[grynwood]

God's merry band of misfits

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

How many vampires do you think have been hit by a car backing up in a parking lot because the driver couldn't see their reflection

I’ve never considered it but you’re really shining light on what’s probably a very serious issue

[depsidase]

[adistraughtjester]

I am hoping that this is some sort of exaggeration or oversimplification because this is just blatant erasure of a major element of Greek culture and replaced by a more Christian version and I want to bang my head into a wall. That’s not what xenia is, and you just erased a major part of the Odyssey.

[adistraughtjester]

@watchanddream Sure! This got a bit lengthier than I intended, but I wanted to try and be thorough.

Put far too simply, xenia is the practice of hospitality, but it's also a ritual and in a sense a contract between guest and host. When a stranger arrives at your doorstep, you're expected to feed them and give them a gift as the host. Typically, you're not even supposed to ask them their name until they've finished their meal. Once you've done this as the host, the guest is now expected to share stories and information about themselves, and not burden you or your household. Typically, people focus on how hosts violate xenia, but guests can also violate xenia.

This is called a guest-friendship, and once it's established, you are expected to offer the same to your host should they ever visit. It's a ritual of hospitality, yes, but it's also used to establish alliances and can be passed down through generations. For example, in the Iliad, when Glaucus and Diomedes discover that their grandparents were guest-friends, they decide not to fight, but rather exchange armor.

Theoxeny is a common story you see in myth where a god (typically Zeus) disguises themselves as a mortal and requests to be hosted by someone. Should the host follow the rules of xenia, they'll be rewarded, but if they fail, they'll be punished or killed.

This is important to the Odyssey, as it comes up multiple times, but in particular, the cyclops, and the suitors. In both these instances, Odysseus arrives disguised and gives a false name, the practices of xenia are failed, and Odysseus reveals himself and punishes the one that failed to follow xenia. The suitors in particular fail xenia, as they both fail as hosts, AND as guests, for burdening Odysseus's household.

Xenia being treated as the golden rule comes across to me like a Christian reinterpretation, as while many Greek philosophers did have something similar to the golden rule, those were philosophers, and the idea that it's a religious command from a god seems much more in line with a Christian idea of where the rule comes from. (Note, I'm aware that other religions had something similar, even as a command from a god, but I highly doubt Nolan is drawing inspiration from those instances)

[notahorseindisguise]

WOAH just saw spiderman eating pizza on a roof

[notahorseindisguise]

oh shit he ate the whole thing . he just like me frfr

[notahorseindisguise]

spiderman just left the pizza box on the roof but then came back a minute later and clearly felt bad for littering so now hes swinging through downtown holding an empty pizza box

[notahorseindisguise]

hes hit a street light

[notahorseindisguise]

he's swinging away now clearly very embarrassed and he thinks nobody saw it. i saw you spiderman

[nycswebhead]

fuck

[trans-yllz]

I think a pet deposit is stupid but at least its a stupid I can understand you know. like sure a pet could cause more damage so extra "in case of damage" money is owed. whatever. at least I have a chance of getting it back. but pet rent is bonkers crazy. like no the amount of rent thats due is what the rent is. my cat isn't like raising property tax. normal rent isn't even calculated by number of people living in the house. you can't raise the rent when an extra person moves in. what. "pet rent". what the hell are you talking about. you sound insane. its a bunny rabbit

[byjove]

Did you know cracked shells are the most common cause for wild turtles to need rehabilitation? Did you know turtles with cracked shells are the most common reptiles in wildlife rehabilitation? Did you know it takes months for the shell to fuse back together? Did you know they fill in the empty spots with epoxy? Did you know that for reasons I cannot understand or articulate, I am fine watching footage of all other veterinary procedures but witnessing injured turtles undergo surgery makes me tear up with grief and sympathy? I have absolutely no idea why watching a spay on a mammal or the surgical repair of a broken leg or the draining of a hoof abscess on an ungulate does not bother me but little turtles being glued back together like Humpty Dumpty makes me hurt too. I’ve cleaned bite abscesses on cats and been fine but watching videos of turtles getting their shell glued together is where my mind draws the line for some reason.

[ultimatebeansmaster]

My guess is because of how life threatening a shell injury can be to a turtle. Cause the shell doesn’t cover their back, it is their back

[byjove]

Yes, I think so. Other broken bones are “just” broken bones but cracked shells open a void into the poor critter’s insides, which is horrifying to think of and extremely painful, I would assume, since turtles can feel their shells.

Anyway, the point of this post is that though shell fractures look extremely grave, they are often survivable if the critter receives prompt professional help. Native turtle species are in decline practically everywhere, every turtle matters, please keep an eye out for them when you are cutting the grass or moving heavy objects and please bring injured turtles to licensed wildlife rehabilitation facilities. They deserve to live long, happy, healthy lives.

