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Not today Justin
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@theartofmadeline
seen from Chile
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@caitlin-from-pokemon
Source for banner (I forgot my tumblr had a theme so a lot of people might not even see it but)
I can’t get a proper source for my profile pic because the source listed on gelbooru is a dead link but it’s an (apparently edited, didn’t know until now) image from the same artist
I didn’t technically get permission to use them so I hope it’s not an issue.
My 2007 book Whipping Girl is probably best known for two things: It popularized “cis” terminology (which I did not coin) and introduced…
I have found that many people who have not had a trans female or trans feminine experience often have trouble wrapping their brains around the concept of trans-misogyny, so I will offer the following two anecdotes to help illustrate what I mean by the term. Once, about two years ago, I was walking down the street in San Francisco, and a trans woman happened to be walking just ahead of me. She was dressed femininely, but not any more feminine than a typical cis woman. Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting on a doorstep, and as the trans woman walked by, the man turned to the woman he was sitting next to and said, “Look at all the shit he’s wearing,” and the woman he was with nodded in agreement. Now presumably the word “shit” was a reference to femininity — specifically, the feminine clothing and cosmetics the trans woman wore. I found this particular comment to be quite telling. After all, while cis women often receive harassing comments from strange men on the street, it is rather rare for those men to address those remarks to a female acquaintance and for her to apparently approve of his remarks. Furthermore, if this same man were to have harassed a cis woman, it is unlikely that he would do so by referring to her feminine clothing and makeup as “shit.” Similarly, someone who is on the trans masculine spectrum could potentially be harassed, but it is unlikely that his masculine clothing would be referred to as “shit.” Thus, trans-misogyny is both informed by, yet distinct from, transphobia and misogyny, in that it specifically targets transgender expressions of femaleness and femininity.
The second example of trans-misogyny that I’d like to share occurred at an Association for Women in Psychology conference I attended in 2007 (for those unfamiliar with that organization, it is essentially a feminist psychology conference). One psychologist gave a presentation on the ways in which feminism has informed her approach to therapy. During the course of her talk, she discussed two transgender clients of hers, one on the trans male/masculine spectrum, the other on the trans female/feminine spectrum. Their stories were very similar in that both had begun the process of physically transitioning but were having second thoughts about it. First, the therapist discussed the trans masculine spectrum person, whose gender presentation she described simply as being “very butch.” She discussed this individual’s transgender expressions and issues in a respectful and serious manner, and the audience listened attentively. However, when she turned her attention to the trans feminine client, she went into a very graphic and animated description of the trans person’s appearance, detailing how the trans woman’s hair was styled, the type of outfit and shoes she was wearing, the way her makeup was done, and so on. This description elicited a significant amount of giggling from the audience, which I found to be particularly disturbing given the fact that this was an explicitly feminist conference. Clearly, if a male psychologist gave a talk at this meeting in which he went into such explicit detail regarding what one of his cis female clients was wearing, most of these same audience members, as well as the presenter, would surely (and rightfully) be appalled and would view such remarks to be blatantly objectifying. In fact, in both of these incidents I have described, comments that would typically be considered extraordinarily misogynistic if they were directed at cis women are not considered beyond the pale when directed at trans women.
—serano
For any confused about why transmisogyny is a thing different from "merely" transphobia and misogyny, and who do not like reading long things, then hopefully even the lightest reader can read and digest the above two paragraphs.
It just looks like more because the font is large. You can do it. I believe in you.
It's Yuri Day!
Please enjoy the two ladies from the official Arknights yuri manga
[Bluesky]
friskarm commission... silly fox girl moments
PoV: you are treasure or perhaps a mimic
To my mind, the main advantage of Big Stupid Tables over generative content is that generative models must, by the nature of how the technology operates, produce outputs that are statistically likely to appear in their training data, while the outputs of a well-constructed set of dice lookup tables may principally consist of combinations of elements never before attempted on account of being dumb as hell.
This may be true of generative AI, but not generative content in general. Markov chains, after all, are known specifically for being dumb as hell (affectionate) and Tracery is, in a technically precise way, context-free.
True, but in this context I'd be inclined to place Markov chains in the Big Stupid Tables category because it is, in principle, possible to construct a Markov-chaining approach to content generation as a connected series of dice tables (and indeed, some especially ambitious tabletop RPGs have done exactly that).
#..... what would markov chain dice tables even look like? (via @a-commas-a-pause)
In the most basic implementation, each entry on table A produces some descriptive or mechanical effect, then directs you to make another roll on some other table B, C, D, etc. Statefulness, if desired, is achieved by specifying modifiers to the subsequent roll; for example, the first row of table A might produce effect X, then instruct you to roll on table B with a +3 bonus, while the second row of table A produces effect Y, then instructs you to roll twice on table C and take the lowest result, and so forth. In this fashion, different entry points to given sub-table can produce different distributions of results.
