NASA
Monterey Bay Aquarium
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JBB: An Artblog!
Xuebing Du
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Cosmic Funnies
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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RMH
ojovivo
will byers stan first human second
izzy's playlists!
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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Today's Document
Jules of Nature
styofa doing anything
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@the-cash-cache
To all my new followers, welcome! If you're here from the TTRPG introduction post, I share all sorts of stuff here. From indie TTRPGs to art to whatever my current fandom fixations are (currently spy x family and Arknights) to civil rights, you'll find a wide array of posts.
I also do copyediting and proofreading, and have worked on a few different TTRPGs!
The ornage plague bearer has returned
Will y'all admit that Biden bore the plague for four years, or are we just gonna talk about frito lay products for the next four years?
They both bore the plague but at least Biden didn't actively rail against vaccines
Both are iredeemably evil for the harm they've caused to all these people. But it's even WORSE somehow when Trump is involved because at least Biden was just old and evil. Trump is old, STUPID, and evil.
Biden completely demolished any test/trace/treat infrastructure, got rid of free testing and vaccinations for covid, encouraged people to unmask despite the lack of proof that vaccination alone would stop the spread of covid, did not speak out against mask bans, and didn't do a damn thing to combat vaccine "hesitancy" which is now leading to the massive flu wave that's happening when flu is normally dwindling. If you can't see the stupidity in Biden stripping public health and pushing "back to normal" during an ongoing pandemic while diseases like measles, tuberculosis, and whooping cough reach levels not seen for decades and keep rising, you're obviously not engaging with reality from a place of good faith. We're in a vax and relax public health strategy where not even a quarter of people are getting their vaccines updated, but at least he isn't [food product] man, right?
An excellent summation
See, we're criricizing past administrators for their quantifiable betrayals of the American people because... well it *happened.* Instead of attempting to scry what may come through the looking glass and goats bones and tea leaves, we are pointing to the things by which the democrats gave the massive potential to these anti-science actors on a silver platter by downplaying everything their voting base brought up or cared about and sprinting to the right to appease people they called fascists not two months prior. Discussing the recent past is in no way "downplaying" a future which is malleable and has yet to come to pass. The Yellowstone caldera could blow in 6 months. Covid could put Trump down for the count like it did Biden. Aliens could land in China and attempt to bring us into their federation of planets, only to betray us and use us as beasts of burden. All you can do is speculate until the present has become the past. Focus on what's in your control. Focus on what's recorded. Quit trying to pretend like consuming the latest breaking shit out of every white house press briefing is helpful and not literally a control mechanism. News as distraction and manipulation isn't a new thing. Ready this book.
I really struggle to understand anyone who professes to care about an issue then gets mad at posts like this.
What is the plan? Do you expect an issue to get sufficiently acknowledged if you're not consistent and vigilant? If you pick and chose when you care or when it's bad? If you essentially take the phone off the hook for years then put it back when you feel like you're now in danger?
Because fuck the people sounding the alarm bell on something like this for years right? Screw their incessant calls. We'll sacrifice them, it's okay. Disabled people in particular have been talking about this, but ignore them because them you had an election to win!
I just... do the people who care now really give a fuck? Or is this just some convenient criticism to you? Something you're now willing to admit is bad because you can lob it at a Trump. But will drop, ignore, or excuse it should we get another Democratic president?
Because that is a moral failure of epic proportions and isn't going to get us anywhere.
If can't engage with the government and presidency honestly? If you're not willing to admit any kind of president is going to do screwed up things that you need to address and hold them to task for? That Democrats too uphold the system in a way that sacrifices people and empowers Republicans?
If you can't hold everyone accountable regardless of their connection to you and what they do for you?
You're not ready for conversations like these. Stop entering them. Because it's disingenuous and you look childish.
"It's not that bad when my guy/team does it" is a child's logic. Enough.
I also want to add that a lot of people really weren't paying attention to the last four years if you can say that Biden is just "old/stupid/geriatric" or whatever.
First, Biden is a fascist. He is not a bad person because of concepts of ableism and ageism you tie to him. He is a direct actor in state violence and genocide. I really need people to stop picturing Biden as bad because he's old or "geriatric" or "stupid."
Democrats have also been very directly complicit in the eradication of public health and specifically with the pandemic. He makes fascist, genocidal, eugenicist decisions with a clear and conscious mind.
We have when the Biden administration and Harris specifically abdicated responsibility concerning the Delta variant:
Vice-president’s candid admission on Covid variants came in wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Times
We have that time Biden himself urged others to divert funds related to covid protections and public health to instead increase policing that directly kills disabled, in particular Black disabled people at disproportionate rates:
New York, Washington and a number of other major cities have reported increases in violent crime since the start of the pandemic.
