The Kobold Hideout

In a hole in the ground there lived a Kobold.

[unsolicited-opinions]

i'm legitimately curious, and struggling with a lot of thoughts relating to the war in Gaza. what do you think of the Hannibal Directive?

You've probably seen people online spouting nonsense like "Israel killed most of its own people on October 7th. The Hannibal Directive proves it. Hamas didn't do the massacre - Israel did."

Let's go over what the Hannibal Directive actually was, its status on 10/7/23, and how stories about it have been dishonestly spun.

The Hannibal Directive was issued in 1986. Here's what it actually said:

"א. בזמן מחטף הופכת המשימה העיקרית חילוץ חיילינו מידי החוטפים גם במחיר של פגיעה או פציעת חיילינו. ב. במידה ויזוהו החוטפים והחטופים ולא נענו לקריאות לעצור, יש לבצע ירי נק"ל (נשק קל), על מנת להוריד את החוטפים לקרקע, או לעצור אותם. ג. אם לא עצר הרכב או החוטפים, יש לירות לעברם ירי נשק קל בבודדת, במכוון, על מנת לפגוע בחוטפים גם אם המשמעות פגיעה בחיילינו."

"A. During an abduction, the main mission becomes rescuing our soldiers from the captors, even at the cost of harming or injuring our own soldiers. B. If the captors and captives are identified and do not heed calls to stop, use small arms fire to bring down the captors or halt them. C. If the vehicle or captors do not stop, use aimed small arms fire to hit the captors, even if that means harming our own soldiers."

This isn't particularly controversial in principle. A captured soldier becomes a massive piece of political leverage, a tool for extortion, and a severe threat to national security - and accepting the risk of injuring your own people during a rescue attempt is a standard, tragic reality of combat. The underlying logic is standard across professional militaries.

Note that the directive as written applied specifically to soldiers. That distinction matters when we get to October 7.

From its inception, the directive was controversial within Israel. Some commanders refused to pass it down, as they were permitted to do under the Spirit of the IDF booklet. In 2011, Chief of Staff Benny Gantz clarified that the directive did not authorize deliberately shooting a captured soldier - it aimed to stop terrorists from escaping with them, not to kill the hostage. The directive was revised several times, with legal reviews consistently recommending every effort be made to avoid harming soldiers who were hostages.

In 2016, Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot officially cancelled it.

It was long gone on 10/7/23.

A Haaretz investigation, though, identified three specific instances where local commanders invoked a Hannibal-style order at points along the Gaza border: at the Erez crossing, the Re'im army base, and the Nahal Oz outpost.

The orders were primarily aimed at striking the gaps in the border fence and vehicles moving back into Gaza to stop the mass transfer of hostages. Because Hamas was taking civilian hostages, not soldiers -local commanders were adapting a soldier-focused doctrine on the fly, in chaos, without official authorization. That context matters for understanding what actually happened.

So what does the evidence actually confirm?

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry confirmed at least 14 Israelis likely killed by IDF forces. The Be'eri incident (where a tank commander ordered fire on a house holding hostages, killing 13 of 14) is the most documented single case.

These deaths are real, they are serious, and the officers responsible should face accountability - that's the only acceptable reaction to a friendly fire incident.

At no point has any investigation found that the IDF deliberately targeted Israeli civilians.

Every documented IDF-caused death on October 7 occurred in the context of combat decisions made to stop Hamas from dragging hostages back into Gaza. These decisions were chaotic, unauthorized, and in some cases probably a bad call. A commander who orders fire on a vehicle he believes contains Hamas fighters and accidentally kills Israelis in the process has made a bad decision, but he has not committed a premeditated massacre of his own people.

There is no evidence -NONE WHATSOEVER - that the IDF identified Israeli civilians and chose to kill them. This claim exists solely to launder the responsibility of Hamas (and others from Gaza) for the atrocities visited upon Israeli civilians on 10/7/23.

The total October 7 death toll was approximately 1,200 Israelis. That number is documented and forensically verified. The 14+ deaths caused accidentally by the IDF are worth investigating and accountability should be sought- but they are not an alternative explanation for the massacre.

That's how Hamas supporters spun it.

