Pinning things is for nerds

ellievsbear
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Peter Solarz
Monterey Bay Aquarium
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Discoholic 🪩

JBB: An Artblog!
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Stranger Things
Xuebing Du
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Love Begins
Misplaced Lens Cap
d e v o n

tannertan36
Cosimo Galluzzi

titsay

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

roma★
occasionally subtle
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@wizardofbones
Pinning things is for nerds
from twitter user deejaygeejaygee
it just gets better
and better
Weirdly common stock genre show plots:
Time loop
Body swap
Some members of the team get shrunk (and have to go inside someone's body)
All the male members of the team are turned into simpering idiots by pheromones and have to be saved by the female member(s) of the team and I guess this is feminist somehow
Time loop
Everyone on the team is trapped in their individual worst nightmares and the episode is called "Fear Itself"
Someone goes all "Heart of Darkness" on an alien planet
Trapped in a VR simulation (but you can die for real!)
The team is brainwashed into serving in the workforce of some alien planet
Lotus-eater plot (everyone is trapped in an idyllic fantasy world)
Time loop
One or more members of the team "de-evolve" into cavemen
Someone on the team "evolves" to have super-intelligence (and this is bad)
Time loop
WARNING do NOT start reading books and comics or watching movies or looking at art!!! you will start wanting to create art yourself. or god forbid. writing.
I haven’t read animorphs but everything I see about k.a applegate makes her seem like the coolest person alive
K. A. Applegate: I’m gonna lure kids in with a cute day-dream-able premise about kids turning into Animals and then BLAMMO hit ‘em over the head with a thick stack of War Is Hell, stab ‘em a bunch of times with You Will Commit Atrocities To Win, and leave ‘em bleeding out in a puddle of You Can Never Go Home Again
Head Publisher of Scholastic, doing a rail of coke off a copy of Ender’s Game: yer a goddamn genius is what you are I’ll take 30 books
The vioence is even more clear in Michael Grant's solo stuff
who is the Toronto baseball warlock
Autumn Garden by Boris Groh
I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:
Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.
Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.
In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.
D&D is not a universal entry-level game.
All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.
D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".
Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.
They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.
So how does Hasbro square that circle?
Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.
Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.
The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.
The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.
The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.
Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.
(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)
The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.
In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.
It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.
Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.
That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position they want the GM to be in.
I've seen a few folks in the notes respond "okay, but if that's true, why is D&D so much more flexible than most indie RPGs?", and the answer is that it's not. That's part of the sleight of hand I've talked about where the GM's labour is framed as part of the product. To break it down:
As noted above, all game rules are opinionated about what kind of game they wanted to produce. This isn't just a matter of setting (though setting-neutral games are often misleadingly called "universal" games), but also a matter of the basic structure of the narrative which emerges when you follow the rules.
The rules of Dungeons & Dragons is not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (And again, having strongly opinionated rules is not something that's wrong with D&D; it's merely something that's inconvenient for Hasbro's marketing goals in a way they're unwilling to address.)
In brief, D&D really, really wants your game to be a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. If the GM is using the framework of play furnished by the rules at all, or if the players are responding to the rules' player-facing incentives even a little bit, it's going to squish your game into something dungeon-crawl-shaped.
(This should not be surprising; it's literally in the name!)
The rules of D&D being opinionated in this way tends to fly under the radar for a couple of reasons, one less problematic and one more so.
The relatively benign reason is that many popular RPG premises are not done any great violence by being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.
A cyberpunk smash and grab caper? Basically a dungeon crawl already.
A special forces op in a modern military game? That doesn't need to be shaped like a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl, but it can be shaped like one and remain intelligible as what it's supposed to be.
Gritty logistics-driven survival horror? Not inherently dungeon crawl shaped, but the two genres are compatible – a game can be both at the same time, as video games like Fear & Hunger and Look Outside demonstrate. (Indeed, Look Outside's apartment building follows the structure of an old school D&D megadungeon nearly beat for beat!)
Thanks to D&D's pervasive cultural influence informing what people expect a tabletop RPG to be, as long as this kind of compatibility is present, many folks won't even notice their intended premise is being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.
If your chosen premise isn't compatible in this way, or if the group notices what's happening and decides to push back against it, though? That's where the sleight of hand I alluded to above starts to come into play.
Remember: a Good GM™, even a total novice, ought to be able to use any set of rules to produce any desired experience of play, right?
So get to work!
i.e., just as much of the game's putative approachability is the product of Hasbro selling the players their GM's labour in a D&D-shaped box, much of D&D's putative flexibility is the product of the GM being sold their own labour in a D&D-shaped box.
To be clear, this is not militating against homebrew content or rules. Homebrew is perfectly cromulent, and certainly, some games are more or less structurally amenable to it (though modern D&D tends to fall on the "less" side).
The problem is that what we've got on our hands is a culture of play that wants to have its cake and eat it too: when doing extensive homebrew is treated as part of the GM's basic, entry-level responsibilities, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the product of that labour as merely being a feature of the game.
Which is, of course, exactly what Hasbro's marketing ghouls want.
Anyone know how to represent a sigh other than "*sigh*"
rattlesnake but instead of a rattle its tail is a gun
unfortunately they're now evolving away from having working guns because of cowboys hunting down gunsnakes to harvest the weapons
can we get monkeykey from gameger
"Wow omg you drawwwww? I wish I was a drawer soooo bad omg I suckkkk so bad at arrrt"
me:
Me: starts writing Words
Me: starts storing items
a lot of artists dont know how to draw bullets and to be real it bothers me a lot. here's my simple guide on bullets
Special shoutout to the DavidPro Phantom Blood opening where the bullets are fully brass, flush with the casing, no rim, perfectly undisturbed primer, and fired whole out of some webleys.
raising you this
12ga Recursionshot
You chumps don't know about 65% more bullet per bullet spring system
keysmashes heatmap from my current keysmash-detector test corpus
what
I'm writing some code to detect and analyze keysmashes from flustered transfem submissives, so I've been collecting a small pile of example keysmashes to test against.
I took all the examples and compared how often each key appears, resulting in the above graph
How do you collect the data?
usually I just flirt with transfems until they keysmash for me
what if they have slide to text
what if i get flystered and skew the results with:
adjudication
diarist
Shoshanna
Hakusho to
Baidu
falsify
what then
I've not run into this problem so far, because I've not met anyone who seriously keysmashes like that
I wonder why the left hand is more common, that's the opposite of what I'd expect.
I don't know why this image is making me laugh hysterically. Just the AI image paired with LinkedIn nonsense is making me lose it
theres only two straws and both randomly change colour wtf
This image can actually teach a powerful leadership & success lesson
mmm, steaming hot orange juice
For my dwarves
hurdy gurdying or gurdly hurdying? 🤨