if you give “stupid” characters rural/southern accents i don’t like you and if you give “smart” characters rural/southern accents but it’s a punchline i don’t like you even more

the other day I was out at lunch with some people I don’t know too well & they got talking specifically about West Virginian accents in the context of a movie that takes place there & that the movie opted out of doing accents & one of them laughed and said “I mean, can you imagine if characters sounded like that in serious moments??” I was like yeah I can because everyone where I’m from does sound like that. Y’all are so annoying.

no need for a more specific word because it all falls under classism and/or racism.

west virginia is home to some of the strongest labor & union movements in U.S. history, from miners’ strikes to the 2018 teachers’ strikes (where 20,000 teachers went on strike together with community support).

For the last 100 years it has become very beneficial to those in power for the rest of the country to think of us as very stupid, backward, “inbred,” etc. It’s not an accident. there were real efforts made to create & proliferate the stereotype of the stupid hillbilly.

Likewise it’s not an accident that dialects like AAVE are treated as a joke. Easier to dismiss civil rights leaders if you think what they say is inherently comedic or uneducated.

a lot of people in the tags saying they live in places where they hear people mock accents & dialects a lot & it upsets them. just want to remind you that it’s up to you to challenge that in the moment. when someone makes a shitty joke at the expense of someone else, someone else has to tell them it’s not funny & why. we don’t learn in a vacuum. maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. still gotta try.

at some point you likely had an “ah-ha” moment where you realized an unconscious bias you held needed to be unraveled. likely someone else pointed it out to you, whether that was in a conversation or something you read/watched online.

it’s not enough to learn your own lesson and move on. you have to pass the lesson along.

All of the following is IMO, so YMMV.

"Accent bigotry" - Irish = stupid & possibly a drunk; Northern Irish = bigoted & possibly a terrorist; RP English = educated & probably trustworthy (though also nowadays possibly a villain) - is one of the reasons I'm ... let's call it "ambivalent", about what TVTropes calls "Funetik Aksent".

"Phonetic" misspellings and dropping letters in favour of apostrophes happen at both ends of the literary social scale, but there's seldom any doubt about who's in "Who's Who" and who isn't.

The person who said this:

didn't go to the same school as the person who said this:

Further lot development may and should reveal that neither of those speakers are what they seem - salt-of-the-earth working class or disdainful peer-of-the-realm - but what they SEEM is telegraphed instantly by the way their speech is set in print.

(Sharon McCrumb did this in "Zombies of the Gene Pool" - a big burly man who sounds like a hillbilly villain from "Deliverance" is a linguistics professor born in the region and doing it deliberately to mock the assumptions of the people hearing him.)

Unless there's a good reason for it (for example, a character revealing their true origins by accident or for emphasis) often the only thing writing speech like that does, is to indicate These People Here Speak Properly whereas Theyum Fohx Theah Tawks Funnih.

That comes complete with baggage which the writer either doesn't know about, doesn't care about - or is fully aware of and using deliberately.

*****

Other reasons for ambivalence: a little Funetik Aksent goes a long way; it's often tiresome to read (and to write); most of all, if readers are unaware of some important detail - such as what sounds the weird spelling is meant to imitate - it's pointless.

There's an example of Unaware right in the TVTropes article, which states:

No it doesn't.

For one thing, just looking at them would have shown that speech from Lovecraft stories (here "The Dunwich Horror")...

...is nothing like speech from "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar"...

For another thing - this is much more excusable - that writer clearly didn't know about "The Dagenham Dialogues", a series of British comedy sketches from the 1960s. performed by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

(Not knowing isn't a surprise. Those sketches aren't as famous as they might be because of the infamous BBC policy of wiping / reusing programme tapes to save on costs and storage. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" almost went the same way; a lot of "Doctor Who" and many other popular shows DID.)

What's actually being parodied are the "Dialogues" characters "Pete and Dud", playing two acolytes of Cthulhu. They're described thus:

Rather, or indeed very, like this.

The Defence rests, m'Lud.

These acolytes discuss H.P. Lovecraft's style and vocabulary (overblown and eccentric), the location of sunken R'lyeh (just off the end of the pier, but handy for the shops), Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming (though temporarily deceased), and so on and so forth.

