Home of the Gun Witch

Furthermore, we should have burned Berlin in 1919. --- patreon.com/Qsy ---

[qsycomplainsalot]

If you're reading this, you haven't passed out from heat exhaustion yet. Why not celebrate by buying a seasonal print ?

[stydixa]

PRINCESS MONONOKE もののけ姫 1997 — Dir. Hayao Miyazaki

[spider-girl-palps]

Ohhhh that is too much for you little spider…

[spider-girl-palps]

Ohhh nooo…

[depsidase]

[fictionalauthorityii]

Finding out AI companies are chewing through - literally, they’re pulping and burning them as they go - millions of books often including 1/1s and old texts that cannot be reprinted

Meanwhile there’s always some dipshit telling me AI is the future and we’ve got to just let companies erase human history and literature so they can train their abomination machines to pretend to think like people because a judge said it’s fine

[wageronancap]

[odessa-edmundson]

'Modern Poisoning Tools': AI Firms Buying and Destroying Thousands of Books To Feed AI Models

AI companies are buying and scanning printed books for training data, raising copyright and cultural preservation concerns as rare volumes a

[armthearmour]

A beautiful gothic style Mace, probably German, ca. 1450-1500, housed at the Fitzwilliam Musuem, Cambridge.

[orbitingrook]

[guerrillatech]

[ashenmind]

it’s not nudity if it’s tights

[ashenmind]

it’s like, beyond nudity and out the other side

[pepurika]

I've inked four pages, and then I'll ink two more today before I'm off to Berlin!! Then I'll have enough pages to keep updating those three pages per week... Plus the ones I've missed recently!

Also if anyone is around Berlin or knows the city, feel free to give me any tips and ideas on what to do! I'm also very down to hanging out because my extrovert ass will die if I'm travelling for over a week alone 💀

[leona-florianova]

2008

2026 redraw

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I want to make a dungeon game but I'm not sure how I should handle the settler-colonial implications of "going into an Unexplored location, killing its inhabitants and robbing them". Any tips?

If I'm being completely honest, I just don't think I'm the right person to ask about it because, while I do have a bunch of thoughts about the underlying political implications of the gameplay structure of dungeon games, I'm not particularly inclined to try to fix them.

I have accepted that a lot of the elements of dungeon games whose underlying implications I find to be ideologically questionable are the exact same elements that make dungeon games fun for me from a gameplay perspective. The entire shtick of PCs in a dungeon game is essentially "get rich by plundering Uncivilized places and bringing that wealth back to Civilized places", and some of the most fun gameplay happens when you lean into that job description. The entire dichotomy between "wilderness" vs. "civilization" where Civilized places are small havens of safety in a sea of untamed wilderness, which is dangerous and unexplored and waiting for brave adventurers to plunder it and extract wealth from it which they then bring back to a Civilized place is like. Dripping with settler-colonial implications no matter how you slice it, and yet it makes for a very satisfying baked-in gameplay loop.

Simply put, a lot of the things that make dungeon games fun for me as *games* come from things that, at the core, don't align with my real-world politics, and will never align with them even if I were to try to spend all my creative efforts trying to hammer them into that shape. And I'm fine with that. It's not even like dungeon games are unique in that regard. You could say the same about like. The vast majority of shooters. Or survival crafting games. Or like almost every single action movie I have ever enjoyed. I choose to simply acknowledge this and sit with that discomfort rather than spending my creative efforts trying to square that particular circle.

Now, if you *want* to try to square the circle of making a dungeon game with Good Politics I think the most I can give you is advice about what NOT to do: A surefire way to end up with a game that has just as (if not more) fucked up implications is to acknowledge the fucked-up amoral nature of the actions the a standard dungeon game has the PCs engage in, and go "okay but what if they were targeting all those fucked up actions at people/creatures who Deserve It". You will *not* solve the problem of making a dungeon game with Good Politics if you go the route of trying to find the correct Ontologically Evil target, all you're going to do is show your ass about your unexamined ideologically questionable politics. Whatever idea you can come up with on this front has already been tried and turns out it had equally (if not more) fucked up implications, and we know this because unfortunately this is the route that most people trying to square the circle of Dungeon Game But With Good Politics end up deciding to go.

[impossiblepackage]

the closest you’re gonna get to a dungeon game minus the colonialist vibes is like. “there used to be a wizard and somebody’s gotta go clear out their tower before the fucked up wizard experiments get loose”. which is a perfectly fine premise, but also it’s one premise for a dungeon. and for a good dungeon game, you need lots of different sorts of dungeons.

but ultimately, you’re trying to find a woke version of breaking into somewhere in order to kill and rob the inhabitants. which uh. might be difficult. even if you cut out any intelligent or otherwise person-ish enemies, you’re still left with “break into a rare ecosystem in order to slaughter the local wildlife and plunder the resources available”.

[qsycomplainsalot]

Simply put it's fantasy because it has simple problems you can fix by bashing them in the face with a mace with no ethical ramifications.

[captain-price-returns]

Re: sailors on USS Abraham Lincoln on half rations.

[scrapironflotilla]

An American field gun crew firing their 75 mm Gun M1897, better known as the French 75.

[qsy-complains-a-lot]

Back when it was introduced, this recoil system was nothing short of revolutionary.

[scrapironflotilla]

Oh a hundred percent.

It was a state secret for years, particularly because it was better than either of it's main rivals in Britain and Germany until the war.

[segamascott]

[witchofanguish]

[mahead-ithurt]

Always remember that the EU did a study in 2013 about the effects of piracy on media publishers and found that there is no correlation between piracy and sales! (And then they tried to hide that study bc that's not the result they wanted)

So piracy is at worst not even a problem, and at best it's free advertisement.

Source: (the link to the actual study is in the article)

EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales - Engadget

In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.

[ariaste]

OMG I got so excited about this because they used a really similar (though far less refined) version of this for contracts in the European medieval period!

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Delights me when human beings find similar ways to solve the same problem at two different ends of the world. <3