podficcer by night

kalakirya lives here          she/her/hers           at AO3

[academicblorbo]

Everyone: omg Hollander leash your dog, Ilya is barking at opponent hockey players again

Shane Enabler Hollander: ok so Ilyusha this player has had zero assists in the entire season, he got drafted last, and finally - and this is crucial - he once scored a goal in his own team's net

Ilya Heart Eyes Rozanov: thank you my ShaneWiki this is valuable data, off I go

[quixoticanarchy]

damn people rly hate type 2 diabetics don't they

[quixoticanarchy]

i (type 1 diabetic) was explaining autoimmune diseases to someone and she was like ohh right so yours is the good kind of diabetes where you didn't do it to yourself. to which i objected that's not how type 2 works either. and she said well that's the fat old people disease. and i was like you can't say that, a) not how it works and b) extremely rude. and her defense was her grandparents have type 2 and "did it to themselves" and since they're fat old people she reserves the right to hate on them. i understand hating shitty grandparents but YOU are the shitty one here to hate on them for their medical conditions and weight rather than literally anything else. hello?!

anyway type 2 diabetics i'm sorry about the world. everyone* be kind to type 2s or else

*note to type 1 diabetics especially we need to be better at solidarity and not cling to being the "good ones" at type 2s' expense. what the fuck is a good kind of diabetes anyway

[quixoticanarchy]

also worth saying diabetes is a complex reaction to a not-yet-fully-understood set of factors and environmental pressures and genetics and it's reductive and fatphobic to say fat=diabetes BUT EVEN SO no matter if someone did incontrovertibly "give themself diabetes" that's not a free pass for dehumanization. shut upppp

[jmtorres]

fun fact one thing we DO know is the common view of the causality is wrong. fatness does not cause type 2 diabetes, type 2 diabetes causes weight gain.

diabetes is a metabolic disorder! it fucks up how your body absorbs, stores, and uses chemical energy! like hello???? this is the SPECIFIC case where what you eat and what shape your body are radically don't match up, setting aside the fact that it's not a one-to-one relationship across populations in general

[sarkastically]

Do you have any Baze/Chirrut fic recs?

So. The thing is that I am not a picky fanfic reader. I tend to just gobble up all the fics for particular pairings that I enjoy, but I definitely have some that I reread more than others so I guess I’ll point you in the direction of those fics/those writers. I’ll add the rating for things M and above just in case. Also, I’ll avoid adding anything that isn’t complete as I know some people prefer to skip those.

Firstly, in case you haven’t found them, I have written a decent amount of Baze/Chirrut fic, which is located here

And now other recs, which are in no other order save most recently bookmarked to oldest bookmarked:

Guan Ren and Gao Long by seaofolives

These Hearts (rated M) and The Sea is Divided by  kurgaya

Earnest Truth (rated E) by Pretentious_Procrastinator

The Right Questions (rated E) by Arktikko

In the Hands of Destiny (this is a series so ratings depend on the part you’re in) by cognomen and MayGlenn

A Fish By Any Other Name (rated E and breaking my complete rule because it’s that good) by haku23

Run Me Like a River (series so follow ratings for each), Chef AU (also a series), and A Little of Both (rated E) by erebones

The Moon Represents My Heart by afrai

Like the Universe (rated E), The Tearing of the Veil (rated E series), and Luck Beyond the Pale by EgregiousDerp

A Single Monk in Good Standing Must Be in Want of a Bro (rated M and absolutely wins for best title ever) by Annie D (scaramouche)

Outside (rated E and top in my list of I wish this had more chapters even though it’s complete) by  greygerbil

A Bridge of Birds by  evocates

Young and Beautiful (Flower Shop AU) by  KyberHearts

Haphephobia by roselightsaber

They Have Taken Photographs of Our Footprints in the Dust by dharmaavocado

Sweet With a Little Heat (not complete but ADORABLE) by ShipArmada (SarahSelene)

(I am definitely missing some good stuff in here, and I highly recommend anything written by any of the above, but these are really the ones I read often. I’m kinda convinced AO3 has lost some of my bookmarks because certain things were not on there that I remember adding so that’s annoying.)

