maybe then

how do you people even write bios like hi I'm in a body but I promise it's against my will also ask me about video games and immersion

[hurricaneclouds]

when all of your knuckles crack except one so you have to try and convince yourself to be a sensible human being and resist the urge to break your own finger

[reversecentaur]

the inevitable conclusion

[chaoflaka]

So 2016 is SO bad that it made the creator of this meme give us an alternative version of “This is Fine”. 

[oldsgie-deactivated20260302]

oh. twenty sixteen you say.

[anarchistmemedistro]

[destielgaysex]

NO OTHER PLANET IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM GETS TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSES!! THE SIZE AND DISTANCE OF OUR MOON FROM EARTH AND THE SUN MAKE THE PERFECT CIRCUMSTANCES TO GET TOTALITY!!! THE EARTH AND MOON ARE SOOOO COOL AND OF COURSE OUR SUN!! I LOVE LIVING ON EARTH I LOVE YOU EARTH I LOVE YOUUUUU MOON I LOVE YOU SUN

[hooray4skeleton]

I made this shortly after playing Another Crab's Treasure in 2024 and then never posted it anywhere. It's well overdue for me posting it.

[sofuton]

[playwolves]

it can't just be "inconsiderate" to listen to tik tok at full volume on a train, it has to be a crime worthy of public execution. alternatively, only a foaming-at-the-mouth fascist would find it annoying to have to listen to, so maybe you should kill yourself for not appreciating it

[decapod-of-the-day]

Decapod of the day: Coenobita scaevola | Red Sea Land Hermit Crab

[txttletale]

the more i design/play/think about games, the firmer i become in my belief that the commonly-espoused divide between 'narrative/flavor/aesthetics' and 'mechanics' does not exist

[txttletale]

an example:

"flying" is an 'evergreen' mechanic in magic the gathering, which means it's been used in every single expansion in the 30 years since the game came out, from 1993 to the present day.

flying is commonly cited by mark rosewater, the game's head designer, as the game's best mechanic in part because it's so intuitive: flying creatures can't be blocked by creatures without flying¹. it's elegant and crucially it's memorable. it instantly 'makes sense'. you hear that and think 'oh, they just fly over the other creatures, okay'. very few players misunderstand flying. and even better, the art of the game helps to reinforce that. almost every flying creature ever printed is shown either actively flying/levitating or with huge conspicuous wings. remove the text from cards and ask players to tell you which creatures have flying and they'd get it right 99% of the time.

in fact, the biggest reason why anyone ever has a problem with flying is that the art being such a reliable tell means it can also mislead them: breaching hippocamp got a few players confused because the art makes it look like it flies. rosewater considers whippoorwill's art to be a mistake because it confused players by straight up depicting a winged bird flying on a card without it:

so, you know, the rigid art/flavor-mechanics divide would hold that these are just cases of players being mistaken, of not understanding the mechanics of the card. but as anyone who has tried to write rules text for anything will tell you, if your rules text is consistently misread in the same way, you're doing something wrong! the players who played as though breaching hippocamp and whippoorwill had flying had their mechanical experience severely impacted by the art!

and those edge cases aside, the fact that flying is usually so conceptually intuitive and easy to convey with art makes a huge difference to the mechanical design of cards! a card with a more complicated keyword like ninjutsu, undying, wither or evolve loses a lot of the space it has allocated for complexity. flying, however, uses almost none of the mental bandwidth that goes into understanding a card, and this has an extremely tangible impact on what kind of cards can get flying compared to those other keywords! if you can rely on the art and in some cases the creature type (birds, dragons, angels) to make the 'flying' on the card 'stick' in a players' head, you don't need to worry about how it contributes to the overall memory and complexity issues that card might pose.

& none of these things would be true--i.e. the 'mechanics and gameplay' of the game would be substantially different--if flying were just called "Untitled Ability Keyword #1"

¹or reach, but that's besides the point right now

[card-designers-without-borders]

[theswisscheeserag]

You gotta be really publicly passionate about things if you want your friends to text you. Bc people will forget to text you because they’re human. But if you’re really openly the friend who loves identifying ants your friends will think of you when they see ants. And they’ll text you “what ant is this [blurry photo]”. And then they’ll ask you how you’ve been and we should get coffee sometime. But if they don’t know what you love they’ll never know what you like

[theswisscheeserag]

And then when the ant convention is in town they’ll be like dude… we should go to the ant convention. But they would never think to go if they didn’t know u loved ants

[theswisscheeserag]

And sometimes you need to ask them to go to the ant convention. But you Will not get anywhere hiding your passions

[shamebats]

Migraine sufferers will be like "it's not like I'm disabled or anything, it's just that if I do any of these normal everyday things other people do all the time, my head explodes. But I'm fine honestly, as long as I avoid doing anything ever and my environment and the weather never changes, then my head explodes a little less"

[minovskyy]

i love this website i just feel at home here you know

[whetstonefires]

the problem with knowing things about battle tactics is that an ever-increasing subset of popular media becomes impossible to enjoy properly because you have to sit there like 'wow Captain Protagonist good to know all those dead people on your own side are a direct result of your total lack of anything resembling brains'

[whetstonefires]

seriously i'm not talking about anything elaborate, just basic common sense, but common sense is so much harder to ignore once you've got systematized data to back it up, like

what do they even think a fortification is for???

what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????

make the other sonuvabitch have a hard time killing you without getting killed first! most basic goal of combat! why are movies so bad at writing characters who actually attempt this on even a very small 'army' scale?