In July 2024, when Haaretz published an investigation into Hannibal-style orders at those three military sites on October 7, this was journalism. Israeli reporters, using IDF documents and soldier testimony, holding their own military accountable for specific decisions made in specific locations.

The article did not claim Israel caused most of the deaths. It did not claim Hamas was innocent. It reported on a real institutional failure at the Erez crossing, Re'im base, and Nahal Oz outpost.

Within two weeks, that article had been shared over 16,000 times on X, almost entirely by accounts using it to argue that Israel, not Hamas, was responsible for the October 7 massacre.

Hamas supporters have elevated this sort of dishonesty to an art form: they take legitimate accountability journalism, remove every qualifier, delete the specific scope, and present it as proof of something the article explicitly does not claim and try to make the IDF responsible for the crimes committed by Hamas and other Gazans.

The people doing this aren't engaging with the Haaretz investigation. They're borrowing its brand as a prop to make the absurd allegation seem credible. It isn't - and anyone who actually read the article knows that.

The claim that Israel killed its own people on October 7 isn't a good-faith misreading of a complicated story. It's a conspiracy theory.

It takes a documented atrocity with 1,200 named victims, forensic evidence, and survivor testimony, and replaces it with a fairy tale where the Jews did it to themselves.

That's not skepticism. That's not "asking questions."

The people spreading this libel aren't engaging with the Haaretz story or the UN or any of the investigations they pretend to cite without having read them. They're using the language of accountability journalism to run interference for a massacre.

~6,000 people including Hamas, other militant groups, and Gazan civilians burned families alive, took 251 hostages, and committed widespread torture and sexual violence on October 7. That happened. The Hannibal Directive didn't make it happen. Israel didn't make it happen. Hamas made it happen.

They filmed themselves doing it, they livestreamed it, they called their families to brag about it, they celebrated it in Gaza, their leaders praised it and promised to repeat it. They want the credit for their massacre.

Only western useful idiots have any doubt - and their invocation of the Hannibal directive is how you spot them.

[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."

[forevermorallylucky]

Being from Greece makes a lot of the arguments people give on why Israel should be destroyed sound even more ridiculous and weird. (especially when these people are also fellow greeks) ''Israel is an ethno state!!!''- You mean a nation state, and yes, so is Greece

''The founding of Israel was based on displacement of Palestinians''- Look, I don't want to minimize that at all because people losing their homes is fucking terrible but that doesn't mean the solution is expelling Israelis now. There was a population exchange between Greece and Tuurkey in 1922. Both sides ethnically cleansed people. It was a terrible thing to do. But both Turkey and Greece exist now as two seperate states with clearly defined borders (if you ignore some shit erdogan tries to pull in the agean). And you don't question Greece's or Turkey's right to not be wiped off.

''Israeli identity is fake because it was based on smth that happened 3000 years ago!!!''- Ok sorry to break it to you but us Greeks have made our entire national identity revolve around who we were 3000 years ago. And if you want to argue abt fakeness of identity I would argue ours was a less organic one. Jewish people maintained the same religion and basic belief systems for 3000 years. They continuously felt the connection with Eretz Yisrael. We switched to Orthodox christianity from whatever 12 god shit we had, we lost most of our literacy that allowed us to keep tpuch with ancient texts, we embraced so many customs from the Ottomans and YET it was still valid when we tried to reclaim our ancient greek identity to build a nation partly on the basis of that

''European colonial powers helped prop up Israel which means it is an imperialistic state!''- Do you think Greece got independence or gained more land purely through OUR military strength lol?

BTW one of the reasons i support a 2 state solution so much is bcs I think us and Turkey did a relatively fine job at accepting that although both turkish and greek populations have historically resided in both greek areas and asia minor (which today is turkey) there needs to be a compromise so that we both live in peace.

[fipindustries]

I cannot stand the parodies of modern major general, they're overdone and simply not as good as the original. They've done them about everything, whatever topic, big or small.

And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.

The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.

The scanning of the lyrics in the meter is unbearable, they emphazise the syllables in ways that are untenable, in short in matters musical, prosodic and ephemeral, i cannot stand the parodies of modern major general!

