I'd rather be in outer space đž
Aqua Utopiaïœæ”·ăźćșă§èšæ¶ă玥ă

ellievsbear

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Monterey Bay Aquarium

if i look back, i am lost
Not today Justin
Three Goblin Art
Cosmic Funnies

ç„æ„ / Permanent Vacation

titsay

PR's Tumblrdome
RMH

â

Kiana Khansmith

oozey mess

No title available
Jules of Nature

Janaina Medeiros
đȘŒ
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@sumunsinsot
turning Lizzie into a carrot was a really good idea but somehow i managed to bunnify her
@h0rr0rimus
i had a vision
GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'." A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face
honestly this whole genAI debacle has been a very awesome way to tell which companies truly do not give a fuck about making products or services people actually want. which already-billion-dollar companies are willing to shed what's left of their humanity in the name of *maybe* making more money using technology that is immensely destructive and historically never has been profitable and everybody fucking despises. which companies will fire thousands of employees and alienate all of their consumers in order to *maybe* save money. we here at google have decided to make our main products completely fucking useless because we hate you
Legendary Holy Blade, by nolan192
The addition is ALSO really good
i bite you?
Owwww
i bite you?
it Hurts
i bite you?
i bite you?
i bite you?
i b. actually that looks pretty bad. i put a bandages on it
this was tumblr in 2013
This is tumblr in 2026
grug dont have to change!
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 â 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 â 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 â 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 â 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 â 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:
"Itâs hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, theyâd end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game â 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. Youâd 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 â wasnât he supposed to be DMing right now?
âItâs over!â 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 couldnât believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygaxâs 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 Garyâs group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
I feel like a lot of people get "All Art is Political" confused with "All Art is made with Political Intentions" which is not the same.
i just feel strongly that work shouldnt be the Main Activity of five days out of the week
My job? Iâm the bat enemy in 2D games that flies at you from a diagonal angle you canât shoot in, itâs an under appreciated role but really serves to test the playerâs understanding of the mechanics leading up to harder challenges. I also receive an intense smug satisfaction when they canât hit me.
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as âproblematicâ in class and our professor was like, âThatâs cool, but âproblematicâ doesnât really mean anything. It means that the thing youâre describing has a problem, and in and of itself thatâs not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else itâs not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like youâre trying to say that this is bad, but you donât want to say âbad.â Is that right?â
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the âbadâ thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, âIâm uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.â
Once we stopped calling things âproblematicâ and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, âthatâs racistâ or âthatâs misogynisticâ or âew capitalism grossâ out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, âUhhh... Iâm not sure whatâs so bad?â and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I canât help but think of this professor being like, âGood starting point, now letâs get specific.â I think when we have to commit to saying âthatâs ___â it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever weâre claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes itâs art, and it should be full of problems, because thatâs what art is.