Not Ophelia (most days)

Valerie. She/her. Chicagoland. Known around fandom as wiliqueen, but that URL is taken. Here you will find fannish obsessions, things Pre-Raphaelite, and assorted gorgeous.

[thirtysixsavefiles]

It’s come to my attention that perhaps the beloved ballet The Nutcracker was not meant to be a traumatic childhood rite of passage; until recently I had assumed you always left the ballet enchanted but also slightly terrified. That’s just how it was.

But it turns out that Maurice Sendak designed the set that I saw for several years running at a formative age, so it turns out that if you didn’t attend the Pacific Northwest Ballet between 1983 and 2014, this was not a normal part of your experience:

(Photo from The Stranger)

Those teeth split apart, by the way, and came crashing down at intermission. Like a nutcracker. Get it? Also like the nightmares of small children.

Honestly the Sendak/Stowell production is the only stage production of The Nutcracker I’ve ever seen, so I have no idea what parts of the set/choreography are traditional and what are part of a sideways imagination. For example:

(Photo from Michael Hagen)

This is from one one of the scene painters and it’s hard to tell in a still frame, but the Rat King comes out from the side of the stage as the Christmas Tree grows and grows in the background until it eclipses the whole stage. (See the dancers at the bottom for scale.) Oh, and did you notice Herr Drosselmeyer at the top? He’s watching the whole scene, the wings of his greatcoat bracketing the stage. Terrifying.

Sendak also did a book of illustrations because why not bring the nightmares home with you:

(Photo from Dancing Perfectly Free)

For contrast, apparently this is how the Oregon Ballet Theater styled their Ballachine production Rat King in 2009:

(Photo from The Oregonian)

Get on Sendak’s level, Oregon.

In conclusion, apparently The Nutcracker is meant to be sweet and fun, but honestly I’m glad to have seen the Sendak/Stowell production, nightmares and all.

(Photo from Booksridge.blogspot.com)

Thanks Maurice. Here’s hoping for a reunion tour.

[notophelia]

The Sendak PNW production is definitely closest to the spirit of the original that I’ve encountered. (See also: me yelling at the Four Realms trailers “This will absolutely NOT be darker than I have ever seen it before. It is FUCKING HOFFMANN and you are Disney.”)

The sweet spot between that and the “benign to the point of boredom” that you tend to see a lot is a really tricky balance.

The Russian-inspired production at BalletMet Columbus when I worked there in the 90s hit it very well, imho, but there are a lot of ways to do it. The filmed ABT one from the 80s with Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland (which I think PBS still runs sometimes) comes close, but falls just a little short on the benign side.

Honestly some of your smaller companies will hit it unintentionally, just by virtue of aiming for a higher level of Gorgeous And Sparkly than their budget can actually muster and landing somewhere a bit creepier.

[birbknees]

Whoah whoah whoah @notophelia ! You worked BalletMet’s Nutcracker in the 90s?? I was one of the mice with a bow one year in the late 90s! Do you, by any chance, remember if they added a black cat character to the first half of the ballet? I swear they did, but my family doesn’t remember it, and I was just a wee lass and apparently not a reliable source.

(also, all this explains why BalletMet’s Nutcracker was such a formative experience, and nothing has really come close since. My brother talks about it like every other year, how amazing seeing BalletMet’s version was as kids, but every other version of the show I’ve seen doesn’t quite capture it. I kind of assumed it was just a nostalgia phenomenon)

[notophelia]

Yes! And you can prove it. 😄 This article from the OSU paper at the time David Nixon was doing his new version says "all new costumes have been designed for the cat, the mouse king and an expanded mouse family." (For some reason my brain is insisting that Hiromi Ushino was the cat for at least some performances that first year, but I have absolutely no way to know. She was just one of my favorite company dancers at the time.)

I was more familiar with John McFall's choreography, which he had refreshed for the "centennial" production in 1992. That was where the Russian-inspired costumes and sets came in; David used those with only a few new ones because it didn't make sense to do a whole new production from scratch so soon.