[preserving-tiktok]

[aniseandspearmint]

Oh NO poor guy. And then they LAUGHED.

[immaplatypus]

“so this week my town made the news for—” nope

“there’s a restaurant two miles from my house called—” nope

“today I learned [celeb] went to my high school—” nope nope nope nope nope

these are all real posts I’ve seen on the internet that allowed me to identify a user’s hometown instantly. if it’s a small town, that’s doubly dangerous, because a bad actor could trace you just by a unique first name or selfie you once posted. in an age where doxxing and stalking are some of the worst I’ve ever seen it, you HAVE to think twice about what you’re posting online.

i once saw a 13-year old post an image they noted as being “a few miles from their house.” it had a theater in the shot with a unique enough name to be local. one google maps search, now everyone knew not only what city they lived in, but the possible neighborhoods in that radius too. and they had a HUGE following…who all knew this was a 13-year-old child.

so yeah. not to sound like a 90s internet safety PSA…but I’m gonna be that PSA for a minute.

if you’re posting an image, there is NO need to say that you live there. you could just be traveling. “saw this in Montana” is better than “saw this by my house!”

before you post about a venue, especially a restaurant or small store, check and see if it’s local—CRUCIALLY if it has only one or two locations. people might travel to arenas or convention centers, but they’re far less likely to be traveling to Bartleby’s Fish and Chips. if it’s an anecdote and you still live nearby, you can honestly just leave the name out entirely.

if you’re sharing a news story, it can just be a story you found and wanted to share. you don’t have to clarify “it happened in my town,” because even if you don’t mention your town name, an easily-googled news article will.

if you’re seeing a concert or meeting a celebrity on a tour that’s stopped locally, wait until they’ve hit a few more venues before you post about it, or at the very least wait until you get home. this is honestly a smart move for any event you attend: unless you’re marketing yourself, there’s no need to advertise your location in real time.

check your selfie backgrounds for anything identifying. this includes city names on venues, school names, street signs, and house numbers.

this stuff is flexible if you no longer live in your hometown, or if your city is particularly big, but there’s STILL no reason to tie yourself to your school, your workplace, or your street. you can call it paranoid, but as someone who’s seen my friends get literal death threats over fictional characters before, the last thing I want is someone willing to act on those threats finding out where they live.

anyway. PSA over. does a kickflip or whatever

[pathetic-gamer]

giant redwood trees really are so cool, they just have something incredibly special going on. it's hard to describe if you haven't seen them

[pathetic-gamer]

a certain je ne sequoia, if you will

[pathetic-gamer]

if this post has taught me anything, it's that a great number of people very proudly do not know there's a distinction between "giant redwood" and other redwoods

[memorycycle]

cowpool universe is being born

[cloud--king]

@bovineblogger

[fuckyeahchinesegarden]

Jiuzhaigou Valley in summer, Sichuan Province, China (photos by 魔法少女鸭鸭)

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[dragongirlbunny]

there is nothing a corporation hates more than having employees, but a close second is having to provide a good or service in order to make money. these two reasons concisely explain is why the ai bubble formed in the first place.

[seanofbeankeep]

Imagine getting expelled from school for being an atheist and years later that school builds a monument to you but of your dead drowned corpse with your dick out.

They do it all classy though but still

[featherfangart]

"I'm sorry. Did I come too late?"

[gallusrostromegalus]

re: the warrior cats name wheels and your tags

i cannot emphasize enough that warrior cats is, functionally, game of thrones for children

with all of the violence, politicking, and poor writing decisions that implies

whatever level of brutality that RP had was probably on par with the actual series

Hmm... The RP wasn't as heavy on the GOT-Style Politicking, and it didn't have much interpersonal violence (the cat colony was a very cooperative group for reasons that will become obvious in a minute) buuuut I think it might have been worse because the RP was a different Genre of Horror: Being A Small Mammal In The Wild. Disease. Predators. Hurricanes and other natural disasters. Urbanization and Pollution. The threat of starvation vs. the risk of the hunt. The balance of how much you were doing for the colony vs. how much it benefited you.

It wasn't a forum-type freeform RP, it was more of a chatgroup-based TTRPG where everyone played multiple characters and there was a lot of interpersonal RP, but there were very much encounters/combats/puzzles that were governed with the rules of a game called Mouseguard, which is very much from the school of early D&D where you'd show up with a binder full of characters you'd rolled up, because you were expecting most of them to die. Some sessions could involve multiple generations of cats.

