Dank Sus Gwyndolin

24. Icon by Elichev Alexandr.

[thevoyaging]

Dark Forest Path, Idaho

photo via owsumm

[thekimonogallery]

Ruins of a restaurant, Japan. Photography by toshibo｜廃墟と写真 @JIYUKENKYU_jp

[pommegf]

autour du monastère

[ghostowlattic]

 by Thais L

[drchucktingle]

classic way

[andmaybegayer]

Struggling through half a dozen abortive posts to explain this so just the thesis: I think that an inability to imagine yourself adapting to and maybe even finding satisfaction in a wide array of living situations weakens your ability to make decisions about your life. I know so many people who have let potentially good things pass by even when they have a generous safety net because they are paralyzed by a fear of doing something that feels alien to them.

[theleoisallinthemind]

source: unknown

[lovingexotics]

Source: here

[parsabad]

Darougheh House/ Mashhad/ Iran

Photo: ehsan rad

[jca-archive]

Christian Broutin, from JCA Annual 9 (1990)

[oldschoolfrp]

Too many tentacles (John Sibbick, Dungeoneer, core rules for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG, Puffin Books, 1989) — Tolkien’s Watcher in the Water inspired many similar encounters across other fantasy worlds.

[expressions-of-nature]

Woodland by Nick Green

[expressions-of-nature]

by Igor Svibilsky

[potnialabyrinthoio95]

Töregene Khatun as regent of the Mongol empire and her minister Fatima from the historical josei manga "A witch's life in Mongol"

[cock-holliday]

We have got to stop framing our oppression in ways that promote the idea that other people cannot relate to our struggles. Not only does it isolate comrades in the struggle, it actively diminishes recognition of other struggles--often including those even more horrific than what we are at risk of. And this happens especially between Gay and Black struggles.

"when have straight people ever had to check what states were safe for them?" Sundown towns are still a thing. Starlight tours. What states have abortion access? What states have open carry? What states have stand your ground? What states have 3-strike rules? Women, people of color, disabled people, immigrants, and more have had to be abundantly cautious where they travel to. Straight trans people have much more travel risk right now than gay cis people.

It's a new iteration of the same tired question: "imagine if straight people weren't allowed to marry" interracial marriage in the US is younger than my parents. We disgrace people of color by forgetting their history and contemporary struggles, and we abandon queer people of color, Black queer people, by segmenting their overlapping fights.

As lovelyshananigans says, "intersectionality, babes"

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I want to make a dungeon game but I'm not sure how I should handle the settler-colonial implications of "going into an Unexplored location, killing its inhabitants and robbing them". Any tips?

If I'm being completely honest, I just don't think I'm the right person to ask about it because, while I do have a bunch of thoughts about the underlying political implications of the gameplay structure of dungeon games, I'm not particularly inclined to try to fix them.

I have accepted that a lot of the elements of dungeon games whose underlying implications I find to be ideologically questionable are the exact same elements that make dungeon games fun for me from a gameplay perspective. The entire shtick of PCs in a dungeon game is essentially "get rich by plundering Uncivilized places and bringing that wealth back to Civilized places", and some of the most fun gameplay happens when you lean into that job description. The entire dichotomy between "wilderness" vs. "civilization" where Civilized places are small havens of safety in a sea of untamed wilderness, which is dangerous and unexplored and waiting for brave adventurers to plunder it and extract wealth from it which they then bring back to a Civilized place is like. Dripping with settler-colonial implications no matter how you slice it, and yet it makes for a very satisfying baked-in gameplay loop.

Simply put, a lot of the things that make dungeon games fun for me as *games* come from things that, at the core, don't align with my real-world politics, and will never align with them even if I were to try to spend all my creative efforts trying to hammer them into that shape. And I'm fine with that. It's not even like dungeon games are unique in that regard. You could say the same about like. The vast majority of shooters. Or survival crafting games. Or like almost every single action movie I have ever enjoyed. I choose to simply acknowledge this and sit with that discomfort rather than spending my creative efforts trying to square that particular circle.

Now, if you *want* to try to square the circle of making a dungeon game with Good Politics I think the most I can give you is advice about what NOT to do: A surefire way to end up with a game that has just as (if not more) fucked up implications is to acknowledge the fucked-up amoral nature of the actions the a standard dungeon game has the PCs engage in, and go "okay but what if they were targeting all those fucked up actions at people/creatures who Deserve It". You will *not* solve the problem of making a dungeon game with Good Politics if you go the route of trying to find the correct Ontologically Evil target, all you're going to do is show your ass about your unexamined ideologically questionable politics. Whatever idea you can come up with on this front has already been tried and turns out it had equally (if not more) fucked up implications, and we know this because unfortunately this is the route that most people trying to square the circle of Dungeon Game But With Good Politics end up deciding to go.

[impossiblepackage]

the closest you’re gonna get to a dungeon game minus the colonialist vibes is like. “there used to be a wizard and somebody’s gotta go clear out their tower before the fucked up wizard experiments get loose”. which is a perfectly fine premise, but also it’s one premise for a dungeon. and for a good dungeon game, you need lots of different sorts of dungeons.

but ultimately, you’re trying to find a woke version of breaking into somewhere in order to kill and rob the inhabitants. which uh. might be difficult. even if you cut out any intelligent or otherwise person-ish enemies, you’re still left with “break into a rare ecosystem in order to slaughter the local wildlife and plunder the resources available”.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Not to mention that I also find "cutting out any intelligent or person-ish enemies" to be an extremely unsatisfying band-aid solution because it removes the possibility for one of my favorite things in dungeon games: faction play.

One of the things I find the most fun about dungeon games is when a dungeon is inhabited by at least two groups with conflicting goals, because of its potential for dynamic, emergent situations. But this is a gameplay element that kind of inherently requires the places that the PCs break into in search of treasure to be already inhabited by sapient creatures.

So yeah you can theoretically get rid of one of the ideologically questionable elements of the game by making all the enemies non-sapient animals, or undead minions, or constructs, etc etc etc, but that would come at the cost of getting rid of a good chunk of what I enjoy in a dungeon crawl. It's just another example of an instace where I think what I enjoy from dungeon games as *games* is just never going to align with my politics.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

my notifications are once again devolving into a spirited debate about the ethics of actions that could potentially make someone uncomfortable, and at risk of sounding like someone about to get a lot of irate anons I think we're frankly giving way too to much moral weight to hypothetical discomfort

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the thing about discomfort is that it's an extremely nebulous category that can be triggered by virtually anything and that's far too broad a category to have any inherent moral quality to it. like. my mom was mad uncomfortable when I stopped shaving. that didn't mean I was doing violence against my mom it just meant she needed to get over herself. many such cases it must be said.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

there's not a single example I could give that's better than this

[cloverchameleon]

[ipsey]

When people say I should work on my accent I exaggerate it to a near comic degree to point out the ridiculousness of the suggestion.