The Snarky Druid

Madeline. 26 year old grad student studying medicine. Ace, Gay. I like D&D, TV (lots of TV), sci fi, fantasy, comics, board games, reading books, learning magic tricks, playing guitar/ukulele, and drawing.

[discoasphodel13]

Hey so it's come to my attention that the Creators of Disco Elysium want you to share the game and not give the company who took over and fired them (illegally)?) any profits off of their ideas and work, and I originally joined tumblr 2 weeks ago when that post was going around about the Steam sale and how you should [Skull and Crossbones flag] it instead.

So.

in light of that.

Check the replies/notes of this post :)

I was informed that posts containing links in them aren't findable in the search so i'll just.... drop a link in a seperate reboot :)

first things first though, copy this key:

q4-EJ9G2DV7MYYI-Vs0KdQ

[discoasphodel13]

here's the edited version with the captal YY in the key above!

2326 files and 29 subfolders

and also the Google drive link :

[fallout-lou-begas]

[marrowjaw]

Beau energy is perching on chairs to get a good view

Laudna energy is just straight up crawling upon the table

[lyricalporcupine]

and Kiki energy is falling into the floor

[marrowjaw]

ah yes the three stages. novice, expert, and ????

[one-time-i-dreamt]

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Remember when Jeff Bezos, who is worth 181 billion USD donated 690k to stopping Australian fires? Yeah, me too.

[s-s-s-senp-p-p-pai]

McKenzie Scott is literally proof that these fuckers can donate HUGE sums of money to EVERYTHING and still live a comfortable life.... But nooO someone HAS to justify the pitifully small donations the richest men on earth make every year for their tax write-off

[a-slut-for-smut]

[tehriz]

Some also important context (this is June 2021, after her second round of grants was announced), as well: 

[image description: tweet from Dan Price, the Seattle business owner who doesn’t take a massive salary and pays everybody at his company really well: “Two years ago, she had $36 billion. Since then, she has donated $8 billion - more than anyone in the world. She is now worth $60 billion. I think people struggle to understand just how fast wealth accumulates for the super-rich. She literally can't give it away fast enough.”.]

[mana4anam-deactivated20221204]

She’s trying to singlehandedly redistribute the wealth she took back from Jeff Bezos and is failing at it because the economy is built so that wealth travels from the bottom, accumulates at the top, and then stays there. She literally cannot give her money away fast enough.

Think about this. This is our current capitalist economy at work. It is working as intended and designed by those who benefit from it.

Her story is incredibly revealing of how and where the system is failing.

[animeengineer]

It also means that we can, indeed, tax the hell out of billionaires and they will not suffer at all.

[anarchistmemedistro]

this thread is proof it works

[maid-of-timey-wimey]

Here’s Who MacKenzie Scott Donated To So Far In February

The billionaire philanthropist, and ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, has given four organizations $172 million so far this month.

In case anyone was curious what she’s been up to lately. (She has stopped publicly announcing the donations, saying that too much attention was going to her instead of the organizations she chose. Recipients are welcome to name her as the donor when they announce whatever they’re doing with the money, however.)

[one-time-i-dreamt]

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Remember when Jeff Bezos, who is worth 181 billion USD donated 690k to stopping Australian fires? Yeah, me too.

[s-s-s-senp-p-p-pai]

McKenzie Scott is literally proof that these fuckers can donate HUGE sums of money to EVERYTHING and still live a comfortable life.... But nooO someone HAS to justify the pitifully small donations the richest men on earth make every year for their tax write-off

[a-slut-for-smut]

[tehriz]

Some also important context (this is June 2021, after her second round of grants was announced), as well: 

[image description: tweet from Dan Price, the Seattle business owner who doesn’t take a massive salary and pays everybody at his company really well: “Two years ago, she had $36 billion. Since then, she has donated $8 billion - more than anyone in the world. She is now worth $60 billion. I think people struggle to understand just how fast wealth accumulates for the super-rich. She literally can't give it away fast enough.”.]

