Magic Trick

Occasionally NSFW ::: This is presently as close as I can get to piping your brilliant and wonderful ideas directly into my brain.

[rb-theartgoat]

Did some sketches for my aberrant dnd character and her most recent transformations in game! Was very fun to do

[undeadsucker]

now that thats done i have to start the biggest x-stitch i will have attempted to this day. the televisionnnnnn

[undeadsucker]

see you in 1-3 years

[undeadsucker]

ta dah bitch!!!

[musubiarte]

The other day I was surfing the internet and I found this specialized painting colour wheel, it shows how real paint colours relate to each other. 

Outside: the purest/brightest colours.

Inside: naturally muted or earthy colors, like browns and ochres.

The Center: dark neutral tones used for mixing shadows.

The Lines: the lines connect colors that are opposites, if you mix them you neutralize the tone creating clean grays or browns instead of muddy puddles.

I want to share this with you because I think it is really illustrative!

Reference: “Quiller Wheel” by Stephen Quiller

[ndnbutch]

fyi. being intensely self critical is not the same as being self aware. if you’re really self aware you’ll be aware of the good stuff too. just in case anyone needs to hear it. don’t mistake constantly dissecting what you see as your flaws for some kind of personal enlightenment.

[cheaphalloweencostume]

i just saw the saddest tiktok in the world that purported “im not like other girls, i dont masturbate because i know it would make disinterested in men forever” baby girl you have to jack off and never talk to a man again im literally begging you.

[squagel]

It's literally just "If I masturbate I'll get addicted to it and I'll let myself and my future spouse down" in fewer words 😔

So, as a woman who has been where this girl is rn, is married to a man, and was sexually active with this man prior to the marriage, let's clear a few things up:

1) There is no guaranteed future spouse or "the one" for everyone. Churches may tell you this and even secular materials may tell you this, but it is not true.

2) Marriage and sexual activity often go together, but they do not have to, and a healthy marriage depends on way more than just sex.

3) Even if you do end up getting married in the future, you are not cheating on your future spouse by masturbating or having sex before you meet said future spouse.

4) Whatever you do and think about to pleasure yourself are entirely private and have zero bearing on the health of your future relationships--except, of course, perhaps in a positive way: if you learn what you like ahead of time, you'll be able to teach that to your partner, and you'll enjoy sex more, and by extension so will they!

5) You will not get "addicted" to masturbation just because you enjoy it, and you're not addicted just because you do it multiple times a day. There really is no such thing as masturbation addiction.

6) There also really is no such thing as porn addiction.

7) People who fear such a thing happening to them or who believe they are in that position are often found to have been conditioned to feel that way due to sex-negative religious upbringings. Usually what's found is that their masturbation frequency/level of porn consumption/etc is entirely normal.

8) There is such a thing as compulsive masturbation or compulsive porn consumption--when you do either or both to the point that it's getting in the way of you being able to be present in your daily activities and relationships--but usually there is some root cause, like avoidance of deep feelings or problems. The same thing can happen with any activity, like food, video games, or work.

9) Masturbating does not leave you incapable of receiving sexual satisfaction from or desiring sex with another person.

10) Same thing with consuming porn, by the way.

11) And on that note, using porn within a relationship doesn't necessarily mean you are cheating or that you are dissatisfied with your partner. But knowing their partner is doing that hits differently for different people. What really seems to have the most negative effect is discovering secret usage despite setting boundaries about it ahead of time. Checking in with each other to make sure you're on the same page is important.

12) Using toys/vibrators to masturbate and even during partnered sex is entirely normal, healthy, and sometimes necessary for some people, especially those who have a clitoris. If your partner feels jealous or inadequate because of that, it's because of their own insecurities and hangups, not because you are doing anything wrong.

[shirbird]

Just going to drop this article here

Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction, You Should, Too

Research finds that porn-related problems are predominantly caused by religious conflict. Clinically, this means people need help, but not n

[yyyyddmmsupremacy-deactivated20]

one person's "ugghh this trope is so overdone" is another person's "oooooohohohohohohohoho"

[queer-as-city-folk]

tumblr users are living in a world wholly their own which I can not help but envy

[disheveled-notion]

New “do it scared” just dropped

[sparrowlucero]

driftwood wolves. driftwolves if you will (available on my kofi as adoptables!)

[the-bitch-mob]

fuck it. be creative even if you never really *make* anything. write out plot synopses of stories and then move on. design OCs you'll never use. make mood boards and concept art and don't do anything with them. life's too short to forget everything that inspired you and creation doesn't have to be "complete" to be worth the time you put into it.

[twlvmn]

made some tetrapods

[twlvmn]

made a big one

[andre-moraph]

Caught

[calllynx]

The shape of love

[calllynx]

This is on paper btw

[rowlfthedog]

[foxboytail]

As a young adult, I used to think what messed me up as a kid was having completely unfiltered access to things I wasn’t ready for, like NSFW content, gore, heavy discourse, and the existence of predatory adults online. But now that I’m older, I see it differently.

