lokasenna's den of iniquity

This space currently available for rent.

[mousenemy]

LIKE TO CHARGE REBLOG TO CAST LET'S GET THIS FUCKER EXPLODEDED

[bogleech]

Why the FUCK did he put a semicolon there

[kalichnikov]

i wanna talk about this shot

[kalichnikov]

if forum signatures still existed this would be mine

[un-javi]

[karvina]

[teslaswife]

[shitposting-hobbits-to-gallifrey]

God fucking damn it

[bored-dromaeosaur]

[girl-detector]

[prokopetz]

Movies using red-tailed hawk calls for every bird of prey can be irksome, but shit, at least that one hits the right clade. Sometimes a movie will show you a songbird opening its mouth and a frog call comes out.

[prokopetz]

A mistake that horny body horror RPGs often make is having a specific trait that says "you have a big gross monster dick". This is a problem not because it's crossing a line, but because it locks your game down to a specific mechanical interpretation of big gross monster dicks. Ideally, your game should have many traits which can potentially be interpreted cockwise, leaving it up to each player to decide what a big gross monster dick means to them.

[infrabeest]

You know some of us are going to ask for examples of games that succumb to this pitfall. I'll go first: example, please?

[prokopetz]

Running an epic year-long Exalted 3rd Edition campaign culminating in a confrontation with the Bishop of the Chalcedony Thurible purely to see the dawning horror in my players eyes as debate breaks down, blades are drawn, and as I cue up the music for the final battle they hear the opening notes of Megalovania.

[prokopetz]

#please tell me it's the homestuck version #that electric guitar riff before the main part makes it so much funnier (via @teddy-bearer-of-bad-news)

I see where you're going with this, but for consistency it really ought to be the Undertale version. There's a specific reason this hypothetical campaign's final boss is the Bishop of the Chalcedony Thurible and not some other random Deathlord.

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

I don't know Exalted, nor can I wend my way through your Advanced Logic, why is the final boss the Bishop of the Chalcedony Thurible and not some other random Deathlord?

[prokopetz]

It varies a bit from edition to edition, but broadly, the Bishop of the Chalcedony Thurible's deal is that he's trying to True Pacifist Run the Apocalypse by promoting a religion-slash-philosophy engineered to persuade everyone to voluntarily cast themselves into the Void without need for conquest or violence. The trouble is, his explanatory tracts about the glories of Oblivion have a tendency to drive mortals murderously insane, so he's not making a great deal of progress.

(Also, he prefers to manifest as a wizened old priest who really plays up the aw-shucks-I'm-just-a-little-guy angle, at least right up until the point where you annoy him and he proceeds to kick your ass in heretofore unimagined ways.)

[scp-l4-clef-alto-001]

Is this the guy who's true form turns out to be a gigantic zombie covered in dicks?

[prokopetz]

The giant dick zombie is (un?)fortunately no longer canon.

(I've actually wondered about that; it used to be a recurring thing in Exalted for baddies to have rawr-behold-my-true-forms that were just randomly covered in dicks, then at some point they quietly stopped doing that. I'm kind of suspecting it was one specific writer.)

[prokopetz]

Important discussion happening in the replies.

[prokopetz]

"Are you a Homestuck", no, I was like 25 when Homestuck debuted, so I don't have the excuse of the comic's fandom being a formative part of my identity. You're talking to a guy who has an original printing of The Starlight Calliope on the bookshelf over his bed; I'm something worse.

[prokopetz]

"Then why do you sound like one" well, mostly because I was once a fourteen-year-old with unmonitored access to the Internet as it existed circa 1998, and that's just what being a fourteen-year-old with unmonitored Internet access in 1998 was like. The comic is very effective at capturing the voice of an era!

[prokopetz]

Like, you need to understand that if you were in your early teens on the Internet of 1998, there were entire communities of people around your age with no adult supervision where everybody talked like Dave Strider, and you were almost certainly part of one of them.

[transmutationisms]

u have to just get comfortable with the idea that every medical procedure involves risk, having a body at all involves risk, & defending bodily autonomy can't be contingent on defending only the actions that (you think) correspond with the least risk

[prokopetz]

On of my favourite vices of old-school tabletop RPGs is the tendency to extend their subsystems absurdly beyond the game's intended scope purely to demonstrate forethought or completeness. Like, yes, player characters in your gaslamp fantasy game probably won't range beyond the boroughs of London, but should they for some reason find themselves on the planet Neptune, then by god they'll be able to calculate their social status with whomever they might find there!

