singing is such a great grounding exercise tbh bc doing it well requires a lot of attention to your entire body and active listening. if your posture is restricting your airflow or you're holding tension in your body it affects the way your voice sounds. you need to take deep breaths otherwise you won't have enough air to move through your vocal folds. and being able to hear and correct your own pitch requires you to be present and paying attention to what you hear. plus it's fun and comforting
Just wanna reply / add stuff due to your lovely tags!
>#also anybody can learn vocal technique!! #not that like. you need to if you're not interested in that #but so many people are like 'oh no you dont want me in your choir i cant sing' YES YOU CAN WE WILL TEACH YOU #if you want to sing well but you think you just dont Have It #sing anyway. find youtube tutorials. take lessons if you can swing it #you can sing! you can sing! you can sing!
We took lessons a few years ago, starting from scratch! Scratch, as in, all the "beginner" and "learn to sing" guides online that we could find were too advanced for us!
For whatever reason, all the advice was "record yourself singing and see if you're sharp or flat in places" and i'm like. What part of "beginner" did youse not understand? i don't know how to tell if i'm sharp or flat because i don't know how to know what note i'm supposed to sing, or what note i am singing.
Anyway. If there's anyone reading who feels like i did, here's a process - note that i'm assuming here you can already read notation, but the first few steps will be doable even if you can't.
Get a tuner. There are free apps. I like this one for android (you'll need to manually install it, or install through f-droid) because it shows wobbles in pitch quite well, but any works. https://f-droid.org/packages/de.moekadu.tuner/
At your comfortable speaking voice, say "laa". Try to hold this for 3+ seconds without it pitching up or down.
Use the tuning app to check what pitch it is. If you're sharper flat, raise/lower the pitch ever so slightly so you're on a whole note.
Tuner on phone + virtual piano on computer + headphones with one (1) speaker in/over your ear, the other off your ear (so you can hear both yourself and the piano, but the tuner can't hear the piano).
Play the piano note that matched your voice from before, then try to copy that note with your voice. Try to focus on matching the sound, and only using the tuner to help confirm you had it right.
Pick a line of 3 notes that includes your starting note (so, if your starting note was E, pick something like CDE, DEF, or EFG).
Play your starting note and match it with your voice for 3 seconds. Play the next note in your sequence and match it. Keep just playing these three notes and matching them for a while.
This is probably the most you want to do for day 1. Don't hurt your throat! Tomorrow you start by doing these again, from step 2/3 - your voice will do different things day by day, so your starting note might change!
Start expanding that range. See how high & low you can (comfortably!) go. Make sure you're practicing both up and down!
Hopefully by this stage, you'll have started at least sometimes hearing when the note you sung and the note on the piano matched, or didn't match. If you haven't, try listening carefully to a match, and playing a mismatch on purpose to hear how it sounds "off".
The challenging bit (and another part where a teacher might help!) - find a song you like that has these traits:
you can find the notation online somewhere (probably musescore)
Is within your range (someone who knows what they're doing (teacher!) can help you with changing the key to match your range).
is mostly or only whole notes
Has a few of the same note in a row
Has most of its notes step up or down by one note at a time
("Snuff" by Slipknot is a good example of a song that meets the last two points).
From here it's basically, practice the first line or two of the song using the technique above (play note on piano, match note with voice, check tuner for confirmation.)
Later you can start practicing skipping notes (so go A C E G E C A and B D F D B (or whatever is within your range)) and start practicing all the notes including sharps/flats. Practicing sliding up and now the notes smoothly (like laaaaaaa vs laaa laaa) Start singing more lines of the song you picked.
You'll also want to be hydrated (i recommend having hot honey water with you!) and stop by the time your throat gets a little sore. You'll also want to look up guides online (there's plenty of 'em!) for how to breathe properly / use your belly / abdominal / diaphragm muscles to help with singing, as this is a good habit to get into early. My teacher was performing before he learned this, and his throat would hurt a lot after every performance! Not good.
Posture! Sit or stand up straight as you are able! If you’re sitting and can, sit at the edge of your seat. If you’re standing, stand with your feet about shoulder width apart. This opens up your chest so your lungs have more space to expand.
A lot of places will say don’t lock your knees, this is if you’re standing in a group and you fall you’ll fall in place and not knock other people out. So good advice but may not be applicable.
