Just learned about Bull Press, a tabletop publisher that focuses on games that are prison compliant (no hardcover, no dice, no maps), and their catalogue seems sick as hell. Def gonna pick smth up when I get paid next. They do a lot of donation work with books for prisoners programs!
As mentioned, Bull Press donate playbooks to prisons out of their own pocket. If you know somebody in prison you'd like to refer to receive books, you can email them with requests.
a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.
care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.
connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims
gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme
glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.
ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme
life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure
taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies
the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care
islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support
baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies
gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.
hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste
anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care
palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon
dahnoun mutual aid - provides water, food, tents, baby supplies, financial support, and other necessities. updates can be found through their instagram
certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.
I think the thing that is the most disturbing to me about Obsession is just how quickly it becomes totally clear that Bear not only never loved Nikki, but that he never even liked her.
In the little time we spend with Nikki before she becomes possessed “freaky” Nikki, Obsession goes to great lengths to establish Nikki as a person.
In just the first 15 minutes of the film, we learn that Nikki loves writing, she’s laid back, and that she cares very deeply for others. We see that she’s funny, she likes to gently tease her friends and joke around. She has ambition and wants to pursue her writing seriously. She has her own goals and thoughts and opinions.
She’s also characterized very well by her wardrobe, how she talks, her body language and expressions (courtesy of Inde Navarrette’s absolutely STUNNING and brilliant performance).
In a VERY short amount of time, the audience is given a VERY clear picture of Nikki’s personality and usual behavior.
Which makes her “transition” into “Freaky” Nikki all the more horrific when Bear makes his wish.
Because even if we give Bear some grace, and acknowledge that he couldn’t have known that the One Wish Willow would do what it did, and even if we treat his kissing her on the first night she comes over as morally grey (although in my opinion he absolutely did take advantage of the fragile mental state he believed her to be in), there is no way to excuse Bear blatantly ignoring that Nikki changes so drastically from the person Bear claims to be in love with.
After the wish, Nikki starts speaking differently and using a higher pitched voice, she starts dressing completely differently and wearing more traditionally “feminine” clothing. She suddenly drops her plan to quit working at the music store and pursue writing, she stops showing any care towards her other friends and the people in her life. She defers to Bear in every situation, with the only exception being any time Bear shows any sign of moving away from her emotionally (or physically).
After the wish, Nikki becomes a completely different person.
And Bear does not care or show any concern regarding this at all.
Everything that makes Nikki who she is, everything that makes Nikki, Nikki, is just gone after Bear uses the One Wish Willow.
And Bear couldn’t be happier.
We get a whole montage of Bear and “Nikki” as a “happy couple” hanging out together and ignoring everyone around them.
It’s not until Bear starts seeing actual consequences to his wish, such as “Nikki” causing a scene on their date or feeding his dead cat to him, that he begins to worry about her behavior.
And even then—EVEN THEN!!!!—Bear STILL adamantly refuses to accept that Nikki is not behaving rationally or how she used to in any way. While he eventually acquiesces to canceling his wish, he first tries to just “alter” it to make it so Nikki still loves him, but is just less intense.
He would rather use “Nikki” to satisfy his own desires and ego.
If Bear loved Nikki, hell, if he even just LIKED her for who she is, he would be horrified by “freaky” Nikki. He would have recognized and acknowledge extremely early on in their relationship, that something was deeply wrong. He would know that the woman he was with was not Nikki.
But Bear would rather have a bootleg version of Nikki that he can feel validated by, than have an actual relationship of any kind with the real Nikki.
He does not love Nikki. He does not even like her.
He likes the idea of Nikki. He likes the image of Nikki that he’s constructed of her, the image of her that only exists in his head.
He likes the fantasy of what Nikki would provide to him emotionally and physically.
From the beginning of the film, Obsession shows us exactly who its villain is. Nothing that “Freaky” Nikki does horrifies me as much as Bear’s treatment of Nikki and his refusal to see her as an actual person with autonomy.
For me that’s the most disturbing element of Obsession. That the people you trust the most and care about may be so obsessed with the version of you they’ve created in their mind that they’ll actively ignore your personhood and autonomy.
