aarongoldenwrites

[aarongoldenwrites]

most of the talk on this website about Game Changer is how Sam Reich psychologically tortures his contestants, but I want to make it clear to the uninitiated that he's actually extremely ethical about it

He sends out a company wide email and asks them to choose episodes based on a chili pepper rating system

meaning he doesn't put 🌶️🌶️ people into 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ episodes

they're also big on consent ie cast and crew have to be okay with it before they'll do nudity or something like that in an episode

it's like the bdsm of psychological torture. safe, sane, and consensual.

the contestants know what they're getting into, and they're full down

[aarongoldenwrites]

[Ravnica Battlemap]Precinct three - Selesnya Territory 32x56

Natural and urban life intermingle throughout the precinct, and the people who reside here view it as a respite from most other places in the Tenth District. Folk here tend to live simply, and generations of families have dwelt in the same structures for hundreds of years. During the day, the gardens, small pastures, and stables are tended by young and old. Evenings are given over to communal gatherings, sometimes featuring performances by trained beasts or storytelling.

More variations of this map:

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Details that spoke to me while replaying DA:O

Because the DA team really has been working on their lore and plot since the dawn of time.

Zathrian’s words about betrayal that would work so well for a certain someone else, too:

Dalish Warden to Zathrian: “How could you betray our people?”

Zathrian:

First mention of the Seekers, chasing outlaws mages from the Imperium:

The description of carvings on an ancient elven tablet that eerily resembles that of the Well of Sorrows:

Theories about Andraste being a powerful mage, as World of Thedas 2 also mentions. This would explain the “miracles” ascribed to her, her half-sister’s mysterious disappearance, and Andraste’s visions and episodes of trance. It would also give points to the theory “Andraste was one of Mythal’s first vessels”:

Sten correctly predicting the future moves of the Qunari and their attempt at conquering the South:

Flemeth’s Grimoire which bears Mythal’s symbol, the leafless tree:

First mention of an ancient elf - an Arcane Warrior - escaping their physical body to live as formless spirit, in this case inside an amulet. We will find another mention of this ability of the elves only in Trespasser, in the text related to the Exile of the Forbidden Ones.

On the altar used for the ancient elven ritual described on the tablet (see above) is etched the image of a wolf:

“Mined from the living.” Could this be about the Titans?

There are other little things, but I felt like these were the most jarring and interesting. It’s also good to remember that the devs recently confirmed that they planned the truth about the elven gods and Fen’Harel since from the very beginning of the series. Kudos to them.

[aarongoldenwrites]

Did you know that there are whipping posts in the Kirkwall Gallows?

They’re rather easy for players to miss. You can see them in the background during The Last Straw (Act 3), and as early as Act 1 (and continuing into Act 2), Circle mages can be heard complaining, “Don’t talk to me. The templars will give me thirty lashes if they see me speaking to a civilian.” During the quest A Noble Agenda (Act 3), a woman reports seeing a mage cousin “whipped, half-starving” while pleading for mercy from a literal “death squad.”

In-universe, however, the whippings in the Gallows appear to be common knowledge. During Repentance (Act 2), we can see a whipping post (the exact same model observed in the Gallows later on) being used for sexual roleplay in the Harimann Estate in Hightown.

Lord Harimann: Now, you be the naughty apprentice, and I’ll be the Templar torturer.

It’s Played For Laughs here of course, but it really says something that citizens of Kirkwall know about Templar abuses in the Gallows and just how awful conditions are there — including the use of whipping posts. This isn’t even the only instance in the game of random NPCs referring to the severity of the repression and the rampant cruelty.

For example…

Keep reading

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The most popular browsers in different countries in 2012 and 2022.

by @theworldmaps_

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sick of “scottish independence” this and “irish reunification” that

theres 3 of us and 1 of england

i say we just kick the english out the uk

[aarongoldenwrites]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

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something i think gentiles do not get abt judaism is that it’s not a religion in the modern sense. rabbinic judaism as we know it today exists because of the roman destruction of judea and subsequent genocide and expulsion of a huge number of the judeans living there. prior to that, there were judeans who lived outside judea and still participated in many judean practices and followed many judean laws. there was a conversation happening particularly in the rabbinic movement (which was an incredibly small and fringy movement btw) about how to maintain a cohesive identity and community with members of an ethnic group that had stayed in babylon after being released from slavery or had moved to the italian peninsula or to egypt, and that identity was beginning to form. jewish identity was becoming something we might recognize today.

but prior to the roman expulsion and destruction of the temple, that identity had been centered around the land and the temple for very obvious reasons. ancient israel, judea, it was a place and the people who lived there lived under the same governance with the same culture and the same language. it makes sense they’d be a unique ethnic group. another huge part of the identity they’d formed was opposition to occupying forces, greeks, babylonians, assyrians, and finally the romans. eretz yisrael was constantly under occupation. and rebellion was a unifying force for these people. so when suddenly they have no land to defend, no central temple to look toward, suddenly the rabbis’ outlook on “portable judaism” was pretty much the only option if they wanted to remain a coherent group. they started communicating with each other over thousands of miles and multiple continents, discussing how to maintain their identity while in exile. and that is how judaism formed. it wasn’t a belief system that was spread throughout the world like christianity. it was a group of people whose population and homeland was devastated by a brutal occupying force who were trying to hold on to the only thing they had in strange lands where people weren’t always very welcoming: community. particularly in places like eastern and central europe where jews physically looked so different than the rest of the population, their culture was so different, and europeans reacted very violently to that, holding onto their traditions and immersing themselves in the study of how to stay connected is the reason those communities still exist today. they could have just moved to a new place and assimilated into the populations there and we would not have jews today. the reason we have jews today is because of that communal decision, across continents, to stay connected.

[aarongoldenwrites]

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

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vice news

ironically i am working right now so i can’t do a full post on this like i would really prefer to do… but these are the most cartoonishly evil people that you could possibly imagine, even in a society as flawed as the one we’ve built for ourselves. these are bedrock groups devoted to protecting the american worker and consumer. massive huge giant waving red flags 🚩

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As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

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