Old, grumpy, unwilling to treat bad faith arguments as anything other than goose shit. Ancient punk, part-time wizard, full-time cripple. Probably napping.
I find the different connotations when you call somebody "a cowboy" in america vs the uk somewhat telling:
America: Rugged outdoorsman, individualist, probably owns several guns and a hat.
UK: Poor professional standards, brings shame on whatever profession they're bluffing their way through.
In France, the term is used with the same meaning as the UK, but specifically for policemen or soldier (the one who shoot first and ask questions later).
And cowboy didn't always have the meaning that it does now - when the term came into use, it referred to cattle rustlers and other criminals. It famously became the name applied to the various cattle rustler/bandit/thief/bank robber/etc. people in and around the Tombstone area in the run-up to the well-known gunfight.
[ID: A mosaic done in small tiles of blue, grey, green, and gold; it depicts a gently lapping body of water, with a jellyfish jetting along in the upper left corner.]
Years ago, the band Broadside made a deal with the devil for their success. Now he’s coming to collect. Before we find out what happens, we have to create the band and explore their past.
We played Last Train to Bremen as an improvised musical!
Lauren Drake as Cat
Camilla Franklin as Hound
Dillin Apelyan as Cockrel
Helix as Mule
the “bad guys” in hallmark movies end up always being the most respectful men ever.
because they will find out their girlfriend of 3 years (that they were about to propose to) went off to a random farm in minnesota, hours away from were the two of them built a life together, and she decided to just… stay there without even consulting him.
and then he decides to take a trip to make sure she’s okay, because this is generally alarming behavior, and then sees that she literally fell in love with her ex within one (1) week- and he wasn’t there, but you can TELL that they’ve made out a couple times.
and then she just strings him along for a few days, until fucking christmas eve, when she just breaks up with him and is like “i know we used to have the same values, but i’ve never loved you. mark makes me happier than you ever did. and you ONLY care about work, whereas i like christmas and fun, like a Good Person.”
and then, after finding out his entire relationship was a lie and he had his life turned upside down in a week and he got dumped on christmas, this guy’s just like “ok yeah that makes sense. i only wish you the best of happiness with mark. i hope you guys build a great life together in christmastreefarmville. thank you for everything.”
An AU where two Hallmark Christmas Bad Guys are both getting flights back to New York after being dumped by their respective Smalltown Blonde Girlfriends, and they bond over their shared experiences and fall in love in the departures lounge
Probably he is still in shock. Right? He looks out of his taxi window (it's not technically a taxi, just some guy named Corey who offered him a ride to the airport, because Uber doesn't operate in fucking Tinyville, Bumfuck Middle-Of-Nowhere, Utah) and tracks water droplets racing each other down the glass, because of course it's raining, and his bad knee is killing him.
Levi sniffs and rubs at his eyes and then pulls out his phone and books a ticket back to New York, wincing as four hundred and twenty-six dollars are deducted from his bank account.
And, like, he should definitely be more upset.
He just got broken up with. He was engaged, for God's sake. A four-year relationship… over. Just like that.
Corey says, "Ten minutes to the station."
Probably he'll be more upset once he's home. When he starts packing up Anika's stuff into boxes so she can come collect them after New Year's. He'll have to do all that processing and he'll put away all the pictures that are up and probably he'll remember all the good times they had together and flashes of their relationship will play out in slow motion in his mind. Like a movie montage.
Levi catches his reflection in the passenger side window and starts, pulling his thumb out of his mouth. He hadn't even noticed he'd started biting the nail.
Corey drops him off at the train station and he books a ticket to Salt Lake City and Levi wants to tip him for the ride but when he turns back the car's gone, and it's started snowing again.
He re-wraps his scarf so it covers his ears and turns back. He has to jog—ow ow ow—to catch his train.
Once arrived at the airport, Levi's gotten over being baffled and has started being mildly pissed.
You're obsessed with work, Anika told him. You barely make time for us anymore. Yeah, he'd had to pull some long hours for the last few months, but for good reason—he'd been working towards a huge promotion and a raise and he thought she'd be happy for him.
He'd gotten the promotion, by the way. Editor in chief. He'd tried calling her first, a whole bunch of times, and then she hadn't picked up, so he'd decided Well, fuck it, and flew out to Doodootown, Utah to break the news himself.
He thought it would be nice. Spend the few remaining days before Christmas with Anika and her family in their hometown, then flying back home for Christmas and New Year's and starting 2023 off with renewed vigour and excitement.
Then, of course, Anika told him that she wouldn't be flying back with him for Christmas. Or at all.
Which, well. Okay.
She didn't even congratulate him.
He checks in, and the lady at the desk asks him whether he wants to drop off his carry-on luggage for free, since the plane is very full, and Levi shrugs and says okay and watches his suitcase disappear behind black rubber flaps.
His flight leaves in four hours.
Levi decides to pay the extra fee so he can stay in the fancy lounge, because he thinks he probably deserves that at this point. It's quiet here, though, so he orders a tea and claims a table over by the window, stretching out his right leg with a contented sigh.
There's an empty table in front of him, but at the next one sits a man who looks so miserable it's impressive.
The man is slouched in his chair, dark hair mussed and suit a little ruffled. The cuffs of his slacks are damp, and so are his knees. He's leaning his head against the window, eyes closed, holding a bloody tissue to his nose. A purple bruise is starting to form on his cheekbone.
Levi stares.
Damn. And he thought he was having a rough day.
Should he say something? Probably not, right. Like, that would be weird, right?
Then he notices the small, black velvet ring box the man is fiddling with and it's like all the air's punched right out of his lungs.
Damn.
Levi looks down and takes a sip of his tea, then hisses and curses under his breath because it's still way too hot and he's an idiot.
When he looks up again, the man is eyeing him with mild amusement.