It's an excellent simulation of Pete and Dud and yet, apart from a couple of dropped-letter apostrophes, der's nun uv d'yoojul kunstruksh'n trikz. Instead it's done by matching the repetition, pace and rhythm of the originals.

*****

Incidentally, "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", the titular beer of the story, is itself a parody of Theakston's Old Peculier, a not half bad dark ale.

Note the difference in spelling: "PeculiAR" means strange or odd, "PeculiER" means a kind of Christian ecclesiastical court, so that's another beery association with a temporarily deceased god. Accidental, coincidental or deliberate?

Knowing @neil-gaiman, my money's on deliberate. :->

*****

Here he is, reading "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar": Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

And here are a couple of bits of "Dagenham Dialogues": One and Two.

I was really enjoying Peter's analysis and then suddenly I was reading about my story. He's spot on, on every point.

i was going to jokingly make a list of things the dungeon meshi guys could eat in the world of dark souls but realized i dont know enough about ecosystems, animal biology, or cooking to achieve this. i dont know if you can eat things that live in a poison swamp. this isnt a problem we deal with very often irl

Dark souls is interesting because it represents an ecosystem in collapse. The curse of undeath would cause unprecedented ecological destruction, that would cause available nutrients to pool in highly specific places, i.e. things that prey on the literally infinite supply of undead.

We can safely cross out Hollows, Skeletons, Demons (sapient and unethical to eat), and most armor golems (animated by magic). This leaves us with the non-sapient chaos demons like the Chaos Bugs and Sunlight Maggots, self-reproducing constructs like the Treant Gardeners, and wildlife like the basilisks and giant cats.

The list of edible creatures for DS1 is actually pretty small:

Although, as evidenced by the Aldrich Faithful in DS3, consuming the flesh of living things can be both physically and spiritually unsafe. Especially when it comes to things afflicted by the undead curse. So we can safely cross off Rats, Leeches, Basilisk, Rockworms, and Man-Eater Clams, all of whom are necrovores who can transmit the undead curse.

Im a serendipitist. I believe god exists, but he made creation on accident.

I'm a logarithmic creationist. The world is only 6000 years old, but time slows down the earlier you get. That first decade took 10 billion years.

Im an urbanist shaman. Nature spirits are suicidal. They want to become roads and strip malls.

I don't have a name for this one, but I think sin exists because Eve ate Lilith.

Im a transchronological cosmologist. The universe didn't have a beginning it just keeps going the further back you look.

Im a para-islamist evangelical. I believe Muslims should proslytize but ONLY to jinn.

I'm a Vajrayana truther. I believe that Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism don't actually exist.

WIZARD COUNCIL 2024 BANNED SPELL LIST

I've briefly touched upon this topic before but here goes; I know you can play D&D for pretty much free because it's extremely easy to pirate, but I think we've settled by now that piracy doesn't actually hurt companies as much as they want us to think, meaning that pirating D&D isn't as big of a "stick it to WotC" move as it's often presented as. Of course if you absolutely have to play D&D (but, like, why?) you won't get any moralizing from me about piracy, like, ever.

But the point is: supporting another game either monetarily or with your valuable time is a much more direct and tangible way to stick it to the cultural monopoly of D&D than playing D&D and not paying WotC. I mean if it's another big-ish publisher I don't have a lot of faith in their working conditions being much better than WotC's, but in some cases it probably is so. As it often happens, the market leader can often afford to pay its employees worse simply due to those positions being more desirable.

But anyway who cares, there's lots of games out there where you can actually get a full game sometimes for less than the cost of a single D&D book and since those games are often built as more focused experiences than the D&D "forever game" formula you're actually more likely to get to experience all of the game instead of a lot of the content existing just as shadows on the cave wall.

D&D's structure being like "here's a game that's so full of content, you will get years worth of gaming out of this" probably contributes to its dominance in part: once you've sunk a bunch of money into D&D you have to experience all the content in there to justify the purchase. It's sunk cost fallacy and FOMO presented as twenty levels worth of content. And D&D isn't the only game that's guilty of this because a lot of other fantasy RPGs that emulate D&D's structure also do this. Pathfinder is guilty of it. Even my favorite game, Rolemaster, is guilty of this.