[thydungeongal]

People who treat D&D's classes as like being in any way representative of fiction outside of D&D are my nemesis, I just saw a post that was like "remember the difference between a Sorcerer a Warlock and a Wizard is this" and treating like those words as if their very D&D specific meanings were like universally accepted I'm going to start taking hostages

[thydungeongal]

"remember as we all know a Paladin is like this" Oh I'm sorry I didn't get the memo that Charlemagne's twelve peers could all use divine smite and divine sense and cast divine sense and summon magic horses. You piece of shit. Don't ever talk to me

[thydungeongal]

"the difference between a Druid and a Cleric" You are nothing. Words mean things here in the real world.

[prokopetz]

The definitions aren't even consistent across different editions of Dungeons & Dragons. The earliest codified use of the term "sorcerer" in D&D had X-Men style mutant powers rather than being a wizard variant. Druids in 2nd Edition were a militant brotherhood who determined their internal rankings by having anime-style tournament arcs. The bard's first core-book appearance was as as a high-level prestige class for dual-class fighter/druids. If you wanted to be a wizard with a sword in BD&D you had to be an elf, because the race/class split didn't exist, and "elf" was the hybrid arcane caster class. "Warlock" has meant about four different things. If you're trying to universalise these definitions, you aren't just going to be wrong about fantasy fiction more generally, you're also going to be wrong about most iterations of D&D.

[prokopetz]

Hell, let's look at "wizard" specifically. Over the history of Dungeons & Dragons and its various first-party campaign settings, a "wizard" has variously been:

A spellcaster whose power derives from a mystical attunement with one of the world's three moons, and whose strength waxes and wanes with their chosen moon's phases

A spellcaster whose power derives from draining the life from nearby plants and animals each time they cast a spell, as part of a hilariously unsubtle environmentalist allegory which positions arcane magic as the equivalent of the oil industry

A spellcaster whose power derives from a curse that's slowly warping their body and mind, and if they cast too many spells they'll turn into a werewolf or a Frankenstein monster or some shit

A spellcaster whose power derives from a little elemental familiar; when they want to cast a spell, they need to send their little buddy to fetch the spell (spells are physical objects) from the Elemental Planes, and sometimes it comes back with the wrong spell

Again, this is all just from material the game's publisher has historically seen fit to put their official seal of approval on. The game doesn't even agree with itself about what a wizard is; that's not a great basis for a universal taxonomy!

[infrabeest]

Wait which setting is that third one from? I recognize Dragonlance, Dark Sun, and Al-Qadim, but not that one.

[prokopetz]

Honestly, this whole "Luce & Friends" thing could be a positive development. Superbook hasn't aired for thirty years, and we're about due for another generation of kids whose understanding of Christian theology comes principally from officially licensed anime.

[infrabeest]

Wikipedia informs me that it was rebooted down here in the States in 2011, which has gotten 5 seasons as of 2021. I've never heard of it because of the way the Evangelical market is a) totally segmented off from the secular market, and 2) insane.

[prokopetz]

I would not describe the 2011 reboot as "anime", though I grant that there may be reasonable disagreement on this point.

[prokopetz]

Honestly, this whole "Luce & Friends" thing could be a positive development. Superbook hasn't aired for thirty years, and we're about due for another generation of kids whose understanding of Christian theology comes principally from officially licensed anime.

[infrabeest]

Wikipedia informs me that it was rebooted down here in the States in 2011, which has gotten 5 seasons as of 2021. I've never heard of it because of the way the Evangelical market is a) totally segmented off from the secular market, and 2) insane.

[prokopetz]

My controversial game design opinion is that "environmental storytelling" should be actually, tangibly present within the game's environments. Hitting the player with a paragraph of lore every time they click on a random item in their inventory is not environmental storytelling – it's just hiding an epistolary novel in your game's UI.

[prokopetz]

"But the presence of that paragraph of lore is diegetically justified because the toilet skeleton is holding a letter" buddy, what do you think the word "epistolary" means?

[boypart-blog]

WHAT!!!!

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

No

They can leap 36 feet

As in leap forward 36 feet

They don’t jump 36 feet into the fucking sky do you know how terrifying that would be the human race wouldn’t have survived because we’d have all had heart attacks while still in Africa

[handsomeamoeba]

[endquestionmark]

#death from above

[uhouse]

this post makes me cry every single damn time

[gabbigabriella]

This is one of those legendary posts that’s been around since I first made a Tumblr. When I didn’t have access to my Tumblr for a few years I would sometimes reference this post. Iconic lol

[were--ralph]

I really need to talk about pregnant wario more

[were--ralph]

I don't know about that one chief

[open-sketchbook]

I have a new theory which has resulted from me writing porn on my phone which im certain is old hat to everyone but is new to me

it kinda goes like this

basically, as a person or community writes a kinky story for longer, they will kind of inevitably move up a chain of 'paradigms of justification' required to make the kink continue to make sense.

the pace will vary depending on the kink, but motion is inevitable.