Ohio State University Newspaper Archives

[taz-mania]

Obsessed with Matt Mercer's Legend of Vox Machina credits

[actualvampireang-deactivated201]

was fanfic any different in the Olden Days

OH BOY AND HOW. So I am not So Much Of An Old that I was around when print zines were the thing. I got into fanfic-type fandom through the internet. But here are some changes from the late 90s to today:

- In slash fandom, there were a lot fewer main characters written as expressly queer. There was a lot of (in retrospect) very teeth grindingly annoying “We’re not gay we just love each other” type romances. 

- Fic was mostly distributed via mailing lists (email), not by web archives, although some mailing lists also would web archive their stuff. People tended to be more monofannish because you would just participate in the list — people are more multifannish now because we follow specific people through their blogs and get introduced to their other interests, but this didn’t happen as much back in the day. People were definitely still multifannish, though. I’ve always fandom hopped.

- The aesthetic was very different. A lot of older fanfic reads in ways that were more influenced by profic romance novels, whereas modern fanfic has sort of its own, more realist style. (TBH there are also a lot more realistic/pomo style romance novels these days as well.) The stuff from the early 2000s, in comparison to 90s and earlier fic, and in comparison to modern fic, tended to be more experimental stylistically. Overall, fic tended to be longer, but also more uniformly long. There weren’t really many of those 200k monsters either.

- Not a lot of postmodern type fic conceits (i.e. stuff like the one where steve and bucky watch all the movies made about captain america while steve was in the ice, or SGA fic told through excerpts from academic papers, etc.) Early 2000s fandom went through this weird magical realism phase, also.

- In our headers, we used to measure story length in file-size, not in word length. I think this change came about in the early 2000s.

- Real Person Fic was like, not even discussed. It had its own mailing list where we kept basically all of it, and you didn’t mention it in polite company. Then suddenly in 2000-2001 all these legitimate people got into NSync fic. But before that, it was pretty taboo in a lot of fannish circles.

[some-stars]

re: point one, there was also an enormous amount of time spent on characters agonizing over being attracted to other men. like, i was reading something a while back that was actually written in 2003 but by someone who’d been in fandom for a long time and obviously hadn’t changed their aesthetic much, and the first time the pairing started making out, one of the guys suddenly had to stop—and i thought it was gonna be like, traumatic memories, or just general intimacy issues, or whatever. but it was because it was ~all too new~ and he had to take a few more days to adjust to the whole gay thing.

oh and then along the same lines you had guys running out to try and have sex with women and fail, or have sex with women but find it so unsatisfying, before ultimately admitting that they wanted this particular dick. also, considering the prevalence of WNGWJLEO, it was oddly mandatory to point out at great length how much each character never really loved his previous female partners.

basically fandom now, at least the well-written part of it, is a million times less homophobic and biphobic and, believe it or not, misogynist. obviously there were always exceptions, especially with the really good writers, and especially as you move into the late nineties. but as a rule, so much improvement.

oh, and every love confession required a full name. Firstname Middlename Lastname, I love you. where does that even come from, seriously?

i will give them this—there was a lot less badfic that was technically bad, like, unreadable and full of errors. shit got edited back in the day. someone was gonna pay money to print five hundred copies of that and they did not want your terrible spelling to fuck it up.

oh, and not related to anything else, but: usenet! usenet was a super important venue for many fandoms. this actually continued well into the 2000s for certain fandom circles—not slash-focused media fandom in general, but there was a lot of overlap. i was reading alt.tv.angel during season two, and there were fic writers i recognized posting there. and of course earlier on, the alt.startrek.creative.* groups were central.

[saathi1013]

Random things I want to add based on my admittedly-hazy memory:

- elaborate ascii headers/footers/dividers on fic, which were mostly txt files (or bare-bones text-only pages to save archive space) I think?

- faking ages to get access to the adult stuff (which could get complicated depending on what country you were from and what country the admin(s) were from). This sometimes involved emailing an age statement to the owner of a mailing list and them deciding whether or not to trust you (or how much they actually gave a fuck) before giving you the password to an archive or authenticating your whatever to access the whosit, I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked.  Because I was fifteen at the time. Of course.

- There were people who were very adamantly ‘gay stuff is okay in fanfic but immoral IRL.’  Don’t ask me how that worked out logically, but it was a thing.

