dukeofriven

[dukeofriven]

Clone Wars is a bad example in that it's 100% a war nobody should be fighting, as fighting the war in the first place is just fulfilling the scheming desire of a giant fascist. The war in the OG trilogy? That's a war with a meaningful goal. The Clone Wars? A smoke and mirrors trick in which millions if not billions die for nothing other than political theatre.

I feel like people miss the point of the "war is bad" message

What it's supposed to mean is that war is terrible, it's destructive, it ruins lives, it leaves scars, and you should only partake in it when there are no other options, because even if you win, even if you survive, you will not be the same, which is why the phrase used to be more commonly known as "war is hell"

But "war is bad" seems to have been construed by people in fandom into "any fighting is bad, if you fight you're morally terrible and impure, you should not fight at all, no matter what", this is annoying in fandom, as it often misses the point fiction is trying to make, but what's worrisome is when people apply this to real life, as I have seen people do regarding russia's invasion of Ukraine

And that's almost never the point of "War is Bad" works

Works like lotr, atla, transformers, the clone wars, etc all have themes on how horrible war is, but they categorically do not say it is wrong to fight, what they say is usually along the lines of "war is terrible, and what makes it so terrible is that we have no choice but to fight, it would be ideal if we didn't have to fight at all, but we must fight, because not fighting is not an option, because not fighting, not opposing tyranny, conquest, and evil only allows those things to exist unimpeded"

[dukeofriven]

[dukeofriven]

It's coming along. Wish me luck I'm about to use holographic filament for the first time.

[dukeofriven]

Women wearing overalls. Er, I mean, so people have told me. I wouldn't know.

People tend to throw out the phrase "extremely specific kinks" as though that inherently implies something transgressive, but in my experience, the overwhelming majority of extremely specific kinks are so innocuous that you could see them in public and not even clock them. For every person who can only get off to having their nipples electrocuted, there are a dozen who are volcanically aroused by seeing their partner wearing one specific pair of socks.

[dukeofriven]

The Mouse's method reminds me of the horror shows you sometimes hear about from bad coders whose code bloats beyond imagining because they're only capable of defining something with an endless series of IF statements defining what something is not, or actions where the program has to run through a million calculations to check what an input isn't doing. There's a term for this kind of over-broad elimination in philosophy or rhetoric of some kind, and its driving me nuts that I can bring it to mind.

Honestly thought I'd never hear the word "usborne" again. My mom used to live and breathe that company, and while I certainly don't regret a fair chunk, I do find it amusing as I look back now. I legitimately thought it had fallen off faster than Juice+.

In reference to a post where i mention my kid has the usborne “see inside germs” book.

So if people don’t know, usborne is a weird publishing company that has done indispensable books for British children for generations; they’re in every library, school and nursery, and have shelves devoted to them in every bookstore. They are how many people learned to read, and are the originators of many hyper focuses. They’re famed for doing educational lift the flap books for all ages, like “see inside your body”, as well as as the ubiquitous touch-and-feel series, “that’s not my….” In which a mouse comments improbably on various creatures not being their creature. “That’s not my dragon,” the mouse says, inviting you to stroke a dragon with a patch of fur on it, “its tummy is too soft. That’s not my dragon,” on the next page, where the dragon’s ears are lined with textured paper, “its ears are too bumpy.” This seems like such an inefficient way to find one’s missing dragon, a fact that simmers underneath you through endless repetition. Why does the mouse own so many things (pirates, ducks, polar bears) and why is it interrogating other people’s pirates etc by feeling their legs.

At any rate, turn a parents’ house upside down and these books fall out.

Which is why it’s completely hilarious that they are also an MLM.

Well. Kind of. In the old school sense. It’s less about signing up a pyramid scheme and more about getting a random citizen to buy a crate of perfectly popular books and try to sell them on from their home. It’s very traditional for Mums On Maternity Leave to do this. Pre-social media and online ordering, they’d hook up other mums at toddler group. Today, they post awkwardly on social media. The idea is that buying from another parent is cheaper than the bookstore, and they get to keep the markup. They get intense about things, and I believe they attend conferences. Nobody makes a huge amount of money and it’s unclear how undercutting local bookstores is helpful; it’s also basically the same RRP as Amazon I think.

And the books are perfectly respectable and sell perfectly well in bookstores.

