Pocket Fairy*

30s, queer I don’t post a whole lot anymore

[classicalcanvas]

Among the Waves by Ivan Aivazovsky

[tired-fandom-ndn]

I am whatever the opposite of a speed runner is. I am a game meanderer. I have to look at literally everything. I am overly cautious in every way. I forget to pause and wander away from the game. I take a minimum 7 hours to get through any given level. If you give me a timer I will cry.

[notebooks-and-laptops]

Sometimes Bg3 will do this thing where it acts like Baulders Gate is the most evil city ever. However. I've been to Kirkwall. So.

[meddwlyngymraeg]

Welsh Music Wrednesday

Dod nôl for another week of Welsh music suggestions! This week, I've got something a bit more downtempo, RnB and electronic, but it does come from a rock musician.

Lloyd Steele spent years as the guitarist with the celebrated hard rock band Y Reu. During lockdown, with the band unable to meet or do much live, Lloyd returned to his dayjob of being an engineer full-time, but also found a little time to release his debut solo release, a relaxed, peaceful electronic track called Mwgwd (Mask). That came out in 2022, and the song explores his own identity as a gay black man in his smaller Welsh speaking community. He's released a few more equally lovely singles since, and seems to be returning to collaborating this year with an electronic artist called Crwban.

Find his music on the label Recordiau Côsh

[friendly-little-elf]

Dylai pawb wrando ar Lloyd Steele!

[o-lanterns]

they should invent a searching for jobs that doesn't open a miles-deep pit of despair and rage within me that gets deeper and wider with every scroll because it's all shit that is impossible for me to do because I am not a real human like other people

[libraford]

It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

[rahjin]

It is genuinely baffling to me, in a very kind and positive way, especially coupled with the local news continually going several shades of 'wtf, this thing is a roaring success again and we don't quite get why'. They've already quadrupled their capacity for simultaneous clicks and it's still nowhere near enough and there's just... Bewilderment.

[libraford]

I think people want to help the environment in small but tangible ways, which is hard right now because of.. well... because of The Horrors. And being able to say 'wow! I helped this creature cross a dam' makes you feel good.

I also think that most people can relate to a small, helpless creature trying to get from one place to another and there's a FUCKIN WALL in the way.

But to come back to point 1- Citizen Science fills a hole in the soul that wanted to go out on adventures and discover things when we were younger, but the study of it was hard or we didn't have the money or our schools were garbage. But you don't have to have a degree to do things like... press a button or download and use an app, or count or transcribe notes.

Anyways- here's some Citizen Science links if the Fish Doorbell makes you feel happy and you yearn for more ways to help scientists do stuff:

Foldit (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

Bioblitz, an event where citizens identify as many species in an area within a period of time

Species Watch (animal species)

BOINC’s Compute for Science

Zooniverse is a website that hosts information on many citizen science projects

Label trees in aerial photos

Count cells in fossils and modern leaves

Digitize Atmospheric Data

Count penguins

US-based Citizen Science Database

eBird (bird identification)

Merlin (bird identification by sound)

iNaturalist (nature identification)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data)

Smithsonian Archives Transcription Center

[tshortik]

Mild rant from me about Hans Zimmer's involvement in Dragon Age:

I just think it's such sellout behavior to hire expensive movie composers (Zimmer is also known to be a transphobic asshole lol) known for their blockbuster soundtracks for your game when you already had the most iconic soundtrack ever for the previous installment, except the composer was lesser known.

Most people hear the swell of violins and immediately think it must be the best soundtrack ever, but if I am really honest, the DATV soundtrack so far sounds like the most generic slopfest with the laziest leitmotif I had the misfortune to hear in a long while.

Hiring people for their name alone is something I find incredibly shameful. Like I cannot even put into words how nasty it is in my eyes, because it actively takes away from lesser known creatives in the industry who could have made a name for themselves. And it doesn't matter to me if Zimmer only did the Main Theme or whatever, because in that case, it shouldn't be his name that is plastered everywhere but Balfe's! But everyone is talking about Zimmer anyway for exactly the reasons I already mentioned.

Even just the thought of how expensive this endeavor must have been... That money could have gone to other, more important places, easily. It makes the layoffs also that much more bitter in my eyes. Idk. I adore Dragon Age and I am still a huge fan and I will play it, but stuff like that make me angry. I don't need some Zimmer who has been sitting his ass on his laurels from 10 years ago in my franchise. I'd rather have a no name person, or Trevor Morris, to get a chance again.