Every weekend you're playing some indie game that only requires a half a dozen sessions to get a complete arc is a weekend away from D&D where a single weekend's worth of gaming only touches upon so little of the content therein, so of course it's better to focus all your time on D&D so you can experience all of the content there. By the way, according to fan consensus half the content sucks, so you're better off starting campaigns at 3rd level and not playing much beyond 11th.

If you really want to say "Fuck Wizards of the Coast!" Or Disney, or Nintendo, or even Walmart, stealing from them won't do the job. They barely notice.

The thing to keep in mind is that as a company grows, the scale at which something is a problem changes.

An unreasonable amount of theft for a smaller store or chain is nothing to a big enough corporation. It's just a form of loss like a mishap.

They can be so casual about shoplifting because they have the market share. In a lot of America, Walmart is the first, last, and ONLY stop for about 60-80% of people who need stuff. They can just laugh off theft, because they're THE place people shop. Their cash flow is so huge they don't need to worry about petty losses theft, sloppy work damaging several cases of product a day.

By this same token they can let rude or insane visitors run rampant, let the place get disgusting, be stingy with climate control, and generally do a horrible job running the place; All because people shop there so habitually the number of people who will actually consider going to a different store for any or all of the above reasons is negligible.

And that's what we need to change. As much as possible, we need to take the money we're giving to #1 companies that have gone to shit and put it somewhere better.

Now, piracy is like a form of competition, because their games for free is like somebody else's games in terms of income, but because people are generally paying out of pocket for pirate resources, it's not like a form of competition that can grow. If a piracy ring gets big, it's all the easier to bust and harder to maintain.

Actual competing makers have a more positive feedback loop from their own success, and become harder to squash the bigger they get.

Hey guys, love the point your making

Maybe you could include some examples of lesser known or more indie rpg systems? You mentioned pathfinder with a side-eye and you mentioned rolemaster but with no distinction of what they are or how they’re different.

A majority of this post is spent convincing the audience not to give money to or even play d&d/wotc at all but it provides little to no support for those that want to follow your advice.

I mean, you don’t HAVE to provide options for people, you’re not their parents, but this is the internet and if you want people to come away from this post inspired to try a new system and step away from d&d, it would be good to promote some alternatives directly!

Oh the reason I brought up Pathfinder and Rolemaster was to make the point that those two games have a similar structure to D&D and in fact require a similar amount of time investment (if not more) as D&D. The point of bringing up Pathfinder and Rolemaster is about how the structure of D&D as a game also serves the game from a marketing point of view (it's easier to sell a game that requires a lot of time investment as the only game you'll ever need, even though most people will never actually interact with all of the content available for it), and ultimately I think the idea of replacing D&D with another massive game that requires a lot of time investment isn't great. The second post in this chain is more of a diversion from the first post but I find that the structure of D&D as a game plays into the economic realities surrounding it

I know it may sound contradictory because I said that Rolemaster is one of my most beloved games (you can read a bunch of very smart posts under the #rolemaster tag made by yours truly to find out more) and it is technically indie I would only recommend it as a D&D replacement for a very specific type of insane person like me. And that's because a lot of games that started out as D&D clones (Rolemaster is much older than Pathfinder but also basically started out as a D&D alternative) unwittingly replicate the structure of D&D in trying to provide a single forever game that you can play forever instead of a small cohesive game that supports a very specific type of experience.

Anyway the reason I often shy away from game recommendations on these posts is because the point isn't to exactly sell anyone off of D&D but to get them to think about the way they interact with media. This post isn't written for the purpose of turning people off of D&D but to get people who have grievances with WotC who still play D&D but rationalize it via not paying for their game to consider the economic realities of it. Also, I kind of find the style where someone polemizes about D&D being bad for whatever reason and then plugs their favorite game kinda gauche. But for the sake of this post I can say that it was inspired by me looking at the Dragonbane Core Set by the Free League and going "there's so much game in this set for the price of a single one of the D&D core books, what the hell." Anyway link below

Also, for those of us who ARE very much trying to get people away from DnD, recommending a single title to replace all of DnD is... kind of antithetical to what the problem is. It's the other reason why many of us groan in frustration when people mention Pathfinder as an alternative. Because, to steal from the analogy above of DnD being like Wal-mart, recommending Pathfinder in these situations is like seeing someone go "I've finally sworn off Wal-mart! They will never see another penny from me again! From now on, I'm only shopping at TARGET!" Like, your heart is in the right place, and sure... that is... technically, a smaller, more indie product. But it's also very much missing the point. Pathfinder is just as guilty of monopolization as DnD is. The two share so much of the same DNA that if you switch from one to the other, you will ALMOST CERTAINLY run into the same issues.

