My good sir I had a mortgage before any of those characters were published 💀
I know who exactly three of these people are. When I was a kid I wanted to be a Herald of Valdemar.
I wanted to be Menolly with her entire Faire of fire lizards.
I wanted to be a Starfleet officer.
I wanted to be Jaxom, Lord Holder of Ruatha and rider of the white dragon Ruth.
So I've been saying for years that the Discworld series (by Sir Terry Pratchett) and the Vorkosigan Saga (by Lois McMaster Bujold) share several of the same thematic bones
But I never go into specifics
So! For tonight! I will present one case among many.
It's about taking action because these people are yours and you have a duty. It's about speaking up for those with no voices of their own. It's about saying, sure, maybe your motivation is selfish, but the impact of your actions sure as hell is not going to be. It's about finding a center to which you can return, when the challenges you face nearly undermine your purpose.
It's about someone who died, and whose memory you refuse to betray.
What frustrates me with being an "out of sight, out of mind" person is that people tend to love suggesting notepads, diaries, apps, lists, anything that you can write reminders in. But my kind of "out of sight, out of mind" extends to that as well. Truly. If it is not in my sight, it is not in my mind. And you know what happens when you close a book or an app? It is not longer in sight.
Problem: I have 20 things I need to do.
Someone: Make a to-do list!
Result: I have 21 things I need to do.
To-do lists are where ideas go to die.
By James Dunnigan
Playing through scenarios, mostly as a character from Dallas. Seduction is an actual stat (along with Coersion, Persuasion, and Investigation, as well as Power and Luck)
This dumb thing has always been a personal favourite of mine. It was the second tabletop roleplaying game ever to be based on a popular media license (the first, of course, being Star Trek), and features a number of notable game-mechanical innovations for its era, including the earliest known example of a formal "social combat" framework, as well as a rudimentary form of troupe play, in which each player takes on the roles of multiple characters drawn from a common pool.
(Unfortunately, the Venn diagram of prime-time soap opera fans and tabletop RPG players in 1980 had effectively zero overlap. Eighty thousand copies of the game were produced, of which only a few hundred were ever sold; the publisher subsequently went bankrupt.)
I think the best incongruity in it is that SPI was known for a very particular kind of rules. They were a wargame company, so their rules were known for being very efficiently organized with every rule being numbered for the purpose of cross-reference.
They kept this style for Dallas, which has - no joke - 4 whole pages of rules.
I hate Bruce's "I don't kill because once I start, I wouldn't be able to stop"
Like I simply do not buy it. Murder is not a potato chip Bruce. I think he is full of shit and a messy bitch who lives for the drama. I am certain Bruce has some kind of valid reason for not killing, but I don't believe that this is it.
No no let’s dig into this. And let’s not go into the obvious of, “murders bad” or “he’d feel guilty” like let’s try to find another reason to why this bitch man doesn’t kill anyone, including his son’s murderer
So there are generally around 5-6 "big reasons" traditionally given for why Bruce doesn't kill his villains, many of which have been explored in comics and others of which have been discussed and debated ad nauseum around the internet. Here's the four I tend to find most compelling:
As an expansion of #2, you could very reasonably make the point that "but it's the Joker! He's different!" But is he? Is he really? He's certainly done more permanent personal harm to the Batfamily than most other villains (Babs and Jason specifically), but what about Two-Face smashing Dick to pieces with a baseball bat in Robin: Year One? What about Black Mask torturing Steph to death during War Games? What about Shiva killing Cass in Batgirl (even if she brought her back)? What about Ra's nearly killing Tim in Red Robin? What about Talia murdering Damian by proxy (via Heretic) in Batman Inc.? What about Bane murdering Alfred in City of Bane? Where's the line?