(One fun little trick is to include out-of-range results on a given sub-table, like a d6 table whose indices go up to 9 or whatnot, so certain results will only appear when the table in question is reached via an entry point which furnishes an appropriate modifier.)
Genre-savvy horror protagonist figures out they're in a slasher movie, simply turns around and leaves; realises too late that they're actually in an artsy character-driven psychological horror film about them slowly being driven mad by existential uncertainty over whether they've successfully escaped the narrative.
#at the end they figure it out and declare through tearful laughter that finally they understand what's going on #whereupon the killer – whose existence has up until this point been purely hypothetical – pops out of their closet and cuts their head off (via @prokopetz)
i googled my favorite XKCD and the front page of google had some RPGnet forum posts you made the week I was born.
I enjoy how this tells me almost nothing about your actual age – you could be anywhere between ten and thirty and this would be a plausible scenario.
Derailing my GM when they try to do a gazebo bit by having my character pipe up "actually, I think that's a rotunda".
The rotunda wakes up and eats you.
And as a result is even rotunder.
Vampire movie with a running gag whereby the leads keep running into supporting characters who are seemingly only concerned about the fact that the vampires are eating people because they suspect it might be a weird sex thing.
I was reading earlier today about how, in Scandinavian folklore, the nomenclature that's usually rendered as "ring" in modern English can variously refer to bracelets, armlets, or torcs as well as to finger rings. It's usually clear from context which is intended, though there are some legendary "rings" whose form is not specified in surviving accounts.
This ambiguity is, of course, not present in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings; though the work and its titular object are inspired by these sagas, the One Ring is clearly described as a finger ring. However, my brain has seized upon the finger-ring-or-bracelet ambiguity and spontaneously produced an anachronistic 1990s teen movie version of The Lord of the Rings in which the One "Ring" is a cursed slap bracelet.
This would make things harder for Frodo
Bilbo. The ring is still in your cargo pants.
I'd seen lots of people describe Night in the Woods as being heavily rooted in the experience of growing up in a dying small town in the American Rust Belt, but somehow nobody told my West Virginian ass that it's so Appalachian that I probably live closer to where Mae's house would be than to the nearest IKEA.
I cannot convey to people who did not grow up being ferried to Pittsburgh to visit the Carnegie Science Center about once a year for most of elementary school what my emotional experience was on realizing that the rich asshole mine boss who bought the town a really nice public library because he started giving lavishly to charity in his old age would literally be Andrew Carnegie.
Hey Mae if your dad can get a day off work we could all go to the National Aviary, it rules-
This is a game that knows you sometimes find random abandoned limestone kilns in the middle of the woods.
Like, to be clear, even though this is a game set in a Furry AU with all the names changed, I can literally narrow the location of Possum Springs down to within a five-mile radius.
I understand that when folks criticise the self-labelled "cozy" genre as an effort to produce "games about nothing", they're talking about trying to opt out of having opinions by producing a game with a perfectly politically neutral premise (which is impossible), but whenever I see the phrase that gremlin voice in the back of my mind is like:
#jerry can’t stop his neighbor’s cattle from grazing in his pastures because there is no meaningful conflict resolution system #george kills the ailing grandfather who gave him the meager plot of land #elaine runs her cozy bookstore into the ground but gets turned on by the GM’s debt collector voice #kramer treks to the two-sentences-of-lore-unless-you-paid-for-the-kickstarter-add-ons Not China continent to harvest greatwurms for silk (via @zero-energy-counters)
I understand that when folks criticise the self-labelled "cozy" genre as an effort to produce "games about nothing", they're talking about trying to opt out of having opinions by producing a game with a perfectly politically neutral premise (which is impossible), but whenever I see the phrase that gremlin voice in the back of my mind is like:
#A Seinfeld scene where Elaine tries to explain the concept of lines and veils (via @armeniuslaurant)
Elaine suspects that George may be abusing the X Card to exercise veto power over other player characters' actions, but can't say anything at the table because you're not allowed to ask other players to justify using it. In a private conversation while George is out of the room, she raises her suspicions with Jerry, who responds by proposing increasingly specific hypothetical traumas that could account for each seemingly questionable invocation, eventually persuading both Elaine and himself that George's use of the X Card is an unconscious cry for help. Kramer has a bitter falling-out with his lucky d20.
Mr Prokopetz, you've mentioned you're Canadian, but I can't remember which province. Dashcon 2 is happening soon, any chance you'll be attending in Toronto?
Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone with any good sense is attending. The whole event is structured like it's desperately trying to appeal to Tumblr as it existed in 2014, rather than Tumblr as it exists today. Answer me honestly: does being in the same room with five hundred of the sort of people who are unironically nostalgic for 2014 Tumblr sound like your idea of a fun weekend?