That said, not knowing HOW to move away from DnD is... a very valid concern. That is part of how monopolies work, going with them is EASIER, it's so much less resistance than finding alternatives.

If you want to do some windows browsing, there are two major ways to go about that.

DriveThruRPG used to be THE indie power house on the scene, fueled mainly by the fact that they were THE place you went for PDF sales. Even several big names host their PDFs sales through DriveThruRPG because it's just easier.

They have some really nice TTRPG centered search options, allowing you to search for specific mechanics or systems or even just browsing by genre and seeing what is popular at the moment.

The other place to check would be itch.io. Itch is THE reason that DriveThruRPG being the indie power house is in the past tense. Itch is so friendly for creators and gives you so much flexibility as an indie artist, and even has a dedicated section for 'Physical Games'. It also has SO MANY BUNDLES. Pretty regularly TTRPG devs will band together on Itch to raise money for some specific cause, donating their games to the bundle. About 2 or 3 times a year there will be a bundle of about 500 indie games for about 5 whole American dollars. It just offers so many flexible tools for creators.

... it's also... kind of intimidating for first-time customers and trying to figure out what you want. Its search system is... slightly more functional than Tumblr, but it is very algorithmic taking into account things like rating, number of sales, and how new something is. You can enter a search term one week trying to browse around, then enter it a week later, and half the results will be different.

It's search tools do offer a lot of flexibility once you learn them, but it can be a rocky start to begin with.

However, maybe for some completely absurd and alien reason that I cannot comprehend, you don't WANT to spend your entire day stumbling blindly through websites you have never been to, maybe you do SPECIFICALLY want recommendations. You want to know which game to play. Well I do have 3 great recommendations for that. Not for games, but for finding them.

@indie-ttrpg-of-the-day is gonna be your go-to on that one! It's right there in the name! Every day she posts another indie game to try and get people interested in new stuff. Browse through and see if anything catches your eye!

@haveyouplayedthisttrpg is not, technically speak, an indie game recommendation blog. It's a blog for monitoring just how many people have even heard of specific games, let alone PLAYED them. It's entirely user submitted, but every now and then you will see something pop up and get you to go "Oh what is THAT?"

@theresattrpgforthat is gonna be the bread and butter for when you KNOW what you want to play next. You want a SUPER specific genre, you want to emulate a piece of media, you want to only use a Jenna tower to resolve mechanics, whatever. You just don't know how to find a game that does that. This blog is dedicated to uniting people with the game they know is out there, but don't know where to find it.

Hopefully, with a combination of these resources, you can actually find other games you want that would be the best fit for you and your group, instead of just going with the path of least resistance and playing whatever is trendy at the time.

Ok this wikipedia article is pissing me off so much 

yeah i’m gonna re-write this fucker

goddamn. there is so much bias in the first paragraph alone:

this is an EXCELLENT example of the way word choice and tone can be used to create bias and transform the truth to suit the writer’s purposes.

Here’s my re-write: 

i got rid of the passive tone (which distances Profumo from his actions), and changed the photo. notice how the original writer chose a photo taken before the scandal, portraying Profumo in a respected position of power, a powerful man seated at a desk. I chose a photo taken in the aftermath. Which would you say more accurately reflects the context? 

some other changes:

“denied impropriety” like he’s some maiden aunt clutching at pearls. No, what he actually did was:

oh, and he wasn’t

he was, in fact

after lying through his teeth. now here’s my favorite bit:

what does that MEAN? what the hell does that MEAN??? oh boo hoo hooey the Prime Minister’s self-confidence was damaged, how dreadful for the poor dear. the poor sweet man…

fuck that. in fact, Profumo’s actions

of the government, and rightly so.