Bruce has seen 3-4 people he's either legally or nominally responsible for die on his watch, another 3 tortured to near-death conditions on multiple occasions, 1 permanently injured, and had a villain murder the man who raised him and leave his body for Bruce to find, and yet the only thing anyone really ever talks about re: Bruce killing is Jason and the Joker. If the line is torturing one of his kids (or those flying under his banner) half to death, by all rights he should have killed Two-Face and Black Mask for what they did to Dick and Steph. If it's killing a 'family' member, he should have killed Joker, Black Mask, Bane, and Talia (also Lex Luthor and...technically Jacob Kane, considering everyone thought Tim was dead during the Rebirth arc).
It's not just the Joker at stake here: if we start saying "Batman should kill the Joker because of what he did to Jason [and everyone else]," you start getting into really thorny questions about well...a lot of Bruce's villains have done some ridiculously morally reprehensible stuff, including mass murder and irreparable personal harm to someone he considers family. What makes the Joker's mass murder different from Ivy's mass murder (and yes, canonically they are both mass murderers) that justifies the Joker's death but not Ivy's?
You can of course justify that by saying "but Ivy's not unredeemable! She can be reasoned with and rehabilitated!" but...what if Bruce had made the decision that she was unredeemable and worthy of death before her No Man's Land-era redemption arc kicked off? It loops back around to #1, that Bruce doesn't feel personally qualified to make that moral and ethical decision about who gets to live or die, because he thinks everyone has the personal capacity to change (and what right does he have to take that possibility away from someone?)
....also personally I think "they deserve to die" and "I deserve to kill them/let them die" aren't morally/ethically equivalent statements and Bruce can certainly think Joker deserves to die without also thinking he is morally allowed to kill him (or morally allowed to let someone else kill him when he has the ability to stop them).
"If you'll do it for a good reason, you'll do it for a bad reason."
Sam Vimes is, in some interesting ways, the Batman of the Discworld.
i mean this from the bottom of my heart: no one is impressed by your loud ass car. actually we talked about it and we all want you dead.
Top three Discworld books, go
Mine are Feet of Clay, Small Gods, and Night Watch
Lords and Ladies, Going Postal, and Night Watch
Night Watch, Monstrous Regiment, and Fifth Elephant for me.
Thief of Time, Soul Music, Hogfather.
Look, I really like the Death and Susan books, as I feel they avoid the biggest problem I tend to have with Pterry's stuff (power creep). There's not much power creep left for Anthropomorphic Personifications.
I mean it’s kinda the real life tragedy of love exaggerated, innit? Irl people die young or one person dies old and another person dies even older. At the end of it all someone gets left behind and has to learn how to move on after that. And for the one who dies you know you’re leaving them behind. You know you’re dooming them to moving on and if you believe in an afterlife god only knows how long you’ll be waiting for them on the other side. The tragedy of the immortal loving the mortal takes those feelings we all know about and rips your heart out about it.
Telling a couple of versions of that story right now. It's a bitch to write, and one of the best things to inflict on people on the other side of the storytelling wall.
(see also the summary of The Door Into Sunset: "the final sacrifice... will confront him with a choice more terrible than anything he could have imagined: death with those he loves, or immortality without them."
Seeing people drive big lifted and totally pristine giant pickup trucks as just a car to get to and from work on fully paved roads is like watching a high energy working breed dog be forced to live in a 1 bedroom apartment and only go out for poop walks.
If you cant provide them the home they need its abuse. That truck should be hauling bricks, it needs to be maxing out its suspension hitting ridges at 65 mph. It should be dirty and dented because they love it. Theres no enrichment in your 1/4 mile drive to the gas station. Youre torturing it, youre killing that truck.
Reblog and put your rare pair in the tags/comments! I want to see the depths people will go to create, for the most random two characters in the most obscure media.
Since it’s Black History Month, I’m making sure you folks know about Mike Pondsmith.
Mike designed, amongst other things, Cyberpunk 2020 and its wonderful spin-off Cybergeneration. He designed the critically-acclaimed Castle Falkenstein. A black man kicked off interest in two incredibly white-dominated genres in a white-dominated hobby is a remarkable achievement.
