yes my house is haunted, that's the way I want it

This is my box of cool rocks! Art blog is @fluoritesoup. She/her.

[rederiswrites]

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

It's rude.

[ratbastarddotfuck]

you have to forgive the printer because it's one of the most machine-ass machines we interact with on a day to day basis. that thing says kerchunk. hardly anything says kerchunk these days. you can't get mad at her when she kerchunks up a little.

[digitalsymbiote]

Crazy that tech has gotten so bad that we're doing printer forgiveness now

[probablybadrpgideas]

"I'm not kidnapping the children! They are volunteers for my cybernetic experiments! The parents are just mad they didn't read the fine print! Look at Little Timmy! He's having so much fun with the grappling hand I gave him!"

­

[stuckinapril]

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

[thedeliaishere]

theistic crystal shop: these crystals will align your chakras and induce spiritual healing

materialist crystal shop: these crystals will make you feel better because they're a cool part of nature and pretty to look at :)

agnostic crystal shop: no one knows why the crystals are good.

[prokopetz]

If ever you get tired of responding to questions about "rp-forward" games with verbosity and pedantry (which, to be clear, heaven forfend you do, I love reading those posts) may I humbly suggest the (in my opinion highly entertaining) alternative of telling people "Good Society will probably work for you" and refusing to elaborate?

You know for a fact that if I ever resorted to a bit like that it would be Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.

[prokopetz]

#I am only vaguely familiar with the game #why would recommending Chuubo's be a bit in this case? (via @moltensludeinbrainattack)

The structure of the game manages to hit a remarkable number of features that folks who think "RP forward" actually means something and isn't just a marketing phrase would typically regard as categorically excluding a system from being "RP forward", while looking nothing like the kind of game you'd tend to picture based on those features.

You don't want the mechanics sticking their nose into every little thing? Chuubo's is so intensely preoccupied with mechanising the mundane that forming intentions to do things is a rules-mediated action. There are specific target numbers for stuff like "do it correctly", "look like you actually know what you're doing", and "be happy with the result", and without a relevant skill or resource expenditure, the best outcome you can ordinarily achieve is "make everything worse".

You want to do stuff because it "makes sense for your character", and not because it gives the most points? As far as Chuubo's is concerned, those are the same thing. Just living your everyday life is framed as a kind of quest, with milestones and XP triggers and whatnot; this is a game where you might actively look for excuses to "have a conversation in a poorly lit place" or "gaze contemplatively over a large body of water" because your personal quest line awards XP for doing that.

You want a game that will let you make up whatever character you want and doesn't expect you to faff about with "classes" and "levels" and such? Not only does Chuubo's effectively have both of those things, it's so strongly opinionated about what sorts of characters are appropriate that it recommends you use pregenerated characters until you get a good feel for the milieu. One of those pregens has a character sheet that's twenty pages long – and you might assume that means most of it is just a big tedious lore dump, but it's not.

And on top of all that, it's not combat focused (because it has no formal combat system) and doesn't ask you to roll dice all the time (by dint of the technicality that it's a diceless system), so it can't readily be dismissed as "not RP forward" on any of the usual grounds. It's a slice of life game about adolescent gods attending high school. The kid who owns the titular Wish-Granting Engine can turn into a giant snake.

[prokopetz]

@caseyuptobat replied:

The only reason to actually play this game beyond novelty is if you have a supreme case of writer's block and are running behind to turn in a manuscript of an azumanga-esque 4koma chapter

Not true.

It's also a very solid choice for running Homestuck.

[prokopetz]

@bobafloutist replied:

Would you say the game is fun?

I certainly have fun with it. Take that for what it's worth, in light of what you know about the kind of person that I am.

[emesissy]

desire is the root of all yayyy desire is so fun i love to desire

[emesissy]

it continues all the time! yipee!!!

[machinesonmute-deactivated20210]

the temptation every time there’s heavy rainfall to just go out on the street and

[vangogh-vanhoe]

[mongeese]

The Murderbot Diaries are a power fantasy about being aromantic and still developing extremely important dedicated emotionally intimate partnerships where you are a top priority in a person's life, equal to their other family or romantic attachments despite your own emotional difficulties. And having guns in your arms

[kateammann]

Happy Pride Month to all of my fellow aces!! 🖤🩶🤍💜

[stuckinapril]

“Do it scared” “do it alone” are all great tips, but my biggest takeaway from therapy is do it messy. This is especially true if you’re getting out of a burnout, which I experience often. Literally just do it messy. You don’t need to pick the perfect trail to walk, the perfect playlist to listen to, whatever the fuck it is. You don’t need to have a meticulous to do list and wake up at the exact time you planned and drink the exact amount of water you planned to drink. Like the biggest thing for people like me to remember is sometimes it’s okay to do it messy. Put on a random yt workout and just get it done in sweats. Do 5 minutes of a daunting task and go from there. Sometimes just getting up is a win during intense burnouts or depressive funks. Literally just do it messy.

