I like the idea that Fig, specifically, always stands on Fabian's blind-side. not only cuz she's just very protective of her friends, but also cuz she's never quiet so Fabian always knows she's there without having to see her. she's always rambling, humming a tune, thumbing idly at her bass, chains and jewelry jingling and boots thunking as she walks
A lot of younger people have no idea what aging actually looks and feels like, and the reasons behind it. That ignorance is so dangerous. If you donât want to âbe old,â you arenât talking about a number of years. I have patients in their late 80s who could still handily beat me in a raceâone couple still runs marathons together, in their late 80sâand I lost someone who was in her early 60s to COPD last year. What you want is not youth, it is health.
If you want to still be able to enjoy doing things in your 60s and 70s and 80s and even 90s, what you want to do, right now, is quit smoking, get some activity on a regular basis (a couple of walks a week is WAY better for you than nothing; increasing from 1 hour a day of cardio to 1.5 will buy you very little), and eat some plants. Thatâs it. No magic to it. No secret weird tricks. Donât poison yourself, move around so your body doesnât forget how, and eat plants.
If you have trouble moving around now because of mobility limitations, bad news: you still need to move around, not because itâs immoral not to, but because thatâs still the best advice we have. I highly recommend looking up the Sit and Be Fit series; it is freely available and has exercises that can be done in a chair, which are suitable for people with limited mobility or poor balance. POTS sufferers, Iâm looking at you.
If you have trouble eating plants because of dietary issues (they cause gas, etc.) or just because theyâre bitter (super taster with texture issues here!), bad news. You still want to find a way to get some plants into your body on a regular basis. I know. It sucks. The only way I can do it is restaurantsâthey can make salads taste like food. I can also tolerate some bagged salads. On bad weeks, the OCD with contamination focus gets so bad I just canât. However, canned beans always seem âsafe,â and they taste a bit like candy, so theyâre a good fallback.
If you smoke and you have tried quitting a million times and youâre just not ready to, bad news. You still need to quit. Your body needs you to try and keep trying. Your brain needs it, too. Damaging small blood vessels racks up cumulative damage over time that your body can start trying to reverse as soon as you quit. I know itâs insanely, absurdly addictive. You still need to.
You cannot rules lawyer your way past your bodyâs basic needs. It needs food, sleep, activity, and the absence of poison. Those are both small things and big asks. You cannot sustain a routine based on punishment, so donât punish your body. Find ways to include these things that are enjoyable and rewarding instead. Experiment. There is no reason not to experimentâyou donât have to know instantly whatâs going to work for you and what wonât, you just need to be willing to try things and make changes when things arenât working for you.
You will still age. Your body will stop making collagen and elastin. Tissues you can see and tissues you canât see will both sag. Cushioning tissues under your skin will get thinner. Youâll bruise more easily. Skin will tear more easily. Accumulated sun damage will start to show more and more. Joints will begin to show arthritis. Tendons and ligaments will get weaker and get injured more easily, as will muscles. Bones will lose mass and get easier to break. Youâll get tired more easily.
But you know what makes the difference between being dead, or as good as, in your 60s vs your 90s? Activity, plants, and quitting smoking. And donât do meth. Saw a 58-year-old guy this week who is going to have a heart attack if he doesnât quit whatever stimulant heâs on. I pretended to believe it was just the cigarettes, and maybe it is, but meth and cocaine will kill you quicker. Stop poisoning yourself.
Baby steps; take it one step at a time; you donât need to have everything figured out right now. But you do need to be working on figuring things out.
You will be unsurprised to learn that someone already accused me of ableism for suggesting that people not smoke, move regularly in ways their body can tolerate, and eat plants.
Do NONE of you eat canned beans with maple and ham? This is at every Safeway on Earth as far as I can tell, and if you hate most vegetables, these are a lot sweeter because of, you know, the added sugar. Eat candied plantsâglazed Brussels sprouts, candied yamsâif you canât stand the regular kind.
Oh, this is true, but you arenât familiar with how lazy I am. I will work 36 hours straight for WORKâIâve done it before and god willing I will never have to do it againâbut cooking or preparing food has never been something Iâve devoted time to. (Partly because of hours and demands of work.) I wasnât taught to cook because (explanation of my mother) and I didnât even scramble eggs until I was 19, and then I set them on fire the first time I tried. I gave myself nutritional deficiencies twice during residency. The prospect of having to know whatâs in my crisper AND use it before it goes bad despite the attentional difficulties, when my contamination OCD focus is already very bad, and KNOW when itâs gone bad when my only reference point is my also extremely OCD father, is untenable. I donât enjoy cooking or making salads, and theyâre pretty affordable at local places (in the sticks), so for me the math maths. However, it is definitely a good idea to learn to prepare salads and those of you with less baggage than me should definitely give it a shot! Salads can and should taste good! Raspberry vinaigrette and some candied walnuts or pecans plus some blue cheese crumbles = good shit. Who cares what plants you put it on. Except not iceberg lettuce.
