Quote: "many hoo hoo's and heh heh's were had on those projects"
hello vonnie
will byers stan first human second
almost home
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

pixel skylines

oozey mess
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
noise dept.
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
occasionally subtle

JVL
art blog(derogatory)
KIROKAZE

Kiana Khansmith

Kaledo Art
Peter Solarz
Keni

No title available
styofa doing anything
seen from United States
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@s0rdin
Quote: "many hoo hoo's and heh heh's were had on those projects"
Bead bugs for a friend :) by dog-water
Mining God Corpses
Sure, the corpses of dead gods are an unexplained horror of the cosmos, a sign that even the divine is impermanent. They're also one of the best sources of spaceship-grade metals in this sector. You stop getting so existential after a while.
Even in the mining mechs, we need protective suits to protect us from the divinity. It's not radiation exactly, although it sets the geiger counters off like crazy. Lab techs are still trying to figure out that one. Even with the suits we get some mutations. The lucky ones don't get anything physical, just speaking in tongues. The worst ones are anything that changes your bodyplan, because unless it matches any of the Known Species, you won't be able to fit into a suit, which basically puts an end to any career as a spacer.
We asked for better suits, but the company said we can't afford them. Can't organize for them because of the turnover. See, Godmining's a seasonal thing because you need a different crew for each job. See, when someone's too good a person and they set foot on the site, they get ascended or raptured or some such. Don't actually know what happens on the other side. Only problem is, what constitutes a sin is different for each god. There are some things that are almost universal, but the straw boss says that staffing a crew full of murderers isn't exactly great for group cohesion, so you gotta test by trial and error.
EVERYOBODY GET DOWN HES TAKING A CREATIVE LIBERTY
Man notices an Eagle eyeing the fish he just caught
*gets back to the nest* baby you are NEVER gonna believe how i got this fish
As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".
So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:
Excuse me???
you are right and you should say it.
Is this the face of a man who would put his own infant in front of a plow to avoid going to war?
Absolutely not
You know who would try that shit?
Is this the face of a man who would defy the very gods to get home to his wife?
You know who would defy the gods just to show he could get away with it?
The last thing Penelope's suitors ever see:
I didn't even know or care that there was Odyssey discourse ... But now I'm completely on board with Jason Mantzoukas as Odysseus.
Figuratively on board, to be clear. I'm not literally getting on board any ships involved with the Odyssey.
“The Midnight Sun Ceremony” from Andrea Zanatelli’s embroidery series
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
"No, why would it?"
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)
It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.
It also bears mentioning that the current culture of RPGs encourages a separation of player knowledge and character knowledge. I, as a player, know that the big cat with tentacles out the back is a displacer beast, but my character doesn't, and the character that replaced the one the displacer beast killed. That separation, particularly with Survival Modules, was not the case back in the day. Characters had full knowledge shared between them, so if Dave the fighter got disintegrated by a beholder, Dave's identical twin brother now knew beholders have disintegration attacks. This is part of the reason why it was considered bad form for players to read monster books.
It's broadly untrue that the idea of separating player knowledge from character knowledge is a modern development. The practice descends to tabletop RPGs from the historical wargames they splintered off from; tabletop wargames which focus on accurately re-creating historical battles often operate on a gentleperson's agreement to refrain from acting on strategic information that your side's commanders couldn't reasonably have been aware of, or employing tactical doctrines which had not yet been developed when the re-created battle took place, and many early tabletop RPGs adopted similar conventions, to greater or lesser degrees. Heck, games like Paranoia were parodying those conventions as early as the mid 1980s! It's come in and out of fashion in mainstream RPGs over the past half-century, but it's not a recent thing.
It is, however, correct that there typically was no expectation of observing these conventions when playing survival modules in particular.
Oh, so that's where Munchkin got the idea of your identical twin turning up when you die in game.
Yeah, having your previous PC's identical cousin randomly come rocking up five minutes after you died is totally a thing that happened, largely as a response to the awkward transitional period where survival play was still in fashion, but the game's rules had become too fiddly for rolling up a new PC on the spot to be a pain-free process, so folks would just recycle their existing character sheet instead. You saw a lot of it in the 2E era!
fascinating insight into early D&D culture!
Now, are superhero comic books good? Selectively. Mostly no. Are superhero comics high art? Definitely not. Are superhero comic books in any way politically important? Well, no, not in the way that you see some people trying to paint their personal preference of pulp pop culture extrusion as politically important in order to justify to themselves how much of their headspace it takes up. But I will say this. If I spend an hour reading a middle-of-the-road big two superhero comic I end that hour in pretty chill mood, whereas if I spend that same hour browsing tumblr I almost inevitably start mentally the drafting the blueprints for a new variety of urban megastructure that surviving historians will eventually come to refer to as "Charnel Spires"
Or at least they will if they know what's good for em
being on an airplane is a lot like being in kindergarten
I wanna hear where you're going with this
-there's snacktime
-there's always some kid screaming
-the authority figures are mostly there to keep you safe rather than get you to do anything in particular
-all else equal they would really rather you take a nap, though
- someone tells you a story / tries to teach you something using pictures, props, and exaggerated hand gestures
- everyone acts like they’re new to the whole “line formation”/“taking turns”/“walking around other people”/“staying out of the way” thing
everyone has a cubby that's for them alone, and some people struggle with making sure their cubby space doesnt spill into other people's cubby
The chairs are too small for an adult human
Inchworm this week brought up the old question of why Mannequin bothered to make himself look human and am now envisioning the world where Sphere stuck with his old theme and his showdown with Taylor looked like an episode of The Prisoner.
Taylor: “I have no idea how the fuck I’m going to do it, but I’m going to make you regret that.”
Alan:
I refer to the protagonist of fallout 4 as NateNora because both the man and woman versions of the character are essentially the same person.
Because they gave this game a voiced protagonist, Bethesda has invited me to analyze the sole survivor NateNora as a person and my analysis says that because it doesn’t really matter much which spouse you choose to literally fridge that they’re one of those couples who have been together since high school and as a result are basically two halves of the same braincell.
Same sense of humor, same homicidal tendencies, same compulsion to collect random magazines.
If you knew Nate and Nora before the apocalypse you probably couldn’t invite one without inviting the other and both of them probably kept the exact same pictures of baby Shaun in their wallets. Not exactly the same person per se, but they’ve been together for so long that if you remove one of them the other basically doesn’t know who they are.
Which is my theory as to why one of the possible first thoughts they have upon being unfrozen to a dead spouse is violence. You killed their other braincell, Kellogg. That was all of their impulse control and you’re about to pay the price for that. They actually have to develop a personality now and it’s all your fault.
Juliette Brocal
DID YOU SEE THE VAMBIT LEAKS OMMGGG IM SCREAMINGGG
im salivating-
I am looking………..I am listening…………..I am learning….
Combining THE couple for bisexuals into a genderqueer twink is exactly the pride month gift I needed
the worst thing about 90% of adaptations of alice's adventures in wonderland is that they mistakenly write alice as a mild-mannered everywoman, when part of what makes those books so timeless and treasured is that alice is able to tell when adults around her are full of shit and is nearly always able and willing to articulate that frustration. she is proud and headstrong and contrary and, yes, polite--but not at all his meek wishy-washy wisp of a girl that adaptations love to turn her into!