RedGamer3

Started as Doctor Who, found Supernatural, now onto the Cosmere.

[redgamer3]

I’m back from hiatus, and I come bearing gifts!

I’m published!  Now available on Amazon, Kindle and paperback!  https://www.amazon.com/…/dp/1976575486/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0…

If a mysterious stranger offered you a life of adventure traveling in a time machine, would you take it? Would you leave behind the family and life you knew for the unknown?

The adventure-seeking Vicki knew her answer when Mr. Smith, an odd time traveler, showed her an incredible metal machine, and asked, “Would you like to fly away?” Journeying through time and to other planets, she never regretted saying “yes.” However, that choice is tested when Mr. Smith leaves her on an alien moon near the forbidden planet Fensgsele. More questions are raised when a passing ship discovers her, and Vicki meets Captain Carol, a militant, composed woman who harbors hidden motives and an arcane agenda.

When secrets and pasts emerge, Vicki questions the one aspect of her travels she never wanted to: why did Mr. Smith choose her? And more importantly, what wickedness lies beneath the surface of Fensgsele? When an adventure turns into danger and worlds are hunted by an ancient evil, sacrifices must be made. Can the universe live with the consequences? Can they?

With every decision comes a price, and sometimes, an ultimate sacrifice.

[mousidy]

remember. when faced with the rise of fascism it is always the most important thing to start vitriolic and divisive online discourse about who is more oppressed

[mousidy]

begging you people to understand that some of the divisive takes you're seeing online are made up bullshit designed to sow mistrust between us. everyone seems to know about right wing sockpuppet shit stirring accounts but we seem to forget that they can and will shape our discourse

you don't have to go witchhunting and trying to root out specific sockpuppets, but if you see some wild and divisive take, you can frankly just remember that it might be made up bullshit formulated specifically to piss you off and make you distrust your own people

[beggars-opera]

Because someone is on the ball, Turner Classic is playing (among other WWII films) The Great Dictator today.

If you haven't seen it, please do. It was produced by Charlie Chaplin in the late 1930s, when it became clear that the war was going to happen, and came out in 1940 after it had started. Essentially, Chaplin realized that his famous mustache was about to be usurped forever by a fascist, and that fascist was going to kill a lot more people in the future than he had already.

It's a parody, made before the worst horrors of the Nazi regime were known to the general public, so there is discomfort here (if you've seen Disney's Der Fuhrer's Face, you'll get the idea), but the movie ends with Chaplin essentially saying "fuck it, no one else seems to be speaking out about this and I'm going to use my platform to do that."

For context, this character is a Jew who has been mistaken for the dictator (for obvious mustache-related reasons), and has been sent onstage at a rally to give a speech. Instead of trying to impersonate Hitler, he says what he really thinks. And keep in mind, Chaplin was coming out of semi-retirement for this. It was the first time most people had ever heard him speak, and this is what he said:

[aleshakills]

I don’t think you’re ready to have an adult conversation about politics until you’re able to admit that there are things you love and enjoy that would not and should not exist in a just world. $8 billion dollar budget movies every other month don’t exist in a just world. New 900 GB AAA video games every year don’t exist in a just world. Next day delivery doesn’t exist in a just world. 80 different soda brands don’t exist in a just world. 

All of those things come from exploitation on some level, and if you wouldn’t trade those for a world where everyone can eat and have a home no matter who they are or what they do, I don’t know what to tell you. 

[captain-acab]

Man, this post makes me feel conflicted, because on the one hand, of the things listed, next-day delivery is the only one that DOES actually exist in the world today. The others are exaggerations, and while I understand the point being made, they do detract from it.

I understand—and agree with—that sentiment of, “I want slower deliveries by drivers who are paid better,” as one recent tumblr post put it. I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to produce and consume less as a culture, and that an actual substantive conversation about politics should involve willingness to relinquish the many modern luxuries that are built on exploitation.

I don’t think these are good examples of those luxuries, though.

Large budget movies are possible because consumers (and investors) are willing to pay for them. A large budget is actually a necessary component in making sure workers are being adequately compensated; the fact that they currently are often exploited by studios is a result of deliberate misallocation of resources, not anything intrinsic to the size of the production. Same thing goes with high-quality video games. As for releasing a new film/game every month/year, that’s only unsustainable because there’s only a handful of monopolistic studios doing it. In a well-regulated industry that encourages growth and competition, we could see tens, if not hundreds of studios producing big-budget films and games. And, with a well-compensated and socially-supported citizenry, consumers would have enough disposable income to support it.

Similarly, the problem with soda isn’t that we have 80 brands; it’s that we have two. And those two brands each own 800 different labels. In a healthy economy, these monopolies would be dissolved, and we could support well over 80 moderately-sized independent beverage companies producing their own sodas.

