Not even at stoplights!!! I know it’s so so tempting to just glance at your phone when you’re stopped, but there’s actually something called “distraction hangover” where even once you put your phone down, your brain is still processing the interaction and isn’t fully paying attention to the road for up to 30 seconds afterwards. So it’s still really dangerous even if you’re stopped when you look at your phone. If you need to check something on your phone, pull over.
this especially applies to people with adhd. you know that symptom you may have heard of called “difficulty transitioning between tasks”? you don’t want piloting a ton or two of potential death to be the task you can’t mentally switch back to.
ok i feel crazy reading through the tag for sinners because theres this very weird pervasive notion that it seems like people do not understand remmick and his kkk member first victims are in fact lying repeatedly throughout the movie. like they lie. we know they lie because they promise all they want is to come inside and play music for the juke joint. that is not true at all as they want to come inside and kill everyone.
so why are there so many posts resting on the notion that they are unable to lie when these same vampires say they dont believe in the kkk anymore and just want equality.
"when remmick de-racist-ifyed the former kkk members" did we watch the same movie. no the fuck he did not. that woman was lying when she said they no longer worked with the kkk. because she wanted to eat the people still inside. good lord.
We established incredibly early on to the movie that the KKK lie! It's their main thing! They lie that the vampire ain't in their house, they lie that the Klan is gone, they lie about that musician to lynch him in a train station. Folks ain't got no media literacy.
FINALLY someone brings up how they were lying about the Klan from jump! We literally saw the dudes Klan robes in the house before/when the Choctaw hunters were chasing Remmick down! They dead just didn't pay attention to anything in the movie!
Just so we’re clear, if I point out that you did something racist, that’s not the same as me thinking you’re irremediably terrible. You did a racist thing.
You think you don’t do racist things, homophobic things, etc? You do. I caught myself in fat phobic and homophobic lines of thinking/speech just this morning. I’m fucking gay married. Nothing disqualifies you from acting in a way that reflects the society you exist in. We are obliged to fight it. Why not fight it in honesty and with camaraderie?
Honey I am not going to give two shits about social justice discussions by any American that still enjoys the works of authors who support Imperial Japan
watching westerners talk about how all transmascs will one day reach a stage* where 'misogyny will no longer affect them' really makes me understand why theres such a big 'feminism is no longer needed' sentiment within western countries. You really think the main body of oppression is just 'are there people who dislike you'. Which is a part of it yes, but thats not like IT?
Misogyny permanently alters your life path.
There are binary trans men who pass today who still suffer from after-effects of fgm which a lot of the time cannot be cured.
There are binary trans men who pass today who do not have the basic education needed to advance in the modern world.
There are binary trans men who pass today who cannot walk/are permanently disabled by misogynistic practices in their youth.
There are binary trans men who pass today who will live in poverty forever because they were forced into marriages young
There are binary trans men who pass today who will never achieve their dreams because they were not allowed to play instruments or sport or early life skills that cannot be 'caught up' later in life
There are binary trans men who pass today who cannot have children because of reproductive violence
There are binary trans men who pass today who missed out on critical promotion years because they were forced to be wives/mothers
And this is not a #sadcore #never transition post, because all this stuff does not mean that you cannot live a happy and fufilling life, it does not mean that there isn't joy in transitioning or that the world is hopeless.
This idea that in order to be a happy man you must deny the role of misogyny in your life is such an insidious lie because it forces trans activists to either shove every single one of these men (plus all the ones who dont even pass/transition/know they're trans now) under the bus, or discourage young boys from transitioning.
Hint: Pretty much everyone chooses the 'lets throw these trans men under the bus and blot their brains out to the reality of transmasculinity' option.
Literally. Some of you heard this quote 'How many Einstein’s have spent their lives washing dishes, how many Mozart’s bent over stoves instead of pianos, because they had the misfortune of being born a woman?' and said: But the moment you find out you're a man it can all go away!
Anyway this is getting long and disjointed but my point is basically summed up with: misogyny permanently alters your life path and there is not such thing as 'graduating' from the affects of systematic oppression
*the idea that half, let alone ALL transmascs have access to transition let alone transition to the point of 'passing', let alone all the complexities of stealthing is absurd in and of itself, but thats for another post.
There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.
Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but it’s a game that actually exists:
[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]
Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if you’ve played or enjoyed this game. It’s just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud.
The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesn’t. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like it’s above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. It’s so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something “problematic” that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive.
To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:
(What the fuck do they think an “explorer” is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)
Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, it’s ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldn’t just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.
The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)
The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be “the good guys.” All of the “problematic” aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them..