- DO NOT FORGET THE BEFORE-TIMES when there was no google and there were scattered archives everywhere, from ‘archive of [specific mailing list]’ to authors’ personal archives to pairing- or fandom-specific archives and the way you found a lot of them was like hoping aol or yahoo search would turn up something new?  But on the other hand you had a fair number of folks who were twitchy about having webcrawlies being able to find their porn because fanfic was already kind of side-eyed and porny stuff even moreso.

- there were archivists who actively trawled mailing lists and authors archives and such to compile their own interest-specific archives, sometimes asking the authors if they could host a fic… and sometimes NOT asking.  Cue: wank.

- OR you navigated WEBRINGS (which are like tumblr ‘networks’ I think? I don’t grok tumblr networks but ya’ll have fun with them, I’ll be over here in my rocking chair mmk) where there was essentially a master list of websites catering to a specific interest, sometimes with details but sometimes it was just a name and a link so you had no idea what you were clicking on half the time, you just knew it fell under category [thing the webring was about].

(…tbh, this was probably how I found out about slash, because of some X-Files or Pretender or maybe early SG1 webring, I don’t even know. I just saw “[fandomname] slash archive” and was desperate for new fic in [fandom] and hey presto “boys?? kissing?? GIRLS? KISSING?!! YOU CAN DO THAT? Ship things that don’t match what canon would expect you to ship?? oops now I have an exponentially greater amount of ships than I did before”)(given that description, it was probably stargate because there was a LOT of pretty to go around okay)

- let me TELL you about the recurring firestorm of wank that would rush through every goddamned fandom for at least a 5- to 10-year period there where someone would be like “all same-gender shippy stuff needs an NC-17 warning because that stuff is not okay for kids” and other folks would be like “can we not equate handholding to explicit PIV intercourse solely based on the genders of the participants” and holy jesus it was the EXACT same ugly nausea-inducing merry-go-round in at least six of my fandoms, which is why I am zero percent impressed with ‘family’ networks caving to that bullpockey because My People already hashed that out, get with the times, thanks.

- fanfic archives without search functions, where everything was just listed by date posted and sorted by pairing IF YOU WERE LUCKY.  One sentence summaries with no tags, no warnings, sometimes no ratings.  Sometimes no lengths (see above regarding length measured by filesize).  Because everything was coded in early html and some folks just didn’t want to (or knew how to) code all that.  This is why I give money to ao3, people.  I REMEMBER THE BEFORETIMES.

- oh, and finding That Reccer whose tastes ran similar to your own and posted like 10+ recs a week?  Like Santa and Baby Jesus came down from on high and showered glitter all over you before kissing you gently on the forehead and then disappearing in a double rainbow.  (You think recs help you filter wheat from chaff NOW, it was all the moreso when you had to do all this hunting just to find stuff TO sort though)

- yes this was also before lj and wordpress and basically any kind of rich text editor-enabled blogging platform.  Hand-coded html pages hosted on geocities with terrible font color choices and pixellated blinky tiled gif backgrounds, aw yus.

>midlevel-bofq jazzhands<

[calligrafiti]

Oh, goodness, yes. There’d be the occasional fangirl collective where a prolific handful of fans of a given franchise (Highlander comes immediately to mind) would put a website together for hosting all their fic. And you’d get the impression that they were all betaing each other’s stuff, and if you liked one take on the canon you’d probably like everything on the site so it would be a total “jackpot!” moment.

[lunaris1013]

I hand-coded one of those geocities pages - that’s how and why I learned to code. (And yes, it was on a webring!)  There was a subgroup of us from alt.tv.highlander that split off into our own private mailing list (you needed an invitation to get on) and for that I rented space on a university server and learned the unix commands to run it. I think this is the fandom equivalent of walking five miles uphill - both ways! - to school.

Right around 2000 I started watching Starsky & Hutch re-runs. But unlike when I watched it as a kid (first run) I now had slash goggles! I went looking for the fandom, only to find it was mostly hide-bound to print zines and slash was still a dirty word.  OMG the kerfuffles I got in to with the old BNFs trying to pull that fandom, kicking and screaming, into the digital age. I did have one digital compatriot, and she photocopied several old slash zines for me.  Swear to god every story was a WNGWJLO fest of sexuality angst and outright hatred of Hutch’s ex-wife. There was one memorable story with butter for lube. :-)

[brak666]

So, THAT’s where butter for lube came from! I failed gloriously attempting to draw that in a game fanish pictionary back in the day.