Same-day delivery, again, could be easily supported with proper allocation of resources. Currently, we have huge centralized distributors like Amazon exploiting gig-workers with slave-wages to ferry cheap mass-produced crap to people, and that’s what makes it bad, not the speed at which they do it. If instead, we had something like a super-robust USPS, with well-compensated deliverypeople working reasonable hours within a decentralized network of independent-but-cooperative suppliers, there would be absolutely no reason why you couldn’t get something delivered to you from the distro ten miles down the road within a day.

When we critique capitalism, and they respond, “Yeah, well capitalism made the cell phone you’re using!” our response shouldn’t be, “Oh shit u right,” it should be, “No, capitalism made the cell phone I’m using break after a year so I’ll buy a new one, and they use slave labor to do it while they pocket the rest.”

There are luxuries, and there are artificially-valued, mass-produced, built-to-break trash that are marketed as luxuries. But we don’t solve the problems of fast-fashion by saying, “Welp I guess I shouldn’t wear clothes.”

[greenekangaroo]

yeah that’s a decent rebuttal imma reblog now

[marzipanandminutiae]

people don’t realize how much stuff you used to be able to get locally

nowadays I might pay for rush shipping on sewing supplies if I need them for a project deadline. 100 years ago, I could just go to a store and buy silk thread, a zillion different types of braid in different fibers, cut glass or steel buttons, a tailor’s ham for ironing, a needle board for ironing velvet, etc. there were entire stores just for ribbons, for faux foliage, for specialty sewing machine attachments, for individual varieties of fabric. and most of it was locally produced

especially since I live in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. if you told someone in 1924 that I couldn’t find any newly-made glass buttons for sale in a city the size of BOSTON, they’d look at you like you were insane. doubly so if you told them that buttons, period, could only be purchased at like three stores in the area, from maybe two different brands

today I go to the craft store and it’s. one brand of polyester thread. maybe seven colors of cotton thread, all dull or dark. one size and brand of snaps. one size and brand and type of ironing board. plastic buttons (MAYBE a few cards of wood or metal). flat polyester ribbon trim in a few sizes and colors. and that’s pretty much it

you didn’t NEED next-day shipping as much even as recently as 60-70 years ago, because more things were manufactured and sold closer to you

[incidentalcomics]

The Shape of Ideas

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

All these billionaires who invested in the metaverce and Neuralink must be questioning their life choices looking at what what furries are doing in VR chat.

[baby-dragon-maybe]

I've been on this project for nearing 3 years, now! Here's the repository for anybody interested. We support loads of different EEGs, but most initial testing was done on our Muse 2 headbands (you can find em on ebay for around $120. They fit under VR headsets just fine).

[daco-showman]

I'm literally losing my mind

[ur-daily-inspiration]

[msshadowqueen]

A Bug’s Life, 1998

[furryprovocateur]

no amount of monetization or algorithm favoritism will have me call it unalive or seggs or grape

[furryprovocateur]

generally speaking if doing something makes an advertiser angry you should do it and keep doing it

[prokopetz]

I heard the claim that Bloodborne is a metroidvania

Do you have any thoughts on that matter?

That's a ridiculous notion. Bloodborne is clearly a Zeldalike.

[yoursjupiter]

Most things (games or not) are Metroidvanias, which is part of the problem of video game genres.

[prokopetz]

To be serious for a moment, there are problems with how video game genres formulated, but that's not one of them. That you can plausibly argue that anything is part of any genre based on an understanding of genres as checklists of tropes stems from the fact that genres of media are not, in fact, checklists of tropes – the checklists of tropes are just something we made up after the fact because humans enjoy creating taxonomies. A genre of media is a dialogue: creators responding to and borrowing from and criticising each other. A game is a "metroidvania" precisely and only to the extent that it's in conversation with other games that are considered to be such; to what extent does Bloodborne engage with that conversation?

[prokopetz]

(This is also ultimately the justification for considering metroidvanias and Zeldalikes as distinct – albeit closely related – genres. You can be pedantic about camera angles all you want, but none of that changes the fact that there are two distinct conversational threads in play here. There's definitely enough crosstalk between them to justify considering them to be part of the same family of games, but that broader family doesn't really have an agreed-upon name right now.)

[probabilitydirigible]

Now I want to see games made by people who have never played a meaningful example of the genre but have been given the genre as a goal along with a checklist of key traits.

[prokopetz]

[miyoriia]

sorry for suddenly stopping talking to you yeah lol i had a curse laid upon my mind and it convinced me that you hated me. no sorry i activated it due to my own folly. yeah i miss you a lot but you do hate me now

[prokopetz]

Final Roundup for Tumblr 200 Word RPGs 2024

I'm going to start putting together the offsite archives for the 2024 event this weekend, and there are a couple of small pieces of business to take care of first.

