Untitled

a 'whatever grabs my interest' blog, not focused around a specific fandom or message

[ruegarding]

so. percy's arc in boo (learning to step back, allowing leo to sacrifice himself despite his loyalty/fatal flaw) sucks. for many reasons.

for one, percy yielding is such an integral part of pjo. all of pjo. but even if u somehow missed it in the first four books, tlo explicitly spells it out. "sometimes the hardest power to master is the power of yielding" hestia says to percy. "i yield when necessary. can you do this?" and then this is the climax of the story. "you are not the hero...it will affect what you do." percy has spent the last five books being told that he's the super powerful chosen one able to save or destroy the world, and he still chooses to yield to someone that has done nothing but betray him. "the line from the great prophecy echoed in my head...my whole world tipped upside down, and i gave the knife to luke." hoo acting like this is a lesson percy needs to learn is an affront to reading comprehension. percy lives bc he yields. and then he does it (yielding) again when he surrenders godhood, and power, to choose other demigods instead. this is not subtle writing.

for two, percy has rejected power, and his title, for the entirety of his story. percy doesn't even fully recognize how powerful he is until the volcano in botl. and he had to be told directly that it wasn't a fluke. then in son, percy immediately rejects the power and status offered to him. repeatedly. reyna offers him praetorship, he turns it down. frank is abt to let percy climb the wall first in the war games, percy says it was frank's claim. percy doesn't even want to go on the son quest but relents bc frank asked him. in moa, percy never demands that he lead. instead, he includes frank where he probably wasn't necessary, supports hazel, encourages annabeth, follows leo and piper's lead, and strategizes w jason. he isn't acting as a leader, but rather as part of a team. percy didn't need to "step back," the writing for the other characters needed to step up.

for three, percy had to be kidnapped and manipulated to be on this entire quest. he's not there bc he has a hero complex. acting like he has to learn to step back when he was quite literally shoved into place is wild.

for four, an integral part of percy's character is freedom, autonomy, and he extends this to the ppl he's loyal to. this is pretty explicitly established in tlt: "you're enough like me to understand," sally says. "if my life is going to mean anything, i have to live it myself." percy respects ppl's decisions. this is one of the first lessons he learns when he becomes a hero and an integral part of pjo: percy has to let sally save herself. percy has to let tyson go to the boiler. percy has to let bianca defeat talos. percy has to let nico walk away. percy has to let annabeth fight. if he loves them, he's going to let their lives mean something. even in hoo, percy still lets annabeth go on her quest alone, despite hating it, despite disagreeing w it, bc it's not his place to tell her what she can and can't do. this is her life. she has to live it. so this plotline doesn't even work it we ignore all of pjo and focus solely on hoo.

this theme of autonomy is especially important bc pjo is abt disability. one of the first things ppl try to take away from u when ur disabled is ur autonomy. the fact that percy vehemently defends it not just for himself but for others is essential to the narrative. percy advocates for other demigods, other disabled kids, and tyson, and he does so while maintaining their autonomy. it's why he's the leader, it's why he's the protagonist, it's why there is a callback to it in every pjo book. trying to act like he wouldn't respect someone's autonomy is a bastardization of this entire theme. which is actually fitting for hoo considering it bastardizes the rest of pjo anyway.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Been thinking about the animorphs series (been getting back into the audiobooks too), specifically how much would change or not change if Tobias has been trapped in the body of a female red tailed hawk all those years. I think Tobias would have at least become genderfluid, definitely genderqueer in some aspect.

As a fellow animorphs enthusiast, do you have any thoughts? Do you think it would have changed much?

Not really. I don't think Tobias cares much about the sex of his hawk body, and I don't think the other kids would talk about him as a girl if he was in a girl hawk, if that's what you mean -- they morph across sexes all the time and never have much to say about it except for that one time really early on that Marco complained about being a "girl wolf". Being a hawk is a radically different experience than being a human already, and I don't think that female hawkitude is any closer physiologically or socially to female humanity than male hawkitude is. I think the main difference, if Tobias had a female hawk body, would be slightly different teasing from Marco.