Stretch before if you can- the goal here is to relax because tension is not good. So for me choir was always great (in addition to the singing part) because we started with stretches and movement like that! For me this was a lot of neck rolls, shoulder shrugs, shaking my whole body out. Gentle and slow! Listen to your body!
Warmups are also to get your muscles ready to go. Sometimes they practice specific tools you might need for a particular song. Consider tongue twisters!
Breathing with your diaphragm: this is like breathing with your belly. You want your lungs to expand horizontally not vertically. If you’re doing it right, your shoulders probably won’t move much. I practiced this lying on the floor with a folder on my stomach. We were supposed to get the folder to go up and down with our breathing. This is also a great technique to get good at shouting without losing your voice!
Singing practice will have you do some silly things that will almost certainly push you out of your comfort zone! Have a sense of humor about it! Laughing is great for releasing tension.
I learned some songs singing with a guitar. This is one way to do it, but keep in mind that notes on the guitar are different than notes on the piano so something that seems in your range on one instrument might sound different on the other. Still good and transferable skills though!
As someone who struggles with asthma and frequently has to go to urgent care for breathing help, the healthcare providers were always confused when they called and I told them I was busy at choir rehearsal. But truly, it was the one time of day when I knew I would be able to breathe!
When people tell me to calm down and just breathe, it actually makes me anxious, since I get nervous about my asthma and having trouble breathing and that escalates everything. But singing allows me to focus on my breathing without it being the only thing I’m paying attention to. Sure, I may have to sit down early or skip a couple measures to get my breath more than usual, but it’s better than having a panic attack alone in my room!
My choir people are a large part of my support network and I love singing with them.
I know this is a jokey post (rip OPs notes) but a fursona is typically an animal REPRESENTATION of YOURSELF, not an external animal that is strongly meaningful to you and your life/journey.
I've seen daemon and familiar proposed, but to keep in line with the cursedness of the original post, may I suggest: spiritual tamagotchi
When you are just starting out learning about crafting visuals, the "rule of thirds" is given to folks as training wheels. If you don't know what you are doing, it is a good way to force people to think about their framing and avoid obvious snapshot compositions.
The idea is that if you gain experience and get better, you will shed those rule-of-thirds training wheels and start thinking more deeply about composition.
Eventually, you learn that central compositions can be done well and may gravitate back to them. Professionals use central framing all the time and some use it almost exclusively. You can play with focus and symmetry and layered compositions. It's a great way to draw the eye with leading lines. The idea is that you put the subject in a central position and then the secondary subject and the periphal context support the subject.
This movie was not made for TikTok or vertical viewing. That Twitter user overlayed the vertical video lines to demonstrate their point, and it ended up proving them wildly incorrect.
Remember that composition, more than anything else, needs to serve the story.
Let's look at how this falls apart.
How does this composition work without the other kids gossiping about her? This composition was constructed to show she is a school pariah. If it were on TIkTok, she'd just be walking down a hall.
Here we might not even know these are legs.
Here you can't tell she's hiding in a bathroom stall. Never has a roll of toilet paper been so important to a composition.
Have some random fingers, TikTok.
The subject is actually the glowing hands. This is a symmetrical composition, not a central one. Her in the mirror is not actually the subject.
I'm pretty sure that floating mouse needs to be in frame. TikTok gets an eyeball and a thumb to figure out what is going on.
You get one leg to figure this one out. Good luck.
I did find one single scene where the entire context could be shoved into a vertical video format.
That is the only shot that would work on TikTok out of the entire trailer.
What most people call composition is actually just subject framing. Which can be an important part of the composition, but it is only one variable.
I'm going to steal from another post of mine because I don't feel like writing essentially the same thing over. But I detailed how a professional visual author thinks about composition beyond just framing and rule of thirds...
Things that are often considered when designing a shot… background, midground, foreground. Symmetry or asymmetry. Primary and secondary subjects. Visual weight and balance. Visual anchors. Subject separation via depth of field, background/foreground exposure ratio, contrast, or color palette. And most importantly… storytelling.
Let's think through the composition of this shot.
I prefer to think back to front. What do I want the viewer to see?
Background is the sky. Midground is the town. Foreground is Michael B Jordan.
They chose a symmetrical composition. Symmetry is a powerful and dramatic visual anchor. If you would rather the viewer chew on the environment and absorb the entire frame, you may frame the subject off-center.