I once saw it observed on Tumblr that adding good tasting things you like to a salad you're making does not cancel out the nutrition in the vegetable matter
(might've been OP. sounds like the kind of thing you post)
That wasnât me, but I co-sign it 100%. Iâd rather have patients eating salads that are completely covered in those âhigh fat!!!!â salad dressings that news programs love to freak out about than not eating plants. Do what you need to do to the plant to make it enjoyable to eat. Caramelize your onions. Put hollandaise sauce on your asparagus. Glaze your Brussels sprouts. Make! Life! Worth! Living! And make it possible to keep living it.
Penitence as a lifestyle is both unnecessary and often actively harmful.
Julie Hunterâs movement_with_me on Instagram is a great resource for low-energy movement/exercise strategy. Julie was bedbound with ME/CFS following a COVID infection, and she used her experience as an athletic coach to figure out ways to reintroduce tiny doses of movement into her schedule, interspersed with purposeful rest, in such an effective way that she is now effectively cured and has returned to her pre-COVID baseline. She offers paid personalized movement coaching, wherein she creates a flexible multi-week schedule for clients to follow. Her Instagram account is a totally free treasure trove of advice, and if you scroll back a ways youâll find videos demonstrating very simple starter exercises with a range of adaptations for different levels of ability.
Justin Agustin has an Instagram account and a YouTube channel full of âgentle functional exercises for everyday life,â including lots of workouts for beginners, seniors, and people living very sedentary lives. Many of his videos demonstrate techniques for beginners alongside a more advanced option, and he heavily stresses to only do what you are able to instead of pushing yourself further and potentially getting hurt. There are also paid versions of his work â a website and an app â with monthly challenges and a nutrition guide (and possibly more, but I havenât used the paid version so idk).
And a guided flexibility recommendation!
David Thurinâs movementbydavid account on Instagram is all about gaining and maintaining flexibility through both active and passive stretching. He is incredibly flexible now, but he frequently mentions that it didnât come naturally to him: He has consistently put time and effort into becoming more flexible, and you can do it too! Being flexible helps prevent injury, and, like fitness, is something you have to work to maintain and will lose if you donât put in that work. Also like fitness, itâs something you can get better at, even starting from scratch.
All three of these people emphasize that you can follow their videos without special equipment, using things you probably already have (like a chair, a wall, a counter, and weights like a water bottle or can of food).
If you have access to an oven, I can't recommend enough just cutting whatever veggies you like into bite sized chunks, drizzling some olive oil over them on a sheet pan, adding generous salt and pepper, and chucking it in the oven at 400 for 15-20 minutes. Carrots, potatoes, cauliflower, brussles sprouts, broccoli, asparagus, its all delicious this way and takes zero babying. You can eat it standing up at the stove straight off the sheet pan if you don't wanna do more dishes. Chuck some meat on there too, or pop some beans in the microwave and you've got a full meal, and if you have a big pan you can easily cook enough for four people at a go this way. Leftovers are good cold and can be eaten straight out of the fridge.
The most terrifying part of having memory issues is when you can feel something from 5 seconds ago be thrown out the window and there's an empty hole where it once was. You remember that you forgot something.
also it occurred to me last night that since i headcanon that fabian and almost certainly ayda as well know how to play some intruments (i think fiddle/violin for fabian, less sure about ayda. piano is the go-to in period novels but i'm not sure how well it fits her). it could be fun for them to make a guest appearance on a sig figs song. either classical genre OR since gorgug and fig(?) are both metalheads, maybe a symphonic metal song.
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 itâs 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 donât think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if youâve played or enjoyed this game. Itâs 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.Â
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.Â
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 doesnât. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like itâs above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. Itâs so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something âproblematicâ that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive.Â
To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:
(What the fuck do they think an âexplorerâ 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, itâs 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, youâre gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldnât 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 âthe good guys.â All of the âproblematicâ aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them..Â
(Donât worry guys thereâs 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:
(Donât 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 districtâs 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 novelâs worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just donât have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the âradium girlsâ 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 âbad actors who hold terrible beliefs.â 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 donât go anywhere either. They donât belong to any social movements, they donât get organized, they donât push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals.Â
You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? Theyâre under assault.
Thatâs right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of⊠uh, âOtherwhere.â (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) Thatâs 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 âcolonists.â With nukes chain lightning.
(That last sentence continues on âtens of thousands..â You get the picture.) So, whew, glad thatâs 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 wouldnât want to hear its thoughts on Israel.Â
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, âperform questionable acts in the name of the common good,â 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.
Itâs actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaireâs 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. âGay 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!â
On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscuraâs gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create âactual-playâ shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, thatâs 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 itâs not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. Itâs 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 doesnât 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 Obscuraâs 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. "Donât have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Donât have actors say foreign words they donât know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Donât show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."
Weâd 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 âthey donât want to be disrespectful by playing itâ 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 - donât buy or support their game!
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