The Game Master of that RPG was a former Hackmaster player of mine, and when she was busy with grad school, it was convenient for her to have me come in and play an antagonist for her players, instead of making her play ALL the NPCs. Some of the Antagonists I played were:

A female cougar that systematically hunted the colony to drive them to extreme paranoia so they'd fragment and be easier for her to hunt as her pregnancy progressed and she became less mobile/her cubs demanded more from her body. She was based on real-life events where a female cougar destroyed a large and controversial local cat colony over the course of a winter. The party did not defeat her, they had to leave and re-settle outside of her territory.

A Rabid Bat, and the subsequent Rabies Outbreak, with me taking over Player Characters as they succumbed to the disease. I remember a deliciously tragic post by the player who was the medicine cat. They decided their PC was so devastated by the outbreak that they consciously decided to go insane and join the rest of the rabid despite not actually being infected.

A Great-Horned Owl that should have been a fairly moderate encounter for the colony but somehow ended up killing like 80% of the PCs before they finally got it? RIP Horohoro, you were a wonderfully stupid menace to play.

A Team of human Trap-Neuter-Release volunteers, which got really existential and traumatic really fast. We kind of agreed halfway through that this was actually too depressing and moved onto my next, less tragic and Much funnier antagonist:

A Horse With A Phobia Of Cats. Cats had a 20% chance of encountering The Horse if they crossed a specific meadow, which they had to cross All The Time, because the only two sources of water and the fucking moonpool were in the meadow. It presented a severe logistical nightmare with a countdown- the cats had to figure out how to deal with the horse before the next half-moon or risk getting cut off from the starclan, and every day they didn't deal with the horse they had to roll for complications for dehydration. It took them five deaths and 26 days to figure out they could just Open The Gate.

Assisted in playing some natural disasters including a Hurricaine (and resulting flooding) , an 8.0 earthquake (and resulting tsunami), and a wildfire (and resulting famine).

Just A Fucking Alligator, who the players weren't actually supposed to fight, it was just there to prevent them from crossing a river at a convenient place on the map that the DM didn't want them to use, but Getting a 12AM Text from a friend asking me "Hey, wanna be an alligator?" When I was zooted on cold meds was really fun if somewhat disappointing in that I wanted to be magically transformed into The Objectively Best Reptile.

An Escaped Serval, who was actually perfectly friendly towards the PCs but *massively* disrupted the social and political dynamics of the colony because he was just so extremely fuckable. He got murdered in an ides-of-march style uprising by the male cats who felt they had been cucked, which lead to a full-on civil war event.

An Outbreak of Rabbit Papilloma Virus that had mutated to effect cats as well. Don't google that after dark. That arc lead to a shitload of political fuckery and the ascension of the new clanleader: Stageye, who became a very bitter believer in Nominative Determinism.

Since the Players enjoyed the Mountain Lion Psychological Horror so much (and everyone was playing too many characters and wanted a die-off event), I returned as another systemic colony-killer: A pack of similarly magical and hyperintelligent Feral Dogs. The Ash River Cemetery Pack were some of the best antagonists I've every played. I'm trying to find my RP notes but I remember Streetmeat, Third-Rail Racer, Overhead-Underhand, Two-Buck Luck, Darkstar, and Magenta, son of Tangerine (the medicine dogs were all named after different shades of red/purple/orange, AKA colors dogs normally can't see). I should draw them sometime. IIRC, the cats killed at least three of the eight dogs but ended up having to cede a lot of their territory to them and make an alliance with a previous rival colony to survive the winter.

Garfield, Eldritch Entity (Joke session modeled on a Simpson's Halloween Episode)

Like I said, I'm not very familiar with Canon Warrior Cats Lore, but my god is it fun to come in and play A Fucking Problem while everyone applauds you for being Such A Devastating Fucking Problem.

[oneconfusedfeesh]

Yeah, a lot of those sound pretty par for the course for Warriors, actually. A few fun tidbits from warriors canon:

Cats disembowel 'on-screen'

There actually was a cougar menacing the cats

for a while everyone thought one of the clan's leaders had rabies. Turns out he was possessed by his wife's dead stalker(I stopped reading before this happened)

Cat heaven and cat hell decided to duke it out and dragged the living cats into it

One noteable character got her face ripped off by dogs

A cat learned how to control dogs

fire

The second series was about the cats having to move because humans had decided they needed to bulldoze the forest they started in

disease outbreaks. So many disease outbreaks.

Assassinations

TNR's been alluded to

The very first main character joined the clan cats for the sake of his fireballs(IYKYK)

One of the cats travels to the past and meets a possibly eldritch cat being

Sometimes a bird snatches a cat and they just have to deal with it

Also kitty bigotry. So much kitty bigotry.