The primary subject is his face and the secondary subject is the gun. You can tell this because the gun is out of focus. They want you to visually anchor your attention to his expression. The angle of the gun even has a leading line that goes straight to his eyes.
Subject separation is mostly done with an exposure ratio. He is dark against a bright white sky. There is some background blur as well.
The camera is slightly below his eyeline, so it is looking up at him. This gives him a sense of power and control. He is dangerous and imposing. They are using a strong central framing with a low perspective as storytelling tools.
All of those creative decisions are part of composition. If all you consider is subject framing, your shot is probably going to be weaker for it.
I agree that there is some content being made more friendly for watching on phones. But even with shows and movies, most people still make the effort to turn their phone sideways. So I don't think this central framing thesis holds any water. I think it was just a compositional preference by the filmmakers.
Either that or Wes Anderson was a visionary, creating the most TikTok-able movies before the platform even existed.
Thank you! I saw the “ugh it’s so centered it looks so uglyyy” posts on twitter and I had no idea what they were on about? it looks normal and fine?
before blu ray and digital, most movies needed to be edited for both widescreen (often two separate widescreen formats, one for theatrical and the other for home) and 4x3 fullscreen, so this has been happening for basically as long as home video & theatrical releases coexisted—the standardization of widescreen is relatively new—so I wouldn’t see this as a problem even if tiktok were a consideration in framing these shots.
Every two-state solution normie with two functioning brain cells was telling y'all to keep the focus on Bibi's government and to condemn Hamas but the Free Palestine movement decided to cheer on rape and murder on 10/7 and make everything into a philosophical discussion about Zionism instead of the Likud Party.
Biden actually issued sanctions against the worst of the West Bank settlers, but you wouldn't know that from listening to pro-Pallies. Pretty much all of the actually substantive criticism of Netanyahu that I've heard comes from Zionists (and especially Israelis.) And I'm trying to remember if I've ever heard a "Pro-Palestine" activist mention Ben-Gvir.
iroh: once, i told zuko that he needs to work on his inter turmoil. he screamed at me that he had no such inner turmoil, and then proceeded to go to a cliff during a thunderstorm to scream at God to strike him with lightning
alfred: master bruce and i have that interaction at least three times per week.
hey bruce spent a lot of his bat-study abroad in the far east and has kind of a weeb weapon collection so proposal, what if Bruce appreciates Iroh’s tea
while Zuko is enthusiastic about cream and sugar
further fueling their dad-figures’ passive-aggressive rivalry?
thing thats pissing me off the most is that in rtd’s post, he’s acting like the christmas special being written and the casting of the next doctor are some crazy fandom conspiracies and not. things that we were fucking told were happening. the fuck do you mean, “sit in that chair and wait to be proved right?” YOU WERE THE ONE WHO SAID THOSE THINGS WERE COMING.
this is not a secret fourth sherlock episode situation, sir, you said multiple fucking times that things were in the works for a christmas special. you commented on the doctor’s casting and whether piper was the next doctor or not. no one made this up. you did that. what the hell are we being mocked for, believing what we were told by the guy who was supposed to be in charge of making it happen???
the fact that we only have “herculean task” and “sisyphean task” feels so limiting. so here’s a few more tasks for your repertoire
icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down
cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)
feel free to chime in i ran out of ideas much faster than i anticipated
Promethean task: opposite of a Cassandraean task. You have the right information, and SOMEONE has to share it. But it's all in the delivery and if you're the person to identify the problem you WILL be hated forever.
Oedipal Task: (1) Attempting to avoid an unspeakably awful outcome and in doing so creating the circumstances that will bring it about.
(2) Trying to solve an problem and discovering that you are in fact the problem you are trying to solve.
damoclean task: the thing you've been putting off long enough that it becomes a constantly hanging doom over your head
pyrrhic task: you can get it done but it's going to cost you
medean task: you can get it done and you don't care what it costs you
dionysian task: task that might not be -better- if you do it drunk, but -will- definitely be more fun
hegelochic task: it was a simple job, but your name will be recorded in the annals of history for how impressively you fucked it up
task of theseus: a project for which the parameters have changed so many times that you're not sure it IS still the same task
gordian task: ok technically there Is a Right Way to do this but it's going to be fiddly and awful and take forever and what if. what if you just said fuck it. and started slicing
The misconception that zionist ideas only existed and have been a part of judaism since the zionist political movement has formed is so fucking harmful actually
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How can we sing the songs of the Lord
while in a foreign land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.