[wheeloffortune-design]

my publisher: Good morning! Huh did you advertise for the pre-sale yesterday? Because we launched twelve hours ago and we already made sales!

me: yeah, i posted on tumblr

publisher: .........tumblr?

me: that's where the gays are.

(link to Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a sapphic western)

[wheeloffortune-design]

update

publisher: And what is your marketing strategy on... tumblr?

me: idk, i shitpost at 2am?

publisher: .....and it works?

me: depends on what the gays find funny at that point in time.

publisher: Could I have a link to your tumblr?

me: .......absolutely not.

(link to Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a sapphic western where 50 year old women kiss and murder)

[wheeloffortune-design]

update!

publisher: I've been looking into tumblr, have you thought of using Blaze to promote your book?

me: NO

publisher: But it seems like an efficient way to get this in front of more eyes-

me: people on tumblr hate Blaze.

publisher: There is no algorithm and you can't pay to promote a post? I don't understand how anyone advertises anything on tumblr.

me: That's the best part. They don't. They can't.

(trying to make him understand that we do not control the attention. We just have to show something shiny and gay enough and if people are interested, they'll reblog.)

(Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a deconstruction of the colonialist cowboy mythos dressed up as a sapphic romance.)

[wheeloffortune-design]

update with picture of a pet!

This is Cosmos, my publisher's dog.

He barks at my publisher's phone notifications. So every time a book is sold, Cosmos barks.

It's been days.

I think you guys would love to know that when you buy a book, a dog barks in Vancouver, Canada.

(Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a story where women help women bury the body of your abusive husband.)

[wizardysseus]

the thing about CC is that she did plagiarize. she was found guilty of plagiarism and banned from fanfiction dot net! she plagiarized pamela dean, among others, and lied about it repeatedly! it happened! and regardless of whatever else she writes, regardless of whether the publishing industry and her fans trust her not to do it again, regardless of how many times her wikipedia page gets scrubbed clean, that will always have happened! so it is not in fact cruel gossip, but a factually true statement, to say that she plagiarized and i'm not interested in supporting her or giving her the benefit of the doubt because she plagiarized and lied about it repeatedly! fuck!

[wizardysseus]

what really incenses me about cassandra clare — and forgive me for bringing this up again, but i don't think i've articulated this point yet — is not that i believe she is currently plagiarizing. any accusations i've seen about recent work seem to me to be superficial. but even if one could prove that she never plagiarized again once she started publishing, it wouldn't matter to me, because she chose to capitalize on her fandom history. while trying to distance herself from what she did, she made a brand out of the fanfic pen name "cassandra clare" and continues to profit off the reputation and fanbase that she amassed while she was, provably, a plagiarist.

you don't get to do that and bury the things that made you famous. as an individual, as a human being, she is capable of change and any other good qualities you may want to ascribe. but she built her career on lies. professionally, i don't understand why she gets to move on.

[toppingilyarozanov]

the worst part for me--worse than building her career on plagiarism--is that her career was also built on a truly reprehensible level of harassment. she told her followers to help get her unbanned from FFN (as if that would ever happen) and they spent months harassing the site owner and several abuse team members. one of them, after enduring extensive abuse, ended up in the hospital.

this was just the beginning of the harassment, though. CC additionally used her friend heidi, a lawyer, to send cease & desist letters and other forms of legal harassment against ppl. none of it would hold up in court and these sort of things weren't even heidi's area of expertise as a lawyer, but it still happened.