[mana4anam-deactivated20221204]

She’s trying to singlehandedly redistribute the wealth she took back from Jeff Bezos and is failing at it because the economy is built so that wealth travels from the bottom, accumulates at the top, and then stays there. She literally cannot give her money away fast enough.

Think about this. This is our current capitalist economy at work. It is working as intended and designed by those who benefit from it.

Her story is incredibly revealing of how and where the system is failing.

[animeengineer]

It also means that we can, indeed, tax the hell out of billionaires and they will not suffer at all.

[anarchistmemedistro]

this thread is proof it works

[maid-of-timey-wimey]

Here’s Who MacKenzie Scott Donated To So Far In February

The billionaire philanthropist, and ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, has given four organizations $172 million so far this month.

In case anyone was curious what she’s been up to lately. (She has stopped publicly announcing the donations, saying that too much attention was going to her instead of the organizations she chose. Recipients are welcome to name her as the donor when they announce whatever they’re doing with the money, however.)

[roger-taylor-owns-my-wigg]

every person can feel freddie’s presence in their souls when they sing MAMAAAAAA UUHHHH, I DONT WANNA DIE, I SOMETIMES I WISH I’VE NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL with all the air in their lungs i’m not joking

[peachdisco]

it’s fucking crazy to think about the amount of people who have sung bohemian rhapsody? like it’s such a unifying song, by nature of the fact that so many people know it. it holds so many good memories for me and other people. it’s a song you scream in the car with your friends while you drive around your boring hometown, it’s a song you drunkenly sing with your arm around your best friend, or a song you sing along to with strangers when it’s on in public. it’s bittersweet to think about freddie’s legacy carrying on like that through his masterpiece. freddie carries on because he’s a part of so many people’s good memories and bohemian rhapsody is a huge part of that.

[deathbutwithfuzzyanimals]

Reblog if you have sung bohemian rhapsody with your friends

[reikah-deactivated20190906]

every time i see this post i’m reminded of the video of 65,000 people singing bohemian rhapsody in near-perfect harmony

like, what other song can make that claim?

[crewdlydrawn-deactivated2022072]

Some of the highlights of that video include:

The crowd cheering after the first stanza when they realize what they’re all doing

So many people audibly ‘doing the guitar parts’… like ya do

The sheer number of voices joining the rediculous falsetto (thanks, Roger)

How they all start jumping at the ramp-up “so you think you can stomp me”

Hands up, hundreds, thousands deep for the final “ooooo”s and the last line to close the song

[aces-to-apples]

Only days before my state went into lockdown, “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on in the restaurant kitchen I’d just been hired at and, no shit, every single worker in that little diner started singing along. Me (the only queer afaik), the manager, all the other kitchen workers, the dishwasher up front, the two people on the counter, all but two of the men over 30. Just belting out Freddie Mercury at the top of their lungs. And you can bet when “sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all” came around, we every single one of us ramped up the intensity and basically made sure Freddie could hear us in the afterlife.

[zohbugg]

[solitarelee]

[iamthespineofmybook]

One of the things that struck me, listening to the video, is that you cannot distinguish the original vocals from the crowd, and sometimes you can barely hear the music. And the POV is on the stage the speakers are playing the song from!

There’s good reason why, nearly fifty years after the height of their career, Queen is still considered one of the best bands of all time ever.

(And how albums left lying about in cars will eventually metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.)

[prismatic-bell]

Something else that’s rather incredible about this is, Bohemian Rhapsody is a very difficult song from a technical standpoint. Like–humor me, okay, go flip it on and try to sing the whole thing at the top of your voice without falling off-key, out of breath, or cracking at least once. Then come back.

Okay. You’re back? Welcome back. Unless you’re a trained singer, you probably can’t do it. There are too many long notes, too many key changes, and too many places where–if you’re singing all the parts–you’re just up and down the scale too damned fast. I’m saying this as a trained singer and I can’t do it. I always crack on “magnifico” and “leave me to die,” and I have a pretty decent range, but I know I sound ugly as hell on that final coda.

