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@kingsolomonblog
8 page comic about a mech and a mechanic and grief
hello precious followers. i made a comic about grief, or how i feel when i process grief at least. i put a robot in it. please read it.
if you wanna catch future comic pages i make as soon as i make em, heres a link to mmmmmy patreon! huge giant massive thank you to my patreon supporters you guys rule
petra parker x mj yuri
I'm at a convention for the game of Go with a friend who is almost 84 years old, and he is constantly being accosted by elementary schoolers who want to play him because every year there is a prize for whoever plays a game with the biggest age difference between players.
So every time I go to look for him, I see this:
People in the tags pointing out that this is a great way to get communities to interact: you are extremely correct. There were a lot of kids at this year's go congress (many of them extremely strong players) and it's very funny to watch them roving in packs looking for old people to challenge. At one point when my friends and I were sitting in one of the side rooms, a trio of elementary schoolers marched in and shouted "IS ANYONE HERE OVER FIFTY?"
Presumably so that they could compete for the Elder Slayer award:
I have faith in them I think they were competing for Dan Destroyer and had identified over 50s as most likely to be dan-level
MORE PHOTS IN MUH REBLOG
Psst. Don't tell the jolkein rolkein rolkein estate, but this is amazing. DO consider buying a print from the extraordinary artist responsible:
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/leiaham/
Original Twitter thread with the artist's thoughts and commentary:
yes carrie killed over 400 people ok. thats bad i know. but have you considered that i feel really bad for her :(
carrie deserved to kill 400 ppl as a treat
That's because he didn't write, nor intend to write, a horrible terrible disturbed woman beyond redemption. The genesis of Carrie (told in its entirety in the 1999 edition's introduction that you can read here, and in King's memoir On Writing), was this: sometime in high school, King read an article in Life magazine about supposed poltergeist activity in a home, which seemed to be associated with the teenage girl who lived there. The article included the hypothesis that poltergeist activity is, in some way, tapped into or manifested by girls at that critical and tumultuous age.
And some years before that, King had gone to school with a couple of girls he pseudonymously calls Tina and Sandra, who were bullied and shunned by the other kids—Tina for wearing the same clothes every day, Sandra for her epilepsy and extremely religious mother, but both really for having some undefinable Other quality that kids pick up on like blood in the water. Both of them were dead by the time King began writing Carrie: Tina by suicide, Sandra from her epilepsy.
Carrie was what King imagined might have happened if that explanation of poltergeist activity were correct, and if Tina and Sandra had been able to tap into such an energy. He started writing the story a few years after getting married (his wife Tabitha is also a writer), but abandoned the idea a few pages in; the raw, merciless adolescent cruelty the story called for was too much to deal with, and what did he know about teenage girls, anyway? But Tabitha dug the pages out of the trash and read them, and convinced him it was a story that needed telling.
Carrie is a story which, perhaps like poltergeist activity, could only happen to a girl on the brink of womanhood, when every emotion and sensation is excruciatingly vivid and nothing makes sense anymore and every single occurrence in your life is the most important thing that will ever happen to you. It's about being horribly powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and alienated from your own body. It's about the visceral, starved animal fear and rage of being a teenage girl, and it goes to show what an arcane and powerful craft creative writing is that a man could manage to capture that without having experienced it firsthand.
"Sometimes—quite often, in fact—I wish that Tina and Sandy were alive to read it," King says in the 1999 introduction to Carrie. "Or their daughters."
I've said it before but I'll say it again I refuse to believe anyone that likes turning themselves into the opposite gender as much as Naruto does is anything close to cis I cant prove it but I know in my heart that lad is gender fluid
Thats why Kishimoto didn't give Kurama any notable screen time until the very end of the series
I grumble about how if chess was released today it would have tutorial pop-ups and a dozen different colors each with special units and buffs and the end result would be a game that looked much more complex than the bare simplicity of the original but would actually have shallower gameplay compared to the incredible depth offered by chess.
modern games can feel like advanced simulations of competence, much like the mobile clicker games, where they guide you through tapping on stuff and you look like a genius and always win (until the difficulty inevitably ramps up to the part where you have to pay).
the best classic games are simple but deep, with a small number of mechanics that combine in intricate ways to create gameplay that scales in difficulty such that children can learn them and yet spend a lifetime trying to master them.
Civilisation used to be more like that! and of course the simplification made it unrealistic: a phalanx might randomly beat a battleship (!) if it got in a lucky shot (with a spear presumably, or maybe the battleship accidentally blew itself up) and the setting was a mishmash of anachronisms: Frederick the Great in 2000 BC building the hanging gardens and then living for thousands of years and going to the stars.
the newer games add in tons more detail and to me that weakens the game, it becomes more like a tour of alternate history than a game, but maybe that's still a useful thing: the crude complexity of the mechanics offers some insight into the moving parts of the past, and the broad cast of characters and buildings and units feels more like a Wikipedia deep dive than trying to explain exactly what a "rook" is supposed to be in chess and why it can travel so fast.