CC was such a terrible serial harasser that people started to leave her alone about the plagiarism stuff after a while because it was just not worth her blowing up your entire spot. not just with her lawyer, but with her minions who harassed targets on her behalf. getting a deluge of harassment is a horrible experience that hurts people, so of course people tried to avoid it.

i hate CC because she hurt lots of people. she did it intentionally, repeatedly, and with singular focus on covering her own ass no matter who she hurt.

she has the career she has now because of her harassment of fandom as much as the plagiarism.

[alessandriana]

receipts

fanlore article

[victusinveritas]

[lasrina]

OP you left out the best one

[fictionadventurer]

Persuasion is a particularly comforting read, because it's a book where good things happen, not in spite of the bad things or as consolation for the bad things, but often because of the bad things.

Anne loses her family home, and her family moves to a city she hates instead of staying in the familiar countryside like she wanted, but being forced outside her comfort zone is good for her. She's useful to her nephews, she strengthens her friendship with the Musgroves, she makes new friends with the Harvilles and Captain Benwick. It allows Captain Wentworth to come back into her life, and that seems like a bad thing at first, but it allows her to move past the regret of the past and into a new relationship.

Louisa's injury is a terrible turn of events, but it brings Louisa and Benwick together, and allows Anne to show her true worth in a way that makes Wentworth admit his love for her.

Even Anne's great regret, her refusal of Wentworth that led to eight years of misery, turns out to be a good thing. Wentworth's disappointment made him throw himself into his career, and his lack of a wife gave him freedom to go on voyages and into battles without worrying about how it would affect a family that relied on him. Anne's rejection--his first taste of failure--gave him enough maturity to keep the money that he made, and he came home a rich man who could well support a wife. Instead of starting out married life with stress and worry over uncertain funds, they are able to wed as people who are financially stable and secure in their love for each other.

It's a deeper, richer message than just saying that good things come to those who wait, or that someday you might get enough good things in life to make up for the bad stuff. It's saying that your suffering might be the necessary step to bringing about a life that's better than you could have hoped for. And that's very comforting.

[crap-userrname16]

[not-available-for-comment]

Haven’t had a chance to watch the tutorial yet, but I’m seriously considering making this for my gf’s niece

[dollsonmain]

I need to make one for work...

[onedirectionforever]

“you support gay rights so you must be gay”

i support animal rights do i look like a fucking alpaca to you

[onedirectionforever]

turns out i am gay

[monsieurenjlolras]

holy shit how’d this alpaca learn how to type

[mywitchcultblr]

Diversity win! The alpaca is gay!

[adreamthatsworthkeeping]

[thebirdkiwi]

he was a llama

[fritextramole]

a llama?! he’s supposed to be dead!

[graveyardrabbit]

I really love those posts of people showing their stuffed animals various things and locations, gonna start doing that

[graveyardrabbit]

showing my giant ground sloth the Feather River and the Feather River Fish Hatchery fish ladder

[graveyardrabbit]

showing my cat the location of the last stagecoach hold-up in San Mateo County

[graveyardrabbit]

showing my sockeye salmon The Gates Of Hell

[graveyardrabbit]

showing my humpback whale Methuselah the coast redwood

[graveyardrabbit]

showing my banana slug the grave of Emperor Norton

[cursemewithyourkiss]

Showing my bear I got from @professorlightcap Castle Howard

[diniidjarin]

showing my oldest companion the land of his forebears (Bieszczady)

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[mariacallous]

This Jewish museum is lending art across America — with one condition

A quiet initiative is filling museums that don't have Jewish art, but only if they're displayed alongside the cultures that shaped them

[creekfiend]

"Jewish culture exists because for 3,500 years it’s been wandering the global diaspora,” said James Snyder, the director of the Jewish Museum, the art museum at the helm of the initiative. “How it looks is a function of its engagement, not its disengagement.”

An Iraqi menorah adorned with peacocks belongs in a Middle East gallery, he argues, where visitors can see that the peacock was a common decorative motif across the region’s art, regardless of religion. A German Torah crown belongs among European decorative arts to tell the story about how, for centuries, Jewish ceremonial silver was largely crafted by non-Jewish silversmiths after Jews were barred from joining silver-making guilds."

