Iron Age Understanding Of Technology

He/Him.

[papayajuan2019]

i'm digging the hole deeper tomorrow

[lizardsfromspace]

Beautiful: a child has drowned and returned from the other side with a report of going to the afterlife. "When I arrived in heaven I was greeted by a mammoth-headed man who said 'I am Anghprett Vul, sky god of the one true religion'. I asked 'who are you?' and he said 'we visited a tribe of Neanderthals and gave them our teachings but then a landslide killed them'. I asked 'so do I have to bring back your faith and believe in it?' and he said 'we don't really care". Find his book at your local apatheist bookstore today

[blue-dissolve]

So it turns out its been just over a year since I first drew my OCs, decided to redraw them with updated designs to celebrate!

[handfulsofhistory]

Two Yataghans

[mysharona1987]

[despazito]

Another one for "objectively funny crimes should not be punished"

[nortism]

Rules of the Les Misérables magic system (as far as I can figure out):

As long as there is still suffering to be had, Jean Valjean cannot die

Jean Valjean has super strength which cannot be depleted by age or his poor ability to look after himself (up to a point)

Once a person has met Cosette, lack of proximity to her will slowly drain their life force

The dead benevolently haunt those they loved while alive (ily ghost!Fantine)

Javert has an incredible ability to recognise potential criminals (read people from lower social classes)

Eponine has the ability to blend into the background but cannot turn this power off

The only one immune to this power is Javert which isn’t very helpful

[calico-cows]

bonus:

Javert is immune to guns

[dani-m-art]

Smaugust day 5 - "Small."

Very, very small.

Combined my love of dragons with my love of cell biology and sciart for this one!

[guuest-deactivated20140905]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Life must be a rollercoaster for the D class. You live in a shitty prison cell for the remainder of your probably extremely short life. One day some security guards show up and take you to a big room where a scientist tells you to copy an image onto some paper. You do. The scientist shrugs and writes something down and you're taken back.

One day a scientist hands you a poptart and says "eat this". You say "is it full of some kind of fucked up interdimensional poison". The scientist says "eat it or that security guard will tase you and tie you down and make you eat it". You eat the poptart. It is not full of fucked up interdimensional poison, but it is kind of stale. You describe the taste to the scientist and he shrugs and writes something down and you go back to your shitty cell.

One day a security guard takes you to a big room and there's a flute sitting on a table. A scientist tells you "play Hot Cross Buns on that". You explain that you do not know how to play the flute. You are instructed to try. You play the flute and get immediately get dragged into some incomprehensible shadow dimension and torn to pieces for no reason that makes any sense to you. You are very lucky to have survived so long and died so quickly.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

This guy will spend hours staring at his blank wall and wondering what the fuck was in that chamber and why they thought he might know.

[walcutt]

i always love the way that mtg strategists and high level players discuss red decks in articles. this quote has been going around the local mtg server:

and the thing is that i really love hot dog decks. this guy is so fucking right

[shadowen]

I'm scrolling Tumblr. I pause to watch a video of Amaury Guichon. He pours chocolate into a mold, then carefully removes the shape of a human head. There are time lapse clips of chocolate being formed into a body, limbs, and hair. As the final detail is finished, he steps back to reveal the figure of a beautiful woman, uncannily lifelike. He steps forward and places a delicate kiss on her lips. The figure, now a living human woman, stirs and looks around in wonder. Amaury Guichon looks into the camera with a wide smile and holds out his arms in presentation.

"Fucking chocolate guy," I mutter to myself before scrolling to the next post.

[thydungeongal]

"Games are art" doesn't just mean "games are good," to me it also means "games have meaning and deserve to be looked at as pieces created by people that actually reflect the circumstances of their creation." This means looking at games critically beyond a lens of "is it good on the scale of gameness?"

The Call of Duty games are actually popular not just in spite of their quality, but they're actually well-crafted games. However, there is merit in critical analysis of them that goes beyond "how many graphics" and "how much gameplay," but also looking at them via their quite real connections to the US military and how they basically mirror the ideology of the US military. This doesn't mean that you should treat the Call of Duty games as infohazards which will turn anyone who interacts with them into drones for the US military, but as reflections of real ideologies that are larger than the players themselves.

And like, there's a lot of art that carries ideologies that when transplanted into the real world would be morally repugnant to me, but as works of art they are worth engaging to me. Old-school D&D doesn't actually describe a real world but the fictional folks and structures used to populate it still say something about the people who made it, their priors, and what concessions they were willing to make in the fiction for the sake of gameplay.