---

so say you decide to write some rope bondage kink. as you continue to write, you are likely to progress through the stages as follows:

Stage 0 - Baseline: i am writing A tying up B, because i want to, A wants to, and B is into it (or isn't, depending on what kinda freak you are). Regular fic goes here.

Stage 1 - Psychological: Why is does A like tying up B? Why does B like being tied up? Normal character stuff. Not yet weird. You're still normal. If you mom found out you were writing this, she'd probably still love you.

Stage 2 - Logistical: How does A afford all those rope? Why hasn't B's hands fallen off from lack of circulation? Getting odd you'd write about this, but fair enough, real kinksters deal with this. You just like to pay attention to details.

Stage 3 - Sociological: You have written the kink long enough that you need it to be normalized in-universe in order to push the envelope. You need a Federal Department of Kinky Shit Why has nobody called the cops when B goes missing for three days due to the suspension bondage setup you researched for two hours last night? Did you just invent a law so its okay for A to tie up the pizza delivery guy? Why is it not a violation of the labour code that B spends all her time literally tied to her desk? This is where the descent into madness begins. You have total freedom now to introduce new characters, but they will probably end up being A-like and B-like because that's your kink and why you started writing in the first place. People laugh when they see the premise, but keep reading.

Stage 4 - Biological: Oh, now you fucked up. See, eventually, you're going to start wondering why the world is filled with people like A and B. You're going to need to answer definitively why B didn't fucking die when you accidentally wrote a poorly conceived stress position in chapter 2. You gotta answer why there's only like 1 A for every 10 Bs. You realize with horror you accidentally implied that shibari harnesses is literally a biological requirement for human reproduction. It's over for you. This is ABO with extra steps. Get thee to a nunnery.

Stage 5 - Synthesis: "Oh fuck, it all makes sense now." Terminal brain stoppage. Death would be a mercy. ---

The thing is, once you have progressed through these stages, you are going to skip ahead in future stories because, let's face it, its incredibly convenient to have these structures laid out for you. If you've gotten to Stage 3 in a previous fic and then start a new one, well, you could fuck around justifying what's going on, or you could simply bring back the Federal Department of Kinky Shit and jump straight to the silk cord. It's efficient and we're all busy people.

I ended up following this trajectory with my first set of Porn On Phone stories pretty closely:

Hot lady am sexy kidnaps!

But why am hot lady sexy kidnap?

How am hot lady afford lavish lifestyle for sexy kidnapee?

Why am nobody arrest hot lady for sexy kidnap?

am reason related to why am no men in stories?

characters am now exclaim 'judith christ!' when stub toe.

Terminal. Put me down like the dog I am.

But the dark realization I had, right about now, is that all the normie fics out there, all the boring straight stuff?

... yeah they're already at Stage 5. The straights are living at stage 5, patriarchy is their Federal Department of Kinky Shit, they believe in alphas and omegas already.

So, put that way, it's actually totally normal and okay to do this progression, right? Like, it's subversive. This is feminist! This is feminist! I scream, as I'm dragged into the van and driven down to the river to be drowned like an unwanted kitten. I'm the normal one! You're all mad!

anyway i started writing a star trek porn parody in an attempt to write 'normal' porn again, hit stage five within 3000 words, had a mental breakdown, and came here to write this.

[lynati]

[fuckyeahsnackables]

[flightyquinn]

Was prepared to leave a cheeky "this is how we got Omegaverse" comment and move on. Then I saw It.

The straights are living at stage 5, patriarchy is their Federal Department of Kinky Shit, they believe in alphas and omegas already.

Not only have I been beaten to the punch, the punch has been given brass knuckles and lessons in mixed martial arts. This line is more raw and impactful than anything I could possibly add. I am deceased.

[smllscallywag]

reblog if the first musical you listened to was not Hamilton

[prokopetz]

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

[prokopetz]

@bianca-hooks123 replied:

Man, Protestant churches would be so much cooler if there was Wizard shit.

American Protestants going into wizard shit withdrawal is how we get snake handling:

Snake handling in Christianity - Wikipedia