelling games were a feature of artistic salons for way longer and they appear much closer to roleplaying than rulesets for reenacting ancient battles on tabletop.

Salon games didn't have skill checks but neither did wargames and it's strange that nobody came up with simplistic skill checks to add uncertainty and realism to the game

I think the line is a lot clearer when the role of dice and rules in tabletop roleplaying games is correctly understood.

"Uncertainty" and "realism" are, at best, secondary to what the dice are actually doing. Even most tabletop RPGs get it wrong when they try to explain themselves – they'll talk about the rules as something to fall back on to prevent schoolyard arguments (i.e., "yes I did!/no you didn't!") from derailing the story, when in fact it's the exact opposite.

If we look at freeform roleplaying as an illustrative parallel, we see that, while newly formed groups may in fact fall to bickering when a consensus can't be reached about what ought to happen next, mature and well-established groups tend instead to fall prey to excessive consensus-seeking: the impulse to always find an outcome that isn't necessarily one which everybody at the table can be happy with, but at the very least one which everybody at the table can agree is reasonable – and that's a lot more constraining than one might think.

In this sense, the role of picking up the dice isn't to build consensus, but to break it – to allow for the possibility of outcomes which nobody at the table wanted or expected. It's the "well, this is happening now" factor that prevents the table's dynamic from ossifying into endless consensus-seeking about what reasonably ought to happen next.

Looking to the history of wargames, this is precisely the innovation they bring to the table. Early historical wargames tended to be diceless affairs which decided outcomes by deferring to the judgment of a referee or other subject matter expert, but the use of randomisers increasingly came to be favoured because referees would tend to favour the most reasonable course, precluding upsets and rendering the outcomes of entire battles a foregone conclusion. This goes all the way back to the roots of tabletop wargaming – people were literally having "rules versus rulings" arguments two hundred years ago!

(This isn't the only facet of tabletop roleplaying culture which has its roots in wargaming culure, of course. For example, you can draw a direct line from the preoccupation of early tabletop RPGs with punishing the use of out-of-character knowledge to historical wargaming's gentleperson's agreement to refrain from making decisions based on information that one's side's commanders couldn't possibly have possessed when re-creating historical battles.)

To be clear, I don't necessarily disagree that salon games could have yielded something like modern tabletop RPGs. However, first they'd have had to arrive at the paired insights that a. excessive consensus-seeking is poison to building an interesting narrative; and b. randomisers can be used to force the breaking of consensus, and historical wargames had a substantial head start because they'd figured all that out a century earlier.

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If Kaiba dueled Mai would he figure out the perfume thing?

Pro-Kaiba arguments:

-He knows psychics are fake, so he'd know she was running some kind of scam; almost certain to correctly conclude her cards are marked, even if he doesn't know the precise method

-Generally smart and observant

-Being in the card game business means he's probably seen every attempted method of cheating or card-marking under the sun, including some weird ones

Pro-Mai arguments:

-I don't think Seto Kaiba has ever smelled a woman and I definitely don't think he can tell women's perfumes apart

-Prefers not to stand close enough to people to smell them regardless

-I think if he noticed she had lots of perfume he would mainly just be annoyed that this sensory assault is preventing him from focusing on summoning his damn dragons

-might notice the perfume but dismiss its importance out of hand out of casual misogyny all while furiously racking his brain for every other possible cheating method she could be using, which is funny

#yeah the last one honestly

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“[… M]any of us have never had a good role model on how to have civil and productive disagreements. I took a great class that helped me a lot when it comes to having difficult conversations. 1. focus on the behavior, not the person, not their motives. 2. don’t assume you know why somebody is doing something. (I.e they are coming in late because they are lazy). Because then you get stuck in a moral judgment scenario, not a problem solving scenario. Ask questions and remain curious before you decide you “know” something. 3. You don’t have to get to mutual agreement that behavior X is a problem/wrong/shouldn’t happen, etc . Then you are stuck in the problem. What you have to get to is an agreement about a mutual solution. 4. It is possible to have a solution to a problem without either party having to admit they are wrong. They just have to agree that they will do X instead of Y. 5. It is even possible to resolve an issue and still think the other person was being ridiculous/overreacting, whatever. As long as you have a solution that both parties agree to, you can feel however you want to about it, as long as you honor the agreement. 6. And remember that somewhere there is somebody who is having a problem with you. Yes, you. How do you want them to approach you about it? Try that.”

— don’t send anonymous notes at work — Ask a Manager (via tinsnip)

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Out of pure curiosity and fun!

