I MAKE MY OWN LUCK NOW

Jack, formerly Pat! Gay nonbinary guy (they/he), 26. Jacket on @hex-catcher-jacket. Multifandom dork. Tags #spoilers, and triggers are marked with #[trigger] warning as much as possible. No queue. Blog title from Dessa's "Fighting Fish". Header image is Jason Engle's "Eerie Ultimatum", icon modified from Kev Walker's "Vivien, Monsters' Advocate".

[bread-into-toast]

"We can love one another freely, without fear, hatred."

Doomed old man yaoi (before they were old men, so maybe it's just yaoi). Maybe I'm just a projecting Cherik fan, but the way they look at each other so intensely in '99... and the way Heavy catches Etienne in #13...

[odyver]

alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?

under 18, AI is a net positive

under 18, AI is a net negative

18-29, AI is a net positive

18-29, AI is a net negative

30-45, AI is a net positive

30-45, AI is a net negative

46-60, AI is a net positive

46-60, AI is a net negative

over 60, AI is a net postive

over 60, AI is a net negative

Remaining time: 5 days 21 hours

[odyver]

Question 2/3

How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?

Frequently (multiple times per month)

Often (multiple times per year)

Occasionally (a couple times per year)

Rarely (once every couple of years)

Never :(

Remaining time: 5 days 21 hours

[odyver]

Question 3/3

If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?

under 18, more inclined

under 18, less inclined

18-29, more inclined

18-29, less inclined

30-45, more inclined

30-45, less inclined

46-60, more inclined

46-60, less inclined

over 60, more inclined

over 60, less inclined

Remaining time: 5 days 21 hours

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

🫶

[not-freyja]

Can everyone who makes video content do a Deaf bitch a favor? Watch your shit with the captions on and the sound off, and then do another round of editing to fix things including but not limited to:

Captions cover the spot on the screen you put the information I need

The dialogue is captioned but not the song you have playing that the dialogue is responding to

You only captioned the person on the screen, not the person off screen who is also talking

No captioning of critical sound effects (alarms, bells, dogs barking, etc)

Speakers are not labelled at moments where it is not clear on the screen who is talking.

Captions cover the spot on the screen that you put the information I need!

Other d/Deaf people welcome to add.

This post brought to you by the fifth video tutorial I could not follow because the bad, auto-generated captions covered what I was trying to watch today.

[vintagerpg]

Behold, the front cover of my forthcoming book on the idea of the dungeon, Down Down Down! Pre-order (and the full wrap-around cover) coming late summer, release in December. Hype copy from Strange Attractor Press below:

Tune into chthonic clamour, subterranean shrieks, and abyssal ambience, as writer Stu Horvath channels hypogean imaginaries from ancient religious writings to the most contemporary of indie roleplaying games in Down, Down, Down... forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press this Winter. Surveying the dungeon, the cavern, and the dimly lit grotto as spaces of play and projection, Down, Down, Down is both a work of literary analysis and pop-cultural criticism. Richly researched and edited, this unique anthology assembles an encyclopaedia of texts intended to furnish the imaginations of both the game master and general reader alike. Stu is the author of the phenomenal Monsters, Aliens & Holes In the Ground: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership, MIT Press, 2023, and the omniscient brain-in-a-jar behind one of our favourite online archives, the inhumanly enormous Vintage RPG. Wraparound cover art (yet to be fully revealed) by the always eldritch Shoggoth Kinetics aka Lucas Korte (whose work you may have seen gracing the cover of the Shadowdark TTRPG).

[vnapologeticapathy]

i hope rome is easy to build because i only have a day 😁

[phaeton-flier]

One thing I wish had been better shown in the as-released The Power Fantasy is what the geopolitics are for the non-US places. (Spoilers up thru #16)

Like. After the Major gets turned into a golf ball, the US officially has zero ability to play global peacekeeper; at best they have nukes they might get to use as retaliation against other supers. Maybe.

Other countries are non-players entirely, things to not be fought but merely fought over. Thus, unshown and unconsidered, when it comes to opinions.

So... What's that like? What is the day to day politics and society, in the places where the real-world balance of forces produce ethnic cleansing or second-class citizens or open corruption?

