Grumpkins and Snarks

[xavantina]

Murderbot + text posts [175/∞]

[birdandmoon]

Where you'll see a rare bird.

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[lmaonade]

my favorite video game quest trope is "HELP US, THEY ARE STEALING OUR ANCIENT ARTIFACT. THANK YOU FOR HELPING US, AS A REWARD YOU MAY HAVE OUR ANCIENT ARTIFACT"

[6qubed]

the ancient artifact was less important than having agency in its distribution

[suinicide]

Nothing is more important than keeping it out of the hands of the British museum

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

there's literally nothing more radical in 2026 than believing that humanity can become good news for each other and the only world we'll ever share.

[liminalbeauty]

Saving the tags.

[specialagentartemis]

this isn't really the same thing as intentionally/unintentionally a-spec characters but it is interesting thinking about how intentionality does dramatically change how characters read regarding a-spec identities and themes.

So: repurposed vaguely Kinseyesque scale describing your aromantic and/or asexual protagonist's awareness of and relationship to their own aromanticism/asexuality:

Unaware That This Is A Thing People Can Be. Type specimen: Carl from Dungeon Crawler Carl. Has never once considered that "not wanting romance or sex" is a thing people could feel, let alone identify as. He is normal, which means straight. It's just a coincidence that his relationship with his girlfriend was a disaster and now he's just way too busy in this new nightmare dystopia world for any of that! Anyway!

Aware They Have These Feelings, Assumes Everyone Else Also Does. Type specimen: Doug Eiffel from Wolf 359. Firmly believes that his aro-allo experiences are universal and everybody else is just better at acting like a functional human being than he is. Being a huge movie nerd also leads him to believe that "romance" as we understand it is massively exaggerated for drama in movies and people in real life don't actually do and feel that stuff any more than they mind-meld or can use the Force. He's just a fuckup at everything; why wouldn't relationships be included in that? For most of the show if you told him about aromanticism he would NOT be comforted about it, he'd probably take it as a diagnosis that his fuckup-ness regarding relationships was innate and incurable. (This doesn't have to be negative; this is also where Andy Wheyface from Arden falls and he is having a GRAND old time.)

Aware They Have These Feelings, Realizes That It Sets Them Apart From Others, Doesn't Conceptualize It As Part Of An Identity. Type specimen: Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary. His reaction to other people having sex is mostly "why would you do that." His single attempt at a serious romantic relationship didn't work out and he has a nagging sense that there is something in him that can't maintain serious relationships; attributes it to cowardice and fear of commitment. Ironically he does know what asexuality is. He's a middle school teacher in 2020s California, he has absolutely gotten LGBTQ+ Sensitivity Education at least in "pamphlet listing queer identities" form, he for sure has students with pride flag pins on their backpacks and pride stickers on their notebooks, and he is also not immune from the Culture War Bullshit around gender in schools. Knowing that asexuality exists did not even slightly lead him to apply this to himself.

Aware They Have These Feelings, Considers Them Significant, Attributes Them To Some Existential Feature Of Their Existence Rather Than A Personal Identity. Type specimen: Murderbot from The Murderbot Diaries. Murderbot is very confident it does not want anything to do with romance or sex, and it attributes this to Being A SecUnit, and romance and sex are Human Things SecUnits Don't Do. Has not yet realized that this is an itself thing and not a SecUnit thing. Probably willfully at this point.

Considers These Feelings A Significant Aspect Of Their Selfhood, But Doesn't Name It. Type specimen: Sister Carpenter from The Silt Verses. Clearly confident in who she is and what she wants in her personal relationships, recognizes that as something that makes her different from others and out of step with what others expect from her, and is basically like, that's their problem. She knows who she is. Sometimes other people try to make it her problem but she has so many other problems that societal amatonormativity keeps getting pushed lower and lower on her list of Problems.

Recognizes Themself As Aromantic/Asexual As A Personal Identity. Type specimen: Nova NoStar from InCo. Clearly considers this part of her identity, but is allergic to talking about her feelings even at her therapy android's insistence and besides that's not anybody else's business is it?

Publicly Identifies As Asexual And Describes It With Period-Correct Sexual Orientation Language. Type specimen: Sally Grissom from ars PARADOXICA. The only character I've ever heard come out as asexual and lay out the definition in terms of sexual orientation and attraction to another character on-air that made me go "yeah she would do this, this is in character for Sally." Strongly feel like she would be an active commenter on the 2010s ace blogosphere. Would get in an argument about the correct definition of asexuality on AVEN.