More illuminating re: Tobias' gender is his reaction to being in a female human body, which he finds to be an incredibly positive experience in a very pointed way. Also, his discomfort with his own human body, which can have a lot of causes (his shitty home life and the bullying will cause this regardless), but in combination with his reluctance to be a human boy when he has the option even in safe and supported circumstances and his reaction to morphing Taylor, is extremely telling. Tobias has a lot of indicators of being trans (I personally think of him as trans), but I don't think being a female hawk would have changed much.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I think a more interesting conversation re: morphing as gender fluidity is Rachel's tendency, when given the option to pick her own morphs, to target male morphs. She explains this as wanting the biggest animals and working from species where those happen to be male, but it's interesting that the Cheerleader Popular Girl who learns to react to stress with physical violence, a response somewhat acceptable in teenage boys but utterly unacceptable in teen girls in her culture, always indulges this stress reaction by turning into something male first.

[quasi-normalcy]

So...how much of the bad discourse surrounding Steven Universe is just because people were really hoping that the Gems would beat up Andy DeMayo in "Gem Harvest"?

[quasi-normalcy]

I was astonished to learn that there was controversy around this episode, because I felt like it was just kind of a normal children's cartoon about getting along with difficult relatives; and then I looked it up and learned that it had the extremely inauspicious timing of airing right after Trump's 2016 victory, and, yeah, okay, I can understand why a children's fantasy about reconciling with your obnoxious conservative relatives and getting them to accept your alternate family structure would play rather poorly at the time.

[quasi-normalcy]

I think that Rebecca Sugar probably assumed, like most of the world that wasn't my specific flavour of extremely online in 2016, that Clinton would crush Trump and that this episode would maybe help to smooth over divisions; but of course what ended up happening is that an episode about how you should be empathetic towards your bigoted relatives ended up airing just as your bigoted relatives were going around victoriously hate-criming people in the street.

[quasi-normalcy]

Watching it now, though, it ends up feeling wistful more than anything. Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did? It feels like a pleasant dream.

[livingauthorssociety]

Steven Universe is fundamentally a power fantasy—but the fantasy is being able to get through to people and heal things. The power is love instead of strength.

[lilly-kittyeyes]

"Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did?" Yeah....

[partywithponies]

Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???

[urlocalpyshcopan]

as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name

[brainsforbabyjesus]

for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!

[infamousbrad]

I think I know how this works.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.

[kagedtiger]

Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm

[ladyshinga]

i think baby-priority-seating should be a thing on planes. like. not, "they go on first", i mean how seating is ARRANGED. like o shit there's a baby on this flight? then the attendants ask everyone in the waiting area "who here is good with babies and enjoys the communal human experience of helping a parent soothe a scared child?" and then they rearrange everyone to make sure those people are sitting next to the baby just in case, and boom, less stress for probably literally everyone including the baby

i have no idea why i am thinking about this. i have no baby and have not been on a flight in years. this is dan levys fault

[succulentul]

a comic about nothing in particular. happy pride. if you are trans i love you ❣️❣️❣️

[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.

[kbkarma]

Oh, so that's where Munchkin got the idea of your identical twin turning up when you die in game.

[prokopetz]

Yeah, having your previous PC's identical cousin randomly come rocking up five minutes after you died is totally a thing that happened, largely as a response to the awkward transitional period where survival play was still in fashion, but the game's rules had become too fiddly for rolling up a new PC on the spot to be a pain-free process, so folks would just recycle their existing character sheet instead. You saw a lot of it in the 2E era!