I've always wanted to build the ultimate civilisational simulator and obviously I'll never actually do it because I'm lazy, but also because the ultimate simulator wouldn't be a game, it would just play itself while you watched! and offering you the opportunity to click stuff as it happens might be the tradeoff to get people to pay attention.
still, if I'm ever trapped on an island for a week or two with a laptop but no internet access it would be nice to have Civ 1 or 2 installed, for old times sake.
To me what killed the civ games and successors for me was some of the things they've put in to prevent snowballing, they put in these mechanics to force you second-guess every city building and therefore placement and such because people used to steamroll Deity through colony spam, I feel it was better when people could do that and the I could relax on lower difficulties. Everything feels overtuned now, the pace is tightly controlled, at X point you are supposed to be at Y cities and if you are at too much or too little the game will punish you.
I don't have much experience with that aspect, but I do think it's interesting that Civilisation was originally so settler based, hardly distinguishable from Meier's later Colonisation, so you have ancient empires expanding out from a central capital into virgin territory that is largely empty aside from the odd barbarian, when of course by that point in history the earth is essentially "full" in the sense that there are people and even cities everywhere, the core mechanic of founding a city from scratch and babysitting its development is already ahistorical.
This made me smile. Maybe you need a smile today too.
brownies when you sift powdered sugar on them
fascinating how often men expect women to sympathize with their fears of being perceived as or treated like a woman
so much "masculinity" is constructed around the certainty that being gay or being a woman is inherently demeaning. and we're supposed to nod along supportively
"male loneliness crisis" ok so like.....what would happen if you started acting like a better friend to other men in your life? what's stopping you? is it the fear of being perceived as one of your inferiors?
"men aren't allowed to show emotions" ok so like…..what would happen if you started being more emotionally expressive? what's stopping you? is it the fear of being perceived as one of your inferiors?
Got into a discussion about emergency response at a professional retreat recently and everyone was going on and on about agility, and I was like, "Okay but what about contingency?"
And they were like "What?"
And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."
And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"
And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.
And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.
Anyway, that's how I figured out I'm Batman-coded and also learned how Batman must feel talking to supposedly professional superheroes who never bothered to run disaster scenarios until I pointed out that it's insane that they don't already have a plan for if Superman turns evil.
There’s a phrase that really stuck in my head around this. It was from one of the British divers who enacted the Thai caving rescue, though I couldn’t tell you which one or which interview.
As he described to the interviewer a moment of panic and how he he overcame, the interviewer said, in one of those, summarise-last-answer-given-with-appropriate-levels-of-respect-in-order-to-proceed-to-next-question phrasing’s, “Wow, so you rose to the occasion -“
And the diver said, “No, actually people always get that exactly wrong. In an unexpected and urgent situation you don’t rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training.”
roald dahl was antisemitic and misogynistic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife (and was racist as well as antisemitic!). hp lovecraft was racist as fuck. anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think they bleed into the books so uh keep an eye out for that
the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people
I want to tell a story to the artists and would-be artists out there.
When I was 19, I made a large oil painting of the nerd I would eventually marry. I poured all my attention and care into this painting. It's the only art I have from back then that still holds up as a work I'm proud of today.
I entered it into a judged show at the local art center. It got an honorable mention. I went to see the show with my beloved model. One of the judges came up to talk to me, and highlighted that all the judges really liked the painting. It would have placed, except, you see, the feet were incorrect. They were too wide and short, and if I just studied a bit more anatomy-
I called over my future wife, and asked her to take off her shoe. Being already very used to humoring me, she did. The judge looked at her very short, very wide little foot. Exactly as I'd lovingly rendered it. I would never edit her appearance in any way.
The judge looked me in the eye, and to his credit, he really looked like he meant it when he said "Oh I'm so sorry."
Anyways the moral of the story is that all of those anatomy books that teach you proportions are either showing you averages, or a very specific idea of an idealized body. Actual bodies are much more varied than that.
So don't forget to draw from observation, and remember that humans aren't mass produced mannequins. Delight in our variation. Because it's supposed to be there.
Allright if 20,000 people are going to post a story about a painting I did of my wife, then I am going to post the painting itself.
For those calling for justice, the same painting won a contest at my college (my university professor had met my model), and the university bought it from me and hung it up there for over a decade, square little feet and all. Then, the library underwent renovations and a librarian I am thankful for forever went through heroic measures to track me down again even though I'd gotten married and changed my name, and offered it back to me. And now it hangs in our house even though my wife doesn't ordinarily want to look at paintings of herself and I don't normally want to look at paintings I made. We both have a soft spot for this one.
This is so beautiful, Your wife is very beautiful and I love that I can feel all the love You have for her. That's the most precious thing.
Sharing secrets
What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy
Even as an advertiser (especially as an advertiser), I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change. More than lowering the price of eggs. Removing these advanced manipulation tools would force everyone—politicians included—to snap back into reality. By outlawing advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel.
I started out reading this smugly saying to myself yeah, right.
But by the end I'm sold. Let's ban advertising.
We can start small, maybe with city ordinances. Then roll it out county wide, then at the state level. Once other states see how quiet and sane things can be, they'll adopt the ban too. The ones that don't will remain snarling islands of rage & delusion until the people move away.
Let's ban advertising.
the entire state of vermont already banned roadside billboards years and years ago. change is possible!!
