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#but NO. i live in a capitalist society and i have to WORK. I HAVE DEADLINES 😭😭😭
waveoftheocean · 9 months
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yet another vw wip for this week's wip wednesday bc i have zero (0) self control and so. so. so many thoughts abt them
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anyataylorjoys · 8 days
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I hate when coworkers ask me "do you have any fun weekend plans??" some of us are not trying to lead a life, some of us are just trying to get by and tend to our body's needs as they require.
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cheri-translates · 2 years
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Announcement
I will no longer be translating major MLQC content (e.g. dates, main storyline and events). I’m still considering if I should continue doing smaller translations, but for now I’m honestly too drained to think about MLQC so apologies to anyone who was looking forward to the dates!
There are many other translators in the community so I’ll leave you in their care 💕
Take care pals!! ૮꒰ ˶> ༝ <˶꒱ა Don’t burn out like me LOL
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curiosity-killed · 11 months
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Not to be like a crotchety old grandpa waving my cane at middle school hooligans but I do wish (especially) young, very online queer folks would take a sec to learn a little more about like political movements and social change
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yuribalisms · 8 months
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Essentially what it is all boiling down to is I have fully realized I am bad at being a person, that will always be true, and I don’t know how to handle that
#I’m going to be depressing and self depreciating in the tags so. fair warning to anyone who reads them#I’ve known for a while now that I don’t know what to do with my life. I’ve thought of a few ideas but none of them seem to be working. and I#think a good chunk of what it’s boiling down to is that I am quite literally just stupid when it comes to an actual useful real life skills.#and it’s frustrating because I can’t even talk to ppl I know and confide in them that I feel dumb and stupid without them being like ‘nooooo#don’t say that! you’re not stupid! you were top of your class in hs!’ (that is their favorite thing to fall back on) but like. the thing is#I wasn’t even smart in hs. sure I did good but that’s because I cheated my way through and got lucky a lot. I never actually learned anythin#I never understood what I was being taught or how to apply it. I was good at English and art classes and that was it those were the only one#I truly felt I knew what I was doing in and grasped the subject matter well. I know I’m good at those two things and smart when it comes to#those subjects. but the thing is. in real life. both of those are useless skills. I can’t make money with them and it is highly unlikely#that will ever change. and yes I know not being able to make money with it doesn’t mean it’s useless but like it kinda does. capitalism#sucks. I know that. we all do. but that doesn’t change that we live in a capitalist society and it’s unlikely to actual change in my lifetim#so I’m stuck to try and figure out how to live in it. but I have no skills I can make money with so I will live my entire life poor and#miserable and working dead end jobs that make me want to kill myself. I’m not good at socialization I’m so fucking bad at it so I can’t work#any kind of job that hinges on networking or sales or human interaction which is MOST JOBS but I’m also too stupid for anything related to#STEM. I tried two different stem degrees and flunked out of both of them because I am a FUCKING IDIOT and I know there’s no point in trying#to go back to school for another one. but no degree in anything I naturally have a knack for will help me find a decent well paying job. ill#just be wasting my money to go to school for something like that. and then like. I don’t even think I’ll ever get married and I def won’t#ever have kids. so I can’t even put any hopeful stock in just being happy with a family one day. I know a lot of ppl who don’t like their#careers but they’re fine with that because they’re happy with their family but like I don’t even have that and I won’t ever have that. I#have NOTHING to strive for and NOTHING I am good at that’s meaningful I’m going to fail at having a career and a family and I know that#doesn’t mean I won’t be happy in theory but by societal standards I am and always will be a fucking failure of a person and since I do live#in this society yeah. it’s kinda fucking true. and I don’t know what to do about that. I’m just tired. I’m tired of being afraid and#struggling and going through patches of wanting to kill myself because of this because like what’s the point. I’ll never have anything#better so what in the actual hell is the point of me existing. and I know I’m being ridiculous and my brain is eating itself and none of#this is probably even true but that doesn’t change that it FEELS like it is a lot of times and esp right now and I don’t know what to do#to anyone who reads this I’ll be fine tbh prob as soon as tomorrow like dw about it I just need to get it out so I stop stewing in it.#I’m just. yeah. not having a great time rn but I left work so I’m gonna cry and then maybe sleep for a bit and hope that helps#kaz rambles
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kittykatinabag · 9 months
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Hot Labor Strike Summer and all but fuck do I hate the term "right to work"
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mbrainspaz · 1 year
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that feeling when you're just trying to work on your passion project for an hour before your manual labor shift that you have to do in order to keep your housing but you get a text from your manager saying they're thinking of letting your pregnant coworker go because she can't do the work anymore even though it's her only income and the source of her insurance and the company owners are have been rich enough to lobby against national healthcare and welfare since the '70s so f*ck 'em honestly, please let's find a way to keep her on even if she never shows up because she's too frail and she's just a kid who's been brainwashed her whole life into thinking this is just how the world works when it shouldn't. It shouldn't be like this.