There's an obvious tension where none of them can outright declare themselves Emperor of Earth and make declarations all must follow; but I also can't see any of the petty dictatorships or caste systems of the late 20th century lasting long when every major actor is, at worst, a liberal.

Now, you could interpret this as another layer of the nuclear powers thing; the world outside of the Superpowers gets ignored because how those places do is secondary to whether The Heavy stubbed his toe that morning. But the interactions between real-world nuclear powers is significantly different from TPF's supers: The USA's interests and power are actually tied, to some extent, to who is ruling in Iran. China entered North Korea not just because they ideologically supported Communism but because an American Ally on the border is a threat.

Meanwhile this doesn't apply in-universe: exactly one Superpower has his power depend on outside support and he kept that secret well enough to bluff for a decade. Lux needs puppet bodies to keep his brain safe under NYC, but otherwise does not need the world going in a particular direction to keep his power. The things they push for are preferences, not needs; the opposite of Realpolitik, in some sense.

So is the rest of the world... Nice? Are they all shitty-at-worst democracies, various flavours of communist or capitalist or whatever, but nowhere the government can openly torture homosexuals or slaughter protestors?

I can theorize about this—maybe Dev, deciding to push against Rule by Supers over Anarchism, ended up propping up dictators the others didn't like. Would explain why everyone calls him a Nazi. Maybe Santa "Metaphor for the Liberal Internation Order" Valentina stopped The Heavy from doing regime change. Who knows.

Maybe this just where the metaphor, like all metaphors, stretches past the point of usefulness. That's fine, it's a fantastic allegory at what it's doing and it's fine that it can't handle every fiddly detail; certainly the arguments it's making work in the framing it's using. Still,....

Here's my suspicion: the scene early on, where Tonya is being interrogated, implies that a) police brutality against Atomics exists and b) those same cops aren't afraid of psychic retaliation because they all wear psychic alarms. They don't work, if Lux is really trying, but they sure act like they work.

The implication, in my mind, is that Lux is going thru the worst cases of police brutality and quietly killing the worst offenders, and Valentina is quietly accepting this as a compromise from "everyone is mind controlled into not being a dick". Cops that rough up a random atomic, arrest them just to pad hours, think they're safe; the ones that rape detainees get selected against. It's a silent improvement, a balance between stopping the abuse and becoming Superdictators.

Probably the rest of the world is like this—you can be Silvio Berlusconi but not Saddam Hussein, because anyone who looks like they're going to order a genocide once in power dies years beforehand.

Which ties into the thing where half the Superpowers are constantly doing deniable shit another one of them knows about and dislikes (Dev and the "Inverted Pyramid" supplying the KillSat to the US; Lux quietly letting Nixon nuke Valentina) that they can't outright accuse each other of without risking Armageddon. Spycraft shit, because it's all Cold War.

[etiennelux]

i’m reading the power fantasy and it’s so fucking funny that they destroyed europe 😭 was not expecting that

RIP europe! have you gotten to the explanation of what happened, or just the panel where they show it doesn’t exist anymore 👀 hope you’re enjoying!!! 💕

[worldsandemanations]

Hiroo Isono 1945-2013 磯野博雄

[janmisali]

pick whatever option the person you follow who reblogged this post appears to NOT want you to pick. if you're seeing the original post and not a reblog, pick at random. if it's unclear which option the person whose reblog you're seeing wants you to pick, pester them until they give you a straight answer then do whatever they don't say. reblog at your own risk.

first option

second option

Remaining time: 4 days 21 hours

[tppart]

"Shadow Form"

Acrylic on canvas board

[star-mom-selkie]

happy pride month

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[interestingmistakes]

Reblogging this manually. Op doesn't want credit for fear of being terminated.

[weepingwidar]

Ken Gun Min (Korean, 1976) - Mongolian Wrestler (2023)

[apatheticfluorescence]

some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it

[headspace-hotel]

Shakespeare is like this

[insufferablepirate]

Every time I see a Van Gogh that’s not one of his better known pieces it absolutely blows me away

Have you seen this shit my liege? smh unreal

[makingqueerhistory]

An Introduction to the Gay Gothic: Pioneers in a Haunted Tradition with Justin Tate

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users