army-of-bee-assassins - Tumblr blog

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you know disabled rights include the rights of disabled people to have children. regardless if those children are also disabled. any mesure to restrict disabled people from having children is simple eugenics

[army-of-bee-assassins]

on your third playthrough, six starts out calling you by your name (aliya) instead of "mistress" which is really nice. but i think i may have offended him bc he's switched to "mistress" exclusively again 😭

[army-of-bee-assassins]

[image description, copied & shortened from alt text: a digital drawing of four characters from my sci-fi ttrpg campaign, standing in a row. from left to right: Noci, they/he, a lanky person with dark hair, wearing vest robes with a cowl, standing with hands in pockets; Han'ae, ae/aer, a tall muscular soldier with dark hair in a bun, dressed in tactical gear and standing with crossed arms; Rose, she/her, a tall thin woman with light wavy hair pulled back, wearing a dress with a slit up the front, smiling and relaxed; and Pallor, zie/she, a short thin person with straight black hair in a bob, wearing a bolero jacket and high-waisted pants, standing with hands on hir hips. The drawing is done in black and white with lined hatching for most of the shading.]

ready for duty!

my new scum & villainy campaign (aka Choir) starts in full swing this friday! so to celebrate, here's the crew of invariant ship designation brevity, ready for their first job. they're just a few extremely loyal (for now :)))))) representatives of the evil empire. i'm sure they won't cause any problems at all!

[army-of-bee-assassins]

for the past several months, my ttrpg group and i have been playing through various world- and character-building games to prepare for our new scifi campaign. i've never done something like this before so intensely, and i highly recommend it. we've been having a blast. we start the campaign proper this week with Scum and Villainy, so that's exciting!

anyway, i wanted to share a comprehensive list of the games we played during this prep period and a brief summary of what we did with them:

First, we played Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies, focusing on a satellite community trying (and mostly failing, RIP) to resist assimilation by the Evil Empire.

Next up was Microscope: a fractal role-playing game of epic histories, to flesh out the thousand-year history of aforementioned Evil Empire;

Next we played Fiasco to explore the events that led to a specific faction leader's power grab (aka. a drama-filled graduation party)

Then we played Dialect again (it's a really good game, okay?!), focusing on some robots who were tasked with taking care of a base full of a Big Bad Evil Guy's secrets for 300 years. (They have his soul on a USB drive now.)

Next up was Heretical Geese, to play through the final exam of a group of assassin students, set in a VR speakeasy;

After that was City Planning Department, to create the city where the PCs live at the start of the game, from the point of view of the slightly unhinged city council.

Then we started focusing on the PCs' backstories, and played three different games (one per PC) to explore specific events that happened pre-campaign. You can read about these in more detail here, but in summary, we played:

Good Society, to explore how one PC chose duty over love 25 years ago;

HOUNDs, to explore how one PC stole a sentient spaceship and tried to escape the empire (it went badly);

A Long Night in the Mech Bay, to explore one PC's relationship and eventual divorce (with the npc who will be the ship's captain).

And then we played Bucket of Bolts to explore the history of the ship the PCs will be adventuring on, and we plan to play i'm sorry did you say street magic in a week or so to create the city where the campaign will really kick off! i'm also planning on doing a part 2 of Microscope at some point, to flesh out even more history, for a day when i don't feel like prepping a regular session.

WHEW. as i said, can't recommend doing this enough. it's been super fun and (from a GM perspective) very little actual work, since most of these games are GM-less and prep-free. involving the players in worldbuilding fosters this really great dynamic where everyone really cares about and takes ownership over parts of the world that have nothing to do with their PCs, and it's really gotten us pumped for the game to come.

[army-of-bee-assassins]

one of the most genuninly frustating things i keep having to deal with in my life is how often openly autistic people will just be straight up ableist and weird as fuck to other autistic people who don’t behave in the very specific ‘acceptable autistic person’ manner they’ve conditioned themselves to. have some fucking solidarity

[army-of-bee-assassins]

Lilienne takes care of Cuno cause she knows what kind of a man his father is and she knows every child deserves care and comfort send tweet.

[army-of-bee-assassins]

[image description copied from alt text: two versions of the same drawing of an NPC from my ttrpg game, Han'ae (ae/aer). Han'ae is a tall, thin soldier with brown skin and dark brown hair pulled into a bun. Ae is standing at attention with aer hands behind aer back. Ae's wearing a black military jacket with gold details and tasseled epaulets, black pants, and black boots with gold laces. Han's shadow cast on the wall behind aer is of a tall, unlit pyre of bones. On the left, the shadow is lined in gold and on the right, it's not. Han'ae is looking to the side with a neutral expression. End ID.]

a pyre of bones, unlit.

also, a closeup:

[image description copied from alt text: a closeup of the drawing above on Han'ae's face. A gold pin of a bird and one of a flame are on the front of aer jacket.]