The problem wasn’t what I had access to. It was that I didn’t have access to a safe adult I could actually talk to; someone I could trust to help me without immediately cutting me off from everything and everyone. I remember getting messages from strangers on Skype. I didn’t even respond. But when my parents found out, they banned me from using it entirely. That meant losing most of my contact with friends outside of school. So what did I do? I went behind their backs. And once I was hiding, I couldn’t tell them when something actually dangerous was happening, like when I started being groomed. By the time things escalated, I was already alone with it.

I think about an episode of Scared Straight where a girl was dragged through a prison because she’d been talking to adult men online. She wasn’t doing that because she was reckless or malicious; she was lonely. Her parents weren’t present, she was being bullied at school, and these men gave her attention, told her she was pretty, told her she mattered. She was already being harmed. And the adults in her life responded by terrorizing her. Humiliating her. Calling her a slut. Telling her she deserved it. Breaking her to pieces.

What lesson does that actually teach? Not “this is dangerous, come to us.” It teaches: If you get hurt, we will hurt you more. Do you really think that makes her stop, or does it just make the predators look safer by comparison? They might as well have driven her straight into the jaws of those predators with torches and pitchforks. Because when every path back to safety is lined with punishment, kids don’t run away from danger. They run deeper into it.

If you want kids to be safe, stop treating them like problems to control and start treating them like people worth protecting. Stop ripping away their autonomy the second they make a mistake or encounter something risky. Stop teaching them that honesty will cost them everything.

Be the person they can come to without fear of losing their entire world. Because safety isn’t built through control, it’s built through trust. And if you aren’t safe for them to tell the truth to, then you aren’t keeping them safe at all.

[prokopetz]

I don't disagree with the observation that a lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe that game design is real (i.e., in the sense that they believe any GM should be able to achieve any experience of play using any system, and refuse to recognise that rules are opinionated about what sort of games they want to produce), but I feel like putting that at the forefront is confusing the symptom for the disease. A lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe game design is real because they don't believe that games are real.

I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.

The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.

And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.

Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.

(Note that, while I've identified Hasbro's deceptive marketing as the ultimate source of this culture of play, indie RPGs are hardly innocent of perpetuating it. You only need cast a critical eye on the "Rule Zero" sections of many popular indie games to notice that their authors are all in on the idea that games aren't real!)

[prokopetz]

#ohhhh this is really good analysis #also i think large scale super professional actual play podcasts n shit are a big part of this #cuz imo that was a Lot of peoples main engagement with ttrpgs back in the day (about a decade ago) #and a lot of people thats still their Main TTRPG Experience #and like. those tend to be even less Game Like than the average dnd campaign #like a lot of that shit is in fact. scripted. and made to be more cinematic for the audience etc (via @st4rshiptr00per)

Yeah, big name "actual play" podcasts that pretend they're not scripted and workshopped to hell are a big contributing factor, though I wouldn't classify them as distinct from Hasbro's marketing apparatus so much as one of the most visible arms of that apparatus. The fact that Hasbro isn't paying them directly doesn't mean they aren't serving the brand.

(The weird part is that I get the impression that some of them don't even know it. Sometimes it seems like Brennan Lee Mulligan genuinely doesn't realise that best practices for running a game of Dungeons & Dragons as a kind of performance art for a paying audience are very different from best practices for running a game of Dungeons & Dragons for your three buddies in the GM's dining room.)

[prokopetz]

@hayeseveryone replied:

Maaaaaan. So I'm DMing two DnD 5e games at the moment. One of them is a high level combat focused megadungeon with very experienced players, while the other is more open and has more RP with a mix of experienced and new players. I always feel way more drained after a session running the latter game than the former. And I think you really helped me see why. I'm DEFINITELY having to do a ton of track-laying while running that game, because it's such an unfocused game. I feel way more like I have to be an entertainer who's always the one responsible for my players' fun, rather than expecting them to make their own fun using the rules of the game, like the players in my other group do.

Quite so – that's the central paradox of the rules-heavy-versus-rules-light debate: provided that the game the rules want to produce agrees with the game the group wants to play, a rules-heavy game may actually be less demanding to run than a rules-light one. A rigorous framework of play can be a very effective means of distributing the workload of making the game happen; if you play your cards right, the players won't even notice they're taking a load off the GM's shoulders by making their own rulings, because to them it just feels like drawing the obvious conclusions.

[poolsofchrome]

Blacktop sings to a backroads moon

[witchrealms]

Upcycled Custom curtains made from vintage one of a kind 35mm film slides... All the 35mm slides are original photographic images from the the past 50+ years from various amateur photographers around the world and the subject matters are as diverse as the planet itself. By night the slides are visible from outside when the interior lights are illuminated acting as a privacy window for you. The curtains are 5ft 7in tall by 6ft wide and consist of 36 curtain rings, 1,152 vintage film slides and 1,152 slide mounts and almost 7,000 silver tone rings and took a total of 4 months to make. (x)