Also, those bare bones html and .txt fics and posting the file size were as much about the fact that everyone was on fucking dial-up as it was about saving space on archives and people not really knowing how to code.

[raiining]

And THIS is why I give money to AO3, because godDAMN! The old days were hard, and I say that as someone who started reading fic in 2002 and caught just the tail-end of the webring difficulties.

[elljayvee]

If y'all want a flashback to finding fic back in the day, exclude ao3 from your search results and try to find fanfic for the 1987 Ron Perlman Beauty & the Beast. It’s easier than it was back then, due to SIGNIFICANTLY improved search engines and fanfic in general being less hidden, but it will give you an idea of what archives looked like in the 90s/early 2000s, and how you had to open several tabs and hunt through navigation and IF YOU WERE LUCKY you knew the pairing of the story going in.

[daemonluna]

This is giving me some serious fandom nostalgia flashbacks. Has anyone mentioned the 90’s disclaimers yet? “I don’t own X characters, I’m just playing in Y Company’s sandbox…” Or the warnings for slash. “Contains men kissing each other! If you don’t like it, don’t read.” Way more time spent on characters agonizing about being gay because of how very much less visible gay people WERE at the time. It would have read as unrealistic for it NOT to be a big deal. There were so many more real world consequences to coming out.

And fandoms splitting off into different mailing lists due to DramaTM. This is the main list! This is the list that’s free of that icky slash and kink! This is the list that is for controversial pairing! This is the list for GOOD fic only, by which we mean the list mod’s friends. THIS is the list where we welcome the icky slash, kink, and all pairings. (I’m conflating several fandoms for the sake of example here, but also due South I am looking at you.)

No tags. Maybe genre notes. Warnings, but variable depending on fandom and context. Probably a summary, but not always. I feel like there was more challenge fic where authors wrote on a specific trope or theme in the LJ era because of the way the online communities worked, but that could be context-dependent based on which fandoms and where you’re hanging out now.

Archives that were a massive one-page list of links, or split into categories, but no way to search sub-pages. Fic shared on usenet, posted in multi-parts because of character limits, and sometimes your ISP would be flakey about picking up posts, so you’d get 4, 2, 7-9, 1, of 12 in that order. Individual author pages, that combined fic, character shrines, a links list, and the inevitable under construction GIF. And there was no guarantee that the fic wasn’t in purple text on a navy blue patterned background.

(AO3, I love you.)

[browsedankmemes]

Violently American via /r/memes http://bit.ly/2InoW3f

[edgar-allan-possum]

Why do Europeans fear innovation?

[supreme-leader-stoat]

Because they fear that which they do not understand. We can only continue to hope that they will one day see the light.

[sindri42]

I don’t even like fried chicken but that there is genius at work.

[cookingwithroxy]

That’s genius that is, it’s snack and drink in a container you can hold in one hand, solving the traditional stadium problem of occasionally needing a hand free!

[thoughtportal]

Opinion Here’s how to get free Paxlovid as many times as you need it

When the public health emergency around covid-19 ended, vaccines and treatments became commercial products, meaning companies could charge for them as they do other pharmaceuticals. Paxlovid, the highly effective antiviral pill that can prevent covid from becoming severe, now has a list price of nearly $1,400 for a five-day treatment course.

Thanks to an innovative agreement between the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, Americans can still access the medication free or at very low cost through a program called Paxcess. The problem is that too few people — including pharmacists — are aware of it.

I learned of Paxcess only after readers wrote that pharmacies were charging them hundreds of dollars — or even the full list price — to fill their Paxlovid prescription. This shouldn’t be happening. A representative from Pfizer, which runs the program, explained to me that patients on Medicare and Medicaid or who are uninsured should get free Paxlovid. They need to sign up by going to paxlovid.iassist.com or by calling 877-219-7225. “We wanted to make enrollment as easy and as quick as possible,” the representative said.

Indeed, the process is straightforward. I clicked through the web form myself, and there are only three sets of information required. Patients first enter their name, date of birth and address. They then input their prescriber’s name and address and select their insurance type.

All this should take less than five minutes and can be done at home or at the pharmacy. A physician or pharmacist can fill it out on behalf of the patient, too. Importantly, this form does not ask for medical history, proof of a positive coronavirus test, income verification, citizenship status or other potentially sensitive and time-consuming information.