- about 582 BCE
The last part about Jerusalem has been recited in Jewish weddings, the earliest document example of that is from around the third century and has lasted till this day.
My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west--
How can I find savour in food? How shall it be sweet to me?
How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet
Zion lieth beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains?
A light thing would it seem to me to leave all the good things of Spain --
Seeing how precious in mine eyes to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary.
Was written during the middle ages
There are a lot more examples, as well as examples of Jewish people trying to re-settle in Israel throughout history, as well as ancient prayers that have lasted till today but I don't have time to find all those translated to English now
Nationality became a thing in the very late 1600s.
Zionism as a movement proper started in the very early 1900s.
And while I can’t find any sources for this (for some strange reason) I wouldn’t be surprised if it took some influence from the on and off again “Back to Africa” movement. Which argued that all black people should go back to Africa.
The issue with that movement is; Black Americans aren’t culturally African. They’re culturally American. Because that’s where they were born and raised. They’re a subsection of American, but still American.
And it’s the same for Jewish people.
I get it, it’s displaced frustration from the place you belong not wanting you and actively harming you. That’s completely understandable. And when you’re told over and over again “well actually this is your land, not this place that clearly hates you” you start to believe it come hell or high water.
But is it really your land? When you haven’t been there for so long. When you haven’t grown and changed with the culture that continued to exist there since you left? Not all the Jews from back then left with the diaspora. And their descents are culturally Arab even if they stayed religiously Jewish and didn’t convert to Islam.
Meanwhile, Your culture left with you. It changed as you moved to other places. And those changes are disconnected from the cultural changes that happened in Israel overtime. To put it another way, your home left with you.
Like I said, displaced frustration, I get that. But, I think the answer is to tell the assholes giving you shit for, ex. being American, is to tell them they’re full of shit. You belong in the USA just as much as their white asses do.
Youre welcome to go ahead and make any connection youd like for yourself, but zionism as a national movement did not in fact start 300 years after nationality became a thing. There is a direct documented tie between the rise of other european national monuments and the conception of zionism, also following along the last stages of jewish emancipation and the rise of haskala, both movements which lead jewish thinkers to combine current political movements with long lasting jewish ideas. The idea that a european jewish movement is more easily comparable to an american movement then other jewish movements or other european movements is ridiculous.
2: this post is explicitly not about the political aspect of the zionist movement, but about the cultural and religious roots of it. the concept of returning to Israel as our homeland has had in judaism for centuries before zionism became a political movement. You cannot understand zionism as a modern political movement without understanding that the great grandparents of the jews that started it have been expressing their desire to go back to Israel and jerusalem at least 3 times a day, in every prayer. Probably more, also after every time they ate. And in every holiday. And so did their parents. And so did their parents. Repeatedly. For centuries. You are making some solid points, which i disagree with, but i dont want to get into that because the conversation in this post isnt meant to discuss if zionism is wrong or right but explain why is was created in the first place. You know how meaningful israel is to jewish religion and culture? You know what other movements were going on at the time in europe? You know what movements eueopean judaism was going through before zionism? Good, now you can start understating zionism. And then you can start understating antizionism. I wrote this post specifically about why so many jews are zionists, and about the importance of letting jews define what zionism is using their own history instead of just barging in and deciding that actually, its identical to this non jewish movement because that fits your narrative. Especially in a age where "antizionism" is rampant among people who have never actually spoken to a jew in their life.
Also. There was in fact a extreamly prominent jewish movement parallel to zionism that supported "telling the assholes giving you shit that theyre full of shit". It was called bundism. do you know how many bundists are left? Do you know why? Do you want to?
The idea that Zionism is wholly a modern phenomenon starting in the 19th Century because that’s when it was given a name and was finally able to organize in an effective way is just weird to me, because people tend to have an understanding that just because they only named something at a certain point doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist before that (in fact, it kind of implies it had to have existed before that, in order for people to even bother naming it).
Taking being queer, for instance; just because you don’t understand yourself as gay/trans/etc until your 20s or even later doesn’t mean you weren’t that beforehand; and to use your life before that label to paint you finally being able to live into your sexuality or gender presentation as less valid would be understood by most queer people as ridiculous, and even bigoted.
