tay

twenty one

[ryo-maybe]

Where is the video with the dude running as if he’s about to do the sickest skateboard trick, but then he just keeps running

[nifinof]

[littlebeepo1]

Never hope for anything

[txttletale]

Do you have a list of your favorite books anywhere? I feel like I only tend to read pretty light books and I feel like you probably have good taste!

i have a fiction recs list but it's somewhat out of date... lemme just write up one now. in no particular order, books i've enjoyed recently or enjoyed a lot a while ago:

the entire ouvre of the webfiction author bavitz but if i had to narrow it down, 1 over x and modern cannibals in particular

the apocalypse of herschel schoen by nostalgebraist

annihilation and authority by jeff vandermeer

children of time and its sequels by adrian tchaikovsky

the masquerade books and exordia by seth dickinson

the locked tomb books by tamsyn muir

the basic eight by daniel handler

alice's adventure's in wonderland and through the looking glass and what alice found there by lewis carroll

catch-22 by joseph heller

serious weakness by porpentine charity heartscape

a series of unfortunate events books by lemony snicket

invisible cities and if on a winter's night a traveler by italo calvino

la cresta de ilión by cristina rivera garza

distancia de rescate by samantha schweblin

cien años de soledad by gabriel garcia marquez

worm and pact by wildbow

chili and the chocolate factory: fudge revelation by gaizemaize

wolf in white van by john darnielle

the collaborative dwarf fortress text letsplay boatmurdered

the simslops by magnesium oxide

house of leaves by mark z. danielewski

we have always lived in the castle by shirley jackson

borges' short stories in general, ficciones is the classic place to start

dirk gently's holistic detective agency by douglas adams

pale fire and lolita by vladimir nabokov

the secret history by donna tartt

earthlings by sayaka murata

[maxknightley]

"it would be so good if it was good" will haunt you but "it's extremely good, except for the one or two parts which are so bad it's genuinely kind of insulting" will straight up drive you insane

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I feel like advertising is probably the funniest place anyone can choose to predicate their moral arguments against AI on the basis of environmental impact because like. The advertising industry is already probably the most wasteful i dustry in terms of environmental costs vs. actual value it provides, to the point that adding AI to it amounts to a very small drop in the world's biggest bucket. Like.

"Using AI to design flyers looks cheap and tacky" 👍 I completely agree.

"Using AI to design flyers is bad for the environment" I can tell you with 100% absolute certainty that the environmental impact of printing hundreds of paper flyers which will be looked at exactly once and then thrown in the garbage is like. Several orders of magnitude bigger than the environmental impact of generating the picture that will go on said flyers.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Like I find it hard to think of a position that more succinctly communicates "I never think about where anything comes from or how it's produced or how it's disposed of or the environmental costs of any steps in that process unless there's some sort of moral panic telling me to be concerned about it" than thinking that the "AI" part of "ads made with AI" is the part that's bad for the environment.

[txttletale]

I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?

alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.

so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.

there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.

when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.

why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!

this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.

so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:

the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered

the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate

shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)

bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.

so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".

(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)

and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!

tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)

[nonplatonicsubtext]

compilation of posts i have tagged as victoria dallon

[nonplatonicsubtext]

additions

[kaoinim]

part 3

[kaoinim]

part 4

[prokopetz]

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.

[prokopetz]

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 are not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (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.

[prokopetz]

(I feel I should emphasise for the folks going "yeah, D&D sucks!" in the notes that at no point in either of these breakdowns have I said anything for or against D&D as a game. These problems would still exist even if D&D was the best game in the world at being the kind of game that it is!)

[txttletale]

Hi, im trying to get more into ttrpg design. Do you have any blogs (both on and off tumblr) you would reccomend?

jay dragon's medium and mark rosewater's making magic column are definitely the two blog-like objects that i've found most helpful to my own game design

[txttletale]

there are many people who like to walk into a ttrpg having invented a blorbo in their mind and have the ttrpg to give them the tools to realize that blorbo and all the best to them i am so thoroughly not one of those people. give me a playbook that prescribes a very specific narrative role. give me a pregen character i have to play as. give me a dozen big stupid tables to roll up a guy on. give me some god damn lifepaths !

[txttletale]

cast me as though in a play and then allow me the tools to make the role my own!

