The Friendliest Tree

guess who made a wargame with thirteen thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine unit statblocks

trying to format it but it keeps crashing the word processor

hey uh. thirteen thousand? three zeroes?

seven hundred and ninety-nine yeah

two questions real quick:

hey you know how there's a lot of funko pops

i do, yes

it's here.

I thought this was a bit and

I'm here for this. Incredible.

I keep trying to type up some funny comment about this but I'm simply dumbfounded. Good job on the game design @rathayibacter this rules so much

Assuming my text editor's metrics are accurate, this game is 878 921 words in length. Exactly eight hundred of those words comprise the rules in their entirety; the other 878 121 words are the stat blocks.

@ta2020photography

"Female Northern Harrier performs acrobatic maneuver."

@rfskia this seems like something you would appreciate if you haven't already seen it

Perfection.

A lil compilation of photos of the semi-leucistic/piebald mourning dove who has been visiting my backyard!

First two images are from this morning 💕

I’ll never forget the time I was sitting with this guy, nice kid, didn’t know him well, I think we must have had a bottle of wine or some questionable hashish or something, and in response to an awkward silence I just started talking and ended up going on a long meandering rant about how ugly American robins are. I’m talking a full monologue. I had an intro and conclusion. It was pointlessly vehement. I have never been so mean or loquacious about anything in my life.

Consider my horror when this perfectly nice guy wordlessly lifted his shirt to reveal a full-torso prismacolor tattoo of his spiritual soul animal, the American robin.

Their scientific name sounds like "Migrating Turd" but otherwise I find them charming if fairly derpy and mundane. I don't know if I'd get a tattoo of one though. They're like the potato of American birds.

I have no actual animosity towards them. They’re fine. I like them. They remind me if my college roommate and beloved friend. I don’t know why I said any of that—I was grasping at straws for something kind of provocative to say and failed so catastrophically that I was catapulted into a Seinfeld skit.

eerily similar to the time in college someone tried to make conversation by making fun of a silly book a former high school teacher of theirs had written only for me to just pull out a physical copy of the exact book because i’d realized he was talking about my dad

the foot seeks the mouth like leaves seek the sun

yesterday was the ten year anniversary of my insensitive American Robin comment and my tattooed friend messaged me to celebrate the “funniest thing that had ever happened to him” so sometimes critically failing a charisma check leads to a whole decade of joy for someone else

Leucistic Yellow-throated Toucan

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

This post is the distilled essence of everything I believe in.

boop

happy boops boops day, all

Can't believe I didn't post about these guys for April Fools. More the fool am I.

Newts favourite enrichment is clean bottle caps

I've been doing so much art for work lately that it's left me feeling creatively drained. Today I took off sick from work and finally had some time to make a drawing for myself.

I've been meaning to make a Cheese sticker to go with the Enyo Fan Club stickers I made for Enyo's 19th birthday party. I think this one's going pretty well.

I don't trust anyone who hasn't acknowledged their capacity for evil.

"I'm just a smol bean uwu" No sir, what you are is someone who is so habituated to thinking of yourself as innocent that you will continue to do so even when you're guilty.

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:

death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.

you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.

this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.

The last time we were on a long flight, my wife and I invented a game we call "Little Guy."

You start a game of Little Guy by saying, "I'm gonna hand you a little guy." The little guy is some kind of baby animal you are imagining. "Oh," she might say in response, "Okay," and hold out her hands for it. I will then mime handing her the animal. This provides some clues as to the little guy's size, weight, and general ungainliness.

She then gets to ask questions about what kind of little guy this is, BUT NO QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS ACTUAL APPEARANCE OR SPECIES ARE ALLOWED. Qualitative questions, or questions about his behavior, are the only ones permitted. She can ask "Is he soft?" or "Does he seem nervous about being held?" or "If I put him in the bathtub, does he seem okay with that?" or "Would he like a lil grape?" or "Is he the sort of little fellow who would wear a vest in a children's book?" but not "Does he have fur," "Is he a reptile," "Is he from Asia," etc. Some questions are in a grey area so you have to follow your heart, but the point is not to identify the animal as fast as possible: the point is to guess the animal purely based on vibes + how he would act if he were in your living room right now.

And I'm not limited to yes or no answers! If she asks, "Would it feel appropriate to see this little guy in a propeller hat?" I can reply, "Oh no, he has a gravity to him. A bowler hat would be a more appropriate hat." Or if she asks, "Does this little guy have protagonist energy?" I can say something like, "he probably wouldn't be the main character in a children's cartoon. He'd probably be the main character's ditzy best friend who's always eating sandwiches, or something."

We're big Twenty Questions to kill time in a waiting room people, but Little Guy is more about the journey than the destination. It's got a different kind of sauce that's nice if "killing time" and "lowering anxiety" need to happen hand in hand.