[rachelamberish]

One of the craziest things about Dragon Age (and this might help those of you who don’t go here kind of understand what people are yelling about in the coming months) is its lore. But I don’t mean that in the way you’re probably thinking.

I mean, quite literally, the way it presents its lore to you. In picking up notes and books as you go along and sifting through the codex, the game effectively asks you to act as an anthropologist. You’re met with a host of primary and secondary sources, some many hundreds of years apart from one another, written by anyone from the highest Chantry scholar to John Farmer, and you’re meant to constantly be questioning every piece of information you’re given. What biases are present in what I’m reading? What is fact and what is complete fabrication and what is, potentially, a slightly twisted version of a fact? How does one source potentially contradict another? The lore is one giant mystery-puzzle that you get to piece together across three games, and what conclusions you draw are going to be entirely different from someone else’s, and so on.

And yet, the series still does something even cooler than any of that. You realize, at a certain point, that this idea you have been engaging with on a meta-level — this idea that history is biased and fallible, that it’s written by colonizers and conquerers, genocidal racists and religious zealots, that the ability to control historical narrative is the prize you win for spilling the most blood — that idea is one of, if not perhaps THE most important, overarching theme of the series. The way that we remember history — what we remember and what we don’t, and why — and the impact that has on people on a sociological, political, cultural and psychological level, on both a macro and micro scale. It’s the entire thesis of the series’ main villain’s whole motivation.

And there’s gonna be a lot of people that don’t care about all that but me personally it makes me want to gnaw on a cinder block and scratch at my walls

[okayto]

This is why classes need library instruction

Student: I can’t find any scholarly articles on this subject!

Me: Okay, what’s the subject?

Student: Creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies.

Me: Alright, and what/where have you tried searching?

Student: I searched “creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies” on the library website!

Me:

[okayto]

I’m still mad about this because it happens frequently. Students at all levels of education need library and research instruction–they should get it before graduating high school, they should be getting it in several different classes in college, and there should be something in grad school–seriously, there are people in my master’s program who don’t know anything besides Google.

And don’t say “they should have learned in [previous level of university education].” Do you think every person continues education within a few years of their first degree? THEY DON’T. Even if they did get a then-good introduction to research, you think nothing changed between 2008 and 2018? How about the doctoral student I met today whose last degree–and last experience with academic libraries–was in 1996? How about the guy in my master’s cohort who got his bachelor’s degree in 1987?

Because look. See that very specific topic the student wanted? There may or may not be actual scholarly articles about it. But here are a few things you can do:

First, zoom out. Start broad. Pick a few phrases or keywords, like “tech companies” and “culture.” See what comes up.

Actually, back up. First, does your library’s website search include articles, or do you have to go into a database? My library’s website searches some of our 200+ databases, but not all. And you’ll need to find (in advance search or adjustable limiters that pop up after your initial search) how to limit your search to scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles.

What other keywords are related or relevant? For the search above, you could use a combination of “silicon valley,” “company/ies” or “organization/s,” “sharing,” “collaborative,” “workplace culture,” “social culture,” “organizational culture,” and those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.

Did you find something that looks promising? Great! What kind of subjects/keywords are attached (usually to the abstract, sometimes in the description section of the online listing)? Those can give you more ideas of what to search. Does it cite any articles? Look at those! Some databases (ilu ProQuest) will also show you a selection of related/similar articles.

If you’re researching a very specific topic, you may not find any/many articles specifically about your subject. You may, for example, have to make do with some articles about west-coast tech companies’ work cultures, and different articles about creating sharing/collaborative environments.

That said, this student did the right thing: they tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

[beradan]

They tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

I get goddamn professors pulling this shit, there is not one single level in the academy where research literacy isn’t lacking.  

[plaidadder]

Also: Everyone has forgotten how to browse the stacks. As in, find a book that’s relevant, go to the stacks, then look at what’s near it on the shelf. You will find stuff that way that would never turn up on a search. It really works and can be a useful supplement to electronic research even though it involves your corporeal form and books made out of paper. 

[scary-murphy]

my law school requires a legal research class. you take it as a 1L, and it’s mandatory. you are signed up for it automatically along with all your other 1L courses. it’s a wise thing to do, because you’re fucked as a lawyer if you don’t know to find, you know, the law.

[christina-articulates]

I have a library and information science degree, which I often refer to as a degree in google, and I’m only being a little facetious with that. I often impress people with my ability to find things online, but it’s only because I’ve taken so many classes in research methods that I know how to phrase a search well. It’s so important, not just in school! 