[unorthodoxchronicles]

[animusbell]

celestia is such a funny character like she's constantly manipulating twilight and friends to do shit instead of just asking and you could arguably frame that as being bc she's a "god" and pushing fate to her design or whatever, except that she engages with the group like a normal and relatable person, which makes it more like villainous machinations, except 90% of this manipulation goes towards things like "I don't want my party to be boring shit again. put my little country girl blorbos in there with zero prep so they fuck it up bad"

[animusbell]

you think you've fucked anything up around princess celestia and she's like heh. no worries. all according to keikaku

[jukashi]

Celestia instantly makes more sense as a character when you ignore the princess stuff and remember that she's a 1000+ years old wizard. Of course she does manipulative trickster stuff to teach moral lessons and/or cause chaos to amuse herself, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course sometimes she's actually socially awkward and bad at personal relationships and has bad ideas that she thought were good that result in her eating shit embarrassing style, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course she lets the aristocrats and nobles run around being assholes she's still running on wizard advisor programming, she's basically trying to merlin the entire upper class of equestria instead of just a king and some knights. "Yeah uuhhh we'll release the incarnation of chaos himself from his ancient prison because we think this shy girl can be friends with him", terrible plan if you're thinking like a ruler, amazing plan if you're thinking like a wizard. Just look at Canterlot 'Castle' for five seconds and ask yourself if that's in any way a castle. No. Wizard tower, yes. Wizard.

[animusbell]

You are so right actually

[l0stinnumbers]

Also, she runs a magic school. Not a school that's magical, but a school for learning magic.

[hellbabyfromhell]

just saw this clip and i think itd make a funny reaction image what do u think... does it have potential

[hms-no-fun]

THE CLASSIC

THE ORIGINAL

kids these days have NO IDEA the damage this animal did to the internet in the 2000s

[hms-no-fun]

it physically hurts my brain to watch this video clip and not hear the dramatic music sting from young frankenstein

[whump-polls]

spin the whump trope wheel

opinion on the trope you got?

love it, a favorite

like it

neutral, depends

not really my thing

hate it

nuance

results

Voting ended onJun 1

[plecopsar]

[eldoniousrex]

The BPL has released new video! It's the first in a series of tank guides. The Hetzer is gonna Hetz!

And, Perun makes a cameo return!

[lady-ofmischief]

Everyone is fighting a tough battle so reblog to give previous a sword 🗡️

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

people keep reposting my comics without credit or permission so heres a dump of my comics frome my twitter @/cuptoast

do not my reposts my art, if u see one of my comics uploaded to here, it was not with my permisiions!

[dapperapples]

Cow tools

[pandacommander24a]

You may ask yourself why you need a 15 ft robot armed with guns and cattle prod lance but have you ever considered what Cows of tomorrow are like?

"Adult Range-bulls mass up to five metric tons; in a herd with a 4,000 kilogram herd bull with horns spanning four meters, a six-month-old specimen weighed around half a ton. Range-bull hide is very tough, described as the equivalent of several centimeters of Kevlar. The species is noted for wide horns."

For reference that is five times heavier than a Texan long horn, with horns twice as long covered in level 7 kevlar and is related to animals prone to stampede.

Additionally you need to fight off predators wanting to eat your Range bulls, like dragons.

[her-soliloquies]

I just woke up and saw the news, and you were the most recent poster in the #free iran tag. Do you have internet? What's going on? Is it working? How are the people? Can you fight? Will this work?

I pray earnestly to God that this will work.

This was asked in February. I have no idea what was happening back then. Time has been kinda merged together and warped since January. But today, May 9th, we don't have access to the internet, no. Only national heavily blocked and censored internet that is monitored. The regime have made the internet hierarchical, made it available to a select few to advertise their propaganda for them. The rest of us get barely and very temporarily connected by combining weird complicated ways like using configs and using vpns at the same time. Most of the time that doesn't work either so we have to illegally buy international internet from those who are illegally getting past the firewalls or whatever and are selling it to us ordinary people. I'm probably using up the last of my internet to write this.

What's going on? After an almost two months of war, and the elimination of many political and IRGC figureheads which we are all very thankful for, the ceasefire happened and it's literally like time froze. Like everything changed and nothing changed.