[jasminewave]

Okay, but then, why did you sit down at the table? Why are you playing a TTRPG? You don't want to use the mechanics of the game to express a narrative for your character, why are you bothering to play the game at all? You could just go do improv. Or play a video game. Or look into local theater. If you aren't going to create the character, why did you bother showing up at the table?

[doctorstarky]

To push you into unique situations you might not be in if you had more control over character creation.

To explore the reality of how people can not control a lot of the traits they have or the circumstances they're in.

To create fun challenges by forcing you to solve problems with a random set of tools.

To allow new players to jump into the game immediately without needing to learn how to make a character.

[jasminewave]

Starting backwards

-new players should *never* be brought into a game without making a character. If they do, then they do not know the mechanics well enough to use them to play the game. This makes running the game much harder.

-This is a TTRPG, why are you not playing a puzzle game?

-This is a TTRPG, why are you not playing a video game?

-This is a TTRPG, why are you not just going outside and engaging with world?

We are talking about TTRPGs. You don't do the character creation, you aren't playing a TTRPG, you are playing an improv game. In which case why did you bother going to the effort to get the materials to lay the game?

This is a TTRPG. It comes with character creation. If you don't want to do that, why are you playing a TTRPG?

[txttletale]

You don't do the character creation, you aren't playing a TTRPG

advanced dungeons and dragons: ❌ not a ttrpg

traveller: ❌ not a ttrpg

cyberpunk 2020: ❌ not a ttrpg

cubicle 7's doctor who roleplaying game: ❌ not a ttrpg

burning wheel: ❌ not a ttrpg

apocalypse world: ❌ not a ttrpg

warhammer fantasy roleplay: ❌ not a ttrpg

5e campaign starting with lost mines of phandelver: ❌ not a ttrpg

any one-shot in any system run at a con with pregens: ❌ not a ttrpg

[txttletale]

Introducing: Lotus Basic

i'm at it again: here's a new game you can play with magic: the gathering cards that's not, like, the main one you might have heard of

Lotus Basic

What Is Lotus Basic? Lotus Basic is a rules-light cartomantic tabletop roleplaying gridcrawl for two to four players players with around 150

[prokopetz]

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.

[prokopetz]

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 are not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (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.

[prokopetz]

(I feel I should emphasise for the folks going "yeah, D&D sucks!" in the notes that at no point in either of these breakdowns have I said anything for or against D&D as a game. These problems would still exist even if D&D was the best game in the world at being the kind of game that it is!)

[route7massacre]

boyish grin

[lady-of-vitreous-sight]

Conversational Bottoming And You

or, a transfem guide to conversations for girls who struggle with taking agency

Alright, so there's a post going around about how lots of young transfems have poor conversational skills. It calls specific attention to the tendency to just make animal noises or mindlessly flirt, and how they're an insufficient substitute. This is true, but it's not helpful*, I'd like to try to be actually helpful.

I. Why does the problem exist?

On the one paw, basically all widely shared advice assumes a lot of things that simply are not true for us. "Ask them about their job, their future, their finances, their social lives." Well. Generally, many of us are chronically underemployed, vaguely suicidal, surviving off of scraps, and extremely isolated. These aren't first date questions. A lot of transfems try to bridge the gap by jumping to third date questions like "how's your sex life, what kinks are you into, can I touch your tits, do you want to touch my tits." This has other problems that I will not get into in this post.

On the other paw, a lot of good conversationalism involves taking agency and putting yourself out there. The thing about childhood trauma is you're usually repeatedly punished for taking agency until you stop trying. Plus, agency, if it is a thing you can do, isn't likely to be something you do with strangers. You've been taught that your purpose is to be a punching bag. It's comfortable for you, even, in a weird fucked up way. But, this pushes all the agency onto your partner, which kinda sucks for her. Especially if she has the same background as you.

[ *sidebar 1: "the problem with transfems" and other things not to say.

Unfortunately, we live in transmisogynistic hell world. Unfortunately, you are a part of transmisogynistic hell world. Unfortunately, anything talking about "the problem with transfems" will see increased legibility and get shared more because of transmisogynistic hell world. Unfortunately, this cannot be escaped. Broadly, I highly recommend keeping such discussions to transfem only spaces not visible to the public. Or at least don't write vent posts about transfems. Please. ]

II. Then, what can I do differently?

In this post, I'm going to talk about the strategy that carried me through the first two or three years of my transfem social life, until I had accrued enough experience and confidence to try other strategies.