This is something you should keep in mind when someone makes a point like "well the orcs/bandits/cultists deserve it because they did bad things in the fiction." These are in-setting justifications, ultimately come up with to frame the narrative of the game as heroic. There's not a lot of interesting ground to be covered in discussions of "how do we find an enemy in D&D player characters can kill without it morally compromising players" because the game isn't a cursed tome that'll turn you evil for engaging with it. What's more interesting is "what kind of priors went unexamined to uncritically make bandits/cultists/orcs the default enemies instead of, say, the lord's soldiers?"

And an unwillingness to think about these things doesn't make anyone morally deficient; however, in my opinion an unwillingness to entertain these ideas or an aggressive and vitriolic rejection of these lines of thought may be indicative of intellectual incuriosity and ultimately I feel it emerges from a similar place as "D&D must be woke or it'll infect me:" D&D must be protected from evil criticisms because otherwise D&D may seem morally deficient. Which is like so far besides the point.

And at the end of the day, I enjoy D&D when it's basically fantasy cops and robbers, or robbers and other robbers: it's a game of accumulating power by killing creatures and stealing their stuff. It's a really fun and I would even dare say good game when played that way. The reason I caution against approaching D&D from the point of view of "we must find the right type of monsters our characters can kill with moral impunity" is because you might accidentally end up from going from one unexamined trope to another but more importantly part of the buy-in of D&D is accepting that D&D the game as it exists thinks certain classes of monsters (and as we know from earlier, more equal opportunity editions, Men are also Monsters) are okay to be kill. It's literally fine, you won't be morally compromised for engaging with the game as is: but also, if you're fucked up like me you might find joy in thinking about "hey isn't it weird how this medieval fantasy world looks more like the American frontier than an actual medieval society?"

[vixensdungeon]

Back in the ancient past of circa 2005, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed lass by the name of Vivian was playing Civilization IV. The tutorial featured creator Sid Meier, and a thing he said struck a strange chord with me: he called Civ4 a game.

You'd think that would be obvious, but it was something I had honestly kinda forgotten about the series. For me Civ had been this canvas to construct sprawling historical narratives on, which often lead to disappointment when things didn't go the way I found satisfying. But here was the creator of the series reminding me that in the end, it's not that. It's a game.

And that's Dungeons & Dragons, as well. Yes, because it's a tabletop roleplaying game, it allows for a lot more flexibility than most other types of games (a feature not unique to it). It can produce a sweeping epic narrative of heroes and villains. But that's not what it's for. If you let it be what it is first and foremost, you'll find greater enjoyment from the stories it ends up producing, and also just have fun with the simple act of playing it.

Because it's a game.

[txttletale]

one of the many reasons i hate UB in standard -- and marvel super heroes is really emblematic of this -- is that the need to print recognizable characters on draft chaff uncommons turns it into nothing more than "remember king kong, remember ferris bueller?"

like there were deep cuts in 40K, WHO, and PIP that were exciting to me, but they were exciting because i was seeing a character or element that i liked being creatively represented through magic's mechanics.

i love trazyn the infinite's vast collection and ability to upload his mind being represented by giving him all the activated abilities of artifacts in your graveyard, incidentally making him a crazy niche combo piece. i love the valeyard, the prosecutor in the corrupt kangaroo court from trial of a time lord, rigging votes. i love yes man changing controllers whenever you use him to represent his inability to decline orders from whoever stumbles across him

i love those cards because they make weird, niche use of magic mechanics to convey something about the narrative of the source material. i cannot imagine that i would love any of these cards if they were draft archetype glue in a standard legal set with text like "whenever you SETMECHANIC, gain 1 life". and so like, i just can't imagine what a superfan of [checkes set reveals] Agent Maria Hill or Viv Vision Teen Synthezoid is getting out of these completely uninspired generic card designs other than literally being able to point and go "i recognize that character design and name!"

[sin-ophelia]

Fangirls Through the Ages by Lid Thom

[unhappytogekiss]

a new reality tv show called So you think you can write Doctor Who

twelve episodes, twelve contestants - a mix of annoying middle aged sci fi authors, fan fic authors and random people off the street

a variety of against the clock writing tasks, big finish scripts, ability to interact with actors without shouting at them and challenges where you have no budget or doctor for an episode

judged by solely by christopher eccleston

this is how you find the new doctor who showrunner