mysticking

🇧🇷, 🏳️‍🌈, 21yo, he/they. Queer, nerd, latino, black, pagan and oh so tired. into rpgs, tv shows and books.

[bladesrunner]

It’s a long story, Doctor, can’t be told. It has to be lived. No sneak previews. Well, except for this one…

DOCTOR WHO (2005– ) S05E05: Flesh And Stone

[arkobit]

IT'S FINALLY FINISHED. MY THUMB IS KINDA NUMB. WOOHOOO!!!

EDIT: Updated version. Old version in reblogs!

[philcollinsenjoyer]

Thank you divorce for all you've done for music

[prettyboyhere]

sister post to this

[mystickingstuff]

one of my call of the netherdeep players just got his hand over the deck of many more things... And I can already TASTE the consequences of a wish spell gone wrong.

[adskayapanda]

[ouchmyghostskin]

[whatrudoingbree]

Random IWTV/TVL Thought 1,183,832:

It seems like a lot of people in the fandom are conflating the ideas that “If the show makes decisions that you personally don’t like then that automatically equates to bad writing”.

Example:

“The monsters are acting monstrous…how dare they 🫨🫨”.

-I don’t know what else you expect a monster to do 🤨

“Claudia called Louis a slave… how dare the writers 🫨🫨”.

-Like it’s not a continuation from the first time she referred to herself and Louis as Lestat’s slaves in Season 1 Episode 6 🤨

“How dare Armand and Daniel do that to Louis and Lestat🫨🫨”

-What part of DEVIL and his MINION was unclear 🤨

“How can you still like Daniel after he used a student aggressively 🫨🫨”.

-Because it was already established that Daniel is a sexual sadist sometimes and I’m not going to act shocked that the bad person was bad and did bad things 😐 No one is obligated to have the same moral code they do in reality applied to fictional characters 🤨

Take a deep breath and say it with me:

“ They’re Characters not Role Models”. Once again, big breath in: “They’re Characters not Role Models” 🧘🏾‍♀️😮‍💨🧘🏾‍♀️😮‍💨

[retroize]

I honestly find it quite strange how some people who claim to love claudia refuse to accept that louis is also her abuser. Putting the blame entirely on lestat feels genuinely insane to me and i say this as someone whose favorite character is literally louis

Perhaps that's why episode 6 felt out of place to them, as this was quite clear to me from the minute he begged lestat to turn this child without her consent to fix their marriage and continued to use her as a way to appease his own guilt over the things he'd done

She was never truly her own person to him, rather an extension of himself and she knew this too so it's crazier to me that people are shocked she hated him just as much as lestat

I guess i also just fail to understand how we're watching a show about literal monsters and people are still having debates over who is more morally correct than the other

[lestatgothic]

this gothic princess omgggg

[blighted-elf]

Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York - Scenery 1/?

[vitabreva]

[srune]

only thing that comes to mind today.

[deadgenerations]

the fad of putting these little blurbs in TTRPGs was probably the most embarrassing bit of useless wanking the little industry scene has ever done, besides the time Warmahordes put a "this aint your daddys tabletop game!" in their rulebook.

does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?

At the absolute minimum you could make a game which actually is a meaningful cultural expression of your ideals, or which is politically anti fascist in any way.

[sunspotpony]

So this is actually I can reassure you, the exact opposite of self indulgent wanking with no impact. It’s aggressively impactful in a very specific way—by making the nazis in the room very loud about the fact that they’re nazis.

I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.

This is the updated version. It’s animated now.

But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.

And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.

For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.

And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.

And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.

While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.

So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.

Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?

This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”

It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.

So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.

Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.

It doesn’t fix the world— anyone who thinks the table top scene will magically save the day is a fool—but it does increase the odds that the hobby will be a safer place for more reasonable people, and not become a bastion of fascism like the wh40k fandom has.

[noctumsolis]

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.

Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.

Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.

See also the Godot discord, with an icon that scrolls through pride colours in a beautiful way.

[trismeowgistus]

It even works for games famously infested with fascists like 40k. Games Workshop coming out with a (really rather tepid) statement of support of BLM had Nazis losing their minds in the comments fucking immediately

[walking-fandom]

I remember the meltdowns when the new Worls of Darkness books came out that this blurb is in. It's pretty easy to piss fascists off by just saying you don't want them there.