And, I want to say explicitly: maybe you can't think about it now, but you will get there. It's like immersion, your brain is picking up details from around you and shaping them into your own behaviors. As long as you are around conversations and let yourself pay attention to them, you'll get better at all of this.

I just want to help provide a shortcut.

For me, this was a method to be around people and talk to them when I really needed it. When I wasn't yet a person and didn't know how to talk or make friends or have friends or hang out or any of the shit no one writes guides for because they figured it out in middle school when I was busy discovering suicidal ideation. And it worked for me, so I hope it'll work for you.

III. What is infodumping?

I think most of you are probably already familiar with infodumping. Broadly, I'd define infodumping as a communication pattern associated with autism characterized by one-sidedly sharing a large amount of information with the other party.

There's a lot of memes about it that go something like girl 1: [infodumping about bionicles], girl 2: [not paying any attention, in her head: I'm gonna rail her later]. I don't like these memes.

In an autismphobic society, infodumping is a genuine and vulnerable activity. It's relaxing and fulfilling and kinda embarrassing. It's putting yourself out there. It's taking control of the conversation and not letting go until you're satisfied. In that light, it's kinda like topping†.

But, perhaps in defiance of your expectations, I'm not going to tell you how to infodump. I'm going to tell you how to be infodumped to.

[ †sidebar 2: topping and bottoming.

It's pretty popular in transfem spaces to be critical of the phrase "top and bottom" and prefer "dom and sub", because "top and bottom are more heteronormative". If you think about this for any amount of time, you'll realize that this isn't really true (changing language alone does not feminism make).

While you'll commonly hear top and bottom described as 'the penetrative role and the penetrated role'. This isn't the commonly used definition in bdsm spaces, of which I am from. In those spaces, we use 'top' to mean 'one who does the thing' and 'bottom' to mean 'one who the thing is done to'. In this way, we can generalize dynamics between bondage, discipline, d/s, and s/m.

Of course, these definitions are kinda just a trick of the light, and can go in any which direction if you look at things differently. As long as you can agree that obviously the one giving head is the top. ]

IV. What does the infodumpee even do?

The reason I don't like those memes is pretty simple, they present the receptive role as a non-entity. It kinda sucks to infodump to a non-entity. You're putting yourself out there and being vulnerable and she's just thinking about sex of all things. Bionicles is objectively better than sex.

As I see it, infodumping is a lot like music. And if you're the infodumpee, you're playing a rhythm game.

Just like with normal bottoming, your goal is to take this deeply vulnerable activity and provide consistent support throughout. To be a good recipient and accept what is given to you with an open mind. To illustrate to your partner that you are engaged with the ideas being shared, that you are listening, that you are enjoying the process, and that you're present and there.

What this means in practice is a mix of two things: mhms and questions.

VI. What is 'backchanneling'?

There's actually a lot of skill to mhming. Of course I don't merely mean 'saying mhm'. Backchanneling is the linguistic term for this and it's an essential conversational skill.

This includes phrases such as 'yeah', 'uh huh', 'right', 'I see', and so on. The purpose is to let your partner know that you're listening. This is, most directly, the rhythm game element.

There will reach moments where your partner looks to you to see if you're listening. At this point, you need to indicate that you are listening by giving such a cue. Make the noise, nod your head, send a thumbs up emoji. Sometimes animal noises work here, but generally I think they fulfill a different purpose‡.

If you're too late, she'll feel she caught you looking away. She'll think you were distracted and not paying attention, and begin to be distracted from her thoughts by checking up on you more and more.

If you are listening very closely, you'll give the cue before your partner even consciously thinks to check. She'll never even realize she worried if you were paying attention in the first place, the flow will never be broken up.

But if you give it too early, she'll think you're just saying the words without paying attention. You'll disrupt her thoughts with it, and she'll become confused and thrown off.

With each partner, the correct timing is slightly different. Personally, I try to give my 'mhms' when my partner has completed a thought and is reaching for the next one, or when she's asked a rhetorical question or completed a point. But, it takes trial and error. The only way to improve is by practicing.

[ ‡sidebar 3: what is echolalia?