This series was for middle schoolers by the way.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Oh ok so Warrior Cats is to Gen Z what Animorphs was to millennials, EXCELLENT.

I'm honestly genuinely pleased at the level of gritty realism about the horrors of being an outdoor cat because that's the sort of thing that embeds itself in a young person's mind and makes them never let their own cats out.

Actually the RP might have been nicer than the books because the Trashcan (it was trashcan after all) was getting hit with mass death so often they literally could not afford to do Cat Bigotry, and had plenty of external threats to hate on.

I'm not sure what the timescale of WC is because I am curious about the relative death tolls of each.

There were about 12 players playing an average of 5 characters at any time, but I was called in when the average got over 8 PCs per player, so like, I'd start with a colony of 100-120 PCs and was expected to bring that number down to like, 20. Each antagonist arc I did played out over one week to three months in-game, and I think I calculated the average death rate to be a little over 21 cats per week across all of them. The Horse had the highest kill rate at 26 cats in 3 days (I was on dental surgery drugs last night and couldn't do math), but the Dogs had the highest total kill count, taking a colony of 150 cats down to 8 over the span of three months, with one session spanning one month in-game and running through 100 total/3 entire generations of cats.

My antagonists weren't meant to be defeated, they were meant to be dealt with- by leaving the area, coming to a truce, changing the way the colony operates etc. The Game Master's antagonists were meant to be killed or dealt with without as serious a death toll, but sometimes the dice would decide otherwise, which was part of the fun. She made some great ones like:

Trashclan was looking for a new home when they found this beautiful woodland area and abandoned factory thing full of slow, dim-witted prey and absolutely no humans for miles and miles. Paradise, really, except for the ghost cats that looked like rotting corpses that seemed absolutely determined to not let them settle in the area, causing disasters, possessing PCs and general terrorism. Trashclan tried to hold their ground against what they thought were cats that had been banished to cat hell, until one of the medicine cats managed to commune with one of the ghosts to ask what their fucking problem was. Best in-game use of the "This is not a place of honor" warning ever.

The game was taking place in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey. Like, far enough after the apocalypse that there were cities and civilization again, but there very much had been a major apocalypse.

The Moonpool develops a Carbon Monoxide leak from vegetation rotting under the mud.

Just straight-up Growltiger from Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS. Years before the movie, so look up the stage musical.

Also the Great Rumpus Cat from the same musical

She used a lot of the characters from CATS as NPCs. And the lore as the basis for the afterlife lore of the American warrior cats. So rather than going to the star place, Trashclan believed they would go to the Heavyside Lair.

An Alien Invasion Force lands and the cats save Earth when they eat the 6-inch tall would-be colonizers. There were a lot of them and they had laser guns, but there were a lot of very hungry cats too. Some of the PCs developed alien mutations from eating too many aliens tho.

Not an antagonist per se, but the GM and two of the players got very, very deep into the science of feline inbreeding so they could have a realistic incest mechanic and I think one of them ended up publishing a scientific paper about it because they had done all that research, they might as well get that grant money.

Godzilla, who actually turned out to be a major boon for Trashclan because he laid waste to the city with the TNR volunteers and opened up a bunch of new territory for them. He was grated godhood and ascended to part of their panthe(r)on.

I should get in touch with her again.

[gallusrostromegalus]

1.

PROFOUNDLY DISAPPOINTED WITH THIS SERIES NOW.

2. Guess who might be playing a next generation of the Ash River Pack?

:)

It's me

:)

Rebecca (not her real name) has apparently been continuously running this RP since 2006, and my last participation in it was in 2016. Becca manages this by having an in-game clock where players need to finish encounters/make decisions/accomplish goals by an IRL date so ten years have also passed in the Trashclan RP.

As it stands, there is some Three Houses bullshit going on where the MASSIVE Trashclan (15 players and over 200 PCs!!) is threatening to split into three smaller clans, which would make sense in-game, but none of the players actually want to do that because it's a huge logistical hassle.

So when I texted Becca earlier today, she was DELIGHTED to hear from me because "They've had it too good for too long."

:D

She's setting up a proposal for a Decimation Event, and I'm skimming the timeline channel to catch up, but there's a very real possibility that I'll get to cry havoc and release the dogs of war upon an RP server again.

Oh no. There is ONE player character left who remembers the Ash River Massacre.

Oh No. She's in dubious standing with all three factions.

OH NO. Trashclan hasn't actually *seen* a dog in over 3 years because of their magically shielded location. The majority of the current population doesn't even know what a dog looks like.

OH NOOOOO

The vote is tomorrow but I'm making up lore and rolling horrible dogs now I can feel the evil growing within me again >:D