But there is one key requirement people need to be aware of: Patients must have a prescription for Paxlovid to start the enrollment process. It is not possible to pre-enroll. (Though, in a sense, people on Medicare or Medicaid are already pre-enrolled.)

Once the questionnaire is complete, the website generates a voucher within seconds. People can print it or email it themselves, and then they can exchange it for a free course of Paxlovid at most pharmacies.

Pfizer’s representative tells me that more than 57,000 pharmacies are contracted to participate in this program, including major chain drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens and large retail chains such as Walmart, Kroger and Costco. For those unable to go in person, a mail-order option is available, too.

The program works a little differently for patients with commercial insurance. Some insurance plans already cover Paxlovid without a co-pay. Anyone who is told there will be a charge should sign up for Paxcess, which would further bring down their co-pay and might even cover the entire cost.

Several readers have attested that Paxcess’s process was fast and seamless. I was also glad to learn that there is basically no limit to the number of times someone could use it. A person who contracts the coronavirus three times in a year could access Paxlovid free or at low cost each time.

Unfortunately, readers informed me of one major glitch: Though the Paxcess voucher is honored when presented, some pharmacies are not offering the program proactively. As a result, many patients are still being charged high co-pays even if they could have gotten the medication at no cost.

This is incredibly frustrating. However, after interviewing multiple people involved in the process, including representatives of major pharmacy chains and Biden administration officials, I believe everyone is sincere in trying to make things right. As we saw in the early days of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, it’s hard to get a new program off the ground. Policies that look good on paper run into multiple barriers during implementation.

Those involved are actively identifying and addressing these problems. For instance, a Walgreens representative explained to me that in addition to educating pharmacists and pharmacy techs about the program, the company learned it also had to make system changes to account for a different workflow. Normally, when pharmacists process a prescription, they inform patients of the co-pay and dispense the medication. But with Paxlovid, the system needs to stop them if there is a co-pay, so they can prompt patients to sign up for Paxcess.

Here is where patients and consumers must take a proactive role. That might not feel fair; after all, if someone is ill, people expect that the system will work to help them. But that’s not our reality. While pharmacies work to fix their system glitches, patients need to be their own best advocates. That means signing up for Paxcess as soon as they receive a Paxlovid prescription and helping spread the word so that others can get the antiviral at little or no cost, too.

{source}

[theperksofbeingahugefuckingcunt]

Holy shit, please reblog this. This is incredibly useful information! Paxlovid not only helps reduce the severity of covid but also goes a decent way to preventing long covid. I cannot stress this enough — even if you think this isn’t relevant to you because you’re perfectly healthy, you could get covid TOMORROW and permanently have long covid a month from today if you got unlucky.

And, of course, if you suspect you have covid, take a test or see a doctor ASAP. Paxlovid MUST be taken within the first five days of developing symptoms. The Paxcess copay card seems really easy and quick to fill out, though!

[herpolls]

Shittiest covid sympton you got

Fever

Cough

Difficulty breathing

Sore throat

Congestion / Runny nose

Loss of taste or smell

Body aches

Headaches

Nausea / vomiting

Diarrhea

Other (tell in the tags sis)

Didn't get covid / Was asymptomatic / Bald

Voting ended onSep 7, 2024

[loving-n0t-heyting]

"you become guilty of misdeeds by even involuntarily benefiting from them" is a fucking psycho ass moral principle to see bandied about as freely as i do

"what you are responsible for = what you control" is such an obvious foundational principle i would not even know how to go about arguing for it

[loving-n0t-heyting]

the impression of insanity here is exacerbated rather than diminished by earnest claims that "guilt" and "moralism" are the only things that could make complicity-thru-involuntary-benefit seem worrying. why the need to reach for such radical and vague revisions to our ordinary concepts of "complicit" and "responsible" when it suffices to point out that ppl clearly bear no responsibility for shit they didnt do? leaves me with the suspicion ppl still want to use guilt as a cudgel without the recipients of the cudgeling getting to object to it as such

that and an implicit (well, usually just implicit) demand you accept that you deserve whats coming to you

[roach-works]

it also seems like a quick and dirty way of squaring the circle of how people can benefit from privileged social positions that they can't relinquish, in the stupidest most bloodthirsty puritan manner.

like, i absolutely have white privilege; i can't stop being white or end racism; i benefit from something i didn't start and can't stop. however, there are earnest and worthwhile conversations to be had in how i have the power and thus responsibility to recognize my advantages and use them to promote equity in my own relationships with fellow citizens. i can't give up my privilege and it's kinda absurd to suggest i should exist in a state of wretched penitent guilt for it-- but if you're tall enough to reach the high shelf in a grocery store, it's probably virtuous to fetch inaccessible stuff down for the folks who come up short.