Echolalia is a certain behavior associated with autism generally described as repetitive words and noises. Generally, I tend to understand most "animal noises" as a kind of echolalia (though this isn't always accurate)

Echolalia was first explained to me as a kind of stimming. More formally called 'self stimulating behavior', stimming is another category of autistic behaviors generally understood to aid in sensory maintenance. Flap your hands, tap your feet, bounce in your seat and it'll give you something to focus on to weather the storm.

But, conversationally, echolalia can play other roles. You might use it to hold your place in a conversation. As opposed to where backchanneling says 'pass', echolalia says 'one sec, I'm thinking'.

Further, echolalia can also act as a way of asserting your presence. Meow as you enter a voice call to indicate that it's you and that you're here.

These are useful conversational tools to have. ]

V. How do you ask a good question?

You ask questions to continue the conversation. They indicate not just "I'm listening" but "I want to hear more". They encourage your partner to let loose and just keep talking to you. Turning what could be a simple exchange into a more in depth engagement.

So, ask questions that indicate this. Ask open ended questions that require her to reword things and look from weird angles. Ask analytical questions that reflect your own lack of understanding. Ask silly questions that let her continue her jokes. Ask surface level questions so she just knows you want to hear her speak. Cheat and use google to find more questions to ask but make sure to reword them so she can't tell.

If your partner says "I don't want to get into this, so I'll just say this abbreviated other thing" you better ask about that. But that's when it's really obvious, and only following obvious cues can make her feel like you're just humoring her.

Look at the holes, the thing your partner is skimming over 'to save time' and ask about them. Look at what she's excited about, ask questions about the details that don't add up or that feel weird. Look at what she's interested in, make connections between the different sections and how they relate.

Here, you don't want to just let her go with the same thing as usual. You want to explore new territory. Give her new ideas to interrogate. Plug her back into herself in new ways. Get excited and make her excited about your excitement.

VI. But how do you get someone to start talking to you?

So, we know what to do once we're there, but how do we even get there? This is both the most and the least ritualized element of this.

One way is to simply start asking questions. Most of us wear our interests on our sleeves. On tumblr‖ you'll see us talk about things we like, so you can figure out pretty quickly what to ask about. Generally, someone does not write long posts about things that she does not find interesting to talk about.

But, going in can be hard. If you just say "tell me about X", your partner might think you're only doing this because you want something from her. Or she might care so little about you that she sees no reason to talk to you about it. Being truly purely passive does not work. You need to give your partner something to work with.

One strategy I've seen is the kind of 'instantlossbait' type, where the bottom feigns cluelessness and attempts to trick the top into using them. Here you might ask believably naive questions, present yourself as the 'ideal infodump victim' in a tongue in cheek way.

But, personally, I tend to favor "let's continue this in private". For this strategy, you take a public discussion that someone initiated or led about a topic, you closely read it and synthesize a question about the content, then you ask that question in private or in near-private. Then, from there, you continue to ask more questions. Voila, conversation is happening.

[ ‖sidebar 4: finding a partner on tumblr

There's also a good bit here I could say about choosing your partner. Frankly, I think social media is a bad space for this. If you're going after someone you follow, you're likely going on with some "expectation to perform", and you can't get rid of that no matter how hard you try.

As a rule, if you are meeting someone in a space, you want to meet someone who has the same relationship to the space as you do. Or, at the very least that you both perceive as such.

If this post takes off, I might write one on "finding a discord community", "founding a discord community", or "tumblr dming etiquette", though I'm not really an expert on the last one. We'll see. ]

VII. And then what?

So, you're being talked to, you're talking to people, you're participating in a conversation, albeit a relatively one sided one.

From here, you have a few options.

For one, you could just genuinely enjoy it as it is. I did, for a couple years. I think that true excellency in conversational bottoming can only be achieved through practicing intrinsic enjoyment of it.

You could also try taking turns. Maybe you do in fact have your own needs, and you want to talk and share too. A well rounded partner will have some skill both bottoming and topping. Though, I think only performing one role because you expect an opportunity to perform the other is bad practice, as common as it is.

Alternatively, you could gradually take more and more agency with your questions. As you gain comfort talking to someone, as you see her personality in how she speaks and learn who she is, you could put more of yourself into it. Bring in your own knowledge and your own ideas. And, slowly, reveal more of yourself as a person, and in the process of doing so you'll become more of a person.

[senatortedcruz]

[theresattrpgforthat]

Mint's TTRPG Library

Here is a list of links to the Collections I add Itch.io games to on the regular, where I often go to in search for games to meet folks' recommendation requests.