Okay. Now that we’ve established that, I want to talk a little about singing as a chorus. One of the things a lot of people learned during the pandemic is how hard it is to take twenty people, all in different places, and stitch them together to make a single coherent song with perfect pitch and timing. You’re all practicing on slightly your own tempo, slightly your own key, even if you’re all working from the same base track. (You can see this in a lot of the Wellerman compilations from Tiktok, where someone always says “Soon” a moment before everyone else on “soon may the Wellerman come.”) When you have a chorus comprised of many smaller choruses that are all traveling to be together, this is what dress rehearsal is for–to get all of you onto the same tempo so you’re starting and finishing at exactly the same time. This is a thing that normally only happens after at least several days of practice, and it is an important skill that must be taught. You’re not just born knowing how to do this.

I do not know how many people at that Green Day concert were trained singers. But I do know there is no way in hell all few thousand of them were a single group–they showed up a few at a time, maybe even flying solo for the night. Now go and listen to the video again. Listen to the ends of verses and the pickups. They’re fucking crisp as hell. Everyone is starting and ending at the same place. Not even a single note off. (And yes, you can hear when it’s a single note off, even in a crowd that big. A handful of people would be enough to throw it off.) And while a few in the crowd may be off-key, so many more are on-key that the cumulative effect is of the song being on-key. This isn’t even the band they’re there to see.

They don’t just know this song, this technically-difficult song, this long and complex song by a completely different band. They know it perfectly. They know it down to the fucking note. They know it so well that they did it in perfect synchrony, without a single chance to practice.

Do you know how insane that is?

[deadcatwithaflamethrower]

Bohemian Rhapsody is the song that gives us hope for humanity.

[slayerscake]

I'm curious. On what episode of CR (one-shots, ExU, lovm included) did you decide "Yeah, I'll watch all of this."

[star-anise]

My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”

[freedom-of-fanfic]

“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”

[aphilologicalbatman-deactivated]

thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy

[brs-love]

Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?

[star-anise]

Oh heck yeah.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad).  Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. 

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.  

I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.

[elfwreck]

They died of AIDS because

Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.

Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.

Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.

Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.

Picture from 1993:

We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.

[psychoactive-teratogen]

As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.

[smallswingshoes]

This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.

[mycroftrh]

I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died.  He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

AIDS is not just history.  Neither is homophobia.

[madgastronomer]

Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.

[specificfuckery]

[carnivalseb]

If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the ‘60s, except in lockstep with population growth. I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.

Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.

[purplepints]

This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

Sing for two.

[mg-dl]

My fave part of this post is the repeated usage of the word “queer”. In a discussion about the hatred of LGBT people and how they were left to die by the government, it’s always a great idea to call them all a slur. Can you switch it up a bit and use “fag” next time?

[star-anise]

There’s a really obvious reason why we’re using “queer”.

When talking about LGBTQ+ history, often we have to be really careful with the language we use, because how we understand things now is not how the people we’re talking about understood themselves at the time. We end up using phrases like, “People who we would now understand as gay or lesbian” or “experiences which modern transgender people often identify with”.

In this case? It’s because that’s the word they used.

(Many of them also used the words “fag” or “dyke”, but “queer” is more inclusive.)

When I talk about “the leading lights of queerness” I mean Queer Nation. I mean the people who contributed to Queer Theory. I mean people who deliberately chose to use that word. I mean me and my ex-girlfriend. We exist.

During the AIDS crisis especially, homophobia was so bad that a lot of people didn’t want to be known by any word associated with the gay community: Not gay, not homosexual, not queer, not anything. Epidemiologists had to create the category of “men who have sex with men” because there was literally no existing term that didn’t carry the weight of a slur. The purpose of using the word “queer” was for people to say, “Let’s stop running from the things society is calling us; let’s pick up the weapons they’ve hurled at us and start hurling them back. There is no level of socially acceptable we can be that will make them suddenly decide our lives matter. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”  It meant very specifically embracing and defending their/our marginalized position.