[roach-works]

and to really clarify this i am not responsible for ending a situation i have no say in or control over. a tall guy doesn't have to roam a grocery store perpetually in service to shorter dudes to atone for a corporation's stocking decisions.

when i have a say in inequality, i speak up. when my black coworkers are paid less, i let them know and bring this up to our boss. at my current job everyone's getting paid the same and treated fairly. to agonize perpetually over the moral ramifications of my abstractly superior position would be incredibly self-absorbed. so im just chill.

i think self-flagellation is every bit as selfish and arrogant as self-aggrandizement; ultimately you are not the world's most central character, hero OR villain. if you have no power over something you have no responsibility to it, and i think that's probably a scary thing to accept. but you're free to chill the fuck out when you do.

[agarthanguide]

It’s finally time for another proper series- the Bells Hells in historical art styles!

First up is Saint Laudna with the tools of her martyrdom as stained glass. This is technically in the style of 19th century medieval revivalism.

I had a ton of fun studying stained glass techniques so I could replicate them while working on this. I specifically used a lot of (digital) sgraffito and back staining.

Fun fact- the “stain” in stained glass refers to silver stain, generally silver nitrate, which was used to build yellows on white glass, or greens on cobalt blue glass.

[blanketforcas]

(only answer if you're 20+!) did one or both of your parents/guardians smoke cigarettes inside the house for at least 1 year or longer while you were/are living at their house?

i'm under 20

yes, even bedrooms

yes, but not bedrooms(*)

yes but only in one designated room (eg laundry room) i didn't often need to be

no, they only smoked outside

no, they didn't smoke (or stopped before i lived there)

no, but *i* did/do

even more nuanced answer that really doesn't fit any of the above

Voting ended onJul 19, 2024

*you can answer "yes, but not bedrooms" if that also includes bathrooms or the whole upstairs if that's where all the bedrooms are

also let me know where you're from if you want!

[swordshapedleaves]

This is I think, my best prep tip as a DM:

When the players are about to visit a new town, pre-generate several NPCs who fit the demographics of the town, but don't give them jobs. Your town is Mostly human, with a number of halflings and gnomes? Make a list that's mostly humans with some halflings and gnomes mixed in, with names that match the vibe you're going for and maybe the barest description + a quirk of some sort.

So the list would look something like this:

Ophelia Bracegurdle, older Halfling woman who laughs a lot

Norabecka Johnson, a young human woman who seems tired

Geraldofinio Babblecock Nimsy, gnome gentleman who takes pains to maintain a fabulous mustache

Etc.

Then, when the players are like, "Can I go to the blacksmith?" You look at your list of NPCs and the one at the top is Ophelia Bracegurdle. She's your blacksmith now. Then they want to go to the tavern, where Norabecka is the innkeeper and Geraldofinio is a patron having a drink at the bar. He's using a straw so he doesn't mess up his mustache.

If they had gone to the inn first, Ophelia would have been the innkeeper with Norabecka as the patron, and then Geraldofinio should have been a blacksmith with some sort of mustache guard to keep the sparks off.

Making the list ahead of time doesn't take much time, and you can often re-use the people you never got to at the next town.

Your world will seem vibrant and interesting and like you have everything planned out.

Have fun!

[swordshapedleaves]

Since this post has been getting a lot of notes, I would like to clarify a couple of points. This method has a few different benefits I would like people to note:

This prep is fairly simple and easy. You could use a random name generator and find lists of character quirks online or you could just make your own shit up. Because no one has any jobs or stats, you have very little you have to decide ahead of time.