People have been talking about the criminalization of masking that has already been in motion now:
Opponents denounce ‘dangerous’ Nassau county law making it a misdemeanor to wear a facial covering in public
Amid calls to reinstate mask bans, Covid-19 cases remain on the rise in 38 states, according to the CDC.
There's been coverage for years now about how Biden's policy on the pandemic has been abysmal:
Continuing its anti-science, anti-worker guidelines, the CDC considers once again weakening isolation recommendations for COVID+ people
This isn't even getting into the Biden administration rulings on testing and vaccination distribution, household counting, and so much more.
Biden himself got covid and repeated much of the same propaganda and disinformation surrounding the level of danger covid poses and pushed the "back to work" narrative for a reason.
The president continues to feel well, there is no reason to re-initiate treatment at this time, but he will isolate, said White House physic
Hell, for all the talk about the election outcome, it was repeatedly crickets when we repeatedly pointed out how the effects of the pandemic have changed the political landscape because so many people more likely to even vote democrat are now dead or disabled.
I'm barely even touching on the full extent to which Biden and other democrats have destroyed public health in the last four years, but I cannot emphasize enough that these are not "oncoming" threats nor are they exclusively republican threats.
Nuance lovers HATE the nuance in these tags
If this isn't the point you're getting from these critiques, you're fucking up. Real radicalism seeks to address the root of the issue, and the issue isn't just one party like so many of y'all demand, it's the whole fucking system based on white supremacy and greed.
Handing the Google executive currently chained in my basement a piece of paper that reads "Shall I end your torture?" with one checkbox that reads "No" and another that reads "Maybe later."
holy wounds festering
Spin the wheel. Now, imagine you're on a first date with someone who says they`re a [result]. How does this affect the odds of a second date?
100% guarantee I'll want a second date
It's significantly more likely
The odds don't change
It's significantly less likely
There wont be a second date. Absolutely not
Picker Wheel is a wheel spinner for a random picker. Various functions & customization. Enter choices or names, spin the wheel to decide a r
(anon submission)
this has the highest body count out of any pixar movie by the way
You and several others I follow have written extensively on how actually reading and developing a firm understanding of a game's rules is fundamental, especially in the current ttrpg landscape where the biggest games on the market rely on deceptive advertising, second-to-thirdhand fandom folklore and the voluntary labor of GMs to paper over its flawed design.
I was wondering if you have any suggestions or advice on how to approach and digest a dense rules text to better internalize it. I'm very used to just treating the game like an open-book test, referencing it to find specific rules as they become relevant, but I feel like if I want to GM (if only because that may be the only way I can play some of these games AT ALL), that isn't gonna cut it.
Thank you for your work, regardless! I appreciate RPGs as an art form much more thanks to your posts. :)
No, you’ve pretty much got it, and if anyone thinks that makes you a bad GM, they’re the wrong ones.
Whenever I play any TTRPG, even ones I wrote myself and am therefore intimately familiar with, I also treat it like an “open book test.” I read the material all the way through beforehand, then keep the book open and reference it any time I am not absolutely 100% sure of a ruling. Not only does this make sure I get the rulings right in the moment, but it helps me memorize the rulings better too (this is why open book tests are actually better for learning than convention school tests too) and so the more I play the less I need to look things up.
The only reason this would be considered a bad thing is if you’re poisoned by toxic D&D5e and “actual play” play culture and expect the GM to be what @jburneko would call a “magician,” an entertainer more than a player or referee who is taking it upon themselves to be the game more than the game itself, and “keep the story moving” even at the expense of the gameplay. The magician never lets you see the strings, never pauses the “act,” and performs for an audience more so than plays a game with friends. The magician never expects the audience to commit to any participation beyond standing there and being amazed. The term A.N.I.M. usually uses for this kind of GM is “servitor GMing.”
“Well won’t that slow the game down and make it boring if you have to stop and look something up every five minutes?”
I have several answers to this question.
1: Imagine you’re playing a video game instead of a TTRPG for a minute. Would you rather have 15-30 seconds of loading screens every once in a while for a game that works perfectly, or would you rather have no loading screens but every time you pass a point that would normally be a loading screen, nothing is loaded and the textures are blurry and the collision bugs out and items despawn and so on? The game might even crash (this is your GM burning out and not being able to continue). Rulings made on the fly just because you don’t want to look something up (I’m not talking about when the rulebook doesn’t account for an edge case or something) can really screw the game up and lead to outcomes that really shouldn’t have gone that way, and makes it harder for players and GM to develop the ability to make informed decisions in play because the rules will not be consistent.