[thebraveandthebroiled]

Goddammit there is so much information and so many way to access it that it burns my biscuits when we don’t give students the tools they need to succeed at this. Hell yeah all y’all above!

And here’s what I’ve got to add:  

Ask a Librarian

Seriously guys librarians are here to help. We would love to help you find the right resource for your particular informational need and we’ve been trained to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible. Nowadays you don’t even have to go to the library in person as many libraries offer online chat services as well as the option to contact via email. Further, and I think very importantly we are dedicated to our patrons rights to privacy. To quote the American Library Association the “rights of privacy are necessary for intellectual freedom and are fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship.”  

Search the Stacks

This is one of my favorite ways  to immerse myself in an area of study. While a good subject or keyword search will lead you to some good results sometimes is just as fruitful to go the library and plunk yourself down in section and browse all the books in a topic area. Libraries will label the (book)stacks based on whichever classification system they use and you can use the links below to figure out which area of the stacks you’ll want to look through.

Dewey: used in public libraries

LOC /Library of Congress: classification system used in university libraries

http://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit03/libraries03_04.phtml

Online Books

Some websites like gutenberg project are dedicated to making public domain books accessible to the public. Using the search term public domain books is a good way to go about looking for more sources of them. Open sourced is another good term to use when trying to find freely accessible books online and that’s not just limited to fiction books but textbooks are also offered by various sites.

Project Gutenberg is an online archive of tens of thousands of  books that have enter the public domain that can be freely accessed.

Openstax is one website that provides access to Higher Ed and AP open sourced textbooks.

Libguides and Pathfinders

As stated above librarians are in the business of connecting people to resources. If we can’t do so in person then we also do so by creating guides that can be found and used when we aren’t around. These guides are filled with search terms, books, articles, reviews, lists, links, and anything else we think would be helpful for patrons trying to explore a particular topic area. 

Pathfinder is a particular term used for these guides. Libguides is a particular platform which to host these guides. Using either word at the end of your search terms online will bring up guides that have been created in that particular subject area. Or you can explore libguides directly with your search terms to find what guides librarians across the country have created.

Note: Using pathfinder in your search terms may pull up resources about Paizo Publishing’s same titled tabletop RPG series and while dragons are cool you can modify your search to library pathfinder to exclude these resources.

Other than using a search engine or libguides directly I find a great many pathfinders on university library sites. Usually what I do is find a university’s library webpage, find their pathfinder/research guides/guides section, and then browse through their lists of guides. These are generally organized by field of study so just pick the one you are interested in and look through the resources they have listed.

Some of the resources will be accessible for anyone while some might be locked for students of the particular university.  If the article, book, or resource is locked by a school portal you can either search for it online outside of the university portal or you can go to your own university/public library to see if they have access to the resource there. Even if they don’t have it currently in their collection libraries are often connected with other branches and may be able to request an interlibrary loan of what you need.

Online Reference Resources

Sometimes the problem isn’t finding information but finding good information. Below are two sites that I use regularly to help me with this issue when searching online for resources.

The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association gives a list of the best free reference sites on the internet

The Ipl2 is a good authoritative source to find general information on a variety of topics. Even though the website is no longer updating there are still a plethora of subject guides that can be explored.

Open Sourced Journals and Articles

Just as there are open sourced books and textbooks so too are there open sourced journals and articles available. Again  you can add the term open sourced when searching for these resources.

DOAJ is the Directory of Open Access Journals and you can search through here to find both articles and journals freely available to access.

Journal Article Tips

Finally whenever I’m searching through journal articles there are a few things I always like to keep in mind.

Build context. Once you find an article that is relevant to your search you can do this by exploring the citations. Both those that the article you are using references in its bibliography and those that reference the article itself. 

Every database is going to do this differently but generally with a few clicks you can find out who has cited an article that you have read. If nothing else try popping the title of your article into google scholar and you’ll see a blue ‘Cited by’ below the description. Also in some cases you can click on the author directly in a database to see what else they have written in the subject. Totally ask your librarian for help navigating the particular database you are using again they will be stoked to do so. 

Building this context of literature by finding and reading these extra articles is important to building a critical understanding of your topic and will allow you to build the best possible defense of your arguments. This will also allow you to see if the article you’ve initially selected is in itself a viable position or if it is an outlier of its field.