Jews have understood the Jewish people as an Am for as long as we have existed as a people. Yes, this is technically distinct from modern concepts of religion, ethnicity, and nationhood, but these concepts are language that gets closest to communicating aspects of Judaism/the Jewish people outside of Hebrew and the context of the Ancient Near East. Jews understanding Am Yisrael through the lens of modern nationalism is no more strange or aberrant than us understanding Am Yisrael through the lens of religion or ethnicity. It just happens to be the political structure of most countries in the modern day.
As for the entire argument that culture being different has any bearing on whether Jews “should” have returned to Israel or not, the same argument applies equally a) to Jews moving into countries in the diaspora to begin with, and b) to any course of action that could be taken now, in every direction: in regards to having to pull apart the culture that exists in Israel now, in regards to the culture of Jews in Israel vs that of Jews in other countries, in regards to the culture of Palestinians in Gaza & the West Bank vs that of Arabs living in Israel. So even if it weren’t an extremely problematic and bizarre way of looking at human culture and migration, it’s a moot and meaningless point, with no practical bearing on reality.
The “Back to Africa” comparison is also an ill-fitting one. A huge notable difference between Jewish return and Back to Africa is even extremely different Jewish cultures can still trace fairly unbroken continuity back to a single shared culture, while that is often not true—by no fault of their own—of Black people in the African diaspora. Their descendants were kidnapped from across an entire continent, and often weren’t able to pass down knowledge of their specific culture & ancestry under Slavery. I don’t buy the logic that that has any bearing on whether they “should” or should not be “allowed” to return, and in fact some countries in Africa do have right-of-return initiatives to return members of the African diaspora, like Israel does for Jews.
And even with ideological and cultural tensions between early Zionists and the Old Yishuv, the desire for Jews to return from the diaspora was still shared by Jews living there, and you would be hard pressed to find many of their descendants who would not want the modern State of Israel to have been established (Mizrahi Jews tend to be more hardcore Zionists than Ashkes). So anyone trying to leverage those tensions/differences (especially ones that have long since found their equilibrium) to divide us up and say we should be shackled to whatever country in the diaspora we’re in, or that our cultures have no business coming together, can fuck off.
On this day, 5 July 1948, the UK National Health Service (NHS) was founded, on the principle that medical treatment should be provided according to need rather than the ability to pay.
The idea for the NHS was not the result of individual enlightenment, but of working-class self-organisation. The inspiration for the NHS came from the Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society in South Wales, where coal miners and steelworkers paid in a small weekly subscription. By the start of World War II, 95% of Tredegar was covered by the society.
Philip Prosser was born with club foot and received treatment as a result of his father's membership of the Society. He recounted: "I was taken to one of the top orthopaedic doctors in Wales and that was the start of my treatment for quite a few years. When the NHS came in in 1948, I was transferred over. It was exactly the same as the NHS in 1948. We already had it in Tredegar before that."
During World War II, to motivate millions of people to sacrifice and dedicate themselves to the war effort, the government promised reforms to benefit working-class people after the war was over. Conservative MP Quentin Hogg had warned Parliament that "if you do not give the people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution."
Sure enough, after the war ended, servicemen returning home, and others, began demanding better conditions, backing it up with direct action, like a huge wave of squatting. The NHS was part of a package of reforms introduced following the conflict to ensure social peace.
But almost right away, it came under attack. Legislation to bring in prescription charges was introduced by the Labour Party in 1949. Then fees for dental treatments were introduced, and since then the free, socialised service has been under attack from successive governments who have gradually introduced more charges, marketisation and privatisation. Meanwhile, health workers, patients and local communities have continuously fought to defend it.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10531/foundation-of-the-nhs
No actually as an indigenous Mexican who had the beautiful ancient cities and temples of my people callously buried under catholic churches, who is also Jewish, I’m not going to be chill about the dome on the Temple Mount either.
I’m not going to stop feeling strongly about it in the same way I still feel strongly seeing centuries of my people’s history buried under Catholic churches. I understand the dome is there now, and I don’t think it should be destroyed because I understand the significance it holds now.
