Cope

Mich. K_K_TiBal on AO3. She/Her Writer. Videographer. Dice Designer. Mostly D&D at this point. I don’t give a heck about your Turkish Delight knowledge.

[thebloggerbloggerfun]

Steven the Goldfish D20 from The Adventure Zone!

[thebloggerbloggerfun]

Steven the Goldfish d20 from The Adventure Zone!

[proteinjackalope]

ianthe is awesome. what if there was a girl and she was just so awful and she was born in a wet cardboard box all alone. I need her

[proteinjackalope]

LMAO

[chronicowboy]

the thing about project hail mary is that it says things like at the start of our existence we watched each other sleep to protect ourselves from our biology and now it is just a part of our lives but all my crewmates are dead so i shall watch you sleep to keep you safe please watch me sleep too and then it says things like an alien wants to see our technology so i am cleaning my spacecraft up whilst he prepares the airlock because i am painfully human and we clean up for company and it just expects me to go on living my life normally like that isn't emotionally compromising

[dathen]

Project Hail Mary is the platonic version of “a bird may love a fish, but where would they build a home together?” “then I’ll have to build you wings” send tweet

[iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid]

project hail mary said "we would be ecstatic to find out that there's other intelligent life out there, so why wouldn't they be just as happy to find out about us?" and then proceeded to write an entire thesis on how the inherent nature of sentient beings is to forge friendships, to not be alone, to protect each other at all costs. i'm inconsolable

[omegas-reincarnation]

I will never get over the fact that project hail mary is a story about a guy who goes from having no one - no family, no close friends, no one he has to tell when he gets forced onto an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean for several years, no one to mourn him when he is forced into a suicide mission, and perhaps most significantly, no one he is prepared to die for, to having one person who he is prepared to die for again and again and again.

You had to go lightyears across space to a different solar system and learn a new language you can't even speak unaided to find the platonic love of your life but when you did you burnt and starved and hurt for them without hesitation. Ryland Grace saves the world, but more importantly, he finds something bigger than himself to believe in and it's loving a lil alien crab dude.

Wonderful.

[viciousmollymaukery]

For anyone interested, Die Hard Dice is currently donating a portion of proceeds from their Reroll Dice (made of recycled materials) to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. The dice are a good price and high quality, and they come with a watermelon D20 sticker, a handwritten note, and a nice little pouch to keep them in. So if you're in the market for new dice and also want your money to do some good, consider checking them out.

[destiel-news-channel]

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'The actors of Garth and Benny from Supernatural are getting married' to Cas' 'I love you'. /End ID]

i CANNOT believe this is real

[chikhaibardocowboy]

[jactingjoices-deactivated202406]

all of spnblr when a cast member comes out as queer

[anthonycrowley]

it feels a little gross to take very real people who met and fell in love and devalue that by reducing them to their characters. but on the other hand ‘dean winchester’s werewolf boyfriend and dean winchester’s vampire boyfriend met and fell in love irl’ is one of the funniest technically true statements i can think of right now.

[anthonycrowley]

to everyone in the tags who learned that dj qualls and ty olssen are getting married from this post: sorry

[abandonedblog42069-deactivated2]

hey dnd nerds, dieharddice is donating a portion of the money made off their reroll dice, which are made of recycled plastic, the to palestine children's relief fund. a cheap easy way to support the cause & add to your dice collection at the same time. edit: it even comes with a watermelon d20 sticker. yall !

but also consider going to gazafunds.com & donating directly to whatever fund appears when you refresh the page. from the river to the sea 🇵🇸🐲✨️❤️

[smahwg]

also for all of you nerds who are into TTRPGs, Die Hard Dice is donating 50% of the proceeds from their Rerolls aka recycled polymer dice set to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. They're donating to the PCRF for the entire fiscal quarter (so until March 2024), so if you were planning on getting dice soon then this is a great way to contribute support to gaza

[thebloggerbloggerfun]

Just tried Turkish Delight for the first time. 

It was good, but not “Sell out my family to the White Queen” good. 

