Titled

[cutecipher]

as a feminist i support recreational abortion

[cutecipher]

i have mixed feelings about competitive

[cutecipher]

*maddest ive ever been, eye twitching* thats baseless. its something else actually.

[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.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Sometimes you get blindfolded and told to repeatedly roll a basketball across the floor of a room and then you have to draw pictures and learn piano and cooking and you accidentally become a big monster's beloved Emotional Support Human, though, so there are potential upsides.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#oh my god is this a fandom thing#you cant imagine my horror i thought we were talking about real people#oh my goddddd that makes so much more sense

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but real prisoners also get used as human test subjects with alarming frequency. Admittedly not to play evil flutes but that's only because we don't have any evil flutes.

[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.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Sometimes you get blindfolded and told to repeatedly roll a basketball across the floor of a room and then you have to draw pictures and learn piano and cooking and you accidentally become a big monster's beloved Emotional Support Human, though, so there are potential upsides.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#i know Derin didnt invent this#but it is SUCH a Derin concept

I've been incorrectly credited with inventing rotational pseudogravity in colony ships and the "humanity, fuck yeah" subgenre, so this assumption would be par for the course.

(For the record I have never invented anything.)

Someone came in fully convinced that I wrote 17776 once. I'm waiting for the day that I get confused for the cookie clicker guy.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I'm an SCP anomaly but all I do is cause people to misattribute art they like to me at random.

[wario-hentai-hobbyist]

Art and fibromyalgia.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Oh yeah I forgot about that.

[trevel]

Man, you'd think people would know your work better, after that time you painted the Sistine chapel and carved that statue of David.

[rederiswrites]

Saw this on FB and tried to find the original, which I haven't, but the point is so solid.

[tidesandtwilight]

what is with the cop hate??

Oh sorry for the confusion. It’s because I hate cops

[videolottery]

Someone should make a disco elysium spiritual successor that takes place in a maze and follows a protagonist who has to eat all the dots in the maze whilst avoiding several ghosts

[dragongirlbunny]

you can actually homebrew this in d&d 5e

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Most classic Derin character is an academic that just fucking sucks at their job.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

The difference between Andy Weir's work and mine is that Weir writes about the kinds of scientists who help change the world, and I write about the kinds of scientists who are good at convincing grant committees that they can help change the world and who wrongly believe the committees' faith in them to be accurate.

[trevel]

I do appreciate that Hail Mary and Time to Orbit: Unknown could have both been created from the same prompt.

[prokopetz]

My personal white whale in the "it would be good if it was good" category has got to be the Atelier Iris trilogy and follow-up Mana Khemia duology. In order, we've got a game that changed its core gameplay loop in the last leg of development and broke half of its subsystems in the process, an obvious rush job, a game that can't even decide what kind of game it wants to be, a game whose protagonist is so boring it's actually kind of inexplicable given how fascinating his whole deal is, and a game that actively punishes you for picking the female protagonist by giving her a party that doesn't meaningfully engage with half of its mechanics and a post-game that's functionally unplayable because it was never playtested with her in the lead. If you add up the good bits of all five games you'll have a collection of genuinely fantastic ideas on your hands, but every individual entry is irritatingly half-baked.

(To add insult to injury, the PC remasters just skip right past this entire segment of the franchise, so we've got updated versions of Atelier games from both before and after this era, but nothing within it, and none of the stuff that's interesting about them has ever been revisited in later entries in the series. Fun!)

[prokopetz]

#video games #atelier #it is an eternal mystery to me why atelier knockoffs aren't an entire genre #because it's SO easy to imagine a Good Atelier Game and then almost all of them have some giant weird thing wrong with them instead (via @downtroddendeity)

This is kind of one of those Monkey's Paw scenarios: there is, in fact, a fairly robust ecosystem of Atelier clones, but they're almost all shitty mobile games that spin the Atelier-style time management mechanics into a pay-to-win grind. The only one I can think off of the top of my head that's available in English and isn't either a pay-to-win mobile game or a PC port of one that yanks out the pay-to-win mechanics and ends up being kind of nothing gameplay-wise is Little Witch in the Woods.

(It also doesn't help that a lot of Western developers fundamentally do not grasp the difference between an Atelier clone and a Harvest Moon clone, so you get a fair bit of the latter being marketed as the former.)

[trevel]

I would put the My Time At games somewhere between Harvest Moon and Atelier, but most of my Atelier knowledge is from the Ryza era+ so I have no idea how well it represents the full series.

Also I'm fairly sure my brain is saying they're similar in large part because 3D vs topdown.

What are the defining traits of an Atelier game? My own list is based on Atelier Ryza, Atelier Yumia, and Atelier Resieriana: Red and White,

RPG (stats, levels, et cetera)

Main focus is crafting items

Complicated crafting system mini-game

You can break the game via crafting powerful items

Combat drops ingredients or recipes, sometimes consumable items, almost never weapons or tools

Exploration heavy

ingredients/item quality is important for crafting

Unlocking new areas is generally tool gated rather than plot gated (although tool recipes come from the plot)

[elucubrare]

You’ve heard of “i didn’t say it was good, i said i liked it,” get ready for “i said it had some technical problems & didn’t fully deliver on its themes, not that i didn’t like it”

[elucubrare]

#I voiced a criticism of some of its aspects#which in no way implies I did not like it#“and especially does not imply that I would like to hear a defense of it of the form 'shut up and let people have fun'”

REALLY endorsing these tags from galileosballs

[elucubrare]

You’ve heard of “i didn’t say it was good, i said i liked it,” get ready for “i said it had some technical problems & didn’t fully deliver on its themes, not that i didn’t like it”

[elucubrare]

#I voiced a criticism of some of its aspects#which in no way implies I did not like it#“and especially does not imply that I would like to hear a defense of it of the form 'shut up and let people have fun'”

REALLY endorsing these tags from galileosballs

[zwoelffarben]

is this anything?