[momoboyds]

white europeans love to pretend like the united states and europe aren’t two cheeks of the same ass

[hiimneptune]

Listen, nobody who's ever opened a history book says we didn't do that shit first. Pick an atrocity and chances are there was a time europeans did it on mass to someone for the sake of profit. The difference, is that we have for the most part put that behind us, while the US is just sinking deeper and deeper into it. We're not perfect, and we were a lot worse in the past. But it has been a while since we were the problem

[momoboyds]

so the racism, antiblackness, islamophobia, and hatred for immigrants just disappeared huh

[creatingblackcharacters]

"its been a while since we were the problem" someone Black was murdered by police violence in Ireland last month

[infimace-blog]

Even ignoring the current shit (like we haven't watched Europe get increasingly insane about brown refugees over the past few years), the shit Europe is no longer doing still has consequences. Britain isn't ruling Egypt but they still got the artifacts in the museum. France no longer owns Haiti, but they forced Haiti to pay out the nose for international legitimacy, a process that effectively took Haiti 120 years to fully complete, which is why the island is disproportionately poor even compared to other Caribbean islands. You don't just get to leave your shit all over the world, wash your hands and then go "glad we finally evolved past having assholes"

[spiderbitesandvampirevenom]

can we bring back the term "fair-weather friend" bc I feel like if fair-weather friends got called that more this whole argument about whether or not you should be there for your friends when it's inconvenient/at what point of personal inconvenience it's ok to bail on your friends would kinda fall apart bc like. we literally have a word for "friend who's only there when you don't need something from them" because the baseline expectation is that a friend should be there even when it sucks. like we used to make fun of people for bailing on their friends.

[geniusbee]

these are getting weird

[aadoppelganger]

I’ve got some thoughts on this whole thing:

Cars are expensive. Stupidly expensive. Even crappy second hand ones aren’t that cheap. So let’s say you’ve got a car, you’ve paid it off, or are the better way into paying it off, and then some portion of the company’s leadership jumps off the deep end and turns out to be not such a great person. The value of your car plummets into oblivion, even if you wanted to trade it in for something else, you’d get nothing for it. Hell, it might not even cover the rest of the loan. So you’d be without a car, in a country that depends on you needing a car. Or you’d be in an old crappy car that needs a ton of repairs. Now what?

And sure, you can say all the people who own Teslas are rich and this isn’t an issue for them. I don’t think that’s really the case, you can get a used Tesla for pretty cheap depending on where you live. And there’s a certain appeal to an electric car, especially as gas prices rise.

There’s a chunk of Tesla owners who got them because they’re EVs and wanted to help make the world a better place. There are owners who bought into a lie, who made a mistake and really aren’t in a position to come outside and find their car trashed.

[xcal1bur25]

This is basically my thoughts - you can say Elon has always been an ass, but it genuinely wasn't mainstream knowledge that he was (or was going to be) a Nazi ass.

At which point, you're kind of in the territory of "well all rich people suck, what makes Elon so much worse than the heads of every other car company, besides a bigger social media presence? Hell, he's probably better on balance because at least he's trying to normalize electric cars, something we all want to be normalized on account of climate change."

That take is an extremely reasonable opinion to have prior to Elon sucking Trump's dick. So many well intentioned people, at that time, bought Teslas, because they were the normal semi-affordable electric car, for people who wanted an electric car for economic and environemental reasons.

Them owning the car isn't giving elon any more money. I would rather have them driving their electric car with that sticker prominently displayed as so to not endorse the man or the company, than for them to buy a gas guzzler that will only contribute more to climate change.

Fuck cybertruck owners, though. No excuse.

[thecaptainkindofgirl]

My dad works at Home Depot and this one customer came in trying to return a lawnmower that wouldn’t start. Another employee asked the customer if he had put any gas in it and the customer was outraged, yelling that they should have told him it needed gas (it was in the manual) and the employee told him “Well it doesn’t run on hopes and dreams, sir.” That pissed the guy off more so he called the manager all “Can you believe this guy!? He told me it doesn’t run on hopes and dreams!” and the manager just said “Well, it doesn’t.”

[autistichalsin]

Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:

Fiction is not reality.

You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.

No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.

No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.

You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.

Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.

The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.

Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.

Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.

You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.

[elbiotipo]

More than "here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)" thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that "much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons"

[paperdragonsong]

I will scream about this to anyone who listens forever. AUSTRALIA DOES NOT HAVE "ENGLISH SEASONS BUT BACKWARDS" and the insistence that it does creates a massive layer of alienation from the natural world.

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

Most Indigenous nations around Australia had six or more seasons, revolving around wet and dry times as much as hot and cold, and marked by the appearances of certain native animals and flowers. Schools need to start teaching the real seasons, and explaining that climate cycles are too complex to generalise globally, or else we will keep raising generations who view the natural world as hostile and unpredictable and climate predictions as generally irrelevent and frequently wrong - and I'm sure I don't need to spell out why that's a problem in the era of climate crisis.

[tiredtransgal]

i want to add that 40% of the world's population lives in the tropics, and the 4 season model just doesn't make much sense for a lot of places in there. usually it's just the wet season/monsoon season and the dry season. it's often hot year round.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

in general the way humans define seasons is largely subjective and varies across cultures. the one you were taught is not at all universal!