[werewolfetone]

Every time I remake the same post about how the people typically portrayed as being "poor" in pop histories of the georgian and regency periods are really just lower level gentry and it's insulting to the lower classes of the era and also just not true to describe them as relatively "badly off" I get ninety billion people saying that actually wealthy white english women in 1810 did have it bad as though it's a trump card, so I would just like to ask everyone to join me in a group exercise where we all put our heads together and see if we can think of a group of people to which "poor" and "woman" could possibly both apply

[werewolfetone]

It was often miserable to be poor in early nineteenth century britain and ireland: true ✅

It was often miserable to be a woman in early nineteenth century britain and ireland: true ✅

It was often miserable to be a poor woman in early nineteenth century britain and ireland: thankfully this one is not true as women only existed in the upper classes and therefore the heights of oppression for women were such horrors as "arranged marriage" or "only had one servant" and not "arm torn off in a factory machine; no recourse of any kind as women aren't actually legally allowed to be working at that factory and early workers rights movements were male exclusive" or "indefinitely imprisoned in a lock hospital by the government as a prostitute, the evidence being that she was living on the streets because she couldn't afford rent." learned this one today from my tumblr notes

[justaz]

YO. okay so i know tlt is like percy’s retelling/reliving of perseus’s life with the danaë/perseus/polydectes paralleling sally/percy/gabe until you get to the end when percy flips the script and lets his mom (danaë) kill the abusive man (polydectes) instead of him (perseus). right right right okay and i also know annabeth is meant to be andromeda in this retelling/reliving/whatever. but i was like. there was never a point where percy saved annabeth from a sea monster??? UNTIL just now when i realized that procrustes is (according to sources (the voices)(and google)) a son of poseidon. THEREFORE. he is of the sea. and a monster. which would TECHNICALLY make him a sea monster. who percy had to kill because annabeth (and grover) was tied up like andromeda

[justaz]

THINKING ABOUT THEM AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[gatesofminrathous]

there will never be anything as funny as the mutual disbelief between long form and short form fic writers about each other's style.

short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.

meanwhile long form writers look at people writing 1000 word one shots like god I would cut off my left nipple to be able to say anything concisely. i would love to play with multiple ideas. free me from the shackles of this child I have birthed. i love them but I now must take them to t-ball and doctor's appointments and they're going to destroy everything I own.

[ao3commentoftheday]

[sunderwight]

I do think it would be kind of funny if Eridian media, like Earth media, sort of tends to go through phases. Like you know how sometimes 100% evil vampires are all the rage, and then sometimes they're sympathetic tortured antiheroes, and sometimes it's all vampire romances, and etc?

So like, with the stars dying, I'm thinking Eridian media might have gone on a whole "aliens are bad bad bad out there killing stars and wanting to eat Erid" and etc trend for their sci-fi. Long ballads about what are essentially evil Eridians with the equivalent of prosthetics doing terrible things to the galaxy and brave heroes like Rocky going off to stop them. Because y'know that's probably how you'd conceptualize a huge scary conflict like total cosmic annihilation in a way that makes it seem beatable: designate a bad guy you can just defeat in order to stop it.

But then Grace and Rocky get to Erid and that trend gets immediately flipped. Turns out that there were kind of bad aliens, the astrophage and all, but that's more like a natural disaster, and hero Rocky has returned with the weirdest, nicest alien ever. Erid media suddenly rockets back to a prior era of optimistic sci-fi previously considered intolerably twee and cringe after the solar disaster kicked off, where the aliens are always nice nice nice, incredibly weird and sometimes goofy as fuck but friendly and not the bad guys.

Of course you never get full consensus on these things, so there are also creative Eridians who are like. But what if evil humans question? Evil humans posing as saviors infiltrate Erid and replace Eridians with pods that hatch into creepy non-Erid rock monsters question? Evil human comes to Erid under guise of niceness and KILLS Eridians question???

Which is broadly considered like. Holy shit dude stop being gauche the nice alien saved the planet stop fucking writing stories where his skeleton cracks open like a nest of evil eggs and turns into a bunch of monsters! Rude, statement! Aliens very nice statement!