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itsjaywalkers · 2 years
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being an adult is so hard like. why do i have to look for a job??? isn't it enough that i'm trying to get a uni degree?? that i have to clean my flat?? go grocery shopping??? think of and cook 3 meals every single day?? why can't i just lay down on my bed and look at the ceiling and breathe and simply eXIST-
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arcane-focused · 1 year
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I just wanna goof around for ONCE without worrying about some dumb shit happening. Like, NO Karen, I will NOT be coming into work early today. I am collecting cool pebbles and looking aimlessly at the SKY.
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argiopi · 2 years
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home sweet home!
look at this fat dumpy:
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also ziplining boulders down a mountainside is super fun
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lcrk · 5 months
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basingstokemercury · 11 months
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anyway to completely digress from all-nighter fuelled semi-poetic character analysis
personal life is rapidly approaching the point of impossibility
yes thank you i know i need a job to get anywhere and it's unfair to expect parents to completely support me when i'm perfectly healthy and the things i need to go into serious theatre aren't exactly cheap
so uh
still waiting to find one single job outside the creative arts that can be performed while being:
lazy, selfish, socially nonfunctioning, irresponsible, unable to maintain focus on boring/repetitive tasks, conflict-averse to the extent of shutting down when confronted, completely irregular sleep schedule, allergic to routine that involves more than a couple scheduled events per week, unsuited to manual labour, and oh yeah absolutely terrible at interviews
"you're such a good teacher" thank you. i've been a student. not going anywhere near a room full of kids.
"you said yourself you want to work with animals" i do. i'm also nowhere near responsible enough to be in charge of caring for little squishy things that could die if my attention wanders.
"waitress -" spent years going to restaurants with the kind of person who annoys waiters. wouldn't be one if it were the only job on earth.
"cashier -" just a less intense version of waitress. and anyway i'd never be able to sit there for hours doing the same thing over and over.
it's awfully touching that people have faith in me but i do think i know my own flaws.
okay that was rough. have a fairfax.
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thebibliosphere · 8 months
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I both believe "poor people deserve art" and "artists deserve food", but it's hard to reconcile those beliefs. I blame capitalism. And I suppose it mostly matters who you're stealing from?
I don't mean to question you at all, I'm against people pirating your stories. I guess I was just wondering if you had more thoughts regarding the reconciliation the two beliefs I quoted above.
I think the reconciliation is working toward a future where things are better, and authors and artists don't have to beg people not to steal from them because they think every author is Stephen King, who wouldn't notice if you stole the pennies found under his couch when in reality most of us are hunting for spare change down the back of the couch because we are earning below minimum wage.
We need people to embrace the idea that art belongs to the working class, both in terms of consumption but also creation.
If you don't support the working-class creators, you'll only end up with rich fucks with no scope of the world beyond their own narrow view of privilege.
Indie creators are actually working very hard to change the way the industry works, and the publishing industry is shitting itself over it. They don't like the success some of us are having. It's why they keep upping prices while slashing corners on their own production (while never affecting the man at the top) to try and stay competitive within the rat race they've created.
They're not interested in the proliferation of art. They're not interested in making sure their authors can afford to live. They don't want more diversity. They don't want inclusion. They want profit at whatever the cost.
And while indie creators very much need to get paid because we live in a capitalistic society and everything is burning down around us, and a carton of eggs now costs more than what I earn per hour, our creativity is directly at odds with the type of profiteering big publishers want.