oh, and the young woman in question was a model, not a “would-be” model. But ultimately her profession has no relevance here–what is relevant is that a middle-aged man in a position of power slept with a 19-year-old. I wonder what motive the original author could have had, to choose to emphasize her career over the fact she was still a teenager…

Words can be used to bend anything. Pay attention to tone. Pay attention to authorial intent. Pay attention to what is included and what isn’t. Question everything. But especially question the language used to describe historical and current events. Every writer has an agenda–look for it. Above all: 

Read critically.

ko-fi / paypal

#this is not a commissioned post (it’s a ‘fuck you you bastard’ post) but i wish it was #Someone gimme 4 bucks I spent a spite-fueled 80 minutes writing to this

#spite is a renewable resource #I am absolutely flooded with spite #my spite runneth over

You inspired me to try my hand at a cross stitch pattern. Free to use for anyone who wants it.

fun fact! I only found this article in the first place bc I was watching a cute movie about a gay middle-aged bus driver/community-theatre-director who scandalizes his small Irish town by performing an oscar wilde play. it’s called A Man of No Importance and it’s lovely & heartfelt & has a very sweet ending, you should check it out! it has absolutely nothing to do with the Profumo Affair except for a brief throwaway reference, but here we are!

educate me tumblr

There is (probably, by current models) a state of degenerate matter in neutron stars called nuclear pasta, and that’s exactly what it sounds like. They are atomic nuclei condensed into varying configurations increasing in density as you go towards the core, and these configurations are named after different types of pasta due to the surface level similarity.

there are:

-the gniocci phase, where some nuclei stick together into blobs of 2 or 3 nuclei, just like gniocci tend to do

-the spaghetti phase, where they form long strings

-the lasagna phase, where they form connected sheets

-the bucatini phase, where it’s solid except for some holes

and

-the swiss cheese phase, where it’s solid except for a few empty bubbles

I ASSUME YOU WERE JUST STRINGING WORDS TOGETHER BUT WIKIPEDIA BACKS YOU UP

I REMAIN UNCONVINCED PHYSICISTS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO NAME THINGS

Gaud, all scientists are like this. There’s molecules or chemicals or something in our body named after Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu. There’s a bee named after cartoonist Gary Larson. No field of science is sacred.

and there are math things named shit like ‘tendril perversion’, ‘the monster group’, ‘the ham sandwich theorem’ and ‘the hairy ball theorem’

not even math is safe my friend, nothing is sacred anymore

babe what the fuck

These two came up in a work document years ago and I haven’t been able to forget them since

so there’s a whole wikipedia discussion on why teratophilia doesn’t merit its own article b/c it’s such an obscure fetish.

and clearly i spend too much time on this site b/c i fell off the bed laughing. teratophilia is the desire to fuck a monster, monster fuckers are too ‘rare’ to get their own article

i’ve been thinking about this for 10 minutes and it’s still the funniest fucking response ive ever seen 

i have some questions yet i find myself too afraid to seek answers

dear god not the tumbleweeds

completely justified response if you haven't encountered tumbleweeds firsthand (because most of us are only familiar with the loony tunes version) but in reality....

so the thing about tumbleweeds is they are in fact incredibly invasive. they cause millions of dollars of damage every year, and create serious traffic accidents and agricultural disruption. (they're also highly flammable, because of course they are.) the town in question was piled so deep, residents had to call 911 after being trapped in their homes. bulldozers and emergency workers had to be brought. it was wild.

tumbleweeds are also heavier than they look--they're made of wood after all. and they're big (most varieties top out at 4 feet, but there are larger ones that can reach up to 6 feet across. you know how the Emu War sounds absurd and fictional until you realize emus are 6 solid feet of clawed, beaked, avian dinosauric FUCK YOU? yeah, this is like that

in summary, tumbleweeds are thorny, pollen-filled, fire-spreading assholes (and they can spread radiation from old nuclear sites), which means we are dealing roaming packs of stabby, poisonous, radioactive fireballs of death that can appear out of nowhere coming at you top speed down the middle of the highway!