And like at first all the Eridian scientists are very sure to keep this sort of stuff away from Grace, they don't want to insult him or imply that he's being slandered in their media or anything. And again overall the popular trend turns a lot more to aliens-as-friendly, especially if they're expressly humans, and the sci-fi writers of Erid are having a total BLAST speculating about Earth and writing stories about it and etc, Grace seems to very much enjoy answering questions for the ones who want to keep things accurate and chuckling and enthusing over the creativity of the ones who don't. He's like, oh yeah they are definitely also doing this back on Earth, don't worry.

Researchers laughing and nervously just being like, yes of course, this is the full extent of it, not to worry! Normal thing which humans are also doing!

Until one day Rocky just brings Grace a recording of a full-blown Eridian horror sci-fi where Grace HIMSELF is EXPLICITLY a horrible monster that goes on a killing spree and tries to destroy Erid.

The other researchers are losing their shit. RoCKY?!?! WHY QUESTION??? Oh fuck Grace is going to be so upset! He's such a sensitive soul he doesn't even like it when one of his students gets distressed!

Anyway Grace thinks it's hilarious and Rocky gets to be smug about it for months.

[hope-for-the-planet]

New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

The energy-efficient desalination system produces fresh water without chemical additives and transforms leftover salts into useful materials

Desalination is the process of generating freshwater from brackish or saltwater, usually through the process of reverse osmosis. While this can be a very useful tool in water shortages, it also has some pretty huge drawbacks--reverse osmosis requires a lot of energy, requires chemical treatment of the water, and produces concentrated brine as a waste product which can be harmful to aquatic ecosystems.

Researchers have recently discovered a new way to perform desalination using solar energy, which doesn't require chemical inputs and collects waste salt instead of producing brine. Concentrating the waste salt in a solid form instead of brine means that it can later be processed to extract valuable minerals like lithium.

[phantomrose96]

I think it's funny world-building how like, so at the center of Life we've got Water. Arguably The most important resource. Colorless transparent substance that molds to any container and we die without it and quickly. And all organic functions of society hinge on its availability. Could fight a ton of wars over this thing.

And well beyond organic life, modern society's great human invention is the Electronic Magic. Our greatest minds invented the Electronic Magic and it sends information around the world instantly. Our infrastructure our economy our modern life, minute by minute by minute, hinges on utilizing the great Lighting Technology.

BUT ☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️ DO NOT. DO NOT EVER. get the magical Elixir Substance of Life and Living and Healing, Water, IN the Electronic Device. The water keeps you alive critically but it KILLS the Electronic Device instantly and catastrophically. This Says something.

[phantomrose96]

and this Says something...

[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?"

[rosstmcd]

I think another factor is that in AD&D, there aren't a whole lot of customization options for characters, with the result that aside from equipment there isn't really that much difference between one 5th-level dwarven fighter and another.

This means that AD&D characters could be a lot more fungible than characters in later editions. (They didn't have to be -- you could invest a lot of effort in backstory and roleplaying if you wanted to -- but as far as the rules went, dropping one character and picking up an essentially similar one wasn't that big a deal.)

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

[smadsel]

would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.

[smadsel]

that’s not the whole flag, now is it

[manuciruja]

hey staff what the fuck

[villainessbian]

hey staff don't you think you're being too on-the-nose

[shrodingers-catgirl]

HEY STAFF DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING TOO ON-THE-NOSE

[vacuously-true]

You know how there's like some mathematician or something, who like did some useful stuff but is primarily known for overshadowing that work by going to great lengths trying to convince people to blow up the moon or something?

I wanna be like that but the hill I'm dying on is that the moon should be considered a planet

[vacuously-true]

Stop tagging this about the Unabomber it's not about the Unabomber, it's about time we give the other fucked up mathematicians some recognition, it's about this fucking guy

[hereticalteapot]

OP you're right and you should say it. There are 9 planets in the solar system and two of them are in a binary planetary system. I will die on this hill.

[vacuously-true]

EXACTLY. EARTH-MOON IS A BINARY PLANET SYSTEM. AND I WILL BECOME NOTABLE FOR MY FREQUENT POSTS TO VARIOUS TUMBLR BLOGS AND MY ADVOCACY FOR THE RECOGNITION OF THE MOON AS A PLANET.