[thebloggerbloggerfun]

Happy 10th anniversary to this post

Celebrating the obvious way

[twistcmyk]

hoping aaron bushnell's sacrifice won't be swept under the rug by politicians/media and forgotten about in another fucking week as the genocide on palestinians continues

[goose-onthe-loose]

Can we PLEASE not glorify suicide? There are so many ways to protest and help without killing yourself. Aaron Bushnell's actions, while perhaps well-intentioned, were clearly the result of a mental illness. He died horrifically, and paint him as some sort of martyr or hero is honestly disrespectful.

[edenaziraphale]

I understand the impulse to say things like this, and to be clear there is a certain amount of journalistic caution that is typically (not always) applied to cases like this- pairing coverage with suicide hotlines and resources, for example. Those standards exist not because being without them would be to glorify suicide, but because media sensationalism can inspire copycats, and because you want people in pain to know they aren't alone. However, to claim that this was an act fueled by mental illness is not only disrespectful to Aaron Bushnell's memory and his death, it is deeply, deeply ignorant. Self immolation as the most extreme act of protest has a deeply storied history across the entire globe.

To quote scholar Timothy Dickinson when he spoke about self immolation as protest in 2012: "This isn't insanity. It is a terrible act of reason." Aaron Bushnell was a deeply anguished young man. That anguish didn't come from an unspecified chemical imbalance that he inherited through the genetic lottery. The anguish came from the fact that he was an enlisted airman serving in the US military while the US government actively funds and sends arms to a country committing genocide. That's not mental illness. It's systemic despair. You can't just leave the military. When you enlist, you sign a contract that you have no way of terminating if the government does shit that you don't like. You're property of the state. He was caged and clawing for a way out. As an American Jew I already carry the death of every single Palestinian man, woman, and child with me. The guilt is so heavy- I can't imagine what it must have been like for someone like Aaron Bushnell. It must have felt like he fired every shot with his own two hands. This was not mental illness. It was desperation. It's like you're putting pressure on someone else's bullet wound, screaming for paramedics while people walk past you on the street, never looking over. Sometimes you hear passersby wonder out loud, "Why would someone would make all that noise about a paper cut?" You start asking yourself what you have to do to make someone pay attention. No matter how uncomfortable you are with Aaron Bushnell's suicide, he is a martyr. It is deeply, deeply disrespectful to behave as though Aaron Bushnell was not in complete control of himself and his faculties. It is deeply disrespectful to wave this away as mental illness when that is not the case. I never, ever, ever want anyone to protest in this way. It's so deeply tragic and horrifying, and the suffering compounds for all of those who love you when you go. But that horror doesn't make it not martyrdom. It doesn't make it not a protest. Aaron Bushnell was a very brave, very kind young man. May his memory be a blessing to us all.

[terramythos]

There are so many things to say about the Hugo controversy i dont even know where to start.

The absolute blatant racism and trans/queerphobia in the leaked emails is actually galling. I wouldn't say SURPRISING considering other recent controversy but it really feels like the committee, at least to an extent, used "fear of censorship" as an excuse to remove works with politics they didn't agree with. The assurance that committee members didn't have to actually read the entries to eliminate them. The fact they spelled Zhao's name wrong TWICE then used the completely wrong title for their book while deciding to eliminate them? They eliminated someone for going to Tibet (an insane reason to disqualify someone from a writing award) and turned out he NEVER HAD?

Considering the Hugo awards are such a career changing selling point for authors it's shameful that officials acted in this manner. And again, I would be shocked if the award has any prestige going forward since committee members can just eliminate any entries they feel like without actual justification and with no control against personal biases. If the process is not completely obvious and transparent in the future there is no salvaging it.

[terramythos]

And again, this happening with a speculative fiction award is so grimly ironic its a little painful to think about

[terramythos]

And we probably never would have figured out this is what happened without a whistleblower. And props to her for doing so. But why in the world does-- I cannot stress this enough-- a SPECULATIVE FICTION AWARD-- need a whistleblower?! Just utterly insane to me.