Every word we’ve ever been known by has been a slur. We all have our own histories and flinch reactions. I grew up with “gay” and “lezzo” being used really hatefully around me, as well as “queer” and “dyke” and “fag”, and I have different comfort levels with all those different words.

/shrug emoji You can dislike the word all you like and ask that it not be used for you. But historically and today, a lot of us do use it for ourselves, and we constitute “the queer community” or “queerdom”. Which we don’t think is a bad thing. If you don’t want to join us, fine, but that doesn’t make us stop existing, and any other word you can call us would also be a slur, because our community is predicated on saying, “We are that thing you’re so afraid of. Get used to it.”

[poztatt]

Speaking to the MSM point in the final addition.  Functionally a problem in trying to get studies going in the 80s and 90s that tried to figure out what in hell was going on was trying to get people into studies.  To answer questions.  Because you could lose your job, home, family, life if you incautiously admitted to being gay/queer/homosexual.  So among the men who were terrified of being on any kind of record as being gay because they self identified that way there were a whole host of people who didn’t actually see themselves as gay. Because it was just not something they could accept. But what always fascinated me was in the studies we did (I’m out of Vancouver, BC and have been part of an HIV/AIDS research organization since 96, for context) at one point we had a staunch group of individuals who were predominantly immigrants from other cultures who culturally had definitions of behaviour that didn’t align with North American behaviour labels. Insertive partners in some cultures are not gay as they were/are not mechanically different from “the normal male” sexual actor.  Receptive partners were.  Basically the thinking in some people’s minds is that women=receptive and insertive=male.  And if your sex didn’t match the sexual position…  Now. To be clear.  I’m not saying these things as a point of “this is what I think”.  This is what had been captured in interviews and conversations and studies over the years.  Some people aligned themselves these ways.  I’ve always seen it as part and parcel of the gender issues and misogyny that we’re still, 30 years later, arguing about.  As to the rest… I’ve written about this (and lectured and written and lectured and written) before.  In this particular thread even.  It will never stop amazing me the revisionism that happens around queer.  Those of us who were in large protesting crowds, remembering “We’re Here! We’re Queer! Get Over It!” being told “it’s never not been a slur/been used by us” just…wigs me out. What I remember?  What I remember is my now husband and then friends (and myself) knowing that the straight culture we lived in equated holding hands with a sexual act.  Holding hands in public as queer people was fucking.  It was viewed the same.  Today that seems ludicrous but it’s how it was.  Our being was an act of aggression, of sexual acts, of a political agenda.  A spiritual and moral violence. And we knew. Like everyone has known: the fear behind that was potentially a tool we could use. So standing in rooms with scientists and physicians who had decided we were dirty queers with sick fucking lives and minds, prone to acts of perversion and inhumanity?  We wore shirts with QUEER in big bold letters so when they talked to us, met our eyes, it was over the words they were whispering in their heads.  It was under the leather we wore, the sexualized outfits with no room for misinterpretation about FUCKING.  And SEX.  And in these meetings discussing policy and funding and science we stood there in our entirety on display, forcing them to look at us in all of this - to see we felt all of it was normal and not something we were ashamed of? How could the idea that sex was enjoyable be a topic of debate that had implications on our fundamental humanity?  Apparently people did, and do, think so. This all put us in positions of power in those negotiations.  Negotiations, do not ever forget often that were about whether or not their largess would allow us to live.  So while people were embarrassed to be confronted with their prejudices that they were comfortable expressing out of sight and hearing of us, we stood and HELD their eyes and their attention. Queer fuckers.  Fags and perverts.  And we refused to fucking die quietly. (shrug) So to those that dislike the word, outside of the fire of my own history I will calmly discuss it and follow their instructions not to call them queer.  But if you step into my history, into the graveyard of the men and women I know who are now gone due to apathy and disinterest and hatred and homophobia… you’re going to hear queer.  In great swelling chants from the throats of thousands of people in the streets.  You can like it or hate it but you cannot argue it’s existence and the lever it was that shifted the world we’re arguing in the middle of, today.