And there are a hundred thousand ways that Levi could have handled the situation, but before he can think about ways to not embarrass himself further he hears himself say, "Ouch. Haha."
Somebody please shoot him.
The man raises an eyebrow. Levi gives an awkward cough, then takes another sip of tea and somehow feels betrayed when it burns his tongue again.
"Maybe you should give it a second," the man says.
"Maybe," Levi says, "I should." His ears are burning.
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas plays over the speakers.
Levi desperately wants to ask about the ring box. And the bloody nose. And whether there's a correlation. But then again it is so definitely not his business, so he just stares down at his tea and watches steam rise.
There's a sharp sigh from across the table. "She said no."
Levi's head snaps up, ready to defend himself, because it's not like he actually asked, but then the guy looks so tired and bitter that he immediately deflates and feels both like an asshole and an idiot.
"I'm sorry," he offers, which still feels lame but better than whatever he had going on before.
The guy gives a wry smile. "Gonna, you know. Return this. She, uh, said no to the whole relationship. So."
Ah.
"I'm sorry," he says, running a hand over his face, "I don't mean to dump all this on you."
"Oh, no, it's okay," Levi says quickly, and then before he can think about it too much, he adds, "I get it."
The other guy looks immediately doubtful.
Levi bites the inside of his cheek. "Four years," he says with a shrug. "Engaged and everything." He gives a thumbs down and blows a raspberry.
"Aw, shit, dude," he says, sitting up straight. He removes the tissue from his face, and seeing as he's no longer bleeding, stuffs it in his pocket. "That sucks."
Levi shrugs again, suddenly weirdly self-conscious. He traces the rim of his teacup with a finger. "Yeah, well. I didn't get beat up about it." There's a moment of silence, then he sneaks another glance. "Levi, by the way."
A corner of the guy's mouth twitches. "Xavier Ortega."
Levi gives a half-hearted salute. "Fuckin', enchanté. Or whatever."
Again, Xavier almost smiles. Levi thinks—Levi thinks he'd like to see Xavier smile. Properly.
And then he thinks, What.
No, he's just—Xavier just looks like he could do with a cheer-up. That's it. And, well, so could he, really. They're both in similar boats. Although it looks like Xavier got the shorter end of the straw here, Levi thinks, considering his ruined suit and, you know, face. Still a nice face, though. Symmetrical. Strong cheekbones. Dark eyebrows over dark eyes and a straight nose and—whatever.
Whatever.
He just got broken up with.
God, why's he trying to justify this to himself? Why is he feeling weird about this? He's not even gay. And even if he—even if he was, it's not gay to acknowledge that a guy is good-looking.
But, like, it's fine. He's not—whatever.
Xavier has a split lip, he notices now that the tissue's not hiding half his face. "Got you good, huh?"
Xavier rolls his eyes. He looks away for a moment, hesitating, then stands up and pulls the chair from the table between them, spinning it around and flopping back down at Levi's table.
Levi thinks he must look quite surprised, because Xavier says, "I mean, this is easier for conversation purposes. Unless you're fine with the yelling across tables situation—"
"No, no," Levi protests. "No, you're right, this is—easier." He clears his throat and says, "So, what was her name?" before mentally kicking himself, but Xavier just looks at him weird.
"Well, her name is Chloe. We just broke up, she didn't die."
Levi nods, puckering his lips. Right, yeah. Yes. "Is she… nice?"
"Well, she cheated on me."
"Ha," Levi says with no humour. "Samesies."
Xavier lets out a dry chuckle at this, then rubs at his eyes. "Wow. Happy Christmas to us, right?"
Levi raises his teacup and gives a ghost toast. "Merry Christmas to us." He downs his tea, which is at a palatable temperature now, then says, "Do you want a drink?"
-
So Chloe and Xavier had been together for almost five years. The whole story is… disturbingly similar to Levi's whole deal, actually. Chloe decides, two weeks before Christmas, to take a trip back to her hometown, gets pissed when Xavier can't just take ten days off work to come with her, goes anyway on her sister's advice, meets up with her childhood nemesis who turns out not to be so bad after all and also cleaned up unfair nice, and then when Xavier went after her because hey, she hadn't been answering his texts and he was planning to pop the question over the holidays, she decided to dump him.
"She looked me in the face," Xavier says, head in hands, "and told me she was happier there than she'd ever been with me." He looks up and runs his fingers through his hair. "And I mean, sure, we'd had our rough patches, but, you know. We were gonna work it out."
Levi hums. "Yeah, no. I get it."
"So I said, Are you fucking serious right now, and I guess I raised my voice a bit, and then Mr Goddamn Farm Guy comes storming out and squares up to me and I don't even know who this dude is, and I tell him to get out of my face, and he fucking decks me. Like, completely unprompted."
"Rough," Levi says solemnly.
"Yeah," Xavier says, exasperated. "And he didn't even apologise."
Levi whistles low. It's quiet for a moment while they both nurse their drinks, then Xavier vaguely gestures at him and says, "So what's your Christmas Tragedy?"
Levi gives a lopsided grin. "Well. Anika goes home to Middle Of Nowhere, Utah, 'cause she said she wasn't feeling great. Wants me to go with her, I can't 'cause I'm pulling long hours for an upcoming promotion, she's pissed. When she gets back there she rekindles things with her ex—"
"Augh," Xavier says. "Brutal."
"—and last I heard the plan was for them to start a combination bakery and tearoom together. So." Levi grits his teeth. "Hope that works out for them."
Xavier looks at him over his glass, then, after a moment of careful silence, says, "You're allowed to be mad at her, you know."
