mrrao

nya :3 (over 25)

[captyns]

different faces, one piper 💛🤍💜🖤

[fieaux]

happeh pride

[dragongirl-wings]

standing on the empty bus because they didn't design the seats with tails in mind

[dragongirl-wings]

sitting on the empty bus because it's going the right direction and I'm taking a short break from flying

[thestuffedalligator]

“When we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.

“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”

She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”

After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. “Anyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.”

[orcboxer]

I have just combined all rice in the world into a single rouse

[faggotisaacfloofs]

the person who helped today when I fell out of my wheelchair actually did a really great job, so I want to share in case other people wonder what to do. [Note: this is not universal, this is merely a suggestion from one person, every wheelchair user's needs are different! I am a person who uses a manual chair usually pushed by someone else who is also disabled.]

Scenario: you see someone in a wheelchair fall out of their chair, and you have the ability to help.

1. Approach and ask "are you okay?"*

2. Next question if they say no, are vague, or open to continuing conversation** is, "is there anything I can do to help?" Or "what can I do?"

If they say no to help, then that's the end, just leave and go do whatever you were doing!

If they ask for help or say they are mildly injured, ask "what would you like me to do?" And wait for an answer before doing anything! If they seem dazed or confused, they might have hit their head or had another medical event*, or they might just be like that due to regular disability. Be patient.

Do not touch the person unless they say to, or they are like, unconcious in the middle of the road, ya know?? Wheelchair users usually have conditions that mean being handled improperly can severely injure us, you could cause much more damage than the fall.

Some things they might need you to do:

Bring their wheelchair closer (mine went about 5 feet away after it dumped me)

engage the brakes of the wheelchair

hold wheelchair steady if it's an unsteady surface (mud, hill, ramp, wet, etc)

offer an arm for them to hold onto to get up (them grabbing you, not you grabbing them) or move another solid item closer for them to use (i.e. a chair) [only do this if you physically have the ability to!]

If the terrain is rough (i.e. a parking lot), they *might* ask you to push their chair to a more stable area once they are back in their chair

nothing

Something else

Do what they ask, NOT what you think would be helpful. If for some reason you have to do something (i.e. you can't stop oncoming traffic and need to get them out) ASAP, tell them what you plan to do

Keep in mind they might also be D/deaf, have a communication disability, be stunned after the fall, have a head injury, not trust other people, etc. Be patient and treat them as a person with autonomy and agency! They might need to just sit on the ground for a few minutes to recover before trying to get back in their chair. They might want everyone to leave them alone. They might ask you to call someone specific. Their chair might have broken and that can be extremely distressing. All of this is like if your legs spontaneously stop working when you're out and about!

A lot of wheelchair users (NOT ALL) have ways to get into their chair on their own once the chair is close enough and brakes engaged (but it's hard from the ground!). Here's what brakes look like on a lot of manual wheelchairs, in case they ask you to lock the brakes. They're levers on each side and pushing the lever pushes a bar against the wheel to hold it still.

ID: A manual wheelchair with the brake levels circled in red and labeled "user brake levers"

*There is also the possibility of course that a person fell out of their chair due to a seizure or other medical event, so that is why it is important to ask if they are okay. If you saw them hit their head, tell them so. If they had a medical event, follow protocol for that, I'm not gonna get into it here (thought I could).

**sometimes a person will be clear after the first question i.e. "I'm all good thanks" clearly means they do not need you to ask another question, you can just leave them alone. Keep walking and don't stare. A lot of the time people will be a bit banged up but be totally fine and able to manage on their own.

TLDR: Ask the wheelchair user if they're okay, then what they need, and then do exactly that, including leaving them alone. Thanks!

[ghost-in-a-pinata]

an important reply in the tags

[aangel-biites]

[ID: A reply reading, "It's worth noting that unless someone is in immediate danger (on a road, near a chemical spill) there's basically no justification to move a unresponsive person on the ground, basic first aid will tell you that your objective is to stabilize and support until actual trained professionals arrive. Even outside of the context of pre-existing disability and being mishandled, if someone has a brand new neck injury you could seriously, permanently harm them by causing undue stress on the spine. You should always assume an unresponsive person on the ground has internal injuries you can't account for, and unless they're about to get smushed or asphyxiate on vomit leave them where you found them and call an ambulance." End ID]

[towerofglass]

Got an alert that just my 2nd CPU temps were elevated and investigated...

[semiohazard]

package deal

from this draft:

[395nm]

My stick #mystick

[wizardarchetypes]

someone in the tags said that a lot of the distress-tolerance training for people with OCD is similar to the distress-tolerance training they're learning for their reactive dog and i love that because yeah. we really are just mammals huh.