[hereticalteapot]

Now, dear reader, you might say: "But three of the Jovian moons and Titan are bigger than the Moon!". And to that I say yes, but two of those are bigger than Mercury also and people aren't usually upset about that. Plus all of those are satellites of bodies that are completely incomparable in scale.

Ganymede, the biggest moon in the solar system, is 0.008% the mass of Jupiter. The Moon is a bit over 1.2% of Earth's mass and a solid 27% of its radius. There's no other planet* in the solar system with a satellite anywhere close to the kind of similarity in size that the Earth-Moon system has.

You might also say "Fine but it's literally called 'The Moon' so that's a bit silly". To which I say that I've been calling it that to be more easily understood but it would be extremely easy to switch to calling it "Luna" which is what most people do when they encounter situations where saying "The Moon" creates ambiguity - like when writing sci-fi or a nontrivial amount of astronomical research.

In conclusion, lumping Luna in with the satellites of other bodies is unhelpful because it is geophysically distinct from most of them, and orbitally distinct from all of them. Luna is a planet and it's rad that we can see one so clearly in the night sky.

[*No, Pluto is not a planet, but yes Pluto-Charon is totally a dwarf planet binary]

[kazoracht]

I'll integrate this into my belief system but only because it's funny

[asdfjasklfjdkla]

hello???? hello??????????? have we walked into the twilight zone or something??????????? yes, the moon is a percentage (a percentage almost exactly) of earth’s mass, but that doesn’t magically make us a binary system! the barycenter is still well within the diameter of earth! what next, are you going to say that since deimos and phobos orbit mars, they’re actually a trinary planetary system?? you fucking better not!

[hereticalteapot]

Hi, I'm an astrophysicist, I am well aware of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) definition of a planet. It is a definition that is relatively controversial and doesn't really make a lot of sense - it was mostly written to prevent the list of planets from getting too long as we discovered more dwarfs. This definition does not include anything to do with barycentres - I'll get back to that.

The IAU definition of a planet has 3 parts:

1. Object in orbit around our Sun

2. Object has reached hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e. it's a sphere, not a potato)

3. Object has cleared its neighborhood around its orbit

Both Earth and Luna satisfy 2. I will accept that 1 is debatable, but the crux of my argument is that Luna is the size of a terrestrial planet (yes, ~1% of Earth's mass, but still huge and of roughly the same order of magnitude as Mercury, which is a mere ~5% of Earth's mass) and exceptionally large relative to its orbital partner compared to any other "satellite", a factor the IAU does not account for.

It's important to note that 1 literally does not permit binary planets - even if both bodies are identical, one must be the "moon". This is major criticism of the IAU definition. It also doesn't account for exoplanets or rogue planets, but that's another story.

3 is where this definition falls apart. You could easily argue that most of the planets in our solar system fail depending on how you interpret it, because it's so fuzzy. The Earth fails, because there's a planet-sized body chilling out in its orbit (Luna), Jupiter fails because it has huge quantities of asteroids trapped in its Lagrange points, etc.

In the latter case, we say that because Jupiter is determining the motion of these bodies, it still counts. For the Earth we simply ignore Luna and say that the rule is more about stray bodies than orbital partners. But by the same logic we can say that for Luna we ignore the Earth, and Luna passes.

So I would argue that the IAU definition is bad, but if you fixed it so that it allowed binary systems to exist, it would readily define Luna as a planet in my view (if you deleted the Earth from the solar system and left Luna, it would unambiguously meet the criteria).

Now let's talk about barycentres.

The barycentre of two bodies in orbit is just their overall centre of mass. People often point to the external barycentre of the Pluto-Charon system to indicate that they are binary dwarfs. However, this is a poor metric in my view, because it's highly dependent on orbital distance.