"Fuck her," Levi says immediately. "Like, seriously. Why even get engaged to me if she was so miserable? Just break up with me instead of, fuckin', cheating, and then acting like I'm insane for going to check on her after she just ignores all my calls and texts and goddamn emails. We were going to get married in February, for fuck's sake. Fuck her." He presses the palms of his hands against his eyes til he sees stars.
There it is. The upset. Figures that it's the saying it out loud that really drives home how betrayed Levi feels. Especially when he's talking to someone whom he doesn't have to explain it to, because Xavier gets it. Xavier gets it better than anyone ever will, probably.
It's not quite the movie montage Levi had been preparing for. Rather, what Levi remembers now are all the moments that Anika said things that cut, or did things that bruised. How she'd roll her eyes when Levi got so excited he got the wiggles. How she refused to entertain the idea of getting a dog, even after he begged. How she'd get annoyed with him when his knee acted up and told him to suck it up and stop being such a crybaby. How she'd give him the cold shoulder when she was upset with him and he couldn't read her mind about it and let it build until she exploded out of nowhere.
Little things that didn't seem like such a big deal in the time, but that added up to something like a balm for the sharp sting of betrayal.
Because that's what it is, at its core. That's why Levi is angry.
More betrayal than heartbreak.
And even though it will hurt for a while still, there's something that tastes oddly like relief at the centre of his chest, cool and welcome like a breeze on a suffocating July afternoon.
Xavier stays silent. After a moment Levi blinks hard and opens his eyes and finds Xavier looking at him strangely.
"Yeah," he says quietly. "Fuck 'em."
Levi's stomach squeezes.
He glances wildly around, trying to find anything to look at that isn't Xavier's face, and settles for the screen hanging from the ceiling that displays flight information.
"Oh, look at that," he says. "I should get to my gate."
"Right," Xavier agrees quickly. "Yeah, of course, so should I." He picks up his leather briefcase. "Where are you going, by the way?"
Levi laughs. "How wild would it be if we were on the same flight, huh?" He stands up and winces, ignoring Xavier's questioning look. "New York City. The 9:15. You?"
They make their way over to gate B9 mostly in silence, a general air of What the fuck is happening hanging between them. Not quite uncomfortable, but definitely baffled.
"So this is weird, right," Levi says, dropping into a boarding zone chair. "Like, really weird."
"Right," Xavier says softly. Then, eyes trained on the huge Christmas tree and determinedly not looking at Levi, he adds, "Cool, though."
Levi is—Levi is a little speechless. "Yeah." He feels kind of floaty. He can't stop looking at Xavier's ears, because the tips have gone red. "Yeah. Pretty cool."
God. Fuck.
-
Their seats aren't next to each other, because that would have been crossing the line from freaky coincidence into absolutely fucking insane, but Levi pulls some strings and switches seats with the nice lady who’s next to Xavier, because it’s an exit row seat with more leg room and he has a bad knee. He tries not to look too pleased with himself as he sits down.
Xavier gives him a look. “So do you actually have a bad knee, or…”
Levi slaps a scandalised hand to his chest. “I can’t believe you’d accuse me of such a thing. You think I’d lie about being disabled?”
“I don’t know you that well.”
“And here I thought we had something.” Levi sighs. “I broke my kneecap when I was a teenager. Never healed right.”
“Ah. Sports? Don’t tell me you were a football kid.”
Levi doesn’t know why he feels suddenly bashful. He always feels kind of stupid telling people how he got his injury; the reactions usually range somewhere between mild disapproval and straight up judgment. “Uh, no. Parkour. Actually.”
Xavier’s eyebrows vanish into his hairline.
After a moment of questioning silence, Levi shrugs. “I misjudged the distance between ledges. Fractured my kneecap. But I was stupid and an idiot, also, so I didn’t wait for it to fully heal before going back out, and now I am a human weather antennae.”
“Huh.” Levi would say Xavier looks almost impressed. Mostly sort of exasperated, though. “You know what, now that you say it, I feel like that checks out.”
Levi narrows his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, maybe you look like the type who would break his kneecap doing parkour.”
“And what kind of type is that?” Levi is halfway to miffed and sort of offended, but then Xavier grins wide and he forgets to be annoyed.
“You tell me.”
It sounds too much like an invitation to be a coincidence.
Levi can’t remember the last time he spent so many hours talking uninterrupted. Or, well, talking to someone who was actually listening to him and actively engaging in conversation. Someone who was interested in him.
Levi can’t remember the last time he enjoyed talking to someone this much.
He cracks a joke that makes Xavier laugh softly, and the noise goes straight through his spinal cord like an electric shock, and then it becomes a game, a challenge, trying to make Xavier laugh like that again.
Xavier shows him pictures of his dog, a wonderfully fluffy brown-and-grey mutt named Captain, and Levi thinks he might actually pass away over how cute he is.
“I always wanted a dog,” he says after cooing over a picture of Captain showing his belly for ten minutes. “Like, really bad. I want a dog so bad. But Anika doesn’t, so it never happened.”
“Well,” Xavier says loftily, “Nothing’s stopping you now, is there?”
That is an excellent point. Levi tells him so.
Then he starts thinking about how nice it will be to have the apartment to himself for a while, and then he feels guilty for being relieved about it, about Anika not being there, and then he ponders how weird it’ll be to be alone for Christmas.
Levi's never been alone for Christmas before.
His family lives in Alberta, and he can't really afford another short notice round flight, and anyway the plan this year had been just him and Anika, and they'd had a reservation for brunch on Christmas day, and Levi thinks he should probably cancel that, and that's just a fucking bummer.
After a moment of thinky silence, Levi quietly asks, "What are you gonna do for Christmas?"
Xavier blows out a long breath. "I don't know. I think I'll try to see my sisters. They live a state over, though, and it's all very last minute, I—we—were supposed to spend it at Chloe's, and I'm not big on Christmas celebrations myself, you know, my family's culturally Jewish, so… I'm not sure."