[sainamoonshine]

Also it seems that they have removed a huge amount of chinese works and authors under justification of “slating”, something that is not only NOT against the rules, but also the voting system is specifically designed to prevent slating from influencing final results.

(Slating is essentially when someone with a huge platform asks for people to vote for a list of specific works. In this case, Chinese publishers were advertising lists of works from their authors that were on the ballot, and a lot of people were voting for those works. Vote-stuffing or just regular marketing? YOU* decide!)

(*Dave McCarthy decides)

After looking at the data, many people have pointed out that if those authors and books had not been removed, most of the english-language finalists would not even have made it to the final ballot, including all book winners.

It was definitely a surprise to me that an award held in China had so few chinese works on the final ballot. I thought, didn’t the chinese sff fans vote? Why did they mostly vote for american stuff? Well, now we know. They did vote, and their votes were considered ineligible because some fucking american guy who was drunk on power decided to interpret bad faith in chinese publisher’s nominations campaigns.

Completely fucking disgraceful.

[kingsandbastardz]

The thing is, the published list was in THE biggest science fiction magazine in the world. It was not actually a slate because it had multiple authors recommended per category (both Chinese and western writers) . It's just that Chinese fandom is very, very large and enthusiastic/ excited because this was a chance to get Chinese authors acknowledged internationally.

So DAVE decided to throw their votes out using slates as a justification even though the list was not a slate and slates WERE allowed by the rules. Basically the Chinese recommendations list was turned into a list for the western committee members to exclude all the top Chinese writers.

So not only did this fuck over Asian diaspora, it also did so to Chinese authors and the Chinese sff fandom's international reputation. So much racism impact in so many directions!

(and it bugs me so much that many western ppl commenting are still incapable of differentiation between China's govt, chengdu's business interests, Chinese local govt and Chinese fandom in favor of smashing everything together into some imagined blob of ceeceepee goose-stepping masses)

Other things:

DAVE leveraged language barriers lie to both western and Chinese side about inviting a worldcon guest - which shows he has a history of creating background dysfunction (Edited bc I brain farted and made it sound like this person was nominated for a hugo- clarifying thread here via @jiggit)

Chinese nominees and attendees were segregated to a hotel 30min away while western attendees and staff were housed at a nice hotel on site (in addition to other shenanigans) At least one Chinese attendee was hospitalized due to contact with fumes or chemicals from the hastily built convention site.

Chinese committee members were cut out from emails and planning while all this was happening. DAVE claiming it was for their protection but while simultaneously allowing them to take the brunt of blame for any censorship. And never once asking for input if anything they were trying to censor was actually an issue. Keep in mind at that at least one of the books cut from eligibility was already translated and published officially in China and i believe 1-2 others were also being translated and would be published soon. One of the winners had gotten permission from China to visit Tibet (and live blogged it)

There was already some censorship done in the Chinese side (which is bad!) But means the list handed over of Chinese authors and works came approved. They were thrown out anyway. I'm not entirely sure if those pre- censored list also flagged western authors. But from I hear the name of the committee flagging works was translated incorrectly as some sort of censorship board and that's not what they were at all.

Which brings me to the next issue: For some reason western coverage refuses to reach out to anyone who can read Chinese and when Chinese fluent ppl are trying to correct their mistranslations, the real translations are not being used or they're being "corrected" into being incorrect in different ways. There is a weird claim that ppl writing articles suddenly can't find any Chinese ppl to help them when... they are currently all over social media talking about this in both English and Chinese?

One prominent chinese committee member vague blogged on weibo that he saw this coming and tried to stop it but got pushed out of everything and in the end was unable to do anything at all.

So basically there was a lot of western imagination at play - where they did xyz based off that imagination and didn't even try to listen to anyone talking them that things don't write work that way. They end up doing a western/ anerican-republican-style censorship as a result.

Then lets everyone blames an imaginary version of China to take the heat off themselves. Meanwhile everyone is still ignoring the actual Chinese fans and authors. 🙄 I also want to know wtf is going on with the chengdu business interests. Cuz a LOT of money was involved.