Some weird insane person with a blog

🇵🇸 free Palestine 🍉 - ask me about wasps. i won't have much to respond with than "wasps ❤️" but ask me about them anyway

[asmolfirefly]

hello :]

ummm you can call me jules and use they/he pronouns for me. i am an adult, french, and tme. this is all the personal information you will get about me here!

dont mind the tags, this post is also a tag directory for me ^^ since the mobile app sucks

[shinesurge]

gentle psa to new comic artists about a problem i also suffered from: slow quiet pacing is totally fine BUT if that's not what you're deliberately going for, you CAN fit more Story Progression on the page. no, more than that. more than that even. i promise if you don't want it to a single action doesn't need to take a whole page to illustrate each of its steps, a lot of connecting magic happens in the gutters i /promise/ if you draw someone pulling up in a car then skip to them walking in the door with groceries we will Understand that they unloaded the car and unlocked the house you feel me

[shinesurge]

#I am not a comic artist#but I had a similar problem when I was in film school#I call it “the door problem”#in my thesis film I had written that two characters walk out the back of the club into the alley behind the club#and my club location did not have a back alley but did have a side room that we used as the door#but that door opened in#and the location I used for the alley had a back door but that door opened outwards#and I knew it looked weird#I struggled framing the shots#and blocking the actors#and I got really really caught in my own head about how to make this door work#because to me it was really important that you saw every step from club to outside#because even though we had learned in school that you could transition it didn't feel right because it didn't feel like a new scene to me#(this being one of the struggles with a short film. It can all feel like one scene if your script is short!)#AND THEN#when we got into the editing room we just...cut the door transition entirely#initially not on purpose#what happened was that we decided to tighten up the timing by cutting non-linearly to the custom music I had commissioned#which made it much more experimental especially in comparison to my fellow classmates#however it showed me that the story still absolutely worked without needing to show how they got into the alley#the audience can infer the door#so now anytime I can feel myself getting stuck on something when I'm filming I think#“Is this a Door Problem?”#as a storyteller it's always a question of what is the absolute bare minimum you need to convey what you're trying to say#and sometimes that means you just need to already be outside the club

(via @currentlycreating )

Exactly! Film and comics are VERY similar mediums in this way, I love this. We should always be considering Door Problems

[rifa]

This applies to writing too.

Once I was doing a beta read and read one of ny favorite sentences of all time: "He buttoned up the buttons on his button up shirt."

Amazing, wonderful. We can skip most of thst sentence down to "He buttoned up his shirt." Because readers are smart enough to infer that buttons on a shirt mean a button up shirt, and that the act of "buttoning" implies the presence of buttons.

Writing is full fo door problems, whether its the literal use of words in a sentence or whether its how we write transitions and movements from one place to another. Some writers get hung up about the door, writing the character turn the knob and close the door behind them and walk down the stoop steps and out to the car and and and and.

You need to, as any storyteller, find the elements thst are important to communicate and let the rest go. The medium varies how and what is important and how to communicate it, but regardless we have to just trust that the viewers and readers have lived in the world and have brains that work, and that they will unconsciously fill in the blank spaces

[thefugitivesaint]

oakoak, 'Free Rothko', 2024 Source

[freshcuntgrass]

The best thing about this is how much love for Rothko there is in it. Like... here. Here is a rectangle, and if you stand far away it's just two or three colors a bit streaky, and the closer you get the more it opens up until it swallows you whole with the idea of how vast it is, how much bigger than you. If someone framed the real-life sea and sky and told everybody that's what my artwork was like to them I'd kiss them

[post-pacific]

Quing and Queen of Hometown

(ID under cut)

[ID: Deltarune fan-comic about Kris and Noelle as children at the Festival. Noelle is an anthropomorphic deer and Kris is a human with long dark hair wearing a horned headband. Noelle is at the voting booth, holding a pen attached to the table with a wire, and says: "C'mon Kris, we gotta vote ourselves if we wanna win against Dess and Azzy." Kris, drooping their head and squeezing their shirt with their hand says: "Okay…" Noelle says: "I guess… you can put me down as queen. That makes sense." to which Kris says: "I don't wanna be king." Noelle asks: "You wanna be queen?" Kris responds with a long "Nooo". Noelle says: "But… those are the only options here." Kris responds: "I wanna be queen and king. Quing." and Noelle echoes them: "Quing??" after which she continues: "There's a nicer sounding word for a neutral ruler, yknow. It's monarch. M-o-n-a-r-c-h" Kris face-plants on the booth table and says: "Monarch is lame. Quing is better." Noelle whines: "Krismaaas!" In the last panel, both of their ballots have Noelle voted as queen and for the king slot, the word "king" is scribbled out and replaced with "quing", with Kris's name under it. In the other ballot are doodles of Kris with a crown and of Noelle being annoyed. The dialogue in the last panel says: "You're impossible." /End ID.]

[existennialmemes]

Companies in the 2000s: You wouldn't download a car! Digital copies are still stealing, even if the original copy remains with us.