So. Like. This marketing scheme is completely weird. Why?? Why does it still exist? People buy the books normally! You don’t need to promote them aggressively! You don’t need elaborate independent local middlemen schemes! You can just buy them! I have never understood this. I just file it under one of those weird mat leave hustles.

But don’t worry OP. They’re still going. They’ll never stop. The thing is that your mom got bored and online sales probably ate whatever residual profit margins were left and it’s probably very liberating for everyone to grow out of the “that’s not my cow” stage, but Usborne books are going strong.

[dukeofriven]

I was going to go off about everyone praising the girlbossing Hedy when she sold out all her friends to HUAC and then I realized I had once again confused her for Hedda Hopper. This, a day after I once again confused Reservoir Dogs with The Boondocks Saints, is proving a bad week for me.

[dukeofriven]

Pendant given to Pattie Boyd by Eric Clapton

Mick Milligan

Early 1970s

Christie's: The Pattie Boyd Collection (Lot 40)

[dukeofriven]

I mean that's kind of unfair: it has shipped two installments of the game thus-far and you still get the occasional update on the third installment. It isn't vapourware: it definitely exists just really slow, inefficient, poor game development.

I just got a shipping notice for fulfillment of physical Kickstarter rewards at an email address I have not used in thirteen years.

I could probably dig through my message history to figure out what the fuck this is about, but at this point I'm inclined to let it be a surprise.

[dukeofriven]

what farming items in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i’m not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i’m underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won’t produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes

[dukeofriven]

Girl's Dress

1885-1890

Paris, France

The MET (Accession Number: 2009.300.993)

[dukeofriven]

Try backing up and running them over a third time, maybe that'll get the message across.

[dukeofriven]

eleventh plague. emails. 

[dukeofriven]

I find games often devolve into freeform RPs when the mechanics of a game prove a poor fit for the story the players and GM find themselves trying to tell— a lot of D&D games fall into this simply because people have wildly incorrect beliefs that D&D is a 'one size fits all' system and they've asked Reddit for homebrewing options to do their steampunk western in 5e rather than look for something designed for steampunk westerns. And because there's such a fundamental disconnect between design and goal, you roll less and less and consult the rules less and less because D&D fundamentally isn't designed to give you a satisfying high-noon standoff, a train chase, or a saloon brawl, and the techno-steam skin you've slapped on D&D's already idiosyncratic Vancian magic feels hopelessly mismatched, and you can put a big black hat and a mustache on a Tarrasque but at day's end 'Lair Actions' just don't feel right for a corrupt local sheriff and his posse of goons whose "lair" is the clapboard back room of a brothel. Best RPG I was ever in was a Lancer campaign, but as the years went on we touched Lancer less and less because outside of the robot fights we kept negotiating ourselves out of fighting, the mechanics gave us nothing to play with in the complex social/political/intra-party stories we were telling and loving (and that the worldbuilding is seemingly designed to encourage, but that's a different gripe)—indeed, the mechanics of Lancer were sometimes an active impediment to anyone having fun. You'd roll for the first time in several sessions, and be cross that the result was so mechanically unsatisfying, or worded so specifically that its use cases made it pointless. The "game" because an RP session because the mechanics didn't engage the players in furthering their own stories and sense of play. Whereas the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games I've run use a cumbersome, messy, hair-pullingly unituitive system - but when it clicks with my players they fucking love not just rolling dice but building their dice pool, leverging every square inch of their character sheets—skills, talents, past experiences, inventory, cunning schemes—that make roles tenses, engaging, fun, wonderful. It's not great at selling its full self to players (I think its a failing of density and layout from an editing standpoint), but man the parts that click really click, and I've had players with no TTRPG experience have a great time both RPing and getting into the mechanics of the system - because the mechanics, the system, and the story we're telling all align.

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

#D&D #Lancer #RPGs #RP #Fantasy Flight #Star Wars

[dukeofriven]

Going to tell my kids this was Glee.

X (2022) dir. Ti West Pearl (2022) dir. Ti West MaXXXine (2024) dir. Ti West

#Glee #Ti West

[dukeofriven]

mom, dad… i’m…. RANDOM!! LOL XD

[dukeofriven]

most important thing to remember about being a woman is if youre married you have to go under the covers with your husband and laugh cutely and play wrestle so when you die to progress the narrative he can remember it in slow motion montages

[dukeofriven]