it feels bad to have someone say ‘we will not accommodate your unique way in our space’. that is what the texas library association did to chuck

the thing is, WE have the power to create our own spaces. sometimes that space is SO SMALL, just one cubic foot inside of a pink mask, and sometimes that space is a whole ballroom full of buckaroos cheering and laughing and proving that LOVE IS REAL

thank you to true buckaroos MARK OSHIRO and TJ KLUNE for creating that space with me last night. thank you to NOWHERE BOOKSHOP and BONHAM EXCHANGE and JENNY LAWSON for hosting, and thank you to NIGHTFIRE for going along with this wild idea when chuck said ‘hey if the dang TXLA does not want unique buckaroos inside their convention, then lets have our own across town’

every day there are strong forces pushing back against love, but when we trot together we can make spaces where love thrives

[transcription of a reddit comment]

ew72 • 19 hr. ago

I'm a type 1 diabetic. I require insulin to live, multiple times a day.

When I was in middle school, many years ago, we didn't have insulin pumps and had to use syringes and vials like everyone else.

The school refused to let me carry it with me, meaning I had to go to the nurses office several times a day to inject. It's not just before lunch but could be any number of times depending on the current blood sugar levels.

The district then cut nurse staff to just spending half a day at two schools, and the nurse left before I had lunch.

I asked the office staff to unlock the office so I could take my insulin and eat lunch. They refused.

By middle school, I'd been dealing with t1 for about 5 years, and didn't take shit on the topic. I went to the school lobby, picked up the payphone (I just dated myself) and called 911, telling them, "Hi, I'm at (school), am type 1 diabetic and the office won't unlock a door and let me take insulin."

They sent a fire truck, and a bunch of firemen met me outside and walked me to the office and asked, while ignoring the staff, which room was the nurses office. I pointed to the door and he was like, "Okay boys, chop it down, this kid need his insulin!"

Suddenly, the office secretary could unlock the door and I didn't need to put it in the nurses office everyday anymore.

End id.]

Unfortunately, Gilgamesh was too cool. He oppressed the people of Uruk, taking their lunch money and getting real friendly with all their moms. And so the people cried out to the gods for deliverance. "Save us," they said. "Gilgamesh is much bigger and hotter than us and we cannot stop him."

The gods heard their pleas and sent Bigfoot to kick Gilgamesh's ass. However, the gods overlooked one very important fact, which is that they were both bisexual.

why i stan ryan reynolds’s deadpool

negasonic teenaged warhead (comics): a white goth without a love interest

ryan reynolds: she’s a biracial goth with a lovely japanese girlfriend

russell collins (comics): a buff blond blue-eyed american

ryan reynolds: he’s a chubby polynesian māori kid from new zealand

domino (comics): She’s white with a black tattoo around her eye

ryan reynolds: she’s black with a vitiligo patch around her eye

vanessa carlysle (comics): unknown ethnicity

ryan reynolds: we’ll make her brazilian

shatterstar (comics): white

ryan reynolds: asian

blind al (comics): white

ryan reynolds: black

deadpool (comics): a pansexual canadian

ryan reynolds: i sure am!! …i mean, he sure is!

I feel like he looked at the last ~20 years of comic movies, said “Holy shit, that’s way too many boring white guys!” and then set about personally cramming as many other options into the movies as he could. I also gotta give the Deadpool movies props for not leaning entirely on A-List Mega-Stars, aside from Ryan himself they only included Brad Pitt, and in the funniest way possible. At least until he dragged Wolverine outta the grave.

Tonight’s DnD session went off the rails. The party was called in to deal with a black dragon masquerading as an orc. She’s warmongering and causing havoc, but we cannot out her as a dragon for political reasons. So we need to neutralize her. Our goal is to humiliate her and lose her following.

We challenge her to single combat. We waffle on whether the party half-elf fighter/cleric should face her or our bunnyfolk barbarian, but we know she’s an adult dragon so it’s dicey to face her one on one.

Then I say, “What if… I use Greater Invisibilty on the barbarian?”

This causes much hilarity. The dragon would have blindsight and know that he was there but would look insane shouting about invisible rabbits. We decide he should sit atop the half-elf’s shoulders.

“But what if she knocks him off?”

We consider this. Then the DM goes, “You guys have that saddle…”

And we do. We have a magic saddle that you cannot be unseated from. But then we’d need the half elf to wear the saddle on her shoulders which would give the game away unless we could disguise it. A conundrum. Except!

The DM gave our characters a magic bond. We can cast any spell on each other regardless of distance. So my bard used Disguise Self to make the saddle disappear, we put the barbarian on the cleric with Greater Invisibility and send them into battle.