If you can try and find reviews of literature articles and special issue/special topic editions of journals. These are your best friends in the resource world as these types of articles and journals compile a great deal of information on particular topic in a tiny space. They are immensely helpful in building context in an area of thought and useful to finding out what to read further to be informed in an area of study. Add those words to your search terms to see if you can get some useful resources.

[error-404-fuck-not-found]

this is why it’s so fucking irritating to see smug Europeans be like “Americans have no excuse for your ignorance when Google is free” - hey shitbag, knowing how to ask the right question is in and of itself a valuable skill that must be taught, and having the resources to ask the question at all is only half the battle. Google may be free but the rest of this is in short supply

[headspace-hotel]

Research is one of my favorite things in the world, simply because so many things are unknown, unresearched, forgotten, and buried in old documents no one looks at anymore, or hidden in sources people don’t usually see as academic, or tucked away in a totally different field.

It’s a fun and interactive quest, using your skills of observation to sniff out something that might be a clue and follow its trail until you discover a lead.

The best is when you are following a chain of citations and catch an author being sneaky and straight-up lying about or misrepresenting a source. Betcha thought you could get away with it, huh????

[friendly-little-elf]

One thing I want to add: if you have access to a library, see if they have Libkey Nomad!

It's a browser extension that automatically searches your library's resources for anything you find online. So in the above example, if you found something linked in another library's research guide and want to use it, Libkey would find it for you if your library also has it.

We suggest it to patrons who prefer web searching, too. Find something on Google Scholar that's behind a paywall? Your library may provide access and while you can always copy and paste the information into the library search, if your library doesn't have the ability to search several databases at once and you don't want to have to try a bunch, Libkey is a huge timesaver.

[lesbiansagainsttheatre]

actually i think graduates of a university should have access to the library databases forever and ever amen

[mstornadox]

As an academic librarian, I wish that I could make this happen.

Instead, here are two cheap methods to get access to many of those databases:

1. Go physically to the academic library nearest you. It might even be in a museum. You don’t have be an alum. You might have to pay an access fee and/or parking. But. Most research databases (including JSTOR) cover walk-in usage. No authentication needed. Sometimes it is even enough to be on the campus wi-fi. Ask the library staff for details.

2. Use the digital resources offered by your local public library. They may have access to similar or even better research databases. Especially newspapers. (I work at a small specialized institution, so I refer students there all. the. time. for subjects that are outside of the core curriculum.)

Lastly, please direct some of your anger towards the research database vendors and distributors as well as journal publishers. They are usually for-profit companies (that keep merging and acquiring each other) . They set up the arcane terms and pricing. They want to be monopolies and they know they have a captive audience.

[bunabi]

there's a line between encouraging people to keep an open mind about DAV and pretending the layoffs don't matter & the grim internal reports regarding DAI's production didn't happen and I need 'True Fans' to find it quickly

[bunabi]

Rebuilding a live service title into a single player game in three years and having it looking this good was not easy & should be gassed up

And also staff sued for fairer severance deals last Fall when negotiations fell through, plus a lot of the crew responsible for making this release possible are gone

Doesn't have to be either-or 😭 that's all I'm saying

[gender-trash]

publishing companies will be like ~ooh this is a hardcover oooh it's so durable that will be $35~ and then you see the actual book and it's like. "perfect"-bound with endbands glued on crooked and a completely plain paper cover under the dust jacket. my dudes this shit is a mass market paperback with delusions of grandeur

[gender-trash]

now THIS is a hardcover

[just-evo-now]

what does this mean

[gender-trash]

i can explain in more detail with pictures when i get home from work, but executive summary:

both trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks are usually constructed via perfect binding, where you take a stack of loose-leaf sheets and dunk the spine edge in, basically, hot-melt glue (low-temp thermoplastic with a little flexibility to it). stick a cover on the outside of that bad bitch and you're done. very easy and cheap to manufacture, but not durable; not only does the soft cover provide no protection, pages can fall out individually if the glue fails for whatever reason. (i don't have a picture handy but just grab any mass market paperback off your bookshelf and look at the spine)

typically, or perhaps traditionally, when binding a hardcover ("case-bound") book you assemble the sheets into signatures, which are sewn to each other to form a text block, like so:

(well, admittedly, using both linen tape and french link stitch is sort of the belt-and-suspenders of textblock construction. in my defense though look at the fucking size of this tome) but the point is that even before you've gotten around to gluing anything, the textblock hangs together and functions as a book, albeit an unusually wobbly one -- so if the cover completely falls off or something, the rest of the book still hangs together.