[lair-master]

LAiR-Master’s D&D Masterpost

5th Edition Class Options

Arcane Tradition: Book Wyrm

Arcane Tradition: Mage-At-Arms

Arcane Tradition: School of Chronomancy

Bard College: College of Deviltry

Bard College: College of Disco

Bard College: College of Dwarvenkind

Bard College: College of Help

Bard College: College of Thunder

Divine Domain: Moonlight Domain

Divine Domain: Serpent Domain

Divine Domain: Tentacle Domain

Divine Domain: Vampire Hunter Domain (DMs Guild link)

Druid Circle: Circle of the Flame Blade

Druid Circle: Circle of the Green

Druid Circle: Circle of the Stick

Fighter Archetype: Templar Knight

Monastic Tradition: Way of the Living Shade

Otherworldly Patron: The Green Knight

Pact Boon: Pact of the Boomstick

Pact Boon: Pact of the Lute

Primal Path: Path of the Mancatcher

Ranger Archetype: Witchfinder

Roguish Archetype: Outlaw

Sacred Oath: Oath of Erudition

Sacred Oath: Oath of Medusa

Sacred Oath: Oath of Orderliness

Sorcerous Origin: Arcane Ancestry

Sorcerous Origin: Staff Sorcery

Sorcerous Origin: Sword & Sorcery

Sorcerous Origin: Twinned Magic

Totem Animal Option: Shark

Variant Draconic Bloodline: Trueblood

5th Edition Magic Items

Blazing Jack-O’-Lantern

Frosty’s Old Silk Hat

Matchmaker’s Bow

Medusa Mask

Potion of Bouncing

Primer of Thumping

Sneak Oil

5th Edition Pregenerated Characters

Life Cleric: Sister Temperance Hammerstorm (level 3)

Devotion Paladin: Evicifer the Obliged (level 5)

Orderliness Paladin: Sir Ticholas Toctavius XIII (level 3)

Conjuration Wizard:  Marduk the Mad Mage of Muskwood (level 3)

5th Edition Races

Bounder Bears

Dwarf Subrace: Dragon-Sworn

Lionborn

Rock Gnome Variant: Clock Gnome

Spooky Subrace: Crypt Dwarf

Tiefling Variant: Ice Devil

Uniborn

Wizaardvark

5th Edition Spells

Dragoncraft

Holy Mace

Hammer of Bahamut

Icy Patch

Branding Symbol (DMs Guild link)

Tankard of Tiamat

5th Edition Weapons

Man Catcher

Fun D&D Character Ideas

Series I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII

[lair-master]

Now with my first otherworldly patron: The Green Knight!

[24ozsteak]

thinking about that WoW epidemic

[24ozsteak]

[swampgallows]

i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.

[wheel-skellington]

weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it

[the-jellyfish-galaxy]

The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

And we can’t time travel.

[adobe-outdesign]

[i-wear-the-cheese]

“They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.”

This is the most terrifying one. This is how the rich and healthy are acting about the poor and disabled.

[the-fluffy-folio]

Eternal Automaton – Medium Construct, lawful neutral

The eternal automata are truly a marvel of arcane mechanical engineering – even by current standards. Invented by an ancient civilization of seafarers, their creation led to a period of enormous progress, peace and prosperity. Over the centuries most of these peculiar constructs got lost in time. Legend has it, however, that some of them are still intact…

🔮 If you like my work, kindly consider to support me on Patreon to gain access to monster pages, tokens & artwork of dozens of quirky creatures as well as potion cards based on the monsters’ lore.