Firstly, my notes indicate that I don't have archival permission for the following 22 entries:

ALL THE KING'S MEN by @dialectical-songbird

Anxiety Simulator 2k24 by @binghsien

BASH THE FAScisT by @mylittlegeekery

DISCRETIONARY ARMOR by @effortlessly-emily

Dungeon Delver by @bigmacsbiganchor

Easy Submission by @boredtosizzle

Fusion Core by @bagf1sh

HERMES by @fagenthusiast

The Human Observatory News by @arsene-inc

Level 1 by @sirilyan

The Littlest RPG by @copperspont-games

No Man's Land by @just-another-madman

Ready-Set-Mutate! by @mikethinkstwice

RULE OF COOL by @itsabear

Scales and Rails by @doublestormryu

Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness by @immaculateyaoibaby

Sommelier Smack Down by @henchmaxxing

This is inspired by Homeworld, and I wrote it a while ago, and here it is by @millenomi

Word Count Starts After The Title by @moon-of-curses

THE WORK STORE - RETAIL GOTHIC RPG by @malice-mal

THE WRECKED PLATOON by @zeitghost

You Find Yourself In A Room. by @cartoonofmilk

If you're the author of one of these entries and you did grant permission, but I didn't notice, feel free to make fun of me. Otherwise, consider this your last chance to give the okay!

Second, it's come to my attention that at least one entry managed to squeak in under the midnight UTC deadline on November 30th, but wasn't included in the index of entries because it didn't show up in my Tumblr notifications until December 1st:

Roll The Bones, a game about silly wizards in situations by @highqualityduck

If your last-minute entry is in a similar predicament (you can hit the "index of entries" link up there to check), please let me know – but please also check your post's timestamp first, as I can see there are several folks who flubbed their time zone math and posted their entries hours late; if that's you, maybe hang onto it for next year.

[prokopetz]

Thanks to everyone who followed up, that 22 is down to 11:

ALL THE KING'S MEN by @dialectical-songbird

Anxiety Simulator 2k24 by @binghsien

BASH THE FAScisT by @mylittlegeekery

Dungeon Delver by @bigmacsbiganchor

Easy Submission by @boredtosizzle

The Littlest RPG by @copperspont-games

No Man's Land by @just-another-madman

RULE OF COOL by @itsabear

Scales and Rails by @doublestormryu

Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness by @immaculateyaoibaby

Word Count Starts After The Title by @moon-of-curses

As a reminder, if I don't hear from you, I will assume your answer is "no, you do not have permission to archive my entry".

[apas-95]

predators are more conflict-averse than prey - a herbivore can get into a territorial dispute, get gored by a horn, and spend the next while weakened but still easily able to regain its strength from grass and tubers or whatever. a hunter that gets scratched by prey it still manages to kill might not be able to get a kill afterwards, and slowly starve. an ambush predator will back down if you stare at it, but a plant-eater will try to kick you to death.

[apas-95]

if you have social anxiety that is simply your wolfsona shining through

[hapalopus]

There's a reason you see so many three-legged deer and bison walk away from lightning strikes, herbivores are just built different

[prokopetz]

Like, let's be real – in terms of the substantive sexual dynamics on display, a lot of "mech pilot x handler" stuff is about as transgressive as a story about a secretary fucking their boss. We're writing science fiction here; we should be raising questions of sexual ethics so obtuse that no amount of touching grass will ever resolve them.

[skipppppy]

Over 6 months in the making (mostly bc procrastination) but I finally compiled my Kanto Gym Leader Magazine series. I love the idea of an in-universe style fashion publication where they all do interviews about their hobbies and stuff

Want something like this for your own OC? My commissions are open!!

[rathayibacter]

cracking myself up thinking about the movement towards simplified forms in cave paintings

[rathayibacter]

grug: grug must paint every hair on buffalo in realistic detail

thog: grug can chill out, audience know what buffalo look like. just do one line like thog

[rathayibacter]

thog: cave painting world no longer look for photorealism. expression of form and movement is new frontier

grug: but then how will grug demonstrate high level of skill? grug have art degree

thog: any caveman represent buffalo as it is. grug must represent what it means to grug

grug: hm. this will challenge grug. but grug enjoy rising to occasion

[mikkeneko]

[dyke-terra]

Someone made a post about the abysmal state of Jewish rep in Rick Riordan’s universe so now I’m thinking about how I would do Jewish characters in that.

Jew at Camp Half Blood: *gets their menorah out*

Cabinmate: Oh, that’s so cool, what’re you celebrating?

Jew: Hannakah! It’s a holiday celebrating an ancient military revolt!

Cabinmate: Neat, against who?

Jew: *sweats nervously*

Cabinmate: An ancient military revolt against who?

Alternatively:

Jew at Camp Jupiter: Yeah, I’m pretty bummed out today. It’s the saddest day in the Jewish calendar.

Friend: I didn’t know that— what makes it so sad?

Jew: Uhhhhhhhh

Jew: Uhhhh

[jewish-sideblog]

Alternatively 2:

Jewish host to an Egyptian God: Yeah so I’m not allowed to have bread for a week. It’s a HaShem thing, you understand

Egyptian God: Why

Jew: Oh don’t worry about it. Anyway I have to dab my pinky finger in wine ten times real quick. For no reason in particular

Egyptian God: Wait why are you doing that. Why is that a holiday. What happened