Social Justice Gunbreaker

She/Her, trans, ace, ASD/ADHD, white, feminist, antifascist, anticolonialist, lover of women. Unmarked FFXIV: Dawntrail spoilers. These are related.

[prokopetz]

Inadvisable tabletop RPG jam premise #137: Game jam where each entry consists solely of paratextual discussion of the mechanics of a hypothetical or invented RPG; examples include an errata document, a developer Q&A, or a forum thread debating the correct interpretation of a particular rule.

[prokopetz]

@shoutyourporpoise replied:

I could SWEAR you’ve made this post before, or perhaps this is such a characteristically “you” concept that I already imagined a world in which you had

I don't think so, no. I did once (unintentionally) curate a game jam about writing supplements for invented or hypothetical games, the product of which you can find here, but this is a different thing.

[prokopetz]

(If anyone really wants this one to be a thing, though, feel free to toss your entry into the reblogs. I'm not going to do a proper game jam on itch.io or whatever because its UI really wants you to have cover art and a promotional blurb and such, and this doesn't feel like it warrants it!)

[doctorpotatomd]

[21:08] * Now talking in #dis-hyper-re-assembly

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[21:09] * Now talking in #re-dis-hyperassembly

[21:09] * Topic is 'Loadouts: reactor choice | hydraulics vs. pneumatics | Balance: sprocket expert cost | you have to CRANK it | RDHA general discussion'

[21:09] * Set by cennostar on Thu April 17th 1998

[21:09] <Varilyth> yea

[21:10] <Varilyth> wrenchy knows more about it then me but

[21:10] <taNDy> hey guys

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[21:10] <Sulfur> Welcome!

[21:10] <cennostar> hey tandy

[21:10] <Zalubrio> welcome!

[21:10] <sweetums|AFK> Welcome!

[21:10] <Varilyth> you can make some DISGUSTING fixes when you can ignore chirality like that

[21:11] <Varilyth> like it should be an 8 pt ability at least

[21:11] <Varilyth> hi

[21:11] * Sulfur nods sagely.

[21:13] <Sulfur> Fair enough. I might talk to my group about house-ruling it for our next run. Nobody had any fun this session. Except the wrenchman, that is.

[21:13] <wrenchy|AFK> i had so much fun

[21:13] <Varilyth> right

[21:14] * sweetums|AFK is now known as sweetums

[21:14] <Sulfur> Not you, Wrenchy.

[21:14] <wrenchy|AFK> :'-(

[21:15] <taNDy> hey guys

[21:15] <taNDy> can I ask a rules question?

[21:16] * sweetums rolls eyes

[21:16] <sweetums> oh here we go

[21:16] * cennostar slaps sweetums upside the head with a large trout!

[21:16] <cennostar> be nice!!

[21:16] <cennostar> go ahead tandy

[21:17] <cennostar> ask away

[21:17] <taNDy> thx

[21:19] <taNDy> so im a noob and have only played one session but ive been reading the rules for playing as the chief and

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[21:20] <Sulfur> Sure.

[21:20] <taNDy> and i wanted to ask what happens when the reactor goes critical *during a jump*?

[21:20] <sweetums> lol

[21:21] <taNDy> like it says I can work any system at -1 and do any repair at -5

[21:21] <taNDy> attempt* any repair

[21:22] <Sulfur> Depends on how much of a sadist the captain is.

[21:22] <taNDy> but it also says i can only repair the system im working on right now

[21:22] <sweetums> my first run ended like that

[21:23] <taNDy> so if im working the jump drive and the reactor starts playing up i have to choose between either doing the jump and stabilizing it after, or aborting and stabilizing now, right?

[21:23] <sweetums> reactor go boom-boom, need jump and go buy new core

[21:23] <sweetums> we try jump, captain rolls, captain laughs

[21:23] <sweetums> ship got folded

[21:24] <taNDy> folded??

[21:24] <Sulfur> Folded.

[21:24] <Varilyth> lmao get folded

[21:24] <Varilyth> pwned

[21:25] <Zalubrio> lol

[21:25] <Zalubrio> tandy read tha jumps chapter in tha captain's book and ull get it

[21:26] <Varilyth> or don't

[21:26] <Varilyth> and experience the game the way it was meant to be played :-)

[21:26] <taNDy> oh

[21:26] <sweetums> yea

[21:27] <Sulfur> Seconded.

[21:27] <Sulfur> Or thirded, rather.

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[21:28] <Extronaut> fffffffffffucking dial-up

[21:28] <Extronaut> Hey guys

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[21:28] <Sulfur> Hey Naut. Hey Mrs. Naut.

[21:28] <Varilyth> lmao

[21:29] <Sulfur> :(

[21:30] * Sulfur stares melancholily out of the closest viewport.

[21:30] <sweetums> melancholily isnt a word

[21:31] <Sulfur> Buy a dictionary, sweetums.