This creature was made in collaboration with Dungeon Strugglers & Eightfold Paper ❤️

[cop-disliker69]

[sprachgefuehle]

“That sounds like a good idea…….”-“Is there something bothering you with the idea?”-“No, the idea is GOOD…..🙂”

[biteswhenprovoked]

Can someone explain this to me?

[cop-disliker69]

Old people use quotation marks to indicate emphasis, as a substitute for italics (which many of them could not produce on the old typewriters they learned to write on), whereas young people use them to indicate sarcasm or falseness. They’re used as “scare quotes”.

And old people use ellipses simply to indicate a pause, or for some other incomprehensible reason I’m not aware of. But young people use ellipses to indicate passive-aggression.

So an old person could type something like:

how are things going with your “boyfriend”….

and what they mean is

How are things going with your boyfriend? [Im so excited for you, sweetie, and I wanna hear about it]

But a young person would interpret that sentence as

How are things going with your so-called boyfriend…. [I say, while seething with contempt for him and possibly for you too]

[kaispeakshermind]

The linguistic difference across generations is beautifully explained here thank you

[kirianthedivorce]

Absolutely losing it at this Reddit post

And the update

She buttered Jorts

[anoonzee]

The outrage summed in a perfect Tweet:

[djpaulyd]

my life’s purpose is teaching eldest daughters that people will survive the decisions they make (and think are so incredibly selfish). life will go on. the family member you need to take care of and protect the most is yourself

[andhumanslovedstories]

I started using Head and Shoulders ten years ago for itchy scalp and dandruff, and then for ten years I have not had itchy scalp and dandruff, so I thought "why do I still buy shampoo to combat itchy scalp and dandruff when I do not have itchy scalp and dandruff," so I stopped buying the shampoo for itchy scalp and dandruff and can you guess I have now? Can you predict what currently afflicts me? It's alright if you can't because apparently I fuckin couldn't either

[andhumanslovedstories]

Cutting something out of your life because you think you don't need it any more only to realize that it was in fact working as intended and preventing a problem that will return should you stop doing this is a good experiment to run periodically with something small like dandruff shampoo, lest you start to think it would be a good idea to do this with like let's say public health and the social safety net and vaccines

[thomrainierskies]

I had a liver transplant when I was 14 and like six months later I was chatting with my surgeon and he said “there’s gonna come a time, probably when you’re a teenager, where you’re gonna think, ‘I feel great, why am I still taking all this medication? I haven’t needed it in years.’ and you’re gonna want to stop taking all this medication. Guess what’s gonna happen then? You’re gonna go into rejection and your liver is gonna start failing, and you’re gonna be dying again, and we’re gonna have to find you another liver. So don’t do that.” And I said “why the fuck would anyone do that?” and he said “people are stupid.”

every once in a while when I get annoyed by a pharmacy or don’t wanna get out of bed to do my drugs I think “ugh, this is dumb, why do I do this?” and that conversation slams into me like a truck and I remember that I am, in fact, stupid

[a-daks]

This happens a TON with mental health medications. It’s why so many bipolar and schizophrenic people go off their meds a lot and it’s very hard to get them back on because a lot of people still hold that “but it didn’t help/do anything” mindset after, especially with a potentially skewed headspace. It’s very easy to start to think maintenance isn’t doing anything. Then people wonder why it “suddenly” starts falling apart when it stops.

[language-gremlin]

so weird how in english some words are really just used in expressions and not otherwise… like has anyone said “havoc” when not using it in the phrase “wreaking havoc”? same goes for “wreaking” actually…

reply with more, i’m fascinated

[espanhois]

these are called fossil words! here's a whole list

[amateurlanguager]

[theunvanquishedzims]

Also interested in words that originally had opposites but don’t anymore; i.e. how we say ruthless but not ruth.

[tharook]

Present for my mum: a Lego Julbock for her wintery village.

[tharook]

Calamity! Disaster! Arson!

[lucyllawless]

Xena & Gabrielle being the most married