2: The more you look things up, the faster you are at looking things up, and often the more concretely you memorize the things you have looked up a bunch of times. So yeah maybe the first few sessions will have some stumbles and long pauses, but it won’t be like that forever.
3: Here’s the real secret. That thing I said about how I always keep the book open during a session and reference it constantly? I don’t GM that often. That’s me as a player. I know that the toxic play culture of the magician/servitor GM has deeply ingrained that only the GM needs to know the rules, but that’s not true. Players should know the rules, players should know the rulebook, and players should look up the rules. This spreads the burden of knowing the rules out around the entire table rather than relying on just the GM (who is already usually doing the most work out of the whole group).
If your players are adverse to learning the rules, try to convince them with the following arguments:
1: It’s just courteous. Like, the GM is already doing the most work, and the GM is presumably your friend, if reading a few chapters of a book would make it significantly easier for your friend to do something they’re doing for you, why wouldn’t you do that for them?
2: Even if they’re so selfish as to not want to read like 10-100 pages of text to make it easier for a friend to do something for them, in the vast majority of TTRPGs, players knowing the rules gives them much greater agency in the game. When a monster attacks, knowing the rules can save their PC’s life! If the PC is likely to get shot at, and the player knows how to identify “Cover” and being in Cover makes their PC less likely to die, they can position their PC in Cover before the bullets even start flying.
Of course both of these arguments rely on the players understanding that rules matter and make a difference to the play experience in the first place, and that the GM will actually enforce the rules rather than always bending them last minute to stop PCs from dying, both of which are counter to the zeitgeist of much of the hobby right now, but if you’ve got them to the point where they’re even going to consider another game at all, you probably already have a foothold there.
Oh and finally, for anyone who doesn't already know, there is a "tick" for more quickly navigating PDFs (that is not just CTRL+F).
💬 1 🔁 164 ❤️ 84 · How to Navigate the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Rulebook (or any large PDF) More Efficiently · It came to my att
Answer 3 was gonna be my reply until I read it - I've looked through PDFs enough that I'm usually fastest to a rule
I'll also keep a reference card (a google slide usually) for games with frequent lookup. For The Magical Land Of Yeld, I've got slides for the GM resource formulae, as well as a bunch of the tables sorted by type instead of alphabetically, like this:
I've got a similar one for Blades in the Dark - having stuff like the names, NPC quirks, and scaled injury tables all quickly at hand is really nice.
"can men be lesbians?" bestie in 100 countries women can't be lesbians is this really the most pressing issue rn
“It’s photoshopped” honestly in the age of AI that has a homey sort of nostalgia to it. Remember when people used to put effort into faking things?
photoshop fakers are like the villain with moral standards now
I was asked to draw Leandra smiling
She’s not very good at it 😅
I was helping sort donations at my local mutual aid today (so not exactly thrifting because we don’t change money, but yk)
Shirt that seemed to be some sort of möbius strip with arms, for reasons I do not understand
Don’t know how merica shirt got donated to pride, think someone was lost, apparently it matches a hat that was found yesterday
Second hand wig. Gotta love second hand wig.
The most perplexing sandles I have ever laid eyes on, is this intended for people whose toes get hot but ankels do not? Why so many strips of leather?
And of course, singular shoe
not mullet eagle
OP theaverycottage on TikTok ♡
Cross-breeding mechsplo with Power Rangers style combiners and giving each team member a specific use/degradation kink based on which particular part of the combined robot's body their mech becomes.
Ok ha ha yeah legs/feet ha ha head ha ha torso WHO IS GETTING SEXUAL ABOUT SPECIFICALLY ONLY THEIR LEFT ARM??
There are a couple of perspectives we can come at this question from:
It's not necessarily getting kinky about being an arm. Use kink is, broadly speaking, a subgenre of objectification kink which explores the intersection of function and form. What is the "purpose" of an arm? What would it mean to be used in the manner of one?
The lesbian hand fetishists would like a word.
The left arm holds the shield, traditionally. This has very clean mapping onto self destructive and submissive kinks- the shield serves and earns honor by being hit.
every bi girl out there needs a man hating lesbian best friend to remind her that men ain't shit and to get angry at them on her behalf when she's too sentimental to
it's exactly like the "I hate ur parents lmao" post. YOU may have a complicated intrapersonal relationship with this dude and who he was and what he meant to you, but I sure as hell don't! I'm getting the hammers. we're smashing his car
this is the most correct tag anyone has ever left on one of my posts. 100%
grug dont have to change!
No, no it isn’t.
this gif is perfectly timed because it gives you enough time to read it, comprehend it, and still have this too-long-for-comfort moment of suspense before being punched square in the solar plexus
my couchsona
I would buy this and cover it in weird plush and sleep on it every night.