[21:31] <Zalubrio> lol

[21:31] <Zalubrio> but yea tandy

[21:32] <Zalubrio> tha good news is that if ur reactor goes critical during a jump

[21:32] <Zalubrio> ur captain is *trying* 2 TPK u already

[21:33] <Zalubrio> so ure dead newai

[21:33] <sweetums> dead n folded

[21:34] <Zalubrio> unless it was obv precrit before tha jump

[21:34] <Zalubrio> like sweetums group

[21:35] <Zalubrio> so dont worry about it

[21:35] <taNDy> oh ok

[21:36] <Zalubrio> besides u shuld have a fields engi on tha reactor n nav on jumps newai

[21:36] <Zalubrio> most important roles 4 shure

[21:37] <Varilyth> yeah forget the reactor and the jump drive, you're forgetting about the chief's most important ability

[21:37] <cennostar> lol

[21:37] <Varilyth> +3 on the best action in the game

[21:38] <Sulfur> Uh oh.

[21:38] <taNDy> ???

[21:38] <Varilyth> hand. cranking. machinery.

[21:38] * Varilyth CRANKS it!

[21:38] * sweetums CRANKS it!

[21:39] * wrenchy|AFK CRANKS it1!

[21:39] * cennostar CRANKS it!

[21:39] * Zalubrio cRANKS IT!!

[21:39] <sweetums> llmmmaaaooooooo

[21:40] * Sulfur doesn't crank anything.

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[criticaldiplomacyfail]

something that i really like about the ave mujica crossover in AK is that sakiko's ORIGINAL dreamself terrasona is both a sarkaz and a member of rhodes island. because the funny thing is that Rhodes Island 3* Reserve Guard Operator Sakiko Togawa is morpheus's most effective dream. she's entirely unaware things are unreal, she's happy and fulfilled, and she's ONLY snapped out of it by Grandmother's intervention.

like, fundamentally it's not an aspect that the story ends up touching on explicitly but she's a Sarkaz in a post-crisis Victoria; she's cast herself as the victim but not as wallowing it, as finding new allies and purpose in Rhodes Island. she's not even infected in this, so she also gets to play the noble benefactor helping others.

idk i think sarkazko is an incredibly effective character dive and it makes a lot of sense that apparently after the events of the event it's Sakiko and Umiri who end up signing on as full combat operators. the two of them WANT to be heroes and just by stumbling into RI they've been given the chance to do that - sakiko no longer feels impotent because she's been given this clear purpose and method by which to make people's lives better.

[konanyeh]

pascualaposting

[fatestayyuri]

ifrit is so funny because her two moms have instilled in her a rigorous set of ethics and morals alongside a deep respect for women but also being raised in rhine lab the #1 premier messy polycule drama capital in all of terra means she looks and dresses exactly like a lesbian fuckboy right down to driving a stolen convertible

[wakameyogurt]

🕯️

[n0ctiluntill]

my silly gambler girl ❤️

[nyova-scotia]

the nightmares never end

[prokopetz]

this ask came to me in a dream and i must speak on its behalf: what do you think about homestuck beyond canon

I think it's too early for me to have a well-formed opinion at this point, for a very specific reason.

I basically agree with the majority opinion that the post-epilogue story which would eventually become Beyond Canon is characterised by a whole lot of spite toward its target audience. Where I differ is that I don't think this is anything new; a certain sneering contempt for their audience has always been a hallmark of Andrew Hussie's work, and it's present in Homestuck right from day one. At most, Hussie getting burnt out from the Hiveswap fiasco resulted in a text that's somewhat less willing to entertain the polite fiction that its readers are in on the joke, but that's not a change – it's just saying the quiet part out loud.

The interesting part is that this contempt isn't merely undirected bile: it's motivated by a particular stance regarding the purpose of fiction. Writing a story which invites emotional investment, then turning around and calling you a stupid baby for actually becoming invested in it is one of Hussie's favoured narrative sleights of hand, but it's not the Charlie Brown-esque football pull it appears to be – or, rather, it's not only that. Lurking under it is the insistence that fictional characters are, ultimately, objects: tools for exploring a narrative space. Ironic detachment is the only "correct" way to approach works of fiction, because when you emotionally relate to a fictional character (or, heaven forfend, actually identify with one), you are fundamentally committing a category error – like you've mistaken a hat for your wife.*

To what extent Hussie actually believes any of that, and to what extent it's just a very committed bit they're doing is a fair question, but that's not important here; sincere or not, the opening stages of (what was not yet) Beyond Canon are dyed in the cloth with it. Care of the comic has subsequently been handed off to a separate creative team who, to all textual evidence, don't buy into this notion of what-fiction-is-for at all, but they're building on a foundation that's steeped in it. What we're looking at now is a serialised narrative which disagrees with its own premise. I genuinely cannot imagine what sort of flower they're expecting to grow in the soil they've been given, and I don't think we're far enough in to draw any well-supported conclusions just yet.