But I’m not going to stop being angry about it. Especially since my people are not even allowed to go there. I can’t imagine the rage we Mexicans would justifiably have if Spaniards suddenly decided we aren’t allowed to visit our own ancient cities and temples becuase the land is “their’s now” since they built their churches there. The patience and understanding of the Jewish people is so fucking undermined. We have time and time again been expected to and have bent over backwards for others becuase we fundamentally believe in uplifting everyone, even at the cost of ourselves. Even in our own fucking country. Even in the country everyone accuses of being “Jewish supremacist” do we still face blatant discrimination, and allow ourselves to face it for the sake of our muslim neighbors and muslim Israeli citizens.
My people’s history has been repeatedly stomped over and time and time again attempted to be eradicated from history. I won’t stop being mad about that.
And a reminder: when construction of the Qubbat al-Sakhra began, there were still people alive who remembered the last effort to rebuild the Temple when Jewish autonomy over Jerusalem was briefly restored in 614.
And don’t get me started about the conversion of the Cave of the Patriarchs into the Ibrahimi Mosque, from which Jews were prohibited.
I understand that al aqsa and the dome are significant. I also understand why and how they are significant. Which is that they are specifically imperialist monuments to erase Jewish history and cultural heritage. I don't respect that. I don't see any reason to respect or to preserve that. It is intrinsically insulting. If they want the buildings, they can have them in medina. But it's fundamentally not actually about the buildings to them, it's about erasing and usurping the beit hamikdash. I do wish to see them gone from har habayit. And I do take offense at being told that it's hateful to take offense at the deliberate desecration of our cultural center. No, the mosque and dome are what's hateful. The arguments to preserve such hateful monuments are exactly the same as the arguments to preserve, for instance, confederate monuments in the US. And it doesn't matter that it's a "religious" site. European colonisers in the americas also believed they had a god-given right to erase inferior societies. That wasn't ok there and it isn't ok here. It doesn't actually matter whether a hateful, imperialistic ideology claims its right to supremacy from a human leader or from its god. The latter doesn't magically make the ideology good. The principle of "religious tolerance" does not mean tolerating intolerant, imperialistic religious ideologies. It's meant for them to learn to stop killing, expelling, forcibly converting, and erasing the rest of us who already don't start shit with other religions, of which there are plenty that are capable of coexisting without attacking us. It's mostly just a certain two that consistently feel the need to erase us.
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!
For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.
So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?
Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?
Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.
Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.
Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm
"If there's no solution, should we just make things even queerer and more diverse?"
Unironically, yes. Edge City was written in 1991 - do you think 5% is still the threshold for the "median white shopper" to describe the mall as half black, 35 years later? I'd be very surprised if so.
Except for a small minority of extremely hateful people, things like outrage and discomfort can't be sustained. They fade with time and exposure. This is the same idea with the Overton Window, it's what we mean when we say "normalization".
For some people, and in some ways, that idea of "normalcy" is locked where it was in your childhood, but most people are more pliable than we like to think. Marketing and propaganda are massive industries for a reason - what we see affects how we act and how we see the world, often without us realizing and in ways that aren't comfortable to admit.
So yeah, making things more queer and more diverse isn't giving up on a solution, it IS the solution.
Forgive me for asking, but was it you or @beekeeperspicnic who did that post coming up with a hypothetical Watson-centric series in response to that painful CBS show? The premise was thought out wonderfully! I can't for the life of me find the post, or even remember for sure which of you it was. Sorry for bothering
Don't think that was us, so check with @beekeeperspicnic! We're very curious too now!
I don't remember doing a post about it, but I do have Lots of Thoughts so maybe I did?
When that show was first announced, the only details given were that it was going to be a medical drama, and it was going to be Watson during the hiatus.
This immediately made me really want it to be a late-Victorian medical drama/mystery show.
Watson would have flung himself into his medical practice to combat his grief, because without Holmes providing adventure in his life, what is he but a humble general practitioner? He treats wealthier middle class clients so that he can afford to go and treat those in poverty who can't pay.
However he learned from Holmes, and so in the course of treating the sick and injured, he keeps observing things, uncovering deeper goings-on, mysteries that need solving, and tries his best to do what Holmes would have wanted him to do.
My dream show would feature:
Mary as a major character, the love between her and Watson is strong and palpable
Holmes frequently in flashback. He haunts the narrative.
Mystery of the week, rather than one long story.
I can't begin to tell you how dead Moriarty is, but maybe Watson could uncover Moran and realise his part in Holmes' death.
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