[irate-iguana]

I love it when a classicist has clearly gotten so lost in the BCE sauce that their perception of time has become deeply warped. Case in point: the article I’m currently reading just described the Byzantine era as “a period relatively modern.”

[mockiatoh]

Stop that’s too funny

[11thfempachi]

Girls just wanna have fun

[anim-ttrpgs]

There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.

[catgirltaxreturndocument]

please. i need to see a nine on the jerk-off scale. rebel scum? old forge games? hyper pretentious osr? i need to see the horrors

[anim-ttrpgs]

Eat the Reich was actually what inspired this post, but Candela Obscura also comes to mind

[anim-ttrpgs]

@batmanisagatewaydrug @utracjuszka

Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but it’s a game that actually exists:

[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if you’ve played or enjoyed this game. It’s just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. 

If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud. 

The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesn’t. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like it’s above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. It’s so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something “problematic” that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive. 

To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:

(What the fuck do they think an “explorer” is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)

Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, it’s ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldn’t just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.

The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)

The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be “the good guys.” All of the “problematic” aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them.. 

(Don’t worry guys there’s no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)

..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:

(Don’t worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this district’s points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)

There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novel’s worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just don’t have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the “radium girls” where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:

Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just “bad actors who hold terrible beliefs.” Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they don’t go anywhere either. They don’t belong to any social movements, they don’t get organized, they don’t push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals. 

You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? They’re under assault.

That’s right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of… uh, “Otherwhere.” (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) That’s where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!

Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the “colonists.” With nukes chain lightning.

(That last sentence continues on “tens of thousands..” You get the picture.) So, whew, glad that’s over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:

You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldn’t want to hear its thoughts on Israel. 

You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, “perform questionable acts in the name of the common good,” and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.

It’s actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaire’s society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.

The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. “Gay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!”

On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscura’s gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create “actual-play” shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, that’s more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because it’s not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. It’s intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.

It seems like the game really doesn’t want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.

However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscura’s approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Don’t have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Don’t have actors say foreign words they don’t know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Don’t show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."

We’d like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that “they don’t want to be disrespectful by playing it” because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - don’t buy or support their game!

[gupdoo3]

[echo101]

I have encountered this firsthand. I'm a massive history nerd, especially about pirates (among other things, but pirates are relevant to the story). I was hanging out in a system agnostic TTRPG server and Pirate Borg was mentioned so I talked about my idea for a historical fantasy campaign set around historical pirates and the Nassau Pirate's Republic. Started explaining some basic ideas, how it's basically about trying to keep this rogue nation together amid external hostility from England, France, and Spain and internal strife caused by a lack of trust and Edward Teach's descent into madness. Naturally this brings up Blackbeard and his crew, which contained several escaped slaves, and that the Queen Anne's revenge was a former slave ship. I immediately get the *several people are typing...* and am welcomed with several messages that Pirate Borg takes place in an alternate history where slavery never happened. I end up trying to have to defend myself, explaining the *true facts* that most pirates were escaped slaves, both native and black, and that a lot of pirate ships were captured slave ships because they had thicker hulls and could take more punishment in a fight. They were like "But you can have diverse crews and sturdy ships without bringing slavery into it." My response was "you *could*, but then you lose valuable historical context and systemic evils to fight against, I like running stories about making the world a better place." Some people understood that, but many of them *literally* shot back "But thinking about slavery makes me uncomfortable, so maybe just write it out of the setting?" That's when I shut up but I was just screaming in my head "YES, THE POINT IS IT SHOULD MAKE YOU FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE AND WANT TO CORRECT IT"

[sidgenochronicles]

incredible crossover

[genderkoolaid]

[dozydawn]

[lew-basnight]

Look I know this is a scientific publication but you don’t understand— we need to include milk and cookies in the photo. We have to. Otherwise the science suffers