All of which is a very complicated way of saying that I'm just here for the show!

* With apologies to Oliver Sacks.

[03josten]

stop fucking using the word psychotic to describe bad behaviour and violence already god fucking damn it

[03josten]

oh my god i’m so tired psychotic does not mean violent it does not mean angry or erratic. it refers to a person suffering from psychosis, a loss of touch with reality that includes hallucinations and/or delusions. psychotic people are not inherently violent and y'all need to understand how much stigma you create when you again and again incorrectly use the word psychotic without even thinking about it

[03josten]

would appreciate if non-psychotic people could reblog this

[alex-and-nova420]

In psychosis i was just really annoying i never did anything Evil. People with psychotic disorders are just that – people having a tough time

[burstfoot]

original

[mysweetoddbird]

sorry but once you notice how often ppl use a southern accent as shorthand for being unintelligent you can never unsee it. classism is baked so deeply and why are you acting like anyone who talks the way my grandfather talks is stupid.

[smithalspersonal]

Muelsyse has always been Weird.

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

*Traces my hand along the surface of a grassy park lawn that was clearly wetland many years ago due to how it floods with water every year* Who did this to you….

[a-book-dragon]

You don't have a male or female brain – the more brains scientists study, the weaker the evidence for sex differences

Rather than distinctly male or female, the human brain is much more like the heart, kidneys and lungs – basically the same no matter the sex of the body it's in.

rb to make a biological essentialist mad <3

[liminalweirdo]

“This collapse is a telltale sign of a problem known as publication bias. Small, early studies which found a significant sex difference were likelier to get published than research finding no male-female brain difference.”

[mckitterick]

the notes on this are toxic - to help clear up any misunderstanding, here’s the actual science paper:

Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size

With the explosion of neuroimaging, differences between male and female brains have been exhaustively analyzed. Here we synthesize three dec

in short: brains are brains

[prokopetz]

Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:

Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.

Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.

Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.

Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.

"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.

AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".

Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.

Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.

[dragongirlsweetie]

the problem with fantasyposting on here is the amount of people who try to "um actually" you on the basis that your post doesn't comply with the rules/mechanics/worldbuilding of dungeons and dragons

[amiya-shirou]

Arknights' deep and expansive worldbuilding often tricks people into expecting complete realism from it in every part of its setting which often leads to them feeling like the game isn't answering these expectations - as seen for example with the criticism to Masses' Travels and how it didn't really develop Laterano's body of faith and spiritual practices or how Terran countries and politics can feel exxaggerated in how they're playing up their specific traits too much - but in my opinion that's not really the intended way to approach Arknights. I see the game as far more interested in metaphors than it is in the verisimilitudeness of its own world & politics and its regions as set pieces that mostly exist as stages for specific themes more than an exercise in complex worldbuilding for its own sake.

Things like how Siracusa is played up so much as a country governed by the mafia to the point it didn't even have a police force before I Portatori dei Velluti, or how Ursus subsituted faith in God with faith in the State, or how Victoria as whole is an atheist country are all examples of this. These things are not strictly realistic, but they do their job perfectly because they're intended to work on the metaphorical level - again, they're better seen as stages than as perfect equivalents to real countries.

Nuance is added later by the interactions between the different regions and the individual characters' relation to them and the way they try to change their country into something better, thus making them more complex, and Arknights does spend quite a lot of words in narrating their history so I don't think it's strictly wrong to get interested in how everything works and be absorbed by the worldbuilding (we do have a very good big ass lorebook I'm quite insane about), and everytime the game does develop them more it's always a nice added bonus, but I don't think of that as the primary function and find it a bit unfair to what the story is going for most of the time to focus too much on its lack of realism. Masses' Travels didn't really need a deep and complex dive on the workings on Lateran faith for its themes to work because it's not intended to act like a real life religion does. Laterano is a metaphor (for many things, not just catholicism) and as such its faith only needs to be explored as much as it's needed to build that metaphor (compared to how Kjerag is more directly exploring a specific in-universe religion and how it affects every level of a country and as such it gains more from going in-depth).

You can even see how that metaphor is changed whenever Lateran faith is exported to other countries - other stages - as it's warped around their specific themes; it assumes a very different form in Iberia, Siracusa and Bolívar. Only thing the faith itself needed to do as far as each of these stories was concerned was to exist, because the conversation was about the impact of faith and the variety in how it's utilized and you don't really need to know its inner workings for that. The most extreme version of that is how Abnormal Spectrum was able to discuss faith in Ursus and make a perfectly good multi-layered metaphor without even needing religion or the idea of God to exist in it; that was such an insane thing to do and yet they nailed it so well that I've been thinking about that ever since. I guess I just love my metaphors #mymetaphors