the other method of construction i see on many mass-manufacture hardcovers and some trade paperbacks is that they've folded the signatures and sewn them individually (one at a time, not to each other) -- this is easy to do on a specialized sewing machine -- and *then* potted the spine in glue, like you do for perfect binding. this is less liable to lose pages if you fuck up the spine, because instead of each page being glued in individually, they're sewn together into signatures which provide more glue surface area apiece. (i can post a picture when i get home...)

uhh oh yeah endbands. endbands are the little decorative bits that get glued onto the textblock before it gets cased in -- this is in itself sort of a cheapo mass-manufacture imitation of more traditional sewn endbands, which actually provide some structural stability; modern glued-on endbands are really just decorative. here's a picture of a sewn endband on an example book from the bookbinding museum in sf (left), and a different textblock with endbands glued on (right). (the latter also has mull glued onto it, which is like... starched cheesecloth, kind of? you can use kozo paper here too; it also helps stabilize the spine for extra durability)

anyway on mass-manufacture hardcovers i often see really half-assed endbands that are glued on crooked or slightly undersized or something and i'm like "are you even TRYING" (they are not)

and also usually on recently manufactured books the entire case (the "hard cover" of a case-bound hardcover) is covered in paper, including the hinges, which is a terrible decision because the hinges are the part of the book that MOST needs the durability, being The Primary Moving Part. at least fucking cover the spine and hinges in bookcloth i beg. please. for me

[just-evo-now]

sorry loser you lost me at this

get a real programming language dork.

[gender-trash]

thats why im using it as a clamp and not as a book :p

[gender-trash]

@just-evo-now i am back home! where my books live!! so i can take pictures of the bindings :D

a couple of perfect-bound paperbacks:

the benefit of perfect binding, such as it is, is that all the pages can be aligned with each other and the spine is nice and square. (the other benefit is that it is cheap.) but if you're folding pages into signatures you're always gonna get some creep where the inner pages of the signature extend a little bit further towards the fore-edge [edge opposite the spine] than the outer pages do; you can either leave it like that for a deckled edge or trim it off for a neater finished look. (personally i am not a huge fan of deckled edges but Madame La Guillotine can only handle so much book, you know)

a paperback and a hardcover with the signatures-potted-in-glue style (i wish i knew what it was called):

i quite like the green endband on this hardcover! matches the cover nicely, is an appropriate size, aligned well, etc. (in addition to gluing them on crooked, the other common Endband Sin is to make them too damn short and it looks ridiculous)

the cloth-bound hardcover from the first image in this post, pub date 1978:

as you can see, it has much more flexibility than the potted-in-glue style (which can bend a little bit, but cracks if you open it too far), because the signatures are sewn to each other, with some kind of mystery green paper glued over them for stability (and, deeper in the spine, brown... something. fabric?? some of my other vintage books seem to use thin brown canvas...). no endband, but honestly it doesn't really need one.

and! here is a 1945 pocket handbook for engineers (you know, with useful integrals and trig tables and unit conversions and stuff in it) in norwegian, which was falling apart when i got it (i picked it up on the cheap with the intention of hopefully fixing it someday):

the cover is nonfunctional and the stabilizing paper on the spine has gotten so crumbly as to be useless (i got about halfway through peeling it off), but the textblock itself is in pretty good condition, because the signatures are sewn securely to each other -- if you squint you can kinda tell they used kettle stitches on the ends and chain stitches in the middle and i thiiink the chain stitches are where the loose loops on the top came from. anyway, i can pretty much finish peeling off the old crumbly paper stuff and glue on some new kozo paper (and ensure the loose loops are tucked safely away/glued down) and this bad bitch will be ready for a new cover!

[macleod]

I am really going to have to start paying attention to book binding going forward.

[schech]

i was scrolling through the tags on the 'how many books have you read this year' poll and i just want every 0-5 book reader to know that whether you're dyslexic, you have trouble focusing, you have a job or other full time responsibilities, or perhaps you are just a slow reader by nature, that you're a better reader than this person

[therobotmonster]

"My childhood was so awesome. Kids today don't even know!"

Isn't a flex.

It's a lament.

More people should understand that.

[karpad]

Cereal boxes had toys inside.

Yes, it was a crass marketing for a sugar cereal made of chintzy plastic

Today you're just expected to eat Capn Crunch because that's what you do as a child, that's what breakfast looks like. Which is... fine, I guess. Sugar still tastes good. That's still a pleasure you're otherwise asked to disavow by the protein shake nutribottles advertised on podcasts.