Midway through the dragon just calls in an owlbear. Not to maul our cleric but to just indiscriminately attack all parties. So there’s a bunnyfolk riding around on a half elf fighting a dragon disguised as an orc while an owlbear ran around mauling people until our Druid made friends with it from the sidelines.

The barbarian took a feat to get some on brand spells and at about 1/3 of her health he used Command to get her to submit. It was really low odds she’d fail her save but she rolled a nat one.

She dropped her weapon and kneeled. The party started screeching victory and her horde promptly forsook her and we were all utterly delighted.

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

The point is, as a game designer, you are never going to win over the all-indie-games-are-too-complicated crowd by explaining how simple your player-facing rules are and how seamlessly they support the narrative, because their experience of playing Dungeons & Dragons is that they can simply opt out of engaging with any player-facing part of the game they don't care for, up to and including opting out of everything and making the GM do all the work, and they're coming from a culture of play which has a vested interest in treating this as a valid preference. It doesn't matter how light your rules are, you're not going to beat an expected level of engagement of zero!

Wow I never looked at it this way even though I have known quite a few of these coasting players over the years. Hell I've been that player when I realized that my inability to engage with DnD3.5's rules enough meant that any character build I'd come with myself would always be overshadowed by the hardcore power players in the group.

There are definitely a lot of those sorts of players out there who can be reached by simple player-facing mechanics because they want to engage with the rules but can't. I was one of them.

To be clear this is not a rebuttal. OP never said or implied this is not the case. The takeaway is that you shouldn't be surprised to find players out there will never be interested in juggling even nicely streamlined systems for themselves.

Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying that D&D players who are unengaged at the table because the rules are too complicated or too GM-facing for their liking and would do better with a system whose mechanics are more streamlined and player-facing don't exist. I'm saying that the Venn diagram of those players and players who regard all indie games as too complicated has very little overlap. If, as a designer, you're trying to appeal to the former by addressing the criticisms of the latter, you have misidentified your target audience.

(The same goes for indie game advocacy in general. "Play another game" is a snappy sound bite, but no advocacy that's rooted in talking about the structure of a game – mechanical, narrative, or otherwise – is going to be persuasive to a player who has no interest in engaging with that structure. To them that's all "GM stuff", and therefore nothing to do with them.)

If a worker who isn't the owner says ANYTHING similar to "I'm not really supposed to do this but-" and then does something that helps you, under no circumstances inform the business, including through reviews. You tell them that the worker was polite, professional, the very model of customer service and why you like to go there. You do not breathe a word of the rulebreaking.

Employee-customer solidarity

Even if they don't- Your review can be the thing that wrecks someone up accidentally;

"Janie was so helpful when I wanted to buy a new washing machine on Friday, she stayed with me for half an hour and wasn't pushy at all, we had a good laugh about our cats' silly antics and she got Adam and Suzy to carry it to the car for me- 10/10 excellent service, I'd come back any day!"

-But Management has a policy that workers should spend no more than 10 focused minutes on any customer at a time, and that they should always try to upsell the insurance and the higher price model, so Janie was breaking policy.

-And they aren't supposed to have their phones on the sales floor, so now Janie is going to be quizzed on whether she was showing photos of her cat to a customer.

-Adam is a warehouse worker and shouldn't have been in the front-of-house at all, Suzy is a porter, and store policy is both to use a trolley to move heavy items, and that only the porters should do it, so now Janie is in trouble for pulling Adam off-task, Adam is in trouble for walking through the shop floor, and Suzy is in trouble for poor handling procedure. Maybe the store even has a paid delivery service that Janie was supposed to upsell as soon as you said "I can't put this in my car without help", so this was all against policy.

Your review should always be as bland as possible, "10/10, five star service, will shop here again, thank you to Janie at the Town Street branch" You NEVER know what was technically a rule-break, capitalism is not your friend, the review process is part of the panopticon.

FIVE STARS, TEN OUT OF TEN, VERY GOOD, NOTHING MORE.

One of the people I worked with at the sex shop was a lady in her early forties. She had the most deranged sex stories and to be honest I could never tell how much was real.

I think probably all of it was true? But when someone tells you that a man showed up at her door with a sheet cake he wanted her to sit on so he could eat it off her ass it’s fair to be somewhat skeptical.

Aaaanyway. She hooked up a lot and ended up on a casual date with this guy. She was really stoked to be wearing a button up shirt with snaps, so later when they got to his place she could rip the shirt open like in the movies.

Now, it's worth noting she was a bigger gal, and her cleavage could have suffocated a grown man, it was substantial. There was a lot of boob real estate, okay?

So they get back to his place, and she finally gets to have her moment. She rips her shirt open dramatically, displaying the wealth of her cleavage. At first her dates face was excited and delighted. But as his eyes trailed down he began to slowly frown, which I think we can all agree is not what anyone wants when you've just laid yourself bare in a literal fashion.