[seaemberthesecond]

Unfortunately, a lot of people's idea of feminism does not hinge on women are autonomous beings who deserve equal rights and opportunities, but instead on women are beautiful and precious objects that should be treated well which is not actually the same thing. At all.

[srune]

only thing that comes to mind today.

[deadgenerations]

the fad of putting these little blurbs in TTRPGs was probably the most embarrassing bit of useless wanking the little industry scene has ever done, besides the time Warmahordes put a "this aint your daddys tabletop game!" in their rulebook.

does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?

At the absolute minimum you could make a game which actually is a meaningful cultural expression of your ideals, or which is politically anti fascist in any way.

[sunspotpony]

So this is actually I can reassure you, the exact opposite of self indulgent wanking with no impact. It’s aggressively impactful in a very specific way—by making the nazis in the room very loud about the fact that they’re nazis.

I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.

This is the updated version. It’s animated now.

But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.

And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.

For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.

And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.

And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.

While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.

So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.

Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?

This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”

It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.

So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.

Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.

It doesn’t fix the world— anyone who thinks the table top scene will magically save the day is a fool—but it does increase the odds that the hobby will be a safer place for more reasonable people, and not become a bastion of fascism like the wh40k fandom has.

[noctumsolis]

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.

Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.

Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.

See also the Godot discord, with an icon that scrolls through pride colours in a beautiful way.

[trismeowgistus]

It even works for games famously infested with fascists like 40k. Games Workshop coming out with a (really rather tepid) statement of support of BLM had Nazis losing their minds in the comments fucking immediately

[walking-fandom]

I remember the meltdowns when the new Worls of Darkness books came out that this blurb is in. It's pretty easy to piss fascists off by just saying you don't want them there.

[crazy-pages]

The Pathfinder Facebook group did something like this on purpose as a honeypot and immediately banned all the bigots coming out of the woodwork, and immediately eliminated more than HALF of all incidents requiring moderators. Not just about bigotry, everything.

And that is TACTICALLY USEFUL.

Because game companies spend so much money moderating chat spaces (both forums and in-game chats) and they lose so much business when dominant third party online spaces associated with their game turn toxic. Hell moderation is the big money sink for social media. Managing that cost is one of the most difficult aspects of the business.

Now imagine telling a game or social media executive that you can eliminate half of their harassment in a single honeypot operation. Imagine telling them that you have a technique which surgically targets a majority of their most toxic members and immediately gets rid of them. Because that's what this is.

You slap up a big pride or power banner and an announcement that this company stands with [insert group here], or stands against fascism, and you take names on everybody who has angry or quibbling shit to say about that. And then you ban them all. And just like that the moderation load you're dealing with gets so much lighter. Keep it up with a similar announcement whenever a topical opportunity presents itself and you clean out any new trash which walks in too.

And it just so happens that the way to do this is to clear out the bigots and make a safe space for oppressed groups.

There are so many of these companies which are worried that by taking a stand like this they will hurt their user base. There are so many forums online with volunteer moderators who reflexively don't want to wait into politics because they think that will increase their workload. Give them good solid practical examples of this reducing their workload instead, and you will get some of them onboard.

Because this has a real measurable impact with the right follow through, and the impact is a general reduction in all harassment of everyone. And that is worth capital M Money and capital T Time to some people.

[stars-says-fuck]

Plus, making bigots have to be quiet and ashamed about their beliefs lest they face ostracization is a really good thing actually

[razielim]

that's it that's the nutshell genai is in

[personsonable-deactivated201908]

me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

[miaislying]

Hey OP? What the FUCK does this mean?

[personsonable-deactivated201908]

decay exists as an extant form of life

[miaislying]

That’s a terrifying answer, have a nice day

[haystarlight]

THE ORIGINAL?!?!!!!!!!!;!!!!!!!!???

[shower-thoughts-last-responder]

On my dash!??!

Please hold

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Went to the grocery store with my kindergartener. We weighed some bananas: 2 pounds even. We weighed a watermelon: 4 pounds even. We weighed some mangos: a little over 1 pound. We weighed the watermelon AND the bananas: 6 pounds even.

“That’s funny” said the child “because 2+4=6 and two pounds and four pounds is six pounds. It’s like the same as math!”

“What happens if you add 6+1?”

“SEVEN”

“What if we put one pound of mangos on the scale?” <mangos added>

“IT’S THE SAME!!”

“OK, what’s 7-4?”

“Three?”

“What if we take the four pound watermelon off the scale?” <watermelon removed>

“Mama! Are you telling me math works In Real Life? Think of all the things you could measure!!”

[thebibliosphere]

The great thing about having an ADHD therapist who also has ADHD is that they really get where you're coming from and are able to put real emphasis on the emotional and traumatic aspects of having a neurotype like this, instead of always trying to push you toward productivity and how to be less annoying to neurotypicals.

The less great thing about having an ADHD therapist who also has ADHD, is that they have ADHD and will sometimes forget you have an appointment because it had to be scheduled for a different day than normal, and any break in the precariously structured weekly routine is like watching Godzilla plow through a town made of popsicle sticks.