The money should go to the writers. Not the CEOs. The money should go to the workers in the print houses. Not the CEOs. No one needs the kind of wealth these people have. It's obscene. We need direct action against these conglomerates. We need unionization. We need a means to fight back so that we can make art and make it accessible.
So, how do we do that? I don't know. I'm just a very tired, disabled creator doing my best to keep my head above water. But I think getting people to realize that art and books are worth saving up for would be a good start.
That putting money in the pockets of creators is just as important as your own enjoyment of their art. Because if there aren't any artists, you've got nothing.
Getting them involved with their local libraries would also be a great start. Educating them on how the industry works is part of that. The number of people telling me they had no idea libraries paid authors is staggering. And that's intentional. It's a by-product of right-wing propaganda to make you think libraries are worthless and just sap taxpayers' money.
They're not.
If they were, the fash wouldn't be trying so hard to take them away.
Basically, we need working-class solidarity and for certain people on the left to rid themselves of the idea that just because something isn't borne of manual labor, it doesn't have worth. We need the artists and the dreamers as much as we need to bricklayers and the craftsmen. Otherwise, what's the fucking point of it all?
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zedecksiew · 3 months
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DECOLONISING D&D
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In 2019, after seeing yet another round of alarmist discourse in Xwitter about how Dungeons & Dragons is FULL of COLONIALIST tropes and patterns, and needs to be revised, SCRUBBED of its PROBLEMATIC FILTH---I rage-tweeted this brainfart:
"Decolonising D&D"
I've seen this thread round the community, since. Humza K quotes it in Productive Scab-picking: On Oppressive Themes in Gaming. Prismatic Wasteland quotes it in Apolitical RPGs Don't Exist. Most recently, it was referenced in a 1999AD post about Western TTRPGs (an interesting discussion on its own merit; one that already has a counterpoint from Sandro / Fail Forward.)
If folks are still referring to it five years later, maybe I should give the thread a little more credit? Perhaps the fart miasma has crystalised into something concrete.
In the interest of record / saving this thought from the ephemerality of Xwitter, here is the text in full, properly paragraphed, and somewhat more cleanly expressed:
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"DECOLONISING D&D"
Firstly: saying "D&D is colonialist" is similar to saying: "the English language is colonialist".
If your method of decolonising RPGs is to abandon D&D---well, some folks abandon English; they don't want to work in the language of the coloniser. More power to them!
For those who want to continue using the "language" of D&D---
Going forth into the "wild hinterland" (as if this weren't somebody's homeland);
to "seek treasure" (as if this didn't belong to anybody);
and "slay monsters" (monsters to whom?)
Yeah. There's some problematic stuff here, and definitely these aspects should make more people uncomfortable.
But! I think it is an error to "decolonise D&D" by scrubbing such content from the game.
That feels like erasure; like an unwillingness to face history / context; like a way to appease one's own settler guilt.
Do you live in the West? Do you live in any Asian urban metropole? White or Person of Colour(tm)---you are already complicit in colonialist / capitalist (yes, of course they are inextricably linked) behaviour. (I can't speak for urban metropoles elsewhere, but I bet they are similar centres of extraction.)
Removing such patterns from the TTRPGs you play might let you feel better, at your game table. But won't change what you are.
I think it is more truthful and more useful NOT to avert one's eyes from D&D's colonialism.
The fact that going forth into the hinterland to seek treasure and slay monsters is a thing, and fucking fun, tells us valuable things about the shape and psychology of colonialism. Why conquistadors in the past did it; why liberal foreign policy, corporations, and post-colonial societies do it today.
Speaking personally:
I write stuff that evokes / deals with the context I'm in---Southeast Asia. An intrinsic part of that is looking at the ways colonial violence has happened to us---as well as the ways / reasons we now, supposedly free, perpetrate it on others.
A long chain of suffering. Heavy stuff.
I also write for people who want to have fun / kill monsters / pretend to be elves, of course. But for those people who want to consider serious stuff like colonialism: I offer no FIGHT THE POWER righteousness, no good feeling, no answers.
Only discomfort. Because the truth is uncomfortable.
