tastybrick

just call me brick - any pronouns - end + eye aligned - d20, tma, scp, h2g2

[dmdog]

It lives in the arcade and leaves sticky little footprints on the linoleum. Naming it Gumble

[blackdykegirlblogger]

ik pride is all ppl think of when june hits but i also wanna say HAPPY CARIBBEAN AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH BITCHES ‼️‼️‼️

[rabbitkinglune777]

cool. another black child died in a hate crime

[rabbitkinglune777]

South Carolina jury finds store owner not guilty of murder in killing of Black teen | CNN

A South Carolina jury on Monday found a store owner not guilty of murder in the 2023 shooting of a Black 14-year-old.

apparently the murder happened in 2023 after doing some research but the murderer has been found not guilty.

black children get murdered and become victims of hate crimes every fucking day. this is ridiculous

[rabbitkinglune777]

im posting this here despite the website being extremely white centered, I want people to understand how in this country it's basically ok to murder and victimize black people, especially women and children in the name of "self defense" and white America will reward you for your antiblackness.

[tysonfurybattlepass]

public defenders get behind me. i’ll defend you this time

[tysonfurybattlepass]

“so you like criminals?” I LIKE THE RIGHT TO A FAIR TRIAL.

[goldensunset]

when the characters never really make peace with it

[shamebats]

"it's just stress" oh thank god, it's just the silent killer that slowly kills you, perfectly harmless, no need to worry

[liarsblade]

There's this perception, I've noticed, that if you're going to have a cultural conception of something like "mental health" in your fictional setting it has to be like Ideal, it needs to be the ideal version of mental health awareness/conception/care or it needs to not exist at all even a little. Does that make sense.

[liarsblade]

Similarly there's also this idea that either a character knows what therapy is, has had some, and has had an overwhelmingly positive experience and result from it, or they have literally no concept of therapy at all, like Harry Du Bois not knowing that he's a cop style. Total blank. Very odd.

[liarsblade]

The options are not "this story takes place in the Instagram infographic universe" or "you get nothing. Everyone has a caveman's understanding of what depression is." is all I'm saying. Make a setting with a concept of mental health that sucks. Send the character to therapy that doesn't work. Officially diagnose them with something that sucks and is absolutely going to be taken out of the in-universe dsm in a couple of editions. Try something difference.

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[prokopetz]

It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.

[prokopetz]

Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!

[prokopetz]

@lunchm34t replied:

what adventure games softlock you like that?

I'm usually loathe to suggest TV Tropes as a resource, but given that only a person who's entirely unacquainted with the genre would be asking that question, a primer is probably warranted. Check out the Unwinnable By Design article and read the preamble for context on the types of softlocks we're discussing, then hit either the "Sierra" or "Infocom" links (yes, those two publishers each have their own dedicated sections!), pop open the "Cruel" tab, and get ready to read some stuff that makes you mad.

[sd-d0-l1y]

There really is only one correct way to play some of these games huh.

[prokopetz]

A critical piece of context that a lot of modern gamers completely miss is that Douglas Adams' adventure games are works of parody not only in terms of their narratives, but also in the sense that they're rather vicious parodies of adventure games as a genre. Each of their absurdly obtuse puzzles is lampooning some puzzle design trope or set of tropes that was legitimately commonplace at the time they were made, and many of the really nasty bits are crafted specifically to piss off experienced adventure game fans who otherwise wouldn't get caught out by that sort of thing. They're outliers in the genre only in the sense that they're putting forth extra effort to be annoying about it – most games of the type pull the exact same shit entirely without remark!

[prokopetz]

(Honestly, the player-hostility of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to be tremendously overstated owing to a combination of effective marketing and the fact that it's the only adventure game from that era that any significant number of current-gen gamers have ever actually played. In terms of sheer fuckery it's considerably friendlier than stuff like, say, Codename: ICEMAN.)

[dana-ategina]

were these like, rented out blockbuster-style and the devs got a cut out of said rent, or

[prokopetz]

It helps to understand that point and click adventure games are one of the first genres the Git Gud crowd really fixated on, and a lot of these early design trends revolved around catering to that crowd. It only got reframed as a genre for filthy casuals in the wake of a demographic shift in the mid 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing strongly female; it's practically the only example of a video game genre's reputation flipping directly from "hardcore" to "casual", and one of the most striking illustrations of the fact that which kinds of games are considered "real" games is more about identity politics than mechanics.

[bramblebeau]

arise queers

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

[rivetgoth]

When people talk about all art being political (hard agree) they always talk about the content, themes, etc present within the art itself. Which obviously I get and obviously is a huge part of it. Of course. But I’m personally always struck by the politics surrounding the more metatextual elements of the art; that is, stuff like access to the tools needed for the creation of the art. I mean the literal materials of which an artpiece is made. This is a low-hanging-fruit example but I’m reminded of that Disney adult who tried to claim art isn’t inherently political by being like “I just drew a stick figure on a napkin, is that political? 🤣🤣” & while I think there are multiple different angles from which one could criticize this blatantly pathetic argument, I remember being really struck by like… the flagrant “waste” of implicitly throwaway resources that many parts of the world just literally don’t have and/or that carry with them deeply fraught histories of capitalist labor exploitation and destruction of natural resources. Like. Napkins?? The apolitical canvas that is paper napkins?

[userfish]

this pride month we’re all going to be radically pro transgender. or else.

[userfish]

hey so this means radically pro ALL transgender. don’t put limitations on this. all trans people are radically accepted here.

[puppybotz]

I really hope attenborough just keeps going, I hope he hits 200 but everyone is too nervous to like bring it up or study him or whatever cuz it's david attenborough

[calciumcryptid]

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.

[momoboyds]

here are some books i think everyone should check out

Anti-Racism Reading List

Click here to see our Anti-Racism Reading List for Young Readers

A guide with educational resources about antiracism and the history of police brutality, anti-Black racism & discrimination in the Twin Citi

[saltshroud]

yeup