Amaury the chocolate guy has done it again

SIR YOU GAVE IT A PULL TAB OPEN

WHY WAS THE CAN OPENER NECESSARY

If you’re wondering what the whole drama regarding tieflings is in the Dungeons & Dragons fandom: basically, capitalism ruined tieflings, and for once that’s not even slightly a joke.

Tieflings were first introduced as a playable species in Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, via the Planescape campaign in 1994. At the time, there were no particular rules regarding what a tiefling was supposed to look like. The text explicitly stated that their basic physiology could vary wildly depending on what their fiendish ancestor was, and one of the first major Planescape supplements even included a table for randomly generating your tiefling’s appearance, if you were into that sort of thing.

This continued to be the case up through the game’s Third Edition. However, when the Fourth Edition rolled around in 2008, the game’s text suddenly became very particular about insisting that all tieflings looked pretty much the same. Some campaign settings even provided iin-character explanations for why all tieflings now had a standardised appearance. Understandably, this made a lot of people very annoyed.

There was naturally a great deal of speculation concerning what had motivated this change. It was widely cited as “proof” that Dungeons & Dragons was trying to appeal to the World of Warcraft fanbase – which was nonsense, of course; nearly all of the Fourth Edition’s allegedly MMO-like features were things that popular MMOs had borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons in the first place, and to the extent that tieflings’ new look resembled a particular WoW race, it was in that they were both extraordinarily generic.

In reality, it was a change that had been lurking for some time. Though Dungeons & Dragons is directly published by Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast is in turn owned by Hasbro, and Hasbro has long regarded the D&D core rulebooks as a vehicle for promoting D&D-branded merch – in particular, licensed miniature figures.

This was a bugbear that had reared its head before. When the Third Edition received major revisions in 2003, Hasbro corporate had ordered the game’s editors to completely remove any discussion of how to improvise minifigs for large battles, and replace it with an advertisement for the then-current Dungeons & Dragons Heroes product line. Implying that purchasing licensed minis wasn’t 100% mandatory simply would not do.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably already guessed where this is going: tieflings having no standard appearance made it difficult to sell tiefling minifigs, as any given minifig design would only be suitable for a small subset of tiefling characters. In the brutally reductive logic of the corporate mind, Hasbro reasoned: well, if we tell tiefling players that all of their characters now look the same, we can sell them all the same minifigs. So that’s what the game did, going so far as to write justifications into several published settings for magically transforming all existing tiefling characters to fit the new mould!

This worked about as well as anyone who isn’t a corporate drone would naturally anticipate – and that’s the story of how capitalism ruined tieflings.

Here’s that table, btw.  I really dig the art in the old Planescape books.

I already made a post talking about how varied Pathfinder allows/encourages Tieflings to be, but this seemed like a good excuse to just post a bunch of the official Tiefling art that really shows it off

There’s so much variety and flavor :D

*vibrating* it’s the cowboy witch poem it’s the cowboy witch poem it’s the cowboy witch poem

It's important to drink a lot of fluids when you're sick so that your body has the raw materials to generate gallons of snot.

I learned recently that mucus basically traps the viruses and expels them from your body which is why your body makes SO MUCH of it so now I just imagine drinking liquids as hiring a bunch of goons to take out the thrash y'see nyeehh see we taking back the streets from the bowler hat boys flush em out real good

Perhaps there are many problems which could be solved if you just made enough mucus

Reblog if you are solving problems by generating enough mucus

...he is weaving the chocolate. Do you copy, this bitch is WEAVING CHOCOLATE

We are so damn lucky Chocolate Guy has a passion for chocolate and crafting beautiful, lifelike desserts.... because if he chose to put this level of work, dedication, and sheer determination into anything even slightly nefarious (instead of nearly breaking the laws of physics in order to create culinary masterpieces) we would be so epically fucked.

did I really just watch this man cheerfully force a block of chocolate through a pasta making machine?

"who knows what they still do on tumblr"

us:

Whenever I see a post talking about how it's okay to steal from huge corporations, when they have shit like self checkout, I always want to jump up and say they have cameras and are collecting your information and you need to be so careful because yeah like they're inflating the prices and running monopolies and price fixing with competitors but everybody is caring about shoplifters more and that's really fucked up, but you also need to consider that Target might be keeping track of every time you don't scan something or intentionally scan it wrong, and just waiting for it to add up to a felony.

Which feels entirely beside the point and almost inappropriate to bring up when the point is that the customer is already a victim of theft, but I feel like there are people encouraging others to do stuff that can absolutely end up with them in jail without mentioning at all that it's a risk.

This is real and here are some sources discussing facial recognition in various retail settings. fuck corporations but also go in knowing all the facts 🫡 Kashmir Hill is a great journalist who’s entire beat is facial recognition and how it’s deployed, and she’s an amazing resource if you want to learn more about facial recognition in general. highly recommend her new book on clearview ai too, it’s a great read

ACLU lawsuit that stops clearview from being sold to retail in the us (but doesn’t stop retail from buying other facial recognition tech) https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/technology/facial-recognition-stores.html

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/barred-from-grocery-stores-by-facial-recognition/

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/barred-from-grocery-stores-by-facial-recognition/

Targets privacy policy, scroll down to the camera section

You are the coolest person in the world to me for finding all those sources.