Most of the rest of the flight is quiet, and a little sad, but also nice, and when the seatbelt light flicks on and the crew announces the imminent descent Levi can't help but feel a pang of disappointment.
The plane lands. Impatience in the cabin spikes; everyone wants to get home, it's the holidays, it's cold. Levi gets up and winces, catches Xavier's eye as he reaches for his bag and hands it to him.
Xavier is gonna call a cab. Levi is as well.
They're standing outside.
Levi shoves his hands in his pockets.
"Well," Xavier says.
"Right."
"It was nice meeting you, Levi. The circumstances were… less than ideal, maybe, but…"
Levi looks at him. A purple bruise is blossoming on his cheekbone, crawling up around his eye. The tip of his nose is red from the cold. His eyes are dark but if he pays very close attention he can tell where the iris ends and the pupil begins.
And okay. Okay.
He might be a little gay.
"But nice," he whispers.
Xavier smiles, looks down. Is it—would it be totally weird to ask for his number?
But then Xavier's cab is there, and he tips an imaginary hat at Levi before turning away. He hands the driver his luggage.
The sharp stab of panic between his ribs takes Levi totally by surprise. As does the fact that when he blinks he's closed the distance between him and the cab and is holding onto the door.
Xavier looks at him, eyebrows raised.
Levi didn't plan this far ahead, or at all. He blinks, feeling rather sheepish, then when Xavier's eyebrows start disappearing into his hairline he blusters, all at once, "So I have a brunch reservation. On Christmas Day. I was, you know, supposed to go with Anika, but, you know. And it would suck to have to cancel. And it doesn't have to be weird, or anything, we're just two guys being dudes, getting brunch." He snaps his mouth shut, absolutely horrified. What the fuck was that?
Xavier's mouth parts a little.
God. Shitballs. Fuck. Abort. "But that would be weird, right? You know what, never mind, it's fine, forget I said anything, it's—"
"Levi," Xavier says, exasperated. He covers his face with his hands. Then he says, muffled, "Yeah, okay. That sounds nice. I'd like that."
Oh.
"Are you—are you sure?"
He must sound really incredulous, because Xavier snorts. "Yeah, I'm sure."
Slowly, Levi grins. "Okay."
"Okay." They stand there for a moment, and then Xavier's eyes go wide and he says, "Wait, I should—hold on." He digs in his pocket and pulls out his wallet, hesitates, then pulls out a small rectangular object and holds it out.
Levi's grin goes lopsided. "Xavier Ortega. Are you handing me your business card right now?"
To his credit, Xavier looks away sheepishly. "My phone number's on there."
Levi accepts the card, hoping passionately that Xavier doesn't notice his hand is shaking. "Okay. I'll text you, then."
"Okay," Xavier says. Then, tentatively, "See you soon, then?"
Levi takes a deep breath and steps back, cheeks burning, and probably not just because of the bite of winter chill. Something in his stomach twinges, and he says, "Yeah. See you soon."
also!! low vitamin d levels can worsen chronic pain!! depending on your condition, you might actually need MORE vitamin d than the average person! (example: my doctor expects my minimum to be 40, whereas my chart results say the minimum for "normal" people is 20.)
Low and high vitamin D levels can mimic the symptoms of depression while also causing pain where none previously existed. Get your vitamin D levels checked before trying a more aggressive intervention - if your levels are low, 5,000 IU per day should get you right in a few weeks. If they're high, figure out where the excess is coming from and stop it.
I am begging people who still say “Manifest Destiny” for any reason to understand that it means, very literally and without exaggeration, “White Power”
Like it isn’t an inspirational quote. It’s not just something you can say to mean you’re following your dreams. Manifest Destiny is a phrase created and used to mean that God gave the earth to White people and all other races exist to serve them.
Manifest Destiny was the chant that said “God says White people should rule over other races, so I’m doing what He wants”. To say that when a White person displaces or enslaves a person of a different race, they are MANIFESTING the DESTINY laid out by their God. Manifest Destiny is a philosophy and an order to others to “take what’s yours”.
And yeah, I know a lot of you don’t mean that when you say it. But you wouldn’t yell “white power” after winning a chess game. You wouldn’t brand a light-wash laundry bleach as “white power ultra”. Do You Get What I Am Telling You
And since I know Tumblr can be more of an art crowd than a history crowd, let’s analyze this painting that is kinda the symbol of the ideas around manifest destiny that they use in the article.
Here’s the wikipedia article for the painting-
American Progress - Wikipedia
Some things worth noting:
The woman in the center is Columbia, the personification of the US. Notice how she’s holding a wire connected to telegraph poles. She’s also holding a schoolbook for the time.
Notice how the Native people and the wildlife are grouped together, shadowed in darkness. See how industry and technology are contrasted against the Native people, as if those two are mutually exclusive.
Notice the skin tones of the settlers and the Native people. Now notice their clothing. I find it particularly interesting that the indigenous woman on the left is completely shirtless, while the fabric on Columbia’s dress (reminiscent of Ancient Greek clothing, likely a reference to the origin of democracy) is pulled upwards unnaturally to cover her breasts.
Lots of delicate Canadians in the notes crying that there's no reason for them to know historical white supremacist lingo from the USA but oop I have news about Canada!!
Tip of the iceberg, baby! No we don't expect ~everyone all over the world~ to know (though there sure are several sounding off in the notes who say they ARE taught about this), but Canada sure as fuck should! But of course it has its own skeletons to stuff in closets and gloss over for their own citizens, so I'm disappointed but not surprised.
Hey fellow white people, both within and outside of the U.S., trying to hide behind ignorance here:
Ignorance doesn't save you and it isn't an excuse.