She looked down to check herself, and there, nestled like a little baby bird in a nest of boob, was a single dorito.

When she told me this story she admitted, "I knew I had a choice. I could get laid, or I could eat the chip."

She ate the chip.

Her date looked repulsed, but she wanted to take one last crack at riding that man, so she did jazz hands and sang in a silly vaudevillian accent, "🎶You should probably put yer meat in me! You should probably put yer meat in me!🎶"

He drove her home shortly afterward, the coward.

I completely believe the cake story. Doesn't anyone else remember "cake farts"?

holy shit this is like the holy grail :0

Something about the idea that voting for president only matters if you live in a swing state, and that all the people in blue states or red states can indulge themselves in principled nonparticipation because the outcomes are preordained, strikes me as akin to playing with fire.

Is it really coherent to say "both sides are awful, write in Mickey Mouse or burn your ballot or just stay home and get drunk, unless you live in Pennsylvania, in which case maybe consider taking one for the team and compromising yourself by voting for the lesser evil?" Is that really the message that will lead to a preferable outcome?

What it sounds like to me is a sign that 1) you take your local electorate for granted, and 2) you see avoiding the worst case scenario as somebody else's problem.

I remember when Florida was a swing state. I also remember when Pennsylvania wasn't.

For the love of fuck, vote in your local elections and don't fuck around with presidential ones either. States are in play now that I would never have dreamed of being 'swing' states. When I first started voting, PA absolutely was not a swing state. The district where I cast my first vote went blue for the first time I can remember last election.

Washington state, universally considered a safe blue state, has voted Democrat between 50.1% and 58.0% in presidential elections since 2000. Those are pretty healthy margins. But they are not insurmountable - Washington was reliably red up to 1984, by similar amounts - and they don't happen by magic. They happen because people fucking vote blue even though it's considered a safe state.

If enough people think, "eh, I don't have to vote, Washington is going to go blue no matter what," then guess what happens? The state goes red. And we don't want that.

Oregon is also considered by outside viewers to be super liberal. Then, when you zoom in on individual counties, it's like 90% red. A lower than average Democratic voter turnout in the larger cities could easily make the whole state as Republican as the bigoted Oregon town I currently live in. A higher turnout in rural areas could start making the state look like people think it does.

If you feel safe that your state is a "blue" state, look at the county maps and see just how few of them are actually as blue as you imagine.

As someone who has lived in rural Oregon and rural Kansas, I found rural Kansas less conservative. Do not trust in your state's reputation as one color or another. That reputation is often defined by a very small part of the map.

If you’re afraid of reading anything written by anyone with conflicting views to you because you think consuming media of “the enemy” will lead to thoughtcrime, you should perhaps do some deep thinking on the religious trauma you still need to deconstruct, and examine why you have replaced religious dogmatism with an ideological dogmatism your belief in is somehow so fragile that simply reading the wrong thing could shatter it.

It is important to read things, even doctrine heavy manifestos, by those ideologically opposed to you. It is important to understand their viewpoint and the people that wrote them.

Understanding is NOT agreeing with. Reading is NOT agreeing with. If you do not understand, do you even know what you are opposing? If you do not understand what you oppose, do you even know what YOU believe?

The less you understand those you are against, the less you understand about their beliefs, the shakier your own arguments, the more susceptible you are to propaganda, and moreover, the more likely you are to Other them. Normal human beings are capable of absolutely terrible things. YOU are no less capable of absolutely terrible things because you think the Right Thoughts ™️

Your enemy is still human.

Your enemy is still human.

Your enemy is still human.

Do not cling to political ideology as though it is a new religious doctrine with its own forms of “Sin”.

Important and Good are not synonyms. Many important things are terrible.

They are still important.

What we have in mind for now are black dragons, with low density silver glitter, silver enamel, so that the pride flag pops)

Why do some people get so offended when trans women say “hey can you please not call me dude/bro/man?”

Don’t try to justify/defend yourself by going “ohh I use them gender neutrally!” and then just ignoring that it doesn’t matter if you think it’s gender neutral - if someone doesn’t want to be called certain terms you should respect that!

You just gotta go “I’m sorry for calling you that, I’ll stop using those terms to refer to you.”

It’s really simple. Most trans girls I know aren’t gonna be mad if you call them those stuff once and then after being corrected apologize and stop calling them those terms.

Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."

My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity. 

via- @elidyce

One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.

Sun Tzu, after desperatly trying to explain extremely basic logic to a bunch of upper-class twits, basically sat down and wrote the most elaborate "As per my last email" ever

the art of war is tedious and irritating when you read it as like, immortal prose by the most brilliant man ever to kick ass. but it’s incredibly fucking funny when you realize that sun tzu had to write every single one of those entries because someone somewhere did not know this ahead of time and made a really, really expensive oopsie doodles.