Here's a screenshot of the Author's Note for Lorn Song of the Bachelor:
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"Any text inspired by Southeast Asia has to reckon with colonialism ... This text presents a difficult situation; there are no easy solutions. "... If I offered a mechanical incentive for you to fight colonial invaders, you wouldn’t be making a moral decision, but a mercenary one. "The choice you face should echo ... the kind of calculus my grandparents faced."
I stand by that.
Also: might we be more precise and more careful about using the term "decolonising", please?
Here I quote Tuck and Yang's landmark and (sadly) still trenchant "Decolonization is not a metaphor":
"Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies ..."
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Further Reading
So this post isn't just me reheating a hot take, here are some touchstone writings from around the TTRPG community about colonialism as a subject and mode of play in games:
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"Jim Corbett was called upon to hunt down another fifty maneaters over the course of the next 35 years. Together, those tigers had killed over 2000 people, for much the same reasons as the Champawat Tiger - injury, desperation, starvation, and habitat loss. Would you look at that. The root cause was British colonialism."
D&D Doesn't Understand What Monsters Are from Throne of Salt
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"Another effect of having colonizers in my setting would be giving players the opportunity to drive them away from the islands, their home. This maybe just be for the catharsis. After all, isn’t catharsis a big part of why we play roleplaying games?"
I’m Adding Colonizers To My Setting from Goobernut's Blog
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"When you have a slime boy and the other characters are a really fat lizard and one's playing Humpty Dumpty, it completely shatters the straight-faced serious authoritarian illusion of race, and replaces it with complete fucking nonsense. I love the idea of proliferating the number and types of "races" into absurdity, to the point where the entire logical structure of it collapses in on itself and race as a category ceases to become coherent or meaningful in any sense."
Interview with Ava Islam - Designer of the RPG Errant from Ava Islam / The Lost Bay
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"Perhaps most critically, the fundamental basis of power is not land or even money but manpower. That’s what local rulers fight over, and what Chinese commercial networks export, in return for unique island products. It’s what the European colonists really need (even if it’s not what they most desire). There is rich loot to be grabbed in the form of spices, Spanish silver, Indian gold, sea cucumbers (the Chinese love ’em), perfumes, dyes, cloth etc. so there’s ample opportunity for piracy, trade and smuggling, but the key to long-term success – the key to independent survival – is nakedly and unquestionably uniting people."
Counter-colonial Heistcrawl: previous high scores from Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse
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"They worked their own land—which they dispossessed from American Indians—or became small shop owners or opportunistic gold diggers or bounty hunters or itinerant ranchers. To me, substituting these situations for one ruled by industrial monopoly ignores that the Wild West is a perfect example of how capitalism operates outside of (or prior to) mass industry, instead being composed of self-employers and self-sustainers."
Fantastic Detours - Frontier Scum from Traverse Fantasy / Bones of Contention
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"... using the Western framing and D&D's baked-in imperialist and capitalist structure to get people earnestly participating in the experience of forming imperial power structures and the early roots of regional capitalism ... The PCs aren't the drifters on the train or the townsfolk watching with apprehension - they're the railroad itself."
An Arrow for the General: Confronting D&D-as-Western in the Kalahari from A Most Majestic Fly Whisk
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blockgamepirate · 2 months
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This is my petty complaint time, this video annoys me SO MUCH and even more so what annoys me is that the latest comment on it is this:
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HE TAUGHT YOU SO MUCH BULLSHIT, PLEASE NO, DON'T LISTEN TO HIM
And yes, I've been thinking about this stream for nearly three years now, I've been meaning to go through it to critique Wilbur's arguments, I just never got around to it
Wilbur: "Tubbo, you've created an anti-state capitalist dystopia"
So all Tubbo had explained so far was that his town had a big company that owned two other big companies. Nothing about the government or anything. It's true that one company owning all the major businesses is pretty dystopian, sure, but I have no idea where Wilbur got the "anti-state" thing from, usually capitalist companies are fine with the existence of states, states do a lot of dirty work for the capitalists
Spoiler alert: Tubbo's city turns out to be pretty much a city state so Wilbur is just wrong anyway, not that he ever acknowledges it even when it does come up
Also it's not like corporate acquisitions are completely unheard of in the UK, as far as I know. Admittedly the UK is also arguably a capitalist dystopia but you know what I mean, the concept shouldn't be all that shocking to Wilbur
He's being so dramatic and trying to make it sound like he's caught Tubbo in a mistake or something. He also keeps asking questions and then not letting Tubbo answer properly before taking like one word Tubbo says and running with it
But this is the one that I find the most obnoxious:
T: "I did some research into like economics and stuff and I discovered this thing called UBI, have you heard of it?"