There is no removing this phrase from its genocidal intent. To pretend otherwise is to remain willfully ignorant to protect your own ego. You never thought about the phrase beyond "cool;" please recognize that position as one of intense privilege.
Confront the fact we as white people have contributed to and benefited from racism and white nationalism, unknowingly or willingly. The end result is the same: we did. It should cause you discomfort.
You have many people politely educating you about the genocidal intent behind this phrase. Pushing back on that education because of the discomfort it causes is an insult on top of injury, and furthers the genocidal goal of white supremacy.
If we continue to center our discomfort at our own contributions to genocide and white supremacy, we make no tracks toward eradicating it. If you hide in ignorance, you only contribute to genocide and white supremacy - the choice to take no action is itself an action taken. Neutrality is not an option.
DRI did a song called "Manifest Destiny" on their "Four Of A Kind" album. It is NOT supportive of the concept. I highly recommend both the song and the album it comes from if you like heavier music :)
whenever people are like "it's basically IMPOSSIBLE to know if the porn you are watching is sex trafficking or not!!!" like. is it. because i feel like it's pretty easy to find independent sex workers and pay them directly. and like yeah i guess maybe there's still a possibility but there's also the possibility that the quinoa you bought was picked by victims of labor trafficking and that chair in your living room was made by prison labor and the toy you bought for your niece was made in a sweat shop. i think you are actually much more able to find sex workers who make and post their own content who will personally talk to you if you are really that concerned about them being forced to do it than you think. is it really IMPOSSIBLE or do you just not know that much about porn & think that makes you more pure and objective instead of ignorant
So: I do not like the idea of TTRPGs making formal mechanics designed to incentivise ethical play.
But, to be honest, I do not like the idea of any single game pushing any particular formal mechanics about ethical play at all.
So here I am, trying to think through the reasons why, and proposing a solution. (Sort of. A procedure, really.)
+
Assumptions:
1.
Some genres of game resist ethical play. A grand strategy game dehumanises people into census data. The fun of a shooter is violence. This is truest in videogames, but applies to tabletop games also.
Games can question their own ethics, to an extent. Terra Nil is an anti-city-builder. But it is a management game at heart, so may elide critiques of "efficiency = virtue".
Not all games should try to design for ethical play. I believe games that incentivise "bad" behaviour have a lot to teach us about those behaviours, if you approach them with eyes open.
2.
The systems that currently govern our real lives are terrible: oligarchy, profit motive; patriarchy, nation-states, ethno-centrisms. They fuel our problems: class and sectarian strife, destruction of climate and people, spiritual desertification.
They are so total that the aspiration to ethical behaviour is subsumed by their logics. See: social enterprise; corpos and occupying forces flying rainbow flags; etc.
Nowadays, when I hear "ethical", I don't hear "we remember to be decent". I hear "we must work to be better". Good ethics is radical transformation.
3.
If a videogame shooter crosses a line for you, your only real response is to stop playing. This is true for other mechanically-bounded games, like CCGs or boardgames.
In TTRPGs, players have the innate capability to act as their own referees. (even in GM-ed games adjudications are / should be by consensus.) If you don't like certain aspects of a game, you could avoid it---but also you could change it.
Only in TTRPGs can you ditch basic rules of the game and keep playing.
+
So:
D&D's rules are an engine for accumulation: more levels, more power, more stuff, more numbers going up.
If you build a subsystem in D&D for egalitarian action, but have to quantify it in ways legible to the game's other mechanical parts---what does that mean? Is your radical aspiration feeding into / providing cover for the game's underlying logics of accumulation?
At the very least it feels unsatisfactory---"non-representative of what critique / revolution entails as a rupture," to quote Marcia, in conversations we've been having around this subject, over on Discord.
How do we imagine and represent rupture, to the extent that the word "revolution" evokes?
My proposal: we rupture the game.
+++
How To Play The Revolution
Over the course of play, your player-characters have decided to begin a revolution:
An armed struggle against an invader; overturning a feudal hierarchy; a community-wide decision to abandon the silver standard.
So:
Toss out your rule book and sheets.
And then:
Keep playing.
You already know who your characters are: how they prefer to act; what they are capable of; how well they might do at certain tasks; what their context is. You and your group are quite capable of improv-ing what happens next.
Of course, this might be unsatisfactory; you are here to play a TTRPG, after all. Structures are fun. Therefore:
Decide what the rules of your game will be, going forward.
Which rules you want to keep. Which you want to discard. Jury-rig different bits from different games. Shoe-horn a tarot deck into a map-making game---play that. Be as comprehensive or as freeform as you like. Patchwork and house-rule the mechanics of your new reality.
The god designer will not lead you to the revolution. You broke the tyranny of their design. You will lead yourself. You, as a group, together. The revolution is DIY.
+++
Notes:
This is mostly a thought experiment into a personal obsession. I am genuinely tempted to write a ruleset just so I can stick the above bit into it as a codified procedure.
I am tickled to imagine how the way this works may mirror the ways revolutions have played out in history.
A group might already have alternative ruleset in mind, that they want to replace the old ruleset with wholesale. A vanguard for their preferred system.
Things could happen piecemeal, progressively. Abandon fiat currency and a game's equipment price list. Adopt pacifism and replace the combat system with an alternative resolution mechanic. As contradictions pile up, do you continue, or revert?
Discover that the shift is too uncomfortable, too unpredictable, and default back to more familiar rules. The old order reacting, reasserting itself.
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I keep returning to this damn idea, of players crossing thresholds between rulesets through the course of play. The Revolution is a rupture of ethical reality like Faerie or the Zone is a rupture in geography.
But writing all this down is primarily spurred by this post from Sofinho talking about his game PARIAH and the idea that "switching games/systems mid-session" is an opportunity to explore different lives and ethics:
Granted this is not an original conceit (I'm not claiming to have done anything not already explored by Plato or Zhuangzi) but I think it's a fun possibility to present to your players: dropping into a parallel nightmare realm where their characters can lead different lives and chase different goals.