[whetstonefires]

and like i said in the first post, it's not just that it's Dumb, the thing is that once you put the character in a command role, their ability to think their way through a combat situation with some degree of optimization becomes a reflection on their character on like. a moral level.

if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it's just you punching people that's one thing. or even if it's you and five guys who've decided they like how you roll!

but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don't know what you're doing. that's not okay.

it's not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.

when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn't have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn't want and weren't competent to handle, without support.

or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.

even if they win! i don't want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there's triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!

no! they fucked it up is what they did! this is some Light Brigade gaslighting shit! shut up. our boy just massacred people who trusted him.

[curlicuecal]

kind of a tangent but this is also how I feel when the good guys mow their way through dozens of faceless grunts and then suddenly the big bad in charge is the life they face a moral quandary over

the random foot soldiers and henchmen's lives matter too! tbh

[whetstonefires]

#tbh they should matter MORE #they are way less culpable than whoever's in charge #it's just plot convenient to dehumanize the work force

[contribute-a-verse]

I think it’s worth noting that history is littered with examples of wasteful tactics. A common element is that often times technology advances while tactics do not.

For example, in the American Civil War, the tactics used of soldiers, marching into open fueled, and exchanging musket fire was not all that different than the tactics of the American revolution a little under 100 years prior. However, the rifles that infantry men were armed with were significantly more accurate. As a result, casualties, both in terms of lives lost, and soldiers, injured were horrific.

The concept of trench warfare in World War I was not all that different from wars, fought all over the continent in the century prior, and were designed to try and curb advantages of cavalry. But again, of mortars, more accurate, rifles, and chemical warfare meant that charging trenches resulted in truly grotesque numbers of casualties.

There is certainly evidence that World War I era generals were fairly callous when it came to casualty figures. They were more interested in territory gained. And it mattered very little how many lives that cost since soldiers were replaceable.

I agree that there should be some narrative coherence when protagonist squander advantages due to bad tactics, but when you look at actual history, it’s very clear that even if there are “good guys“ and “bad guys“ in war, there’s also just a lot of waste. That doesn’t make for a very sexy narrative, but it’s the nature of the beast. Militaries in particular are conservative institutions slow to change. you do things a certain way because that is the way they are done. That will always get people killed. But that’s also excepted as the way things are done.

At the end of the day, I’m just not sure there is a good way to organize two groups of people trying to kill each other.

I think the more interesting question is, should there be?

[whetstonefires]

i mean maybe, but that's not what the post is about, it's about fiction that places warfare centrally, but then engages with it only on an aesthetic level.

thereby creating major ruptures in the narrative logic and characterization for anyone who knows (for example) what the point of a wall is.

this is a writing complaint, about failure to adequately situate motive within character and maintain internal consistency.

i'm not going to ask every piece of fiction that wants to have swords in it to engage in a meditation on the nature of conflict. that sounds boring, and also like it's asking too much of people. i'm aiming way lower here.

the problem is a general failure to care enough about the battle as an event within a narrative to make the pieces go together according to an internal logic. people being dumb is fine as long as they're dumb on purpose. people not doing The Most Winning Thing is fine as long as the priorities they're supposed to have are the priorities they're actually displaying.

[mysteryteacup]

There's nothing more frustrating as an audience than being told "this person is a Good Person who Cares about their men and is also a Genius Tactician" and being shown a clown that never thinks before getting most of their people needlessly killed.

[borgevino]

so fucking stupid that meds literally work. "swallow this pebble it makes you think" hateful

[hellish-undeath]

i love medications and swallowing pills #mypebbles

[kunaigirl]

#mypebbles!!!!

[sarcophyte]

how do i make people get into rain world

[shubbabang]

its not funny but i do think about it a lot

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

This made me think about this panel from Calvin and Hobbes:

But unlike the adult in this strip, Calvin’s dad actually APOLOGIZED for yelling at him when he saw how guilty his kid was:

[obliviasart]

Example #1726473 why I will never stop telling people how important Calvin and Hobbes was to me growing up. Kids need this shit, they need to be shown that it’s normal to make mistakes sometimes and that adults should be able to recognize and apologize when they treat their kids unfairly in response.

[teathattast]

[segamascott]

this is honestly such a good idea