X. Their Culture Conceptualizes Intimate Relationships In A Fundamentally Different Framework Than We Use. Type specimen: Breq from the Imperial Radch Trilogy. Whatever model of gender and sexuality the Radch is on it is NOT ours. Breq is still not interested though.

[apatheticfluorescence]

some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it

[headspace-hotel]

Shakespeare is like this

[insufferablepirate]

Every time I see a Van Gogh that’s not one of his better known pieces it absolutely blows me away

Have you seen this shit my liege? smh unreal

[parkayquarts]

hbo max blocks screenshots even when I use the snipping tool AND firefox AND ublock which is a fucking first. i will never understand streaming services blocking the ability to take screenshots thats literally free advertising for your show right there. HOW THE HELL IS SOMEBODY GONNA PIRATE YOUR SHOW THROUGH SCREENSHOTS. JACKASS

[parkayquarts]

somewhere out there is a guy who meticulously takes screenshots of every individual frame of his favorite tv shows and then painstakingly etches each one onto a roll of film which he puts into his old timey projector and recreates the footage as a silent film with his own lavishly hand-lettered dialogue cards and original score that he plays on his upright piano and charges audiences one shiny penny a play. at last, big media has finally outsmarted ol' Zachary Zoetrope

[theheroheart]

PSA for everyone who doesn't know, explained simply

this is NOT because of blocking screenshots, it's because of HOW streaming sites use your computer's hardware to optimise performance, which means the thing rendering the video and the thing capturing your screen aren't the SAME thing. so they can't talk together.

you can fix this by going to your browser settings, searching for "hardware acceleration", and turning that off.

[team-thickness12]

This also fixes screen sharing to other screens. It has been GODSEND

[lucarleigho]

type this in the toolbar to find this setting in firefox: about:preferences#searchResults

[mctreeleth]

ol' Zachary Zoetrope is back in business!

[bstrdr]

Eridian Grace, as in culturally Eridian, not the species Eridian, is so important to me.

Grace who does jazz hands and taps when he's asking a question and says some words three times like Rocky. Grace who makes chirps and trilling noises when he's happy.

Grace who starts thinking and dreaming in Eridian, who sometimes has dreams that are just sound, no visual. (Grace who, if he ever goes back to Earth for whatever reason after years on Erid, forgets some words in English and speaks in the sentence structure of Eridian because he has to translate from Eridian to English when he speaks outloud).

Grace who does scarification (even if Rocky protests at first) - I've read some fics where he does the Voyager pulsar map, or dots and lines showing his route from Sol, to Tau Ceti, turning around towards Sol, and then the line going all the way back to Erid. Even though he already has the scars from Rocky saving him, maybe Rocky's family crest. A scar showing his rank as Captain of the Hail Mary - maybe something to represent her, too.

Grace who wears Eridian gems, as earrings, in a chain for his glasses, in strings draped over him that clink together when he walks - the most important ones, like the earrings he wears all the time, the color of the blueish-green gems (or spots?) in/on Rocky's carapace.

Grace who wears a bracelet on each arm that have ribbed marks like on Rocky's arm so he can properly say goodbye (not something he had to do, but something that felt right to do, something that made him feel more like himself), sound included.

Grace who considers himself an Eridian!! Grace who IS an Eridian!!

[pap3r-love]

you get me… i need eridian grace so bad. i definitely this his body movements and cues would become a lot less aggressive and hed lack some facial expressions, not just from like.. the pressure and stuff hes living in, but also because everyone around him doesnt need those as much more pronounced movements, hell he could twitch a muscle and theyd know.

he speaks quieter, using sound cues a lot that dont particularly make sense to any normal human. most eridians who spend a lot of time with him have developed these sound cues as well, which is definitely strange. since grace cant make all the sounds they can make i like to think he has a sorta like.. sound board? not one he uses a lot but if hes talking to a not well known eridian hell use it to indicate tone and other things like that when necessary, he likes to use it while teaching cuz he doesnt want to have kids growing up and talking weird from the get go (they usually do anyways)

i like also thinking about how rocky is probably so much different than everyone else. he not only spent 4 decades alone with no company, but then spent the next 8(?) or so years with a complete alien with VERY different cultures. he’s probably a lot different now. :3

[fairycosmos]

accidentally got stuck in a compulsive thought loop instead of living any sort of life

[sunflower-eddiediaz]

boobs should have a toggle on/off feature

[loucifersbitch]

if you need me, i’ll be sobbing on the floor. humans, man

[incaseyouart]

Zuko + sk8!