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Jay Dragon tells me she is already exploring this idea in a new game, Seven Part Pact:
"the game mechanics are downright oppressive but also present the capacity to sunder them utterly, so the only way to behave ethically is to reject the rules of the game and build something new."
VINDICATION! If other designers are also thinking along these lines this means the idea isn't dumb and I'm not alone!
ruminating on the leftism that guides much of my thinking. i'm avoiding the very common pitfall of simply applying theory (written by people benefiting from colonialism a few hundred years ago) to living conditions here in the neocolony of america and looking for ways to actually apply historical dialectic into here--it takes a lot of self awareness because as with all things the majority left position in the philippines is based off of joma sison's MLM-ness and the struggle for a national democracy, which has now kind of devolved into a ultranationalist jerk off between colonial intelligentsia and constant protesting and rallying. whenever they are challenged by the state, the main response is that "everything they've been doing is completely legal" and that nothing they've done is wrong. of course, paradoxically, as Mark Fisher writes in capitalist realism, much of this ends up just reifying capitalist reals and borders, and neatly squares away activism into yet another portion of capitalist life. activism (now also commonly romanticized by so many of those in the middle class to the petty bourgeois) is now subsumed into capitalism.
of course, from my point of view, doing something is better than doing nothing. i've participated in the movements of the national democratic mass organizations of the PH (anakbayan, etc.) (and still do, though my capacity has become limited and i'm focusing on supporting the communities closest to me for the time being) but they're increasingly becoming a sort of ideological stepping stone and for the most part i believe they have been completely subsumed into capitalist ideology.
i think the philippines is largely mostly just capitalist now, even with some modes of tenancy in the countryside seeming feudal, it operates entirely within a capitalist mode of view and application.
i don't subscribe to the sort of unilinear evolution of societies espoused by some soviet theorists (the classless -> slave -> feudal -> capitalist -> communist thing)--a lot of classical leftist and marxist theories can be pretty easily seen as sort of eurocentric. that's no bash, that's just the work of limited perspective. future marxists like fanon expand the marxist perspective greatly, though they seem to be largely ignored by the white bourgeois in my experience
i think ph leftism should be a lot more aware of local ideas on society, and use that to sort of influence and shape their leftism. a lot of leftists sort of scoff at "precolonial studies" as sort of cute at best and absolutely ethnocentric backwardism at worst (many ph leftists know jack shit about precolonial ph and/or seasia in general due to the education system of the philippines and the america-centric culture of the metropoles)
if we apply historical materialist dialectic all the way back to pre-hispanic times we get a treasure trove of societies to contrast and synthesize upon. a shared culture and binding connections with the rest of asia. the ideal state is of course international consciousnesses and solidarity--one that doesn't fall into the trap of capitalist reification through nationalism and the enforcement of the cacophony of signifiers that only serves to reinforce capitalist structures (jingles, voting, art that just regurgitates old socialist aesthetic, revolutionary art that doesn't really say anything because these artists lack proper class consciousness and/or perspective [many ph left artists come from the metropoles after all and/or have been subsumed into nationalist agenda through education systems and the need to belong in communities, art ph being one particularly egregious example that reinforces nationalist signifiers while becoming ignorant of the signified).
all in all the philippine left is completely defeated, as a movement. many leftists adopt anarchist tendencies, joyful militancies, try to live outside of the confines of communism through communes or living in the mountains. if we are to have any chance of challenging capitalism the ph left must interrogate its own biases, interrogate nationalism, review its literature, and then look inward, look to fellow tribes and societies, avoid the interventionist failures of soviet societies, and actually fight for a world that won't just degrade into more wage-labor slavery
"that's idealistic!" if you're shooting for the moon you land on the stars. the direction of the movement is more important than the speed. i fully believe ideological recourse is needed in the ph left--some might even say if there is a ph left still. i wouldn't mind abolishing the idea altogether--the left is still a eurocentric categorization after all. perhaps its time for a new revolution that interrogates current structures, even within so-called progressive organizations, with violent indignation, and finds a way to upend capitalism through a firm grasp in pre-capitalist structures and international ties
In the ongoing project of rescuing useful thoughts off Xwitter, here's another hot take of mine, reheated:
"Being good for a reward isn’t being good---it’s just optimal play."
The quote comes from Luke Gearing and his excellent post "Against Incentive", to which I had been reacting.
My thread was mainly intended as a fulsome nodding along to one of Luke's points. It was posted in 2021, and extended in 2023 after Sidney Icarus posed a question to it. So it is two threads.
Here they are, properly paragraphed, hopefully more cleanly expressed:
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(Don't) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour
This is my main problem with mechanically rewarding pro-social play: a character's ethical choice is rendered mercenary.
As Luke Gearing puts it:
"Being good for a reward isn’t being good---it’s just optimal play."
Bear in mind that I'm not saying that pro-social play can't have rewarding outcomes for players. Any decision should have consequences in the fiction. It serves the ideal of portraying a living, world to have these consequences rendered diegetic:
The townsfolk are thankful; the goblins remember your mercy; pamphlets appear, quoting from your revolutionary speech.
What I am saying is that rewarding abstract mechanical benefits (XP tickets, metacurrency points, etc) for ethical decisions stinks.
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A subtle but absolutely essential distinction, when it comes to portraying and exploring ethics / morality, in roleplaying games.
Say you reward bonus XP for sparing goblins.
Are your players making a decisions based on how much they value life / the personhood of goblins? Or are they making a decision based on how much they want XP?
Say you declare: "If you help the villagers, the party receives a +1 attitude modifier in this village."
Are your players assisting the community because it is the right thing to do, or are they playing optimally, for a +1 effect?
