asteroidtroglodyte - Tumblr blog

[asteroidtroglodyte]

fishie…… :]

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Let him crawl on you!

[asteroidtroglodyte]

speechless. the pose. the expression. this should be a painting.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Alrighty here’s what I’ve got. Notes?

[asteroidtroglodyte]

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.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

who's a pretty bird

[asteroidtroglodyte]

[asteroidtroglodyte]

we've been living in this apartment for two months now, and while we've observed most of our new neighbours (my slavic Windowsill Watcher Grandmother gene already activated), I don't think they had the chance to see us often enough to recognise us yet.

I do know, however, from my observations, that the tiny funny dog upstairs is called Gucio. I've passed him once or twice during his walk and heard his owners use the name - and, while both the dog and his owners are oblivious to our existence, Gucio became an apt topic of discussion in our house. you know, we hear barking, ha, that's Gucio, he must be home alone again! or there's a stick left by the building door, that must have been brought by Gucio and he was forced to abandon it before entering! a household name, really.

yesterday as I was leaving to go to the store, walking down the narrow staircase, there he is! tiny funny looking dog, slightly startled by me suddenly appearing on the floor he just reached on his tiny funny looking legs.

"good morning Gucio!" I say joyfully, the most natural thing in the world.

well. remember that Gucio doesn't really know me. so he looks at me in the most flabbergasted way a dog can look at a person. he is positively aghast. agog! not sure how aware dogs are of their own names but he seemed genuinely puzzled at the apparent stretch of social convention.

and as I try to contain my laughter, I see his owner standing on the stairs below. the woman is sort of awkwardly frozen, speechless, and she looks at me.

"you... know each other?" she asks.

is that not the funniest way to phrase it. is this not the funniest question she could have asked. ma'am do you know my dog? you went to school together perhaps? you've met? do tell, are you old friends? maybe you worked together? you know each other, my dog and you? this dog? you know him? he knows you? he never mentioned you I'm afraid

[asteroidtroglodyte]

you know how some people go to parties and befriend the pets there like the dogs & cats? whenever i go to social functions i somehow end up randomly in charge of children. i don’t know how it happens. people are always just foisting children off on me in public places.

and the thing is it never stops at one child, because once you have one with you, another child approaches, and then parents start to think you’re perhaps some sort of hired childcare at the function and they don’t ask you. more children appear whose parents pointed at you and the other children and said, “oh look! that’s where all the kids are! go over there!”

I was at a work picnic once and a man from another department asked me to hold his 5-month-old while he filled up his plate. Then he got distracted talking to friends and didn’t come back for thirty minutes. I stood there with this baby whose name I actually didn’t know, chit-chatting a meeting new colleagues, and everyone assumed it was my baby and kept asking about him and what was I supposed to do? Say, “oh this isn’t mine” ?? Because then they’d ask whose it was and we actually hadn’t exchanged names. So then what would I say, “I don’t know” ??????????

I started wondering if I needed to make up a fake backstory for this baby.

The baby’s MOM eventually showed up looking for her husband, saw me, and said, far more pleasantly than she needed to, “hi! You seem to have my baby????”

I was just like, “indeed. so I do.”

I once volunteered to run the bubble table at a local festival. The point was to come get bubble wands & soap to use around the festival, but people just started sending their children over en masse. The festival ended, and I still had like 17 unattended children. I needed to go home.

I had no idea what to do. I needed to find an event organizer but I couldn’t leave them alone? So I started walking around the festival with a line of hand-holding children to find an authority I could give them away to like some sort of reverse Pied Piper

once I ended up in charge of a 3 year old at a funeral and she realized what death was and that she was going to die one day. I was holding her & she was crying while I was desperately trying to locate her parents.

Idk where I’m going with this.

I need to find a way to seem less approachable so no more strange toddlers have mortality crises in my arms.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

>STATUS: be BUG

>Engage: Protocol GO

>BRRRRRRRR

it's always so funny to see a bug just fucking booking it across the floor. like girl where are you going. bug plans

[asteroidtroglodyte]

african peach moth (egybolis vaillantina) | source

[asteroidtroglodyte]

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Say hello to the oldest known multicellular organism, Rafatazmia chitrakootensis

These guys were, by the modern semantics, a very early Red Algae. They would have grown in shallow seas approximately 1.6 Billion years ago.

The story of Life is long. Longer than you know.

And, I assure you, far from over.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Behold!

American Culture!

[asteroidtroglodyte]

You may sometimes hear a little voice that tells you that you don’t need to use that much butter but I am here to tell you that that voice is the grim specter of the late Dr Kellogg and you should banish that demon immediately with even more butter. This