(Let me get one thing clear for anyone reading this who's empathizing with IR simply because they were the target of Trump and Netanyahu, anyone who sees things so foolishly black and white from the comfort of their free world. We are under no illusion that they must've been saints to help us. No, this is real life and there is no such a thing as saints. And let's be honest, no saint would've dirtied their hand like this anyway. But a necessary evil would. And those two, whether we like it or not, were our necessary evil. Yes of course we don't agree with them on so many levels, of course we don't condone any of their actions that has been against human rights. However, they've delivered. They actually succeeded in killing Khamenei, the dictator of Islamic Republic. They've rid us from the murderer tyrant, something we never could've done on our own. You need to remember that just because it's Israel attacking doesn't mean the other side is automatically innocent. There's such a thing as more than one evil existing in the world. Open your goddamn minds people. If you think otherwise then you've never lived in such a desperate tragic reality. And I know the war had casualties, but they were minor and mostly the regime's. And the school tragedy is not something we take lightly either but when you're standing where we are, you know that that's also IRGC's fault. The blood of those kids is on their hands. Did you know the regime purposefully launched its missiles from public places like schools so that when the other side had to retaliate they had to track and aimed at where it was shot from, not anticipating such a dirty move from the IR regime? But we did. We know their corruption to its root. So can you blame us for having needed outside help, even if it wasn't genuine, after being oppressed for 47 years under a bloodthirsty regime? Can you blame us when you know we have nothing to defend ourselves with against IRGC? You think there's been a night that we went to sleep with dry eyes in the past few months? You, whoever you are who disagree, might have the luxury to choose your savior. We don't.)

So what's going on now is IR political figureheads (yes these bastards are like fucking malignant cancer, they grow back) are lying their ass off about everything to keep the loyalty of their apologists. Iran's national tv has turned into an even bigger propaganda machine that sees it's people as sheep ready to be slaughtered for the “noble” goal of keeping the islamic revolution alive. And that's no exaggeration, IR has declared many time that their goal is preserving islam and not its people.

At nights, they gather a hundred or so of their supporters and apologists (or those who can be bought by money) in the streets and squares and start chanting 'death to America' and 'death to israel' and how they're undefeatable. Around them are plainclothed men, some with their face covered, and they're all holding guns, looking around menacingly. Since there's no “enemy” outside, we know they're holding weapons to kill us again if necessary. They gave guns to teenagers who can't even handle the thing. And we have to walk the streets without showing fear and rage and tears.

We're empty handed, we can't fight. And we can't live either. The economy is shit. Everything is too expensive, and I mean impossibly expensive. We can't make ends meet. It's breaking people.

They're also executing all the innocent people they managed to arrest in January in total internet blackout and there's no one who cares outside.

And I have no idea if it will work. You can kill the man, but you can't destroy a sick rotten ideology that permits you to slaughter people if they disagreed with you. That's the problem.

And that's it.

I've honestly stopped believing in god, anyone would in this godforsaken land, but thank you sincerely for your well wishes.

[x0401x]

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

[x0401x]

Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.

Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.

[starfieldcanvas]

wow. really hope this isn't actually a norm taking hold with new users! this isn't facebook, you don't need to know people before following them

[westiec]

this is the '10 year mutuals you've never spoken to once' site

[startrekgifs]

Follow! REBLOG! It's how the site works!!

[catsbypawty]

Hello, tumblr user. Before you is a tumblr post asking you to name a female fictional character. You have unlimited time to tag a female character, NOT a male one.

Begin.

[humming-fly]

you ever have just like, a really bad idea

anyways if you like bad things here’s a postcard

[humming-fly]

I was trying to figure out why this post starting spiking recently and then I found out you animals had this queued for Mother’s Day

[josephbrassey]

“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.

[some-israeli-guy]

Wait, Y2K was real? I thought it was just a dumb media scare. In my defense I was 5 at the time and didn't really follow up on it.

[l0stinnumbers]

Yep, it was quite real. We don't know for sure how much damage it would have caused, but a LOT of important software was running on two digit year format and needed to be updated.