But it also means the idle minor joy of getting a random toy present, as a reward for nothing, just because you exist, is stripped. That random spark of joy is gone, replaced with nothing.

Where did the public pool go? the neighborhood park? the atrium food court public place to gather?

Same thing. All of them were just replaced with nothing.

Kids today have many good things. But it shouldn't be a trade off. They should get to have instant messages with friends and go skating at the park. They should get to play amazing modern video games at home and go trick or treating for halloween. They should be able to have stickers and markers and macaroni art as well as youtube and streaming libraries and fortnite dances.

Fun should be allowed at every level.

[intrepidheroine]

Also. Kids now are just used to people constantly trying to sell them stuff.

When I was a kid, we had advertising on TV, radio, magazines, and billboards. It was easy to recognize and you could work around it. There were certain types of TV, like PBS or cable, that did not have commercials.

Now, kids are inundated with advertising constantly. YouTube and social media have replaced TV and radio for a lot of families, where in addition to ads every 1-3 minutes, many YT stars have sponsored bits in their videos. Social media constantly tries to sell you things. They have found a way to put advertising into the pumps at gas stations. There are so many things, like access to TV shows and Disney movies, that are locked behind a paywall. They can't even read a newspaper if they wanted to.

I did a school visit a while back to a group of about 100 fourth graders to tell them about the library's upcoming Summer Reading Program. They were totally unimpressed by me telling them cheerfully that if they met their reading goals, we would give them books for free. I thought they were just tired because it was close to the end of the day, and then one kid raised his hand to resignedly ask the question they were all thinking:

Kid: How much does this cost? Me: Nothing. It's a free library program. Kid: Uh huh, like you are going to give us books for free. How much does it really cost? Me, confused: ... nothing. You don't have to give us any money at all. You just have to do the reading and fill out your reading log, and you will have earned the books to take home and keep forever. Kid, in disbelief: Oh come on. If you don't charge us, how are you gonna make money? Me, taken aback: We don't make money, we're a library. Kid, exasperated: What do you mean you don't make money? Me: We're a public service, like the fire department or schools. You don't have to pay to use those either. There is a ripple in the crowd as 100 disbelieving 9 year olds take this in. Other kid: How do you afford to do anything if you don't make money? Like where do you get the money to do stuff if we don't have to pay you? Me: Through things like government grants and taxes. Third kid: So let me get this straight. That means that if some people don't pay their taxes -- Teacher: Friend, this is a great conversation for Social Studies and not during library time! Ms. Intrepidheroine, would you like to show us the LEGOs you brought?

And that's the story of how I realized that children absolutely expect you to try to sell them something if you come in to do a "special talk" even if it's for a library.

Which is tragic.

[lush-retina-is-dead]

assorted spoons | giles newman

[fairycrowbar]

as much as I love Baldur's Gate 3 it is. Baffling and infuriating that there is nobody online talking about how in a world as massive and populated as this game's there are 0 fat people in it, anywhere, at all, when we had body sliders in Fallout 3 fifteen fucking years ago

If you want Boy body type you get to be hunk and More Hunk and if you want Girl body type you get to be skinny or skinny with muscles and that's WEIRD, right? It's weird that no one's talking about that?? This is a bizarre regression from a game that advances so much and I would have happily waited another whole year of development for a body slider feature

[probablyfunrpgideas]

Sixteen Tons of Eldritch Blast

When the lich chose you as his “apprentice” you were a little flattered. After all, not everyone can channel magic directly from an ancient soul jar. The benefits of an increased lifespan and semi-undead resilience are great too! But there’s an hourglass in that cold and trap-filled tomb, and when it runs out your soul will be wrenched out to fuel some undead experiment or artifact.

Your bond lets you know how much time you have left. Whenever you complete one of your patron’s inscrutable tasks (deface that loser Acererak’s green devil statue, or find blackmail material on the Paladin-General of Helm) a year gets added on, grains of dark sand flowing upward. But whenever you use the lich’s power, your debt is manifested as days ticking away rapidly.

If you want to have a mechanical representation of this, work with the DM to decide your starting time and how much you gain from doing your patron’s bidding. Using spells and invocations, however, costs one day per level of the spell or effect (Eldritch Blast costs 1). Ideally, it will take enough magic to get through daily adventuring life and complete the tasks that the warlock will not make much profit from it. This is narrative pathos, a word which here means “making a sad little guy”.