W: "What's it stand for?"
T: "Universal Basic Income"
W: "Yeah, I know about that"
He clearly does not know what UBI is.
It becomes very apparent very quickly:
W: "So you've got universal basic income but then also the rich exist still?"
T: "Yeah! Yeah they do."
W: "How does that come about then,"
T: "So in my mind--"
W: "is this universal basic income different for different people?"
T: "No, no, the universal basic income is better for everyone, just the people who have--"
W: "In order for there to be a 1% that means someone's earning more,"
T: "Yes, someone is earning more"
W: "but that means the universal basic income isn't universal!"
T: "No no no, not everyone's getting paid the same but everyone gets the same to begin with, okay? But then you can build on top of it."
W: "Oh no, you've got a-- Tubbo, you've got a fucking social point system!"
T: "Have I made a social point system??"
W: "Tubbo, you've made China!"
None of what Wilbur says makes ANY sense here. The only explanation I can think of is that he didn't know what UBI was, made an assumption that it just meant "everybody gets paid the same amount of money" or something like that and then just spoke fast enough that Tubbo couldn't correct him
Tubbo is correct here, Tubbo knows what he's talking about, but he can't out-speak Wilbur who is just throwing so much bullshit out of his mouth that there's no time to even respond
So, UBI means that everyone in the society gets a regular payment of a specific amount of money that's the same for everyone regardless of their life situation (and generally a requirement would be that it has to be enough to live on, altho people do like to water this down a lot...) This would be completely irrelevant to your wages or salary or capital gains. You can choose to either live on the UBI or you can just do the regular capitalist things to earn extra money on top of the UBI
Obviously I'm not one of those people who think that UBI would solve all of world's problems, I mean I am an anarchist and all (and not an ancap either), but it's literally just a very streamlined welfare system. That's all. It would probably be a lot better than the current models we have but it's not fundamentally different. There's nothing particularly weird about it, the point is just to make sure that everyone has enough money to live on, in every other regard it's just normal capitalism
Wilbur completely misunderstands the whole thing (because, again, he does not know what UBI is so he's just trying to imagine what it might mean based on what Tubbo is saying) and jumps immediately to something he apparently has heard of, which is the Chinese social credit system, which has nothing to do with UBI. In fact I'm pretty sure it also doesn't actually have anything to do with income either, or at least not directly, so I don't think Wilbur knows what the social credit system is either
He's literally just talking in buzzwords
Like if you actually wanted to make a leftist critique of Tubbo's city, you could, don't get me wrong. But instead Wilbur keeps insisting that he's made a social point system despite Tubbo trying to explain why it's not that at all
Wilbur just keeps yelling over Tubbo until his own chat turns against him and finally Tubbo himself also kinda gives up
And from there Tubbo also kinda just starts playing into the bit and just lets Wilbur direct the whole conversation, the rest of it is just them getting more and more into the roleplay. Wilbur keeps talking about the state pension plan, even though Tubbo already tried to explain that it's part of the UBI (this actually is how UBI is supposed to work, it does indeed streamline most of the welfare spending! Obviously you can still raise questions about that (I can think of a few at least) but Wilbur didn't let Tubbo explain so I have no idea what Tubbo actually had in mind)
I could try to go through all of what Wilbur says here but it's just too much, so maybe some other time. Although to be honest there are so many other streams that I probably should talk about instead that some fans unfortunately took a bit too seriously because they assumed Wilbur knew what he was talking about
My point here is mainly that just because someone sounds really confident and knows a bunch of buzzwords doesn't mean they know what they're talking about.
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anonyma13 · 2 years
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