The centre of mass of the Earth-Luna system is inside the Earth at present, but if Luna simply orbited further away, the barycentre would be in the empty space between them, with nothing about the two bodies individually, or the qualitative nature of their orbits, having changed. In fact, given enough time and pretending the Sun won't consume both bodies in a few billion years, Luna would actually drift far enough away due to tidal interactions for this to happen - it would be silly for it to suddenly be a planet one day when it wasn't the day before.

To answer your question, no. I would under no circumstances argue that the martian moons are planets. They are minuscule space potatoes that are not even large by the standards of asteroids. If Mars were close enough in mass to them for the system to be considered plausibly trinary, it would be far too small to even qualify as a dwarf planet (and there's no way such a system would be gravitationally stable to perturbation by Jupiter regardless).

[vacuously-true]

@hereticalteapot Thank you so much for laying this all out! I totally agree. Something that's motivating to me is the fact that Luna is more gravitationally attracted to the Sun than to Earth- and by that definition is orbiting the Sun, not the Earth. This is not true of any other "moons" in our solar system except some which are not even large enough to become spheres- so this is another way in which it is different from the moons in our system.

It's really frustrating to me when people lash out and say "You're wrong because there's a definition, for the love of god look up the definition" about a topic where I think it's clear my point is that I KNOW the definition and I disagree with it. And that's allowed! Definitions are made up! "Planets" are made up, and I think we should make them up differently!

All the things in our solar system are just different kinds of rocks dancing to each other's gravity- they're all affected by each one's gravity, even in tiny ways. They do not fall neatly into subcategories "planet" and "not a planet" - we made this distinction up because we wanted it. We noticed that some of the bodies in our solar system seemed much more important and dominant than others and we wanted a name for that. But the planets don't know that- they don't have an inherent major distinction between them, nor are they obligated to. When we wanted to come up with a way to clearly decide which bodies were planets, we had to make something up.

What we made up is a little bit vague, and even if it were extremely clear cut, we could still debate whether it was a reasonable or intuitive or useful definition.

In science we have lots of definitions, and they aren't handed down by god, they're made by people, and they are made to be useful, and when they aren't useful or reasonable, they can be and should be and are changed. Knowing which things fit which definitions is part of science, but another part of science is thinking critically about whether things SHOULD be defined, how they should be defined, whether definitions need to be changed, and other things like this- and that's messier than just knowing facts. But that's science.

[vacuously-true]

I hate to say it folks, but my fondness for the "Luna is a planet" argument might not just be because it's silly and I like to be silly. It might be a really convenient training ground for thinking about definitions which are social constructs in other contexts. Like race, sex, gender, disability, economics. These things, like planets, are made up. They are very real, don't get me wrong! They are real because we made them up! But what, exactly, they are... we decided it. And we could decide differently. We have that power. If you don't like something because it doesn't fit a definition- that's not really an argument against it. Because the definition could be changed. Should it be?

[allthebooksandcrannies]

I couldn't agree more about definitions and the usefulness of debating and revising them (as well as their usefulness as a starting point for clear communication).

We run into this same issue in anthropology constantly, so I've been coming to the conclusion that if you get far enough into studying any subject you will eventually run into a situation where it's nearly impossible to agree on a definition of a fundamental term. People make definitions and humans are inherently constrained by the knowledge at their disposal, the limits of the language they're speaking, and their ability to get others to agree with them.

My personal favorite examples from anthropology are the definitions of human biological sexes and gender. We talk about how it's impossible to define "woman" in a way that excludes all trans women while including all cis women, but we rarely talk about how it's actually equally (if not more) difficult to define "female" in a way that is biologically meaningful.

Partly because human biological sexes occur on such a gradual spectrum and are controlled by so many factors (there is no single characteristic that can be used to draw a distinct line between males and females in humans. Not chromosomes, not hormones, not a single phenotype, nothing. They're not biologically discrete types, so any line we draw is inherently arbitrary), and partly because we are unable to separate our cultural background from how we study sex.