[crazy-pages]

The Pathfinder Facebook group did something like this on purpose as a honeypot and immediately banned all the bigots coming out of the woodwork, and immediately eliminated more than HALF of all incidents requiring moderators. Not just about bigotry, everything.

And that is TACTICALLY USEFUL.

Because game companies spend so much money moderating chat spaces (both forums and in-game chats) and they lose so much business when dominant third party online spaces associated with their game turn toxic. Hell moderation is the big money sink for social media. Managing that cost is one of the most difficult aspects of the business.

Now imagine telling a game or social media executive that you can eliminate half of their harassment in a single honeypot operation. Imagine telling them that you have a technique which surgically targets a majority of their most toxic members and immediately gets rid of them. Because that's what this is.

You slap up a big pride or power banner and an announcement that this company stands with [insert group here], or stands against fascism, and you take names on everybody who has angry or quibbling shit to say about that. And then you ban them all. And just like that the moderation load you're dealing with gets so much lighter. Keep it up with a similar announcement whenever a topical opportunity presents itself and you clean out any new trash which walks in too.

And it just so happens that the way to do this is to clear out the bigots and make a safe space for oppressed groups.

There are so many of these companies which are worried that by taking a stand like this they will hurt their user base. There are so many forums online with volunteer moderators who reflexively don't want to wait into politics because they think that will increase their workload. Give them good solid practical examples of this reducing their workload instead, and you will get some of them onboard.

Because this has a real measurable impact with the right follow through, and the impact is a general reduction in all harassment of everyone. And that is worth capital M Money and capital T Time to some people.

[critlore]

It's also important to note that VtM has had long-standing fascist problems, especially when this blurb was included in a release in 2018. Paradox, the rights holders of VtM, had been letting White Wolf have effectively free reign in their VtM releases, until the Camarilla and Anarchs books were released for v5. One of them included referencing the torture and murder of Chechen queer people as a fodder for in-world plot, when it was very much occurring in real life at the time.

Paradox responded by tightening the leash on White Wolf. This blurb was included in the next book as a confirmation to the community that they were making active changes to do better.

[mystickingstuff]

how can people complain about v5 when they give us hot dark fey-vampire daddies??? like, they dark academia-ified marconius (aka, creator of the kyasid, lasombra-fey-like bloodline). Loved it.

[queenoftheimps]

lmfao at the almost casual aside that's basically like "Yeah David Talbot will not be a character on this show, sorry, Louis ate him"

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[mystickingstuff]

As someone working with sales.

Yeah, it can really shake the core of who we are. It does that to me pretty much every fucking day.

I'm finishing college in a private university and I have to work for them to get a 100% scholarship situation. I get enough to pay some bills, and that's it. I live in a place that sucks, and take two hours to go to the wealthiest part of the city so I can watch and listen middle class people having a completely different lifestyle, filled with privileges I can literally only dream of.

I don't remember the last time I had time to go to the movies, or a museum, or hit the gym. Not even go to the beach. The weekends are for resting.

And it gets to me in ways I don't even know how to cope with, sometimes.

I see people having big dreams, and all I can dream of is finishing this damn college and getting a job that gets me a bit more money and a bit more time to focus into something that might give me anything than the feeling that I'm drowning into the void.

I really hope I can make it somehow, cause sometimes it's just so miserable.

[anutzica]

yudala's combat sequences were so good

[i-know-the-enddc]

what I fucking love is how tvl was written in the 80s and lestat is constantly sayinf shit like “as the kids say 🤪 that’s so rad!!” or whatever, and to me, reader of the vampire lestat in this modern age, that does NOT register the way anne rice intended it.

like it is supposed to feel jarring and insane. it is supposed to feel like lestat has been violently submerged in modern young people trends and culture and is now repeating all the new words he learned like a beautiful fresh baby. but because the book is from 1985, all I think is oh interesting huh I didn’t know that slang term even originated in the 80s how vintage how retro how lestat wow he’s so embarrassing aw aw so cute.

but amc in all their incredible genius decided that honoring anne rice’s original vision of writing an extremely modern and weird book that fully embodied the era it was written in was more important then bringing back the 80s nostalgia thing that streaming services love and it’s incredible to me. now I get to listen to lestat say shit like “labubu FOMO cosplay reddit discord Gen Z more like gen SNOOZE 🤪🤪🤪 safe space pronouns donald trump labubu tiktok dance 🕺🏻” and suddenly I understand what it felt like to be a young anne rice reader in 1985. God…. I understand.