These collections are large and unwieldy. I'm not certain that they're easy to navigate, but if you want to do some browsing, you certainly have options!

Systems

Belonging Outside Belonging Breathless Caltrop Core Charge Descended from the Queen Firebrands Forged in the Dark Honey Games (Honey Heist) Into the Odd Lasers + Feelings LUMEN Par-AGON (Paragon System) PbtA Push Together We Go Troika (A bunch of Troika supplements) Tunnel Goons (AKA Goon Games) What’s So Cool About _?

Genre

Adventure - With Pulp! (Westerns, Dinosaurs, Spies, Time Travel) Bittersweet Futures (Post-Apocalypse) Botanical Adventures (Plants) Bring Me The Evidence! (Mysteries) Cogs and Steam (Steampunk) Delicious Delights (Food & Cooking) Dirtpunk (Revolution, Rebellion, Fighting) Eras Both Real & Imagined (Historical, Faux-Historical) Everyone Loves A Competition (Competitions, Sports) Fae and Fen (Faeries, Dreams, & Goblins) Fangs, Fangs, Fangs (Vampires) Grim & Gritty (Gritty & Grimdark Fantasy) Hearts & Threads (Romance) Manners & Mischief (Social & Political) Mechs and Tech (Mechs & Robots) Modern-Day Mishaps (Modern-Day Setting) Monsters & Mutants (Monsters, Monster Hunters, Pokemon - simulators) Neon Lights & Cyber Nights (Cyberpunk) Oh So Anime (Anime & Manga themed) Paranormal Activity (Ghosts, Cryptids, Death) Pastoral & Cozy (Cozy Games, Witch Games) Paws and Feathers and Scales (Animals) Sorcerous Intentions (Magic-Users) Stars and Science (Science-Fiction, Space) Sword & Sorcery & So Much More (General Fantasy) Teenage Hijinx (Teenagers) The Sea Calls (Oceans, Aquatic, Pirates) With Great Power (Superheroes, Magical Girls, Fantasy Superpowers)

Other

Abstract Games & System Bones (SRDs, Genre-less) By Pen and Paper Played (Epistolary Games) Funky Fresh Flavors (Miscellaneous) GM-Less Solitary Adventures (Solo Games) System-Neutral Settings (Adventures & Settings) The Art of Creation (Collaborative World-building) Two Can Play At That Game (Duet Games)

[valencians]

so looking from the perspective of like, a random mid-level prt cape in brockton bay ~2011, right. you know marquis and heartbreaker were both villains active semi-locally in the 90s with powers related to manipulating human biology. heartbreaker is known to have a lot of kids and there's no way marquis wasn't sexually active. marquis has a royalty-themed name and dressing style. heartbreaker's power doesn't apply to himself.

and there are also these two teen capes in town, regent and panacea, both of mysterious origin (regent just showed up out of nowhere and panacea is an adoptee whose powers clearly didn't bud off the dallons'), both with powers related to manipulating human biology. regent has a royalty-themed name and dressing style. panacea's power famously doesn't work on herself.

...

[valencians]

like. regent was totally doing it on purpose right.

[valencians]

regent: knows and he's doing it on purpose. way cooler to let people think he's marquis's kid. won't admit it if you ask him directly though

panacea: someone makes the incorrect guess in front of her and she takes it as fact without asking the dallons. everything plays out exactly the same with her thinking she's doomed to be evil and hurting victoria but when she's like it's finally happened...i really am no better...i have to go face my true father... [starts trudging north] carol is like oh, marquis? and she's like who the fuck is marquis

marquis: some new inmate brings up his "son" and he bluescreens trying to figure out what they're talking about. when amy finally shows up he tentatively he/hims her

heartbreaker: hears that there's another awol heartbroken girl who's not cherie, does a headcount, and goes ah, jean-paul is un transvestite now? hm...freaque. and then goes back to making toddlers fight or whatever it is he does for fun

[crackerjackalopegames]

Crackerjackalope Games is Now On Patreon!

CJ Tucker | Crackerjackalope Games | Patreon

Tabletop RPGs and Games Writing

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I've just launched a new Patreon! The Crackerjackalope Games Patreon is the new home of my free blog Jackalope Mail, and paying members can access WIPs of my upcoming games! There's three posts up right now:

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