God. Obsession is so fucking good. I love film. I love cinema. Thank you Inde Navarrette. Thank you Curry Barker. Film of the year, if god hates horror fans why do we keep winning.
Thinking about how wild it is that enshittification starts as a way for the rich to squeeze the populace for more money but ends up infecting everything so even luxury products decline in quality. They’ve got more money than fucking God now and for what? Literally they can’t even buy fun nice stuff for themselves because they killed craft.
Anyway this post is about Dhaka muslin but it’s also about everything.
Nearly 200 years ago, Dhaka muslin was the most valuable fabric on the planet. Then it was lost altogether. How did this happen? And can we
Fun fact! Revival of Dhaka Muslin has been ongoing for quite some time. The headline of the above article is very very misleading, we know exactly how Dhaka Muslin was made. The process was very well documented. We know how it was made, but colonialism ruined the fabric's production area and devalued the skills needed to make it such that they no longer existed. But the process itself was not lost.
That being said, efforts to bring it back are underway, and they have been making amazing progress, and succeed in creating Dhaka Muslin yet again.
It all began with a search for ‘phuti karpas’ – muslin’s unique cotton plant which is known to have become extinct. However, starting in 201
This is a pretty good updated article, it has a lot of the same info as the BCC one (which also discusses some of the revival efforts) but with more of a focus on that process, an update to the story, and it details some of the other ongoing projects working on the revival!
Here's the first weaver to manage to produce a finished piece in nearly 200 years, Al Amin.
His first piece was 300 threads, according to the article they have now been able to get into the 700s for thread counts, which is absolutely incredible.
Several projects are actually underway now each with different weavers and slightly different methods, producing fabric intended to meet or best the original!
And if you're curious, "okay but can it pass through a ring" yes! Yes they can!
All three of these photos are of pieces made in the modern century, photos by Wasiul Bahar!
It's a very time consuming process, and a very expensive fabric to purchase, but love and passion for it have been steadily bringing it back!
I can actually answer this! So the latex/rubber they used, while standard for Hollywood at the time, reacted REALLY BADLY to being doused in pouring water nonstop for an entire day of shooting. They ended up corroding, which caused them to stink really badly and glob together at the seams. The original plan was to hand out masks to various crew members on the final day of shooting as souvenirs, but the sopping wet, melting, rotting rubber got so gross that by the end of that shooting day they’d already thrown most of them out. Somewhere in a landfill are hundreds of disgusting, bloated, slimey Hugo weaving heads fused together into a nightmarish rotting amalgam :)
It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.
Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!
I'm usually loathe to suggest TV Tropes as a resource, but given that only a person who's entirely unacquainted with the genre would be asking that question, a primer is probably warranted. Check out the Unwinnable By Design article and read the preamble for context on the types of softlocks we're discussing, then hit either the "Sierra" or "Infocom" links (yes, those two publishers each have their own dedicated sections!), pop open the "Cruel" tab, and get ready to read some stuff that makes you mad.
A critical piece of context that a lot of modern gamers completely miss is that Douglas Adams' adventure games are works of parody not only in terms of their narratives, but also in the sense that they're rather vicious parodies of adventure games as a genre. Each of their absurdly obtuse puzzles is lampooning some puzzle design trope or set of tropes that was legitimately commonplace at the time they were made, and many of the really nasty bits are crafted specifically to piss off experienced adventure game fans who otherwise wouldn't get caught out by that sort of thing. They're outliers in the genre only in the sense that they're putting forth extra effort to be annoying about it – most games of the type pull the exact same shit entirely without remark!
(Honestly, the player-hostility of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to be tremendously overstated owing to a combination of effective marketing and the fact that it's the only adventure game from that era that any significant number of current-gen gamers have ever actually played. In terms of sheer fuckery it's considerably friendlier than stuff like, say, Codename: ICEMAN.)
It helps to understand that point and click adventure games are one of the first genres the Git Gud crowd really fixated on, and a lot of these early design trends revolved around catering to that crowd. It only got reframed as a genre for filthy casuals in the wake of a demographic shift in the mid 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing strongly female; it's practically the only example of a video game genre's reputation flipping directly from "hardcore" to "casual", and one of the most striking illustrations of the fact that which kinds of games are considered "real" games is more about identity politics than mechanics.
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
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