Brendawn the 12th

Page of Hope, Werebear, general weirdo, bi, cis, dude, love all y'all

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

If you're comfortable accusing anyone of faking disability, you're not a real ally to disabled people

[teaboot]

One time when I was a kid a group of girls and I had to treat another student for hypothermia by ourselves because she had so many invisible health issues that the adults we asked for help didn't believe us. The student in question was actively hallucinating. When I finally ran for help the people I grabbed were slow as shit to respond, casually joking about how "dramatic" the person in question was.

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Sincerely, truly, from the bottom of my heart- as someone who isn't physically disabled but hears this shit all the time- fuck off

[illogarithmil]

how it started

how it's going

[minttttttttttttttttttttttttttt]

sorry but this video is like a parasitic species to me

[prokopetz]

I understand that it's born of the need to work around people's tendency to read the unmarked figure as male, but it's still fun when porn of someone getting dicked down by an anonymous cock has the frame extend just high enough that you can see an anonymous boob poking in from the same direction, just to make 100% clear where things stand.

[captainsnoop-deactivated2020041]

i hate it when game devs put “fixed several issues” in patch notes 

no. tell me what you fixed. i wanna know what the glitch was.

you know those patch notes that are like “fixed an issue where if the player sat in a bush for too long, they’d become the size of a skyscraper” 

i wanna read those. tell me those. 

[necroesque666]

[sindri42]

[sindri42]

[ahdok]

Adjusted value of Bees. Now that was a special one… because every item in the game had a minimum value, and a beehive was a container for bees, which each had a minimum value… which meant the moment one of your dwarves picked up a beehive, your entire fortress’ net worth skyrocketed… a value used in determining how powerful the foes that visit and try to murder you are.

[prokopetz]

Reblogging for the explanation of what “adjusted value of bees” actually means, because I know several folks following this blog have been wondering.

[probabilitydirigible]

Okay but you’ve all forgotten the best Dwarf Fortress bug of all “Flying creatures give birth in midair, leading to tragedy” 

[probabilitydirigible]

Actually I lied it’s the one where after a major update werewolves and vampires started climbing the nearest tree and refusing to come down. It turned out that he’d given evil creatures the ability to sense each other, but forgotten to set a maximum range on it, so werewolves were aware Hell was underground and trying to flee by climbing 

[thepageofhopes]

This has to be my favorite patch note ever

[flowerbleedme]

My incredibly bleak philosophy of compassion is that we should all pity each other horribly and practice an according amount of kindness.

[flowerbleedme]

I asked for a pastry at the coffee shop. When I raised my card up to pay, he simply said "you're good." and waved it away. I wondered why. I wondered what made him think I deserved to have my order be free. Sparing me those two dollars.

Sitting down at the table, I remembered the scars on my arm. The universal signifier of "This Kid Needs Help." Maybe his kindness was only out of pity. He saw those and assumed there was some great misery and wanted to offer me some relief. It's generally good to be kind to people who are hurting. But I wasn't hurting that bad.

The thing is, there is some great misery. People generally aren't doing that great. There is a great misery within me and within him and within everyone, and some people notice the pain, some people express it, others don't. But we all suffer from something.

It doesn't matter if someone seems to deserve some relief. Everyone needs it. Everyone is suffering constantly. Some more than others, but still. This Kid Needs Help applies to everyone.

Thirty minutes later, I went to get a second pastry, intending to pay and leave a tip this time. It was the same cashier. As he reached to grab it for me, I saw scars on his arm.

But it doesn't really matter. He'd deserve a tip anyway. Because it's never just us hurting.

[ponpurin]

I find it so interesting how some people accept and reaffirm the fact Israel has religious importance in both Islam and Christianity, and say that Jerusalem should “be for everyone”. Then they shit their pants when Jews say it’s also important for them.

So Muslims and Christians have a right to certain sites in Israel because they have deep religious significance, but Jews don’t? They have no right to their own damn indigenous land? To the birthplace of their entire culture, religion, language, and identity? The amount of mental gymnastics and Jew hatred required to make these statements is mind numbing.

And for anyone that’s curious, Muslims and Christians already can and have been to Jerusalem for decades. The whole “Jerusalem is for everyone” is so fucking stupid because literally anyone can visit already. And this argument is even more rich when considering the Temple Mount, the literal holiest site in Judaism, has highly restricted access to non-Muslims. Jews cannot visit their own holiest site without massive restrictions and they are not allowed to pray there. Only as recent as this year have SOME Jews been allowed to pray there (discreetly and out of sight). They’re facing these restrictions in their own indigenous land, no less! You would think since Israel is a “Jewish supremacist” country they’d get rid of these restrictions in their own fucking capital city.

Mind you Muslims and Christians are free to visit the western wall and pray there to their heart’s content. Though most Muslims wouldn’t since they can just go up to Temple Mount. The reason the western wall is holy to Jews is because it’s the closest they can get to the Temple Mount without facing restrictions. All of this to say Jews have no problem sharing their land making Jerusalem “for everyone”.

[escuerzoresucitado]

[churlsgonewild]

[norhuu]

A Crocodile Siren calls a guileless stranger to the murk.

[cshoppy19]

yall think Davy is still in the navy

[thebreakfastgenie]

it's been 50 years and the mandatory retirement age is 62 so probably not

[biglawbear]

🫡

Davy we thank you for your service

[prismatic-bell]

Can we hope that Paul the real estate novelist found time for a husband?

[biglawbear]

He and Davy got together after DADT was repealed

[prismatic-bell]

We love to see it.

Now, about the waitress who's practicing politics...

[prokopetz]

Elaborate fantasy and sci-fi worldbuilding as necessary context and structure for porn is great, but what's really fantastic is when the worldbuilding is a product of the porn. It clearly didn't need to be there, but at some point the author took a closer look at the porn and started asking "okay, so what does this imply?"