(Don’t worry guys there’s no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)
..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:
(Don’t worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this district’s points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)
There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novel’s worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just don’t have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the “radium girls” where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:
Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just “bad actors who hold terrible beliefs.” Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they don’t go anywhere either. They don’t belong to any social movements, they don’t get organized, they don’t push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals.
You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? They’re under assault.
That’s right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of… uh, “Otherwhere.” (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) That’s where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!
Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the “colonists.” With nukes chain lightning.
(That last sentence continues on “tens of thousands..” You get the picture.) So, whew, glad that’s over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:
You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldn’t want to hear its thoughts on Israel.
You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, “perform questionable acts in the name of the common good,” and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.
It’s actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaire’s society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.
The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. “Gay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!”
On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscura’s gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create “actual-play” shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, that’s more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because it’s not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. It’s intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.
It seems like the game really doesn’t want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.
However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscura’s approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Don’t have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Don’t have actors say foreign words they don’t know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Don’t show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."
We’d like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that “they don’t want to be disrespectful by playing it” because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - don’t buy or support their game!
I have encountered this firsthand. I'm a massive history nerd, especially about pirates (among other things, but pirates are relevant to the story). I was hanging out in a system agnostic TTRPG server and Pirate Borg was mentioned so I talked about my idea for a historical fantasy campaign set around historical pirates and the Nassau Pirate's Republic. Started explaining some basic ideas, how it's basically about trying to keep this rogue nation together amid external hostility from England, France, and Spain and internal strife caused by a lack of trust and Edward Teach's descent into madness. Naturally this brings up Blackbeard and his crew, which contained several escaped slaves, and that the Queen Anne's revenge was a former slave ship. I immediately get the *several people are typing...* and am welcomed with several messages that Pirate Borg takes place in an alternate history where slavery never happened. I end up trying to have to defend myself, explaining the *true facts* that most pirates were escaped slaves, both native and black, and that a lot of pirate ships were captured slave ships because they had thicker hulls and could take more punishment in a fight. They were like "But you can have diverse crews and sturdy ships without bringing slavery into it." My response was "you *could*, but then you lose valuable historical context and systemic evils to fight against, I like running stories about making the world a better place." Some people understood that, but many of them *literally* shot back "But thinking about slavery makes me uncomfortable, so maybe just write it out of the setting?" That's when I shut up but I was just screaming in my head "YES, THE POINT IS IT SHOULD MAKE YOU FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE AND WANT TO CORRECT IT"
The reason you can't be the next J R R Tolkien isn't because you don't have the talent, but because you're not the right kind of unwell. Tolkien wasn't bent for fantasy worldbuilding; he was bent for constructed languages, and got into fantasy worldbuilding in order to provide a material context in which to ground the notional evolution of the languages he invented. If you want to be the next Tolkien, you can't start with the worldbuilding; you've gotta find something extremely specific to fixate on, and develop it in such depth that inventing a world to contain it is genuinely the most logical next step.
#the best route is clearly to get really into a specific kink scenario and invent a world to justify it (via @salix03)
That's not even a joke. Developing a kink scenario so elaborate and so excruciatingly particular that it can only properly be contemplated in the frame of a world created specifically to contain it is genuinely closer to Tolkien's actual creative process than 99% of the stuff that plays at being heir to his legacy.
I do think the Hank Green AI thing makes it abundantly clear that if you have ADHD or any other mental illness and/or you are prone to addiction you need to avoid AI at all costs. This shit will rope you in, and if you have a mental illness that say, starves your brain of dopamine, you're gonna be extra susceptible to that. I won't use AI for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is knowing how it would fuck with my ADHD and bipolar. Like yes, it's bad for the environment and giving money to rich scumbags and runs on plagarism, but even more than all that, it's straight up not safe at all and you really shouldn't use it if for no other reason than to protect yourself from whatever the fuck it might do to you.
It's important to remember whenever citing the Picard Double Face Palm that on the other side is Data trying to calculate the parameters of just how much he's accidentally broken his favourite Captain's brain. Again.
updated the character limit on the blinkie maker! previously 15 characters, you can now attempt to cram a whopping 25 characters on your blinkies!! certain fonts and font sizes WILL cut off. use your best judgement ok?
studying dog communication always leads me back to M. Minunno and his amazing work&experience. let's look at this beautiful passage of his book
dogs are wise and can have really meaningful social bonds - it's important to keep in mind especially when they live their life as pets and it's our responsibility not to rob them of all these opportunities
yousharknotpass
pixelskylines
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
izzy806
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