#started off with moshi monsters #and then like a few years of ramdom free to play mmos during the mmo boom i think

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collection

#botns

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people who are like "how dare they retcon Spock having a sister" are so weak. have you seen the show? Spock said "one of my ancestors married a human female" and it wasn't until a year later his best friends found out he was talking about his fucking parents, and even then he only reluctantly let it slip because they were in the room

#thats one of like 3 good decisions discovery made #honestly they didnt need the crew to become a big top secret thing that only weakened the justification

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#this is less comprehensive but i good red flag to keep in mind i heard #from an interview with someone who was involved in hippy communes #if a group wants you to act like there's no reason you'll ever leave run #if no one maintains relationships with ex members or discusses them positively run #any community you want to be a part of has thr attitude of should their members leave their lives should not be thrown into instability #and we can keep being friends with them

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Every time Austin Walker says "we can't do this, we CANNOT do this! We HAVE to move on" in response to a weird side tangent one of his friends has initiated and then continues the side tangent with a comment he absolutely cannot hold inside of himself, a fairy gets its wings. 🥰

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PLEASE rb if you see this I really like seeing people's answers to polls and especially in one with more choices like this it's helpful to have a bunch of people answer:)

also I just want to say that I am a white american so this is definitely a biased list from what I know many people around me consider safe foods, I did try to look through reddit and stuff to get ideas and added things based on that but I apologize that the poll choices are skewed towards that perspective. that being said I think it would be super cool to see what people in other countries/cultural backgrounds eat as safe foods so please do comment or leave tags if you see this!

#safest carb is rice #safest meal with more nutrition is dahl and rice. maybe with spinach or a steamed vegetable on the side if have energy #i guess that isn't the safest or most common anymore cos of partner's allergies but like if im only sorting out for myself

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to the people who want to have a conversation about john's being an indigenous man, a māori man, i would like to remind you that the first time we see māori spoke onscreen it goes as follows.

one person in this room is interested in the cultures and languages of the world that came before, to the point her name and mission in life are respectively a human chain reaching back ten thousand years and justice for the destroyed earth: a mission that allowed her to persist beyond death, which brings her to being in control of cytherea the first's corpse. the other is john, who is disinterested in her idea of justice for them and speaks over her multiple times.

that human chain, her name? he doesn't respect it just as he doesn't respect her. this conversation is beneath him and so is her full name. he is annoyed into reciting it.

māori is spoken by john here, and it is spoken with contempt for the woman who wishes to avenge earth and whose name preserved a part of the language that he helped annihilate, along with aotearoa and all other māori people.

the first time māori is spoken in the series it is spoken by an indigenous man—who received an extensive colonial scholarship, who was alienated from his culture and sought respect and recognition in predominantly white academia, who was burned time and time again by the systems of oppression that formed the basis for climate change and the earth's abandonment by the trillionaires—who speaks it with a tone of condescension and a complete lack of gravitas because it is irrelevant to him. genuinely sad, bordering on very funny.

the second instance of māori is when he renames gideon the transliteration of her name into māori. she does not identify with it and she likely does not know its significance.

she is also a corpse: killed indirectly by cytherea the first, who presented a threat to harrow's life that could only be dealt with via her ascension to lyctorhood via gideon's death, who groomed gideon into accepting her role as cavalier primary to harrowhark nonagesimus.

killed by one of the emperor undying's fists and gestures, killed by the ideals of cavaliership which he societally instituted, killed due to cytherea the first's disillusionment with him leading her to go on a killing spree at canaan house in order to gain his attention, killed due to john and john's actions and the systems of the society he created.

the only time we see john use the māori language in a way that isn't dripping for contempt is when he renames his daughter's corpse, wherein he clarifies that she is prince kiriona gaia, heir to the emperor divine and the emperor's only daughter, the emperor's construct.

construct, like the skeletons that farm leeks on the ninth. she is not entitled to resurrection: she is to ownership, to being the ninth's chattel in life and her father's construct in death. he uses the language to declare her his.

gideon is the name of his saint, his oldest friend, spoken by the ghost of the woman that birthed her, to the nuns of her house—kiriona is john declaring a corpse his heir, and his daughter his construct.

there is a conversation i would love to have about john's indigeneity: it's the one where we acknowledge that after wakes death he has preserved the legacy of the māori language by using it to name his daughter, a māori woman killed by his society and the consequences of his actions, something she doesn't feel any connection to.

john is an indigenous man, a māori man, who was born into a land settled by colonisers who rendered it rife with systems of oppression that alienated him from his culture, and led him to fall back on the same systems of oppression when he founded the nine houses. indigeneity describes a relation to colonisation and settler capital, primarily in the form of dispossession; when john declared kiriona his, did he do so as an indigenous man or as the emperor of an empire that ships populations between planets like cattle?

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I’m a cis man sure but i also wanna opt out of the gender binary. None of that shit is my fault or my responsibility and i don’t want any part of it

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#yeah it's meat #to have a different enough texture to not count as meat categorically i gotta be eating exoskeleton #even shellfish count as meat cos you don't eat the shell

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like black people are present in every single fucking genre and scene and popularized and straight up created several but people are so fucking hell bent on finding every possible excuse to not engage with their music because its easier than trying to confront their own racism. like okay well if its truly just a disinterest in most rap music then surely you listen to black artists in other genres right? who am i fucking kidding. of course you dont.

#music

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adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.

children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.

#hey a kid trying hard to get out of school frequently usually means somethings wrong beyond the normal problems with school #like if your kid's faking sick or consistently skipping school esp if it's not a social thing #something is so fucked with the school environment that the path of least resistance and getting to be social with peers isn't enough to go #'kids will do anything to get out of school' is an easy way to avoid having to take responsibility to protect kids #from bullying and other abuse

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He's right tho