[argumate]

so much crime discourse is implicitly predicated on there being an ontological distinction between Criminals and Ordinary People that the justice system should be able to immediately intuit by mystical introspection, like why would you let Criminals out on bail? why would you put Ordinary People on trial? if police already knew who was guilty in advance then their actions really would look even more perverse than they already are!

[bigbigtruck]

quotes taken from the source

(the 4th one is Bumpus wanting dinner, friends can back me up on this)

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

come back to me most perfect of comics

[capnsoapy]

okay but seriously what's going on with [tumblr] moderation right now

[capnsoapy]

okay but seriously seriously

[capnsoapy]

Not even in an "I'm outraged" kind of way, in a "genuinely perplexed as to what could be going on behind the scenes to produce these outcomes." I want to stop staring at the shadows on the wall and exit Plato's allegory of the website moderation

[pangur-and-grim]

what isn’t captured here are the spit droplets raining down on me

[stoned-ratpack]

I captured some of my favorite frames of The Beast and her activities

[pure-sea-salt]

scrolled through the pangur tag for over an hour to find this specific post because i couldnt stop thinking about it, hence why ive been liking and reblogging a bunch of pangur

[prokopetz]

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.

[stephenleasheppard]

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?

"No, why would it?"

[sabotflask]

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."

[prokopetz]

#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)

It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.

[countzeroor]

It also bears mentioning that the current culture of RPGs encourages a separation of player knowledge and character knowledge. I, as a player, know that the big cat with tentacles out the back is a displacer beast, but my character doesn't, and the character that replaced the one the displacer beast killed. That separation, particularly with Survival Modules, was not the case back in the day. Characters had full knowledge shared between them, so if Dave the fighter got disintegrated by a beholder, Dave's identical twin brother now knew beholders have disintegration attacks. This is part of the reason why it was considered bad form for players to read monster books.

[prokopetz]

It's broadly untrue that the idea of separating player knowledge from character knowledge is a modern development. The practice descends to tabletop RPGs from the historical wargames they splintered off from; tabletop wargames which focus on accurately re-creating historical battles often operate on a gentleperson's agreement to refrain from acting on strategic information that your side's commanders couldn't reasonably have been aware of, or employing tactical doctrines which had not yet been developed when the re-created battle took place, and many early tabletop RPGs adopted similar conventions, to greater or lesser degrees. Heck, games like Paranoia were parodying those conventions as early as the mid 1980s! It's come in and out of fashion in mainstream RPGs over the past half-century, but it's not a recent thing.

It is, however, correct that there typically was no expectation of observing these conventions when playing survival modules in particular.

[ambidisastrous]

People who work within a system: okay so studies show that the normal system works 90% of the time, but because it’s very bad when it doesn’t work, we’ve set up a process to manage those outliers. We need six well-trained workers to run the system 100% of the time without any serious incidents.

CEOs and politicians, every time: Well i just saw it go right twice in a row which means the normal system which you say works 90% of the time actually works 100% of the time. We’re cutting the team down to one person pulling 18 hour shifts without breaks

[revizyonist]

med people are so annoying "This family's 8 year old child who was about to go through a major surgery and kept crying that she was hungry so they pitied her and gave her food, she then had a heart attack in the surgery. They're so stupid 😒" girl they didn't know that could happen or why it happens. it takes so little time to explain to them that will happen instead of telling them "no food" with no explanation 10 times

[revizyonist]

"Before surgery, your body’s reflexes that protect your airway are relaxed by anesthesia. If there’s food or liquid in your stomach, it will near certainly come back up and go into your lungs, which can cause choking, a severe lung / heart infection or even a heart attack. That’s called aspiration, and it is life-threatening. It's hard, but it's only a single day to prevent near certain death. Not eating or drinking beforehand massively lowers the risk and helps prevent these life threatening situations under anesthesia." <- TIP: patients have brains which allows them to receive information just like you

[ancelineonline]

I have four kids. I’ve had one or another of them need some kind of surgical procedure that requires anesthesia four or five times over the past 15 years.

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

I’m not stupid. I understood that just fine. Hell, my kids would have understood that just fine. But no one bothered to tell us.

[bowditch]

i did know this before having kids (i have six). we have a kid that's needed multiple procedures requiring anesthesia. and every single time, i am asked multiple times if i'm sure he was not given any food or water after a certain point.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

"maybe some people will get nervous and refuse surgery" okay so they need more counseling about risks and anxiety, not less information in a way that actually does endanger their child or themselves!

[arctic-turtle-cassiopeia]

Reblogging to save a life and teach medical professionals basic communication skills