Companies in the 2020s: That digital copy, which you have paid for, doesn't really belong to you. We're removing it from your library now.

[existennialmemes]

Companies deleting media you've literally purchased is 1000x more realistically "stealing" than digital piracy, you cannot change my mind

[sobcat]

tomorrow I'll do the possible

[peniswakt-deactivated20210717]

this may be an Unpopular Opinion (even on tumblr) but like the 8-hour workday is just Too Gotdamn Long

like even sitting in an office for eight hours a day isn’t particularly pleasant (or healthy, as we are beginning to see) but when we’re talking about doing *actual work* for that same amount time it gets pretty fucking brutal

doing literally *anything* (even leisure activities) for eight hours straight tends to be less than enjoyable but when we’re talking about things like construction, landscaping, factory work, and hell, even foodservice and retail, eight hours is a fucking ETERNITY

i might just be a lazy weak-willed bitch but honestly i think i’m not entirely wrong

[tyrannosaurus-rex]

this was being worked towards by leftist labor unions way back in the day after the time of FDRs new deal. people in the 40s and 50s were already starting to realize that we no longer actually needed an 8 hour work day or even a 5 day work week.

even with the comparatively primitive factory tech of the time we were already creating a huge amount of excess production back then and companies were making massive amounts of profit. So it already stood to reason that companies should either let their employees work less and thus each employee could work a shorter shift without lowering the yearly compensation of each employee, or in cases where businesses provide an active service they would shorten the shift but hire more people to cover the necessary operating time. but of course that would mean less money for people at the top so companies fought back hard and we ended up with nixon’s bullshit and so on and now its considered the norm for us to spend the vast majority of our lives doing work that really just amounts to waste. 

[dreamer-of-centipedes]

The IWW realised this and were fighting for it all the way back in the 1930s. This is a take with a lot of historical and theoretical grounding, OP, so you’re standing in good stead.

[aztechnology]

I’d also like to add it’s also been studied and scientifically proven that after 6 hours, we have an extremely noticeable drop in productivity. Sweden saw nothing but benefits from a 6-hour work day, including worker productivity, happiness, and half the amount of sick-leave used when applied to nurses.

https://onlinemasters.ohio.edu/the-six-hour-workday/

[laughterkey]

Just gonna add that the IWW is still kicking and basically anyone who is not an employer can join.

[addicted2wasps]

Sphex ichneumoneus, completed!

[juney-blues]

stairs are so funny. falling 100 meters will kill you. solution? fall 10 centimeters a thousand times.

[markadoo]

they invented all those neat si prefixes and people still talk like this

[395nm]

falling a hectometer will kill you. solution? fall a decimeter a kilotime.

[anik]

i love this guy

[anim-ttrpgs]

There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.

[catgirltaxreturndocument]

please. i need to see a nine on the jerk-off scale. rebel scum? old forge games? hyper pretentious osr? i need to see the horrors

[anim-ttrpgs]

Eat the Reich was actually what inspired this post, but Candela Obscura also comes to mind

[anim-ttrpgs]

@batmanisagatewaydrug @utracjuszka

Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but it’s a game that actually exists:

[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if you’ve played or enjoyed this game. It’s just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. 

If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud. 

The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesn’t. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like it’s above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. It’s so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something “problematic” that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive. 

To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:

(What the fuck do they think an “explorer” is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)

Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, it’s ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldn’t just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.

The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)

The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be “the good guys.” All of the “problematic” aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them.. 

(Don’t worry guys there’s no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)

..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:

(Don’t worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this district’s points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)

There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novel’s worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just don’t have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the “radium girls” where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:

Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just “bad actors who hold terrible beliefs.” Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they don’t go anywhere either. They don’t belong to any social movements, they don’t get organized, they don’t push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals. 

You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? They’re under assault.

That’s right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of… uh, “Otherwhere.” (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) That’s where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!

Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the “colonists.” With nukes chain lightning.

(That last sentence continues on “tens of thousands..” You get the picture.) So, whew, glad that’s over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:

You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldn’t want to hear its thoughts on Israel. 

You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, “perform questionable acts in the name of the common good,” and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.

It’s actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaire’s society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.

The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. “Gay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!”

On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscura’s gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create “actual-play” shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, that’s more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because it’s not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. It’s intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.

It seems like the game really doesn’t want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.

However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscura’s approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Don’t have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Don’t have actors say foreign words they don’t know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Don’t show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."

We’d like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that “they don’t want to be disrespectful by playing it” because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - don’t buy or support their game!

[gupdoo3]

[power-chords]

I almost forgot to mention: this woman came into the penguin enclosure with a KESTREL??? I said “oh my god is that an American Kestrel?” and she said “Yes! She was outside doing raptor education for the kids, but she doesn’t like to get rained on.”

[ayellowbirds]

#she was watching the penguins with what I will anthropomorphically project as skepticism

[elkian]

kestrel: i hate rained on!!

human: here is birds in water

kestrel: ......no.....