[prokopetz]

Level 1: The worldbuilding needs to be there for the porn to make sense.

Level 2: The porn needs to be there for the worldbuilding to make sense.

[prokopetz]

Why weren't TTRPGs popularized centuries before video games? Large scale printing for complex rulebooks needed the printing press, but even then, it wouldn't justify taking off as late as the second half of the 20th century

A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.

For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.

It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.

(One of my favourite counterfactuals is speculating what the modern tabletop roleplaying hobby would look like in a world where it kicked off half a century early by growing out of tabletop American baseball simulators in the 1920s rather than historical wargames in the 1970s. Imagine!)

[believerindaydreams]

as an aficionado of the US Naval War College, their version is that they encouraged the 1970s version out of spite when their support apparatus in Rhode Island was shut down for, ironically, military minmaxing efficiency. Handing the general public technology that let you predict nation state developments had previously been kept under wraps

they will, obviously, deny it if you actually go to Newport and ask them, but this is old news to the town itself

[prokopetz]

I'm not saying I find any of this in any way credible, but "tabletop roleplaying games became a wider cultural phenomenon at the time and in the place that they did because the global military-industrial complex had been deliberately suppressing tabletop RPG 'technology', until the US Navy let the cat out of the bag in the 1970s due to an inter-departmental pissing contest" is a fascinating conspiracy theory.

[prokopetz]

Brain: Hey, let’s do something wildly self-destructive for the sheer hell of it!

Me: Or we could just eat cheese.

Brain: That works too!

[prokopetz]

I forgot to buy cheese last grocery day and this has genuinely been the hardest week of my life.

[prokopetz]

I'm not even being ironic. I have been through post-surgical recovery that was more tolerable to me than these past few cheeseless days have been. But I get paid tomorrow, and an end is in sight, so I persevere.

[ashleythetraveler]

One of us does not understand your grocery logistics situation

[prokopetz]

Mostly a combination of "not wanting to walk to the grocery store when it's 30C outside" and "owing to the particulars of my employment situation I only get paid once a month, so disposable income tends to be tight in the final week, and I'm disinclined to incur debt to buy cheese".

[felixcloud6288]

[prokopetz]

The serious reason I have reservations about referring to someone doing art or writing in response to a shitpost as "fanfic" of that post is it feels like it's contributing to the erosion of the term "fanfic" to mean "any media that's in conversation with any other media", which is functionally meaningless because all media is in conversation with other media. At best it's a prompt fill.

The unserious reason is that if doing some writing in response to a Tumblr shitpost counts as as fanfic of that post, the list of people who've written fanfic based on my work includes Eliezer Yudkowski, and I'm not 100% sure how I feel about that.

[sistersorrow]

Accept that this your legacy

[prokopetz]

Honestly, as contemptible legacies of my online presence go, "had a prompt filled by the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality guy" probably ranks somewhere below "coined the phrase 'humans are space orcs'" and "convinced people to start shipping Tony the Tiger with the Grinch".

[kittenwriter]

... wait, people ship Tony the Tiger with the Grinch?

[prokopetz]

You tell me.

[prokopetz]

Faux Middle Eastern RPG Settings: SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND oh and I guess there’s towers or something but did I mention that there’s also lots and lots of sand

[prokopetz]

@gojirahkiin replied:

I get that there are probably harmful stereotypes somewhere in there given the other things prokopetz posts sometimes, but this feels like calling out space games for having too much vacuum.

It ain’t just the geography – there’s this whole preoccupation with sand on top of it. The people constantly talk about the sand. The slang and idioms all mention sand. There are social institutions with the word “sand” in their names. The folklore is about sand. There are prophecies about sand. There’s magic sand. The monsters are made of sand. Sometimes there’s even a made-up religion that somehow revolves around sand. Did we mention there’s sand?

[teaboot]

Lmaooooo I've had this job for 6ish years now and the brand-new baby guard I JUST finished training keeps trying to "help" me

I was on the phone with police the other day describing someone and he was over here talking *over* dispatch to give me details I already knew... because I had paused.... to give dispatch time to type.... and I guess he thought I didn't know???

Like man I appreciate the spirit but I literally taught YOU how to do that, do you think I forgot??

Like I bequeathed unto you my Stone of Power and in doing so lost all arcane wisdom???

Bruh

[teaboot]

Cis dudes do this thing where they share basic ass knowledge with you like you're not the resident expert

and while I USED to think it was because I was a girl and they thought girls were stupid, I have come to understand that really, it comes from more of a benign and congnitively youthful void where "other people know things that I don't" and "sometimes things don't make sense to me because there are things I am not yet aware of"

and this can be directed towards anyone they haven't subconciously identified as a Wiser Authority

Such as a Girl

[teaboot]

And actually now that I'm thinking about it, maybe that's part of the reason that people who are benignly (for lack of a better term) biased insist so strongly that they AREN'T, that race or gender or sexuality or religion has nothing to do with their behaviors

Because if "people who might know more than me" is an unspoken category that applies only to Professors, Guardians, Role Models, and Peers- and NONE of those hypothetical persons LOOKS like "girl", in their head, they aren't treating girls like they're dumb- they're treating girls THE EXACT SAME WAY they treat EVEYONE ELSE...... who isn't more intelligent.

No wonder they're always so blind to it! They're looking for a big solid block that says "BELIEF THAT WOMEN ARE STUPID", and they're COMPLETELY MISSING the big, empty hole where "BELEIEF THAT ANY WOMAN MIGHT KNOW MORE THAN ME" should go

We don't *know* what we don't know not because something is missing or something else is in the way, but because it was never there to begin with