Also, I really want to add this, because I didn't know until my mom happened to see it, but Target has their own privately funded forensics team.

Literally. They have their own CSI style unit that specifically is for tracking theft, but is so well funded and capable that they've helped solve actual non-retail crimes.

So, like, the OP is not kidding when they say that corporations like Target are straight up waiting for shit to add up to felony crimes. They are and they have the technology to do it.

usamericans do really love making posts about parking lots. i met god in a parking lot. fighting my ex in a parking lot. it's like their main biome

the site where most of the Salem Witch Trial victims were hanged is now in a parking lot

(well, the back of a parking lot)

(specifically a Walgreen's parking lot)

(it's somewhere in that clump of trees. there's a marker but this is the best photo I could find that illustrates both Trees and Walgreens Parking Lot)

IT'S LIKE OUR MAIN BIOME BECAUSE THE WHOLE GOT DAMN COUNTRY IS SLOWLY BEIN' PAVED OVER AND IT'S LIKE 90% OF THE PLACES YOU CAN ACTUALLY FUCKEN GET TO BECAUSE THIS PLACE IS BUILT FOR CARS MORE THAN PEOPLE

"Parking space takes up 27% of central Columbus, Ohio." Is a sentence that makes me feral, esp considering how much is already roads and highways.

Joni Mitchell wasn’t kidding. They did pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

I think a lot about who I am to other people in the world–particular who I am to strangers as a mere concept in their lives.

Today this woman called our information desk and said, “my son’s band is playing tonight. I want to come see him, but he never answers his phone…..I want to be there. Have you heard anything about his band?”

And I felt so bad for this lady but I’m not in the music scene around here so I had to tell her no, sorry.

Five hours later, I’m hiking and run into a group of guys setting up for some outdoor performance, and as I watch them unload the drums it hits me.

“Hey,” I said, “are y’all in a band?”

They said yeah and smiled and I told them “one of your moms called today. She wants to watch you play, but she can’t get a hold of you. Call your mom.”

And they all pulled out their phones and started discussing whose mom it probably was as they presumably dialed their own.

And now, unless we meet again and recognize each other, that’s who I’ll be forever to those guys–some mysterious courier for mom-messages who came out of the woods and told them their mom called.

I didn’t even tell them why their mom called me. Who am I to their mom?? Nobody even asked. They just took my word for it and called their mothers.

Amazing.

I’M LAUGHING!!! THEY DIDN’T EVEN ASK WHO I AM.

The absolute best fucking costume ever, OMG 😍🖤😍🖤😍🖤😍

Wow!

SUCH a good horse friend too, because the rider says "he can't see shit" due to costume limitations. So they have to trust each other more than if he was fully sighted.

there’s too many good options this is terrible ;-;

Under D&D rules, a dagger does 1d4 base damage. The average human has a Strength score of 10, adding no bonuses. Several of them, due to the military background of many, likely had strength or dexterity scores of 11-14. But only two or three, and quite a few would be frail with old age, sinking to 8-9 strength. All in all, we can only add a total of +1 damage per round from Brutus.

An estimate of sixty men were involved in Caesar’s actual murder. Not the wider conspiracy, but the stabbing.

Julius Caesar was a general, which is generally depicted as a 10th level fighter. Considering his above baseline constitution and dex, weakened by his probable history of malaria, epilepsy, and/or strokes (-1 dex modifier), and lack of armor at the time of the event, he would likely have something along the lines of AC 9 and 60 HP. The senators would likely hit him roughly 55% the time.

So the Roman senate had a damage-per-round of 66, more than enough to kill Caesar in one round even without factoring in surprise round advantage.

This is a great post, but unfortunately, its conclusion of 66 damage/round is slightly flawed – because this analysis doesn’t take positioning into account. Sixty men can’t all be within knife’s reach of Caesar at the same time; using a normal square grid, only eight Medium-sized combatants can fit in the 5-foot radius surrounding him (and a character can’t end their movement in another creature’s space). I’m sure you see the potential problem here:

5th Edition rules allow any character to break up movement on their turn, moving both before and after an attack. But even with this provision, moving through another character’s space still counts as difficult terrain (requiring twice as much speed to traverse); if the whole Senate rushes in at once, it’s almost impossible for the innermost attackers to push their way back out after delivering their attack, and eventually the curia floor simply grows too clogged with people for everyone to take a stab at Caesar in one round.

It might be possible to deal all of that damage in a single round if the senators all gathered around Caesar in a tight semicircle formation first, attacking in waves from bottom to top. Assuming each senator delays his initiative in precisely the right order to execute a series of coordinated strikes, each row can dart in to stab the dictator and immediately dash out to make room for the row above, like so:

But given that this wasn’t a perfectly disciplined battalion of NINJA SENATORS, I expect that the murder instead involved a couple of sneak attacks followed by a confused stabby dogpile, and probably took quite a bit longer than one round.

(in case you need a knife in the next two days for reasons unrelated to political assassinations)

Inshallah he will be stirred into a fine fry

A delicious meal