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XP As Currency
XP is the ur-example of incentive in TTRPGs. It began with D&D's gold-for-XP, and has never strayed far from that logic.
XP is still currency. Do things the GM / game designer wants you to do? Get paid.
Players use XP to buy better mechanical tools (levels, skills, abilities)---which they can then in turn use to better perform the actions that will net them XP.
Like using gold you stole from goblins to buy a sword, so you can now rob orcs.
I genuinely feel that such systems are valuable. They are models that illuminate the drives fuelling amoral / unethical behaviour.
Material gain is the drive of land-grabbing and colonialism. Logger-barons and empires do get wealthier and more privileged, as a reward for their terrible actions.
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If you want to present an ethical choice in play, congruent to our real-life dilemmas, there is value in asking:
"Hey, if you kill the goblins you can grab their treasure, and you will get richer. There's no reward for sparing their lives, except that they are thankful."
Which is another way of asking:
"Does your commitment to the ideal of preserving life outweigh the guaranteed material incentives for taking life?"
The ethical choice is the difficult choice, precisely because it involves---as it often does, in real life---sacrificing personal growth and gain. Doling out an XP bounty for doing the right thing makes the ethical choice moot.
"I as the player am making a mechanically optimal choice, but my character is making an ethical choice!"
A cop-out. Owning your cake and eating it too. The fictional fig-leaf of empathy over a calculated a decision to make profit.
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Sidney Icarus asks a question which I will quote here:
"... those who hold to their beliefs of good behaviour don't feel rewarded, and therefore feel punished. And that's not a good feeling.
It's an unpleasant experience to play a game where the righteous players are in rags, and the mercenary fucks have crowns and sceptres.
So, what's the design opportunity? How do we make doing the right thing feel pleasant without making it mercenary? Or, like reality, do we acknowledge that ethical acts are valuable only intrinsically and philosophically?
I have no idea how to reconcile this."
I would suggest that the above dichotomy---"righteous players in rags, mercs in crowns"---is true if property is recognised as the only true incentive.
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Friends As Property
Modern games try to solve the righteous-players-in-rags "problem" in various ways. Virtue might not net you treasure or XP, but may give you:
Contact or ally slots, which you can fill in;
Relationship meters you can watch tick up;
Favour points you can cash in later;
etc.
How different are these mechanical incentives from treasure or XP, really?
Your relationships with supposedly living, breathing beings are transformed into abilities for your character: skills you can train; powers you can reliably proc. Pump your relationship score with the orc tribe until calling on them for reinforcements becomes a once-per-month ability.
Relationships become contracts. Regard becomes debt. Put your friend in an ally slot, so they become a tool.
If this is what you want play to be---totally fine! As stated previously, games say powerful things when they portray the engines of profit and property.
But I personally don't think game designers should design employer-employee relationships and disguise these as instances of mutual aid.
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Friends As Friends
In the OSR campaigns I'm part of, I keep forgetting to record money. Which is usually a big deal in such games, seeing as they are in the grand tradition of gold-for-XP?
In both games, my characters are still 1st-Level pukes, though it's been months.
I'm having a blast, anyway.
My GMs, by virtue of running organic, reactive worlds, have made play rewarding for me. NPCs / geographies remember the party's previous actions, and respond accordingly.
I've been given gills from a river god, after constant prayer;
I've befriended a village of monsters, where we now live;
I've parleyed with the witch of a whole forest, where we may now tread;
I've a boon from the touch of wood wose, after answering his summons.
I cannot count on the wood wose showing up. He is a character in the world, not a power I control. Calling on the wood wose might become a whole adventure.
Little of this stuff is codified my stats or abilities or equipment list. They are mostly all under "misc notes".
Diegetic growth. Narrative change that spirals into more play.
This is the design opportunity, to me:
How do we shape TTRPG play culture in such a way that the "misc notes" gaps in our games are as fun as the systemised bits? What kinds of orientation tools must we provide? What should we say, in our advice sections?
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A Note About Trust
The reason why it is so hard to imagine play beyond conventional incentive structures has a lot to do with trust.
Sidney again:
One of the core issues is the "low trust table". I'm not designing just for myself but for my audience. For a product. How much can I ask purchasers and their friends to codesign this part with me?
Nerds love numbers and things we can write down in inventories or slots because they are sureties. We've learned to fear fiat or player discretion, traumatised as we are by Problem GMs or That Guys.
The reason why the poverty in Sidney's hypothetical ("righteous players are in rags") sounds so bad is because in truth it represents risk at the game table. If you don't participate in the mechanics legible to your ruleset (the XP and gear to do more game things), you risk gradually being excluded from play.
You have no assurance your fellow players will know how hold space for you; be considerate; work together to portray a living world where NPCs react in meaningful ways---in ways that will be fun and rewarding for everybody playing.
You are giving up the guarantee of mechanical relevance for the possibility of fun interactions and creative social play.
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The "low trust table" is learned behaviour--the cruft of gamer culture and trauma.
When I game with folks new to TTRPGs, they tend to be decent, considerate. I think there's enough anecdotal evidence from folks playing with school kids / newcomers / etc to suggest my experience is not unique.
If the "low trust table" is indeed learned behaviour, it can be unlearned.
Which rules conventions, now part of the hobby mainstream, were the result of designers designing defensively---shadowboxing against terrible players and the spectre of "unfairness"?
How can we "undesign" such conventions?
Lack of trust is a problem that we have to address in play culture, not rulesets. You cannot cook a dish so good it forces diners to have good table manners.
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This is too long already. I'll end with an observation:
Elfgames are not praxis, but doesn't this specific dilemma in the microcosm of our silly elfgames ultimately mirror real-world ethics?