[hoodlytheowl]

[doloneia]

not to be a gatekeeper or anything but i wholeheartedly believe that if you cannot appreciate the constant planning, effort, and labor of ancient workers (slaves, farmers, weavers, potters, etc) - you genuinely cannot examine or appreciate antiquity in any meaningful way (besides becoming an example for what NOT to do).

[doloneia]

Because so much of what survives - the impressive works that people think of when they hear “Greece,” “Rome,” “Egypt,” “Sumer,” etc. is not the result of ‘scholars’ but was built off the labor and skills of laborers who were not ‘scholars’ in the modern sense, were not ‘educated’ in the same manner as someone from fucking middle-class USA or whatever, but who were trained and informed about their particular discipline in a way that most of us cannot even begin to fathom. And their labor was built off the unseen efforts of other workers - slaves, farmers, weavers, potters, quarrymen, smiths, etc - with similarly specialized, period-specific knowledge that I think is impossible to fully appreciate if you do not respect blue-collar work and manual labor.

Like, you can say you “know more” than the average person in antiquity - but you don’t. Maybe in a conceptual manner - yeah, we know about distant planets and galaxies, we’ve got germ theory, we have made a collection of the entire human genome, we have walked on the fucking moon - but from the perspective of someone from 500 BCE (if I may be allowed a dash of speculation here), does that matter?

In our industrialized, globalized world, I think we forget the sheer effort that went into everything. The sheer degree of skill needed to create homes, tools, clothing, ceramics, fine jewelry, statues, and everything in-between. The skill, knowledge, and effort that went into everyday subsistence activities, like farming, herding, and weaving; and into other trades such as shipping and manufacturing. These are not mindless tasks, devoid of calculation and forethought; to pretend they are in even the slightest is disingenuous.

I would even go so far as to say it is extremely classist & sexist, because - shocker - people still work in these fields. The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the streets you walk, the buildings you eat and sleep and live in - these did not spawn out of a vacuum. Constant effort - unending, backbreaking labor, time, and skill has gone into the world we walk through today, so people can go on pretending like they’re somehow ‘smarter’ than those who came before them, when the only difference is that we* are able to concentrate on something besides our own survival. something otherwise ‘useless’ for everyday survival, and i say that as an archaeologist. Excavating a Bronze Age brewery does not provide food, it does not provide you with clothes (it actually damages them), it does not give you shelter, it mostly provides you with broken potsherds and a whole lot of dirt destined for floatation. Yes, it requires practical skills too - but many of these are essentially also used, even more frequently, in manual labor and agriculture.

And - in this broken, frightful world - we are so damn lucky** that people can even spare time for this, to learn more about the ancient world. And we are even more lucky that - when we are born with health complications, are disabled, or are faced with diseases like pneumonia, measles, and COVID - that these are not death sentences. Artificial scarcity, corporate greed, and fearmongering can make them so, but there is still that ability to live. To focus on the past, instead of making it to the next day, the next week, the next month.

But - I want to emphasize here - this is all entirely reliant on the work of people who continue to carry out the same manual labor done by countless individuals - enslaved and free - up through antiquity. People whose calculations were their survival, whose understanding of the natural world and local resources made the difference between life and death.

To pretend like we are somehow more knowledgable, more capable, more “advanced” intellectually than those who laid the foundations for the entire fucking world we live in today, is a lie. A smug, disgusting little lie that spits on all we have done as a species (and all the progress we are trying to make) with the idea that “we’ve done it”, we’re “superior,” this idea that only encourages rotting in self-assured apathy while the world burns.

And you cannot appreciate the past when you approach it with false assumptions which are based on nothing except preconcieved notions of modern superiority and the belief that knowledge is both ‘quantifiable’ and absolute. We are just as capable of joy, wisdom, compassion, and love as the ancients; and we are just as susceptible to fear, anger, and hatred as they were. I’m not saying everyone has to know the ins and outs of every ancient industry ever to appreciate the fucking Parthenon, but if someone cannot approach the ancient world with an open mind, a sense of humility, and self-reflection - then I suspect they cannot appreciate the fucking Parthenon.

*When I use the term 'we,' I am referring to individuals who do not specialize in manual labor/blue-collar industries and/or engage in subsistence agriculture.

**I know that these are all very situational and that the management and medicine available to people is inextricable from their class, identity, and nationality. I am merely trying to stress that it is possible. I would be dead without modern medicine; and I know countless others who are the same way.

[iamaine]

if you're ever beating yourself up for 'missing the obvious hints' that someone is romantically interested in you, know this: i once met a guy who asked out a girl after she sent him nude pictures of herself in the bath and she said she wasn't interested. it is never obvious

[iamaine]

fascinating things happening here

[thoughtportal]

the things that are reported matters. the language used matters. what is left out of the story matters.

[gamebird]

This is very important. Systemic problems trump individual action all the time.

[sailorbrazil]

points have been made

[axiomschema]

Counterpoint

[big-ovipositor-energy]

an addition

[gauntletqueen]

We’re done

[sailorbrazil]

An exclusive look into the workings of the mind of the average tumblr user