nihilisticbroad @nihilisticbroad - Tumblr Blog

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qqchurch

excuse-me-thanks

“i should take a walk for my mental health” boring, tired, i don’t even really wanna do it tbh

“i need to check the perimeter” i need to check the perimeter

nihilisticbroad

@rsquid2

excuse-me-thanks

“i should take a walk for my mental health” boring, tired, i don’t even really wanna do it tbh

“i need to check the perimeter” i need to check the perimeter

devilcat3d

i should get to wake up tomorrow and my life is just miraculously easier and better and nothing is wrong anymore

demilypyro

It's what he would've wanted

lindleland

trainwrrck

pokemonheritageposts

Pokemon Heritage Post

tpwrtrmnky

"Let's have sex," the one character said.

"Why?" said the other. "I don't see how that adds to our story or characterization in any way."

"We have a lot of subtly implied ideas and themes going on," the first one explained, "but we haven't explicitly signalled that we are in a story for mature audiences. The sooner we get it out of the way, the better."

simply-a-leaf

Christian agnostic: God made it so that nobody knows

Atheist agnostic: Material conditions lead to nobody knowing

Agnostic agnostic: Nobody knows why nobody knows

dknightlight

Posting this iconic piece of media that I just NEVER found online isolated except in an archived reddit thread

somethingusefulfromflorida

nihilisticbroad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR_Gw0RStc8

Reminds me of this

contemptible-scoundrel

probablybadrpgideas

Common problem players and how to deal with them

Problem Player: The player who insists their PC is the only canon PC and all the other players characters are "non-canonical OCs"

Solution: Declare their PC non-canon. This will, in their mind, render the entire game non-canon, allowing them enjoy the game again as a non-canon AU where the other PCs exist.

Problem Player: The player who keeps powerscaling your setting and insisting the goblins are "haxx-based low diff mutliversal" or some shit.

Solution: Just use your chain-scaling outerversal massively FTL smurfing to solo stomp 10/10 the argument

Problem Player: The player who never shows up, and none of you remember meeting, and when you search their social media you just get images of your own death.

Solution: Leave a message carved into the bones of an unburied heretic beneath the new moon asking them if they're still around and, if there's still no reply, you may need to find a new player.

Problem Player: The player from an 80s PSA who thinks they're here to pledge themselves to Satan and is clearly disappointed this is a roleplaying thing.

Solution: Sadly, this is just a find a different game group thing. Luckily, there's plenty of Old School Revival games that apply modern game design to the old-school satanic recruitment style that you can recommend them.

Problem Player: Jock who doesn't care about this nerd shit and is just here to impress their nerd crush.

Solution: This one is just a waiting game - by act three, they'll realise that they actually love RPGs in a big emotional climax. Make sure to have the game involve heavy-handed symbolism for the jock's personal problems to speed up the narrative.

Problem Player: Inhuman creature who's wearing the skin of one of the game group and is clearly planning to devour you all.

Solution: Don't be racist! This thing came from the Andromeda galaxy to hang out with you, the least you can do is let it play our human games and give it some snacks.

Problem Player: Sheldon Cooper

Solution: Kill on sight.

cryptotheism

I just felt someone Z-target me

search-queery

[clearly circle-strafing you] don't be ridiculous

hacvek

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

olyia-stories

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

dragonpyre

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

serinos-kitt

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

dragonpyre

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

serinos-kitt

So what is a rain shadow?

lethalbutterfly

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

roach-works

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

beatrice-otter

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

whetstonefires

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

beatrice-otter

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

maryellencarter

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)

sunflowergardens-world

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

mysteryteacup

This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.

shencomix

idogwee

Clorox

boringkate

You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.

paradigm-adrift

I don't have a problem with people listening to music per se, but I do have a problem with the music industry exploiting & mistreating artists.

Personally, I abstain from all music in order to keep my hands clean but really music should just be illegal outright to protect musicians from abuse.