the more you know :D

in conclusion, please have this photo of the only tumbleweed i have any fucking fondness for (the South African Brunsvigia bosmaniae), solely due to the fact it's fucking PINK

is it as evil as all its cousins? probably! do i care? that just makes it sexier! and the bulbs contain hallucinogenic properties, which makes perfect sense from a single glance:

oh GOOD tags: #we have tumbleweeds here where i live#and one of them politely used the crosswalk to cross the street the other day

(For balance one has to assume the protesters are not ones you would feel inclined to join in with)

"taken" style action movie where a man searches for his wife. as he fights baddies in gunfights and hand-to-hand combat, it's slowly revealed that:

the tension builds until, drenched in blood, our protagonist steps forward for the final showdown. he pulls a manila envelope from his bullet-torn jacket and throws it at his wife's feet. he's just spent an entire trilogy biting & killing & maiming....all so he can deliver his shit wife her divorce papers

call it Taken… To Court

#Taken 2: Court

Category tags that the SCP wiki doesn’t have, but should:

Could you provide examples of SCP objects voiced by Patrick Warburton? Not because I doubt their existence, but because I have not seen them and am excited by the concept.

A representative sampling:

Honestly, a not-insignificant contributing factor to my mid-20s gender crisis is that I used to think I was viscerally repulsed by playing as male characters in video games, but eventually I realised it was literally just playing as smarmy brown-haired thirtysomething dudes with an emotional range running the gamut from dull surprise to generic rage that put me off, and basically every other sort of male player character was fine. It's just that this happened to be when the Uncharted series was really taking off, so a solid 50% of all male video game protagonists fit that mould! Nathan Drake sucks so much that he made me question my gender, is what I mean to say.

Pizza VS Flower with bee on it VS Bisexuality VS Wind turbine

For anyone who doesn't want to watch the video, he used a list of things from Wikidata, pared it down to about 8000 things that most people would have heard of, and made a website where people voted for the best option in randomly selected pairs of things.

Pizza was voted the 9th best thing, making it the best food. Bees weren't in the top 10 best things, but they won 77% of matchups to be selected as the best creature, followed by emperor penguins and hedgehogs. Bisexuality didn't place in the top 10 either, but it won 73% of matchups compared to heterosexuality winning only 45%. (Orgasms were the highest ranked sexual thing, and were miraculously ranked at number 69.) I think the windmill is supposed to stand for electricity, which was the second place winner. And the winner of "best thing" was sleep.

... honestly, I would agree with that list more or less.

oh he 100% doesnt know what year it is

i am not happy with our choices this election. But you should know that the reason he's the first president to "refuse" a cognitive test is because one isn't included in the presidential physical exam in the first place.

There was a petition of doctors who wanted Trump's cognitive function tested during his physical exam, and everybody involved on the republican side said no, and then Trump himself actually insisted he did take one in a fit of ego. He was, as far as i can tell, the first president to ever take one while in office.

At his request for the cognitive testing, Trump's doctor administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment which is like 5 questions and has not been proven to be an accurate test of much at all. It's a lot like when you hit your head and they ask you the date and your name and stuff -- answering correctly in no way means you don't have a head injury or concussion or whatever, it's just a couple of first step questions. Then Trump said a lot of lies and bullshit about his "cognitive test"

Now republicans and right leaning publications are spreading shit like this. Biden didn't "refuse" a cognitive test, his aides confirmed that, as usual, a cognitive test is not included during the president's doctor visit.

again, i think our choices are shit this election, i don't like how old Biden is, and i think the way our first-past-the-poll voting system automatically results in an extremist two party system fronting candidates that the majority of the country doesn't like is some fucked up bullshit

but our house is on fire and one candidate is a bucket of water that won't help much and the other is a bucket of gasoline, and, y'know, angry as i am about it all i am still going to vote for the bucket of water while we look for other solutions

Don't let them trick you into letting gasoline get thrown on this fire please

At this point I’m not even posting this for politics reasons, I’m posting it because my GOD you gullible bitches need to learn how extremely basic propaganda works. Jesus christ.

Repeating for those in the back...

Gullible bitches need to learn how extremely basic propaganda works.

Well, that was a wild ride.