Aaand that wraps up this series ^_^

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[rylandgracie]

what kind of soulmate crack cocaine was everyone snorting in that set when they made this film i'm being serious

[kyt-grace]

STTTTOOOOPPPP OMG IM CRYING MY EYES OUT

[cpericardium]

hey everyone "I" have something to show "you"

[cpericardium]

[cpericardium]

[hungwy]

there are so many funny posts in this world i want them all on my blog like stamps in a passport. look atthe funny things ive seen. its awesome

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

it's that time of year when countless people in countless schools and universities start thinking about running a d&d night, and I'm here to tell you: that's the devil talking. listen, I play a lot of games, D&D among them, and I run a LOT of events for college students. what you want is a game with dirt simple mechanics, character creation that can be completed in about a minute or less, and a contingency plan to split your attendees into groups if too many of them show up to reasonably play together. maybe something that doesn't even have dice idk. I'm not being a buzzkill I SWEAR I'm sincerely trying to save you from the horrors of a D&D night where 20 people show up and half of them have level 20 characters packing 16 magic items and a bad case of Main Character Syndrome and the other half are going to need to spend 45 minutes making their first character sheet ever. just play a different game man.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

some games that my co-GM and I are planning to run this year:

Dread

Queer Coven

Fiasco

I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic

The Quiet Year

Raccoon Sky Pirates

Lasers and Feelings or one of its many hacks

Knave if the students are very good

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

#like people are looking for the dnd experience not really any of these suggestions#have a bunch of premade archtype stuff ready and do a real dungeon grinder like a youll die before the session is over and someone else wil#get to play you enjoy the snacks or apples to apples afterwards#sorry this tagging is rude

well. people are going to learn that a.) open drop-in nights with an unknown number of attendees aren't the best format for D&D and b.) other games are also fun! assuming they aren't already familiar with and hype for games that aren't d&d, which. you know. a lot of people are. nobody is forcing anyone to play anything they don't want to or stopping them from playing d&d at home in a smaller group :)

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

hi gang, I'm checking in half a year later at the end of the semester, typing this from the very last TTRPG night of the semester. at our last meeting I ran Street Magic, and tonight my co-facilitator is running a session of Justicar set in the world we built. I've also introduced games like Oh Fuck the Killer, Fishblade, and Fiasco, and my co-facilitator has run things games including Stewpot and Low Stakes.

do you know what the coolest part has been? it's watching people come in knowing how to play exactly one game but taking a chance on something new, and realize that they're having a lot of fun. there's always a fumbling period while we figure out the rules together, because often myself and my co-facilitator are also playing a game for the very first time!

but it's so cool to see the real time process of watching players figure out new ways to engage with a game! different mechanics for character interactions, systems that aren't even built to facilitate combat, new ways to use dice, games that don't use dice at all, character sheets asking for info they've never considered generating for a character before, games that don't have individual characters at all, stories that get built collaboratively instead of determined by a single person, the list is really endless. players will so often start out hesitant and awkward, then lean in and embrace the new system for everything it's worth and throw themselves totally into the game. the results are messy and silly and frequently don't make for perfect stories, but everyone always has fun trying it out and taking risks together.

I'm really grateful that so many students have taken a chance on us, and I hope that anyone who's worried that it's not realistic to think anyone will play anything but D&D can reconsider that and see who shows up to play :)

[whyenn-reader]

firm believer you can't be a ''good person''. too much niuance to life.

[whyenn-reader]

you can be good (adjective) but you cannot be good (identity)

[whyenn-reader]

if you think you are good (identity) you are more likely to cause harm as you don't consider yourself to be capable of it

[agwitow]

That's a good distinction.

I think it also works with other "positive" traits.

You can be nice (adjective), but "nice" people tend to be too afraid of offending anyone to step up when needed.

You can be honest (adjective), but people who make being "honest" a part of their personality use it as excuse to be blunt (at best) or downright rude

You can be smart (adjective), but those who view themselves as "smart" (identity) tend to look down on others who don't know the same things as them

You can be brave (adjective), but "brave" (identity) people are often reckless

Basically, if you pin your self-worth and identity on a single/few specific traits, you're more likely to embody the negative aspects