Which is why it bugs me that I didn’t know he was black until a couple of years ago. I figure the least I can do is make sure other folks know too.
I’m actually kinda angry at the collective hobby for never communicating this to me before now. I recognized his name and of course immediately recognized the games he’s designed — Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 and Castle Falkenstein are profoundly important and influential works. I don’t think there was much at all in the way of steampunk in the TTRPG world prior to the latter’s introduction (and after it came out I remember arguments over whether or not it “counted” as steampunk).
Mekton 2 was the first time i remember seeing a black dude on a RPG cover
If anything, the OP’s description is underselling Mike Pondsmith’s influence. The guy is single-handedly responsible for creating enormous chunks of the tabletop roleplaying hobby: from Mekton, the first giant robot RPG; to the Urusei Yatsura-inspired Teenagers from Outer Space, the first anime style slice-of-life RPG; to the above-cited Cyberpunk, the first cyberpunk RPG; and even to Castle Falkenstein, which is often labeled a steampunk RPG, but is more properly considered as one of the foundational works of the then-nascent gaslamp fantasy genre. In a just world, the name Pondsmith would be spoken in the same breath as Gygax and Arneson - he’s Kind of a Big Deal!
Anecdote told to me by an associate of his:
“I’ve met Mike Pondsmith, and he is not Black!”
Upon hearing about this, Pondsmith looked down at his hands, turned them over once or twice, and shouted to his wife:
“Honey, I’m not Black! This changes everything!”
And, yes, he’s a Big Deal.
Apparently, back in the 1990s – i.e., before the Internet was readily accessible and people could easily double check this sort of thing – there was some random white dude who’d go around to conventions and trade shows and such claiming to be Mike Pondsmith. He’d sign autographs and everything. I’m not sure if he’s ever been identified, but there are enough older folks in the tabletop roleplaying hobby who have stories about bumping into a white Mike Pondsmith impersonator at some convention or other to suggest that he got around a fair bit.
I've been a fan of Mike Pondsmith since I first picked up TFOS back in, what, 1988? Early enough that it was before they could admit it was anime.
Back in the late '90s I traded a bunch of Magic cards to my FLGS for store credit that mostly got used to buy every Castle Falkenstein book they had. I've carried over CF's cultural rules for dwarven Names into every setting I've created that had dwarves, because I love it so much.
I am literally finding out right now that Mike is black.
Thank you.
A diagram of the Irish seasons and months in the traditional/Celtic, astronomical, and meteorological modes, with the standard calendar months around the edges: courtesy of our one-county-over neighbor, @CarlowWeather, over on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
embracing the patterned ambiguity of gender and sex as more or less social constructs can grant you so much more precision in thinking about so many concepts in science.
like, if there was a study (and I'm just making this up as an example) showing women suffer from mosquito bites more than men do
you could do the ~"Gender Critical"~ thing and go "see!? mosquitoes get it!!"
OR
you could go "that's interesting" and start asking more questions, like:
because in fact the study i made up just then could lead to a huge variety of conclusions. from my description above you can't tell the difference between studies that show:
etc etc etc
you're just not going to understand actual Gender Science, and therefore reality, if you can't put "hmm, but what do they mean by woman this time" in your mental toolkit in a relatively neutral way.
Honestly this is a great way of presenting the kind of scientific literacy that is needed in an era of clickbait headlines and sound bites and facts that turn into memes; so much science "news" as reported by mass media distills nuanced studies into easily quotable and shocking one-liners that generally ignore the context behind the statistic.
I wouldn't trust y'all with the guillotine like y'all would make reign of terror 2 with petty shit like well this dentist has a nice house and perhaps a few decorative pillows while some fucking billionaire sells you the parts to build the guillotine from his private beachfront property
People would buy guillotines from Amazon for use on the store manager at Wal-Mart, and think they're making progress against the 1%.