Cultural beliefs influence what questions we even think to ask about bio sex, the language and models we use (there's a reason sperm are anthropomorphized with active or violent terms typically associated with masculinity, while egg cells are described with more passive adjectives and metaphors—which may have actively hindered research since it seems the egg plays a more active role in "choosing" which sperm is accepted during fertilization), and the conclusions we draw from the data we observe.

And that's all before we consider how cultural factors influence our physical biology. Nurture can change nature. If we go with a phenotypic or hormonal definition of bio sex, this is pretty obvious. Under these definitions, we can literally and intentionally change our biological sex through cultural practices like hrt, cosmetic surgery, or do so even incidentally or accidentally, such as a side effect of medical interventions. We also know behaviors like breastfeeding affect the different hormones related to biological sex (not just estrogen and testosterone btw). And there's a documented association between childhood sexual abuse and early pubertal onset, and while I'm not well-read enough on that specifically to say if this is a causal association, if so, that would be another way our biological sex is influenced by our cultural environment.

And with the study of epigenetics in its relative infancy, there's no telling what we might still discover about how cultural factors might influence gene expression related to biological sex and what that would do to our existing definitions.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

@acavatica #‘it’s better on the isms because it doesn’t discuss them’ might be the whole thing here#‘it doesn’t make me uncomfortable’ isn’t necessarily better than ‘dated thing had an awkward discussion but they tried’

Yes, yes, YES! Starting a new post, because this sums up so many of my frustrations with fan crit. Like, Animorphs clumsily attempts to tackle AIDS and slavery reparations and environmentalism and disability justice, and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't. But at least it tries. AniTV strips all of that out in favor of a far blander "yeerks bad, humans good, we ignore race here" story.

There's this fallacy, where it's easier to criticize a failed attempt than it is a total lack of trying. In the Heights (2021) got smacked up, down, and sideways by critics and fans for its failure to include more dark-skinned characters; meanwhile A Quiet Place II (2021), Venom II (2021), Free Guy (2021), and Black Widow (2021) get no such critiques because they each include Exactly One Black Actor. Scholomance gets review-bombed for "fake" "forced" "diversity" (X) for featuring kids from all over the world, while Mortal Instruments gets a total lack of criticism for its cast having Exactly One Asian Guy (who is half-white).

I vividly recall a media professor ca. 2013 mansplaining to me that, actually, Orange is the New Black is sexist because it shows male characters having power over female ones, and there's no onscreen sex between the Black lesbians. Somehow he didn't feel the need to say this about Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Peaky Blinders, or any other series that went entire YEARS without passing the Bechdel test. No wonder TV shows have again embraced colorblind racism.

It's like when a series tries to tackle the big issues, there's enough there there for critics to get their teeth into; better to blandly replicate the status quo. And studios notice: Better to avoid all controversy by having the Animorphs inhabit a world where no one ever notices Jake and Cassie being an interracial couple, where Marco lives in a McMansion and Tobias's home life is never mentioned at all, where the closest we ever get to discussion of gender is Marco saying Rachel "throws like a girl" only to get belted with a baseball. That way no one can ever find enough examples of sexism to edit into a clever 60-second video montage of "12 most sexist moments of AniTV you've definitely forgotten!"

[thekinglemingle]

See also Netflix's Avatar stripping away Sokka's learning not to be a sexist arc

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What? Nooooooooo. I wrote a whole conference paper about how Avatar talks back to Spivak's "imperialism justifies itself through 'white men rescue brown women from brown men'" framework! It's integral to the show how the division of labor by gender is a survival mechanism in the Water Tribes, and the Fire Nation's egalitarianism is simply a luxury they cannot afford. Because if your entire culture is on the verge of being wiped out, then it makes some sense to have half your population out fighting off the invaders and the other half desperately trying to keep the next generation alive, and you might as well split the halves based on who lactates. But it gets over-extended around things like Yue's arranged marriage vs. Azula's freedom to hit on random beach bros, and when one considers the intersectional implications of class and disability on Toph's gender then