To be moral is to trust in a better world; to be amoral / immoral is to hedge against the guarantee of a worse one.
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Further Reading
Some words from around the TTRPG community about incentive and advancement in games:
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However, the reason there is a big debate about this is that behavioural incentives in games clearly do work, either entirely or at various levels. This applies outside gaming, as well. Why do advertising companies and retail business use "rewards" structures to convince people to buy more of their products? Why do people chase after "Likes" on social media?
A comment by Paul_T to "A Hypothesis on Behavioral Incentives"
from a discussion on Story-Games.com
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the structure and symbolism of the D&D game align with certain structures and values of patriarchy. The game is designed to last infinitely by shifting goalposts of character experience in terms of increasing amounts of gold pieces acquired; this resembles the modus operandi of phallic desire which seeks out object after object (most typically, women) in order to quench a lack which always reasserts itself.
D&D's Obsession With Phallic Desire
from Traverse Fantasy
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In short, my feeling is that rewarding players with character improvement in return for achieving goals in a specific way impedes some of the key strengths of TTRPGs for little or no benefit in return.
Incentives
from Bastionland
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When good deeds arise naturally out of the players choices, especially when players rejected other options that were more beneficial to them, it is immensely satisfying. Far more than if players are just assumed to be heroic by default. It gives agency and meaning to player choice.
Make Players Choose To Be Kind
from Cosmic Orrery
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Much has been made about 1 GP = 1 XP as the core gameplay loop driver of TSR D+D. But XP for gold retrieved also winds up being something of a de facto capitalistic outlook as well. Success is driven by accumulation of individual wealth -- by an adventuring company, even! So what's a new framework that can be used for underpinning a leftist OSR campaign?
A Spectre (7+3 HD) Is Haunting the Flaeness: Towards a Leftist OSR
from Legacy of the Bieth
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Growth should be tied to a specific experience occurring in the fiction.
It is more important for a PC to grow more interesting than more skilled or capable.
PCs experience growth not necessarily because they’ve gotten more skill and experience, but because they are changed in a significant way.
One of the revelations from CEO Matt's public meltdown over trans women that isn't really being talked about much but is nevertheless mindblowing to me:
WHAT IN THE CRISPY KENTUCKY FRIED FUCK!?!?!
Like, did everyone else already know that there was apparently someone on moderation who was effectively bounty hunting trans women and I'm just the last to know or what?
I don't see why being transparent with keeping the consumer base is bad? It's typically what the CEO does in an event of a scandal that calls for open accountability: apologize for what happened and explain what was done to mitigate the problem.
When it comes to the cooperate level of a business such as running this hellsite, there's more than likely managers for managers of departments all the way up to the CEO to make final big decisions. Expecting one person to fully know everything is unreasonable; I'm also assuming the dept managers didn't think such a glaring abuse of power wouldn't be their CEO's problem (which it clearly should have been).
Dude, you are sorely missing the forest for the trees here. No one is upset over the fact he revealed this information. We are upset because he thinks this, in addition to a few other superficial statements, absolves him and the company of any wrongdoing towards the transfem portion of the user base.
The revelation makes us feel less safe and not more safe because A. Trans women are still getting posts flagged and accounts terminated despite no real evidence that TOS was violated. Trans women have complained about the uneven application of the TOS and how we are unfairly singled out by staff since fucking forever, and B. It also highlights how Tumblrs not operating according to best practices because you are supposed to regularly audit your moderation team to avoid something like this happening in the first place!
Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your
One thing that jumped out at me about the situation with @photomatt (huh, did they disable tagging him?) is this post. I think this, more than anything, hints at why this particular episode has upset Matt so much.
There's a type of person who considers themselves very liberal, very progressive, open-minded, and left-leaning. Who donates to LGBT+ causes, who flies progress flags during Pride month, who respect pronouns and will happily declare that "love is love".
These are all obviously good things, but the thing that will really infuriate a certain subset of this type of person, more than bigotry, is the accusation of bigotry.
I doubt that Matt has ever been as incensed at actual transphobia as he has been at the suggestion that he is transphobic. All of his responses during this episode have been laced with this outrage - how could anyone call him transphobic? How dare you call me transphobic when I've done x, y, z for you people?
And I get it. It sucks. If you consider yourself an ally and suddenly people are labelling you a phobe, it does suck. I wouldn't want to be labelled a bigot either. But here's the thing: well-meaning people, who do not consider themselves bigoted, fuck up all the time. Hell, queer people fuck up all the time.
However, if your reaction to many, many people calling out your behaviour is to be enraged at those accusations instead of doing anything to make up for those mistakes, then doesn't that say something about your priorities? People have pointed out how trans women are constantly being left hanging by the moderation team, about abuse against them being rampant, how Tumblr still labels non-sexual content as mature if it contains transfemme people.
Hell, you even admitted yourself that you had an openly transphobic moderator doing that recently! Did you chase that person across social media in a rage too? Because if not, then I think it's clear what bothers you more.
if tumblr 'isnt discriminatory against trans women', to paraphrase CEO mattycarsplatty, then why is it a matter of legal record that they are, in fact, discriminatory against trans women? tumblr literally lost a discrimination case in NYC. again, it's a matter of legal record. and the CEO admitted they had transphobic moderators as recently as 2 months ago. like...?
that's right! it's research traditional methods of moroccan architecture, which follow strict mathematic structures and formulas to create stunning tilework and arches, often also utilizing a special form of clay endemic to morocco famed for its sculptural qualities which are difficult and even impossible to reproduce in other regions! additionally, the cultural significance of the various motifs and colors used throughout moroccan architecture, both in religious and in secular buildings, are distinct and highly formalized, honed over many h
yes! i was actually referencing muqarnas when speaking about the clay! morocco's carved clay and plaster muqarnas are famous for their intricacy and detailed fretting!