I want you to look at the con's official mascot and tell me this is a place of honour.
(Like, I just can't get over how bad this mascot design is. It's like someone tried to grow the perfect Tumblr sexyman in a lab with a business major's understanding of what actually makes the archetype tick. This image is the visual equivalent of having someone sincerely call you a "sweet summer child".)
Asking you as someone who knows a lot about Stupid Dice Tricks - what's the simplest way to get a one-tailed distribution using conventional dice? (i.e. numbers from, say, 1 to 5-ish are fairly common, but there's a small-but-nontrivial chance of ending up with results up in the 20s and 30s)
"Simplest" is subjective, but the most conventional way of doing that involves "exploding dice", a dice-rolling method in which each die is read as its face value for any non-maximal result, but when rolling the maximum possible value, another die (typically of the same size) is rolled and added to the initial result. For example, an exploding d6 might roll a 6, then a 6, then a 3, for a total result of 15 on 1d6.
While straightforward, this method has the issue that certain results are impossible; for example, you can never roll exactly 6 on an exploding standard d6, since the minimum result of the additional roll is 1. This has historically been addressed in several ways:
Rolling with a base of zero rather than one. This is most commonly done with d10s, since a standard d10 is already numbered 0 through 9, though it can also be achieved with other die sizes either using non-standard dice (e.g., a d6 with faces numbered 0 through 5 rather than 1 through 6), or by reading a standard die in such a way as to produce equivalent results (e.g., reading the 6 on an exploding d6 as 0, with the exploding result occurring on a 5). This approach avoids unrollable values, but has the drawback that the extra roll sometimes does nothing, which can feel anticlimactic.
Treating the value of the exploding result as equal to that of the highest possible non-exploding result; under this method, rolling a 6 on an exploding d6 would be treated as "5 + reroll" rather than "6 + reroll". This avoids both unrollable values and rerolls that do nothing, but in my experience, a lot of players just can't get their heads around it, and will always forget to read that 6 as a 5, no matter how many times they're reminded.
This technique can also be adapted to "hit-counting" dice pools; for example, rolling a number of d6s, counting each die which rolls 4+ as one "hit", and additionally rolling an extra die for each die which rolls a 6. This is broadly equivalent to variation 1, above, and suffers from similar drawbacks.
Apart from exploding dice, other reasonably popular approaches include various "dice poker" methods, in which a number of (typically identical) dice are rolled, with the result ordinarily being read as the highest single value, except that certain combinations of numbers are assigned special values. One of the simplest variants involves the summing of doubles, triples, etc.. For example, rolling 3d6 and getting results of 2, 4 and 5 would be read as 5, but a result of 2, 5, and 5 would be read as 10; however, a result of 2, 2, and 5 would still read as 5, since the sum of the double is lower than the highest single. Alternatively, the dice can be read so that all doubles beat all singles, all triples beat all doubles, etc., for a more truly poker-like distribution of results, though this can make assigning target numbers tricky.
A notable twist on the above is the "place-value" dice roll, in which the die's face value is read as the "ones" place, and the number of dice showing that value as the "tens" place. This is typically done with d10s to keep the place values intuitive; for example, rolling 5d10 and getting results of 2, 3, 3, 7 and 9 would be read as a result of 23. Hybridised with hit-counting dice pools, the place-value method becomes the One Roll Engine's "width x height" method of reading the dice, which is definitely worth checking out if you want to delve deeper into this topic.
(An important distinction between exploding dice and dice poker/place-value methods in the particular context of dice pools of variable size is that it's always possible, if increasingly unlikely, to make a roll where nothing explodes, but beyond a certain point, "exceptional" results on a dice poker/place-value roll become inevitable. For example, with a pool of 7d6 it's impossible not to roll at least doubles!)
Stupid dice trick I don't think anyone should actually use:
Roll and sum N dice
Subtract the mean value from the sum.
Take the absolute of that.
This generates one tail of a bell curve by "mirroring" the curve - the final result is based on the difference between the initial roll and the average, growing closer to a single tail of the normal distribution as N increases.
However, this trick has several problems:
Subtraction is slower than addition.
Dealing with negative numbers - even briefly - is annoying
It takes three steps to generate one number.
If you want a large range (and to mitigate the odds of rolling 0) you need a lot of dice, slowing things down even more.
Look at this gorgeous almost-exactly one-tailed distribution! Then despair because nobody wants to roll ABS(10d10-55) at the game table.
If you're okay with a linear falloff rather than a true tail, you can approximate this approach in a much more playable fashion with ABS(dX–dX): that is, rolling two identical dice, then subtracting the smaller from the larger and reading the difference as the result. I've only ever actually seen it in the wild with six-siders – i.e., ABS(d6–d6) – but I'm sure there must be published games using other die sizes.