[army-of-bee-assassins]

Clyde is the best accessory

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Fuck it. Crochet cartilaginous stingray skeleton

[army-of-bee-assassins]

we do not talk enough about how you get hit front and back by being a jew and supporting Palestine. For a recipe that i want to make during Shabbat I have to scroll through a jewish recipe blog and cringe at the I Stand With Israel posts and then go back.

so a bunch of jewish spaces aren't safe anymore or are landmines. then you're forced to go someplace else. then there's tumblr with the people who think Jews=Zionist.

like oh, you're jewish? they immediately think you support the idf or something and praise genocide or something. your family barely survived a genocide that wasn't even like more than three generations ago and its being used as some sort of crutch to israel's moral defense when israel does NOT give a fuck about holocaust survivors at all except for their pr...

like damn bro im just trying to live my life and cook normally. Palestine has my entire heart. but like the pipeline from Palestine advocacy to accidental antisemitism to purposeful antisemitism is so 😭😭. man. i just wanna say guys jewish people aren't your enemies. the goal is to stop genocide not make the nazis proud of you or something

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Another thing is that when this aggression started, we were so worried about winter and how displaced people in tents will survive it. Earlier this week the temperature in Gaza hit 38 degrees (100 Fahrenheit) and we are now wondering how will displaced people survive the heat in those tents.

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i have so many questions about heaven's vault that i wanna ask the subreddit but you need mod approval to post and there's one single mod who (based on their posting history) has not been online in a month. eric andre voice let me in!!!!!!!

[army-of-bee-assassins]

This poll couldve been a "put in the tags..."

[army-of-bee-assassins]

The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.

Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”

[army-of-bee-assassins]

I heard you like conlangs so I put conlang in your conlang

Or, Kat has Heaven’s Vault on their brain after playing Chants of Sennaar.

(Translation notes after the cut)

To start this off, I am a ridiculous person who has religiously avoided language spoilers for Heaven’s Vault, so this is based off of the… sixty-odd pages of notes I took while playing.

The title was tricky, of course - couldn’t really find the etymology of „Sennaar“, so „Chants of Sennaar“ became „Songs of the Tower“. If there is an Ancient word for „tower“ I haven’t found it, so I constructed one. I first thought of „high wall“, but went for „heaven:wall“ as a semi-pun on the Tower of Babel thing instead. (Double pun, but only for English speakers: I’m pretty sure if you exchange the noun marker in „wall“ for a place marker you get „place where something is buried“. As in a vault.)

Also on the title card, „options“ is literally „say change“, paralleling „say your destination“/„say your question(?)“ from hoppers/robots awaiting input. „Change“ is also inferred from the verb.

„Warriors“ was pretty straightforward to translate as „soldiers“. I also „translated“ the exclamation mark in the UI since Ancient doesn’t really have punctuation as such - it now says „important“.

„Bards“ is my own guess since I haven’t found the equivalent yet, but I don’t think I’ve leaned too far out of the window with it - „person who sings“. To reflect how „ungrammatical“ sentences with uncertain words are, I added spaces between the words rather than the run-on style of fully translated ones. I‘m not sure if an approximation of OSV sentence structure like „bards, we are“ would work in Ancient, but the whole mentally switching from OSV to SVO and vice vice versa is enough in the connection segments, I wouldn’t want to inflict it on a hypothetical Ancient-speaking player during all of the Gardens. (Note also the player trying to describe the „plural“ part with „many“ since Ancient doesn’t really do plural forms of nouns.)

„Devotees“ was probably the easiest to translate - „pilgrims“ is as literal as it gets, seeing as they are people wanting to move towards their deity. The „unreadable“ in the inscription becomes „can-not read“. (Not sure whether using „want“ for „seek“ isn’t a Chants-ism, but I haven’t found a better word yet, so it’s the best I can do…)

[army-of-bee-assassins]

Hello if you are rbing content w/ image descriptions in alt text, please be mindful to check the veracity/descriptiveness of the alt text for yourself! I've seen a lot of alt text just say "image", "photo", or "art" (or even worse, some kind of joke text!).

Not any type of callout at the people rbing the posts, but a "alt text is an important feature /gentle" at the original posters.