It removes in-the-moment decision making from your game. Because you assign NPCs to roles as the players meet them, you don't have to pick who is gonna be the blacksmith or make up a blacksmith ahead of time.

This third point is the heart of this method for me: Randomization thwarts stereotyping. Some DMs struggle with this more than others, but I know I have made my fair share of gruff burly man blacksmiths! How many of us would really pick Ophelia Bracegurdle, older halfling woman who likes to laugh, to be the blacksmith? Honestly I probably wouldn't. But since in the example the players wanted to go to the blacksmith first, there she is. And now we have the option but not the requirement to think about why and how old Ophelia got her job. Maybe she's a widow who took over for her dead husband. Maybe she just always wanted to be a blacksmith or this town just has always had halfling ladies be their blacksmiths. Or maybe you don't think about it at all, and she's just the blacksmith because she is.

I've been in games where literally every NPC except the pretty barmaid is a man, and pretty much everyone is a light skinned dwarf, elf, or human. I've also been in games with awesome diverse characters who bring the game to life. I know I want to be a DM who creates the latter, and this system helps push back against our unconscious biases. When you have the list of everyone in the town, you can see ahead of time if you have a good gender ratio, whether your descriptions include any people with disabilities or people from different points of view.

[swordshapedleaves]

Hey! Welcome! Since my silly garbage truck anglerfish post is getting me a bunch of attention right now, check out a post I'm actually proud of while you're here

[great-and-small]

Watching Przewalski's horses run free on the Kazakhstan steppe for the first time in 200 years

[great-and-small]

[khaleesi]

It's my time to shine as a horse girl!!

These horses went extinct in the wild 60 years ago! They were reintroduced in other parts of Mongolia and Central Asia earlier than they were reintroduced on the Steppes, but having them back here has been generational conservation work. It's truly amazing.

These horses and other kinds of horses are probably different branches of evolution, which is CRAZY AWESOME. Modern horse breeds trace back to one branch, and these dudes evolved separately. They have 33 chromosome pairs whereas the horse you're used to seeing in movies and TV shows (or riding if you too are a horse girl - gender neutral title of expertise) have 32.

Despite this, you can interbreed these two species and they will have fertile offspring. That's really rare! (A common equine cross between species, the mule, is an always-sterile offspring of a donkey and a horse, for instance).

I did have to look the exact numbers up here, full disclosure, but it's believed that Przewalski's horses and other breeds have a common ancestor about between 160,000 and 38,000 years ago

The horses you see on cave art? These guys!

It's likely that Attila the Hun and his armies rode these horses (though hard to prove decisively)

Part of the conservation efforts around them involved CLONING to avoid a genetic bottleneck. ISN'T THAT DOPE. You can read more about that here

These are the only truly wild horses. All other "wild" horses -- Australian brumbies and American mustangs, for instance -- are feral descendants of domesticated horses, which is partly why you can see such a wide range of heights, colors, conformations, etc in those populations.

Anyway. This is incredible news and this species of animal is very special, very ancient, and very cool.

[txttletale]

american gun culture literally has so many people convinced that the plot of Funny Games might happen to them at any time and the only way to prevent it is to vigorously defend their right to murder anybody who steps foot in their home

[txttletale]

i keep posting "its bad to kill someone with a gun, even if they're stealing from you" and getting like a dozen responses of "yeah well what if someone broke into my house to Kill Me and they'd stop at nothing until i was dead would that be okay then?" and amiguitas i dont think thats very likely to happen to be honest

[max1461]

This is what I keep talking about as "the logic of self defense". It's the same basic principle used to justify callout posts, "punching up" in a social justice context, a significant chunk of racism (in the US, mostly anti-black racism), hawkishness on the international stage, etc. etc.

"If (I judge that) there is any non-negligible probability that you will brutalize me, the right to self defense justifies me in using whatever means are available to brutalize you first, so that you don't do that."

Naturally, because it's fairly easy to construct a reason for yourself to believe that anyone you happen not to like has a non-negligible probability of brutalizing you, this line of reasoning will be widely utilized by people who just want to brutalize someone to begin with, for one reason or another. The idea that an arbitrarily harmful preemptive strike is justified by merely feeling under threat is widespread and, naturally, anathema to the goal of solidarity and friendship between all human kind.

[rosstmcd]

Once upon a time I took a handgun course at a local gun shop, which was a bit of an odd experience since I was there because I like target shooting and everyone else was there for "self-defense."

But since that was what most people were there for, the instructor talked about defending your home. He said - and remember, this was a guy who worked at a gun store - that the current thinking among experts was that you should never go wandering around your house in the dark with a gun. Far too many bad things can happen.

What you do instead is that you designate a room in your house as a safe room. It might be your bedroom, or the bedroom of your youngest kid, or whatever. If that room doesn't have a lock on the door, install one. If you really want to go all-out, install a security door.

Then, if you wake up in the night and hear a suspicious noise, you quickly gather everyone into that room and lock the door. You can make this a family drill that you practice regularly, like you should be practicing evacuating in case of a fire and other emergencies.

Once you're in the room with the door locked, you can call 911 if it seems warranted. If you do have a gun, you can cover the door.

The advantages of this approach are:

If, as is most likely, the noise was your cat, or your teenager sneaking in after curfew, or your neighbor who came home drunk and mistook your house for his, then you will feel embarrassed instead of making a tragic mistake.

If it actually is someone breaking in, then it is very likely that they're just going to grab your TV or whatever and leave, in which case you and your family have stayed safe and you call your insurance agent in the morning.

In the extremely unlikely event that they are intruders who really do mean to harm you and start trying to break down the door, then you are in a much stronger tactical position then moving around your house in the dark. And your self-defense case, if it comes to that, will be on much stronger legal footing.

But really, the final scenario is so unlikely that the purpose of this procedure is 99% about keeping you from doing something you will deeply regret.

[purplesaline]

I once was woken in the middle of the night by my then girlfriend who had heard a sound in the living room and asked me where the cat was. I replied he was sleeping against me and we went back to sleep.

At six am we were woken by the police banging on the door. They wanted to know where our car was. Oddly my coat was in the middle of the floor but my brain wasn't processing very well that early so I went to get my keys from the pocket.

They weren't there. The car wasn't where it was supposed to be either. Neither was my laptop or our game console.

If we'd instead woken up to investigate and confronted the thieves I can all but guarantee one of us would have been hurt.

Our car was found stuck in a snow drift, which was what sent the police to our home in the first place. Our other things were found in a another stolen vehicle days later in a different city. I had to wait six months to get them back mind you because they were evidence in a criminal trial, bit we got them back.

If you're worried about your things being stolen that's what home owner's or tenants insurance is for.

It's not worth killing someone over.

[pr0m37h3um]

how much do you know about the Challenger disaster

I know nothing about Challenger or the disaster

I know what the Challenger disaster is

I know what the Challenger disaster is and why it happened

Voting ended onJul 1, 2024

Please reblog to increase sample size, I am trying to find out how much normal people know about this because I am Not Normal and my assumed baseline of knowledge cannot be trusted

[pr0m37h3um]

You guys gotta reblog come on

[general-sleepy]

Fic writers, put in the tags what the difference in hits is between your most and least viewed fics. Mine is 7,720 (7,779-59).

[macavitykitsune]

So it’s a little bit of a difference, lol

[taraljc]

um..

104,746 vs 16

That's a lot.

[kaity--did]

Starting an even NEWER thread of insane shit my husband says to/about our toddler that makes me scream laugh 

For reference here’s the first 50

51. Let’s do it again folks

[kaity--did]

52.

Trying to get a toddler to do anything of importance

[kaity--did]

53.

An overheard conversation

Penny: what is that?

Husband : that? It’s a ceiling fan.

Penny: Ceiling Fan. can I touch it?

Husband: …. I mean yeah sure why not

I turn around to see my husband holding Penny Circle of Life style as she closely inspects the ceiling fan in our bedroom.

[kaity--did]

54.

A continuation of the previous interaction

Me: you know you’re allowed to say no to her.

Husband : why though? It seemed like a reasonable request! Shes never been up there!

[dramatic-dolphin]

me: i'm adding realism to this medieval fantasy setting

what people think i mean: grime, gratuitous sexual assault and murder, misogyny, child marriage

what i actually mean: everyone reads out loud, women are spinning wool all the time, peasants marry at 20, people wear colors.

[ororium-z]

Happy Pride!

[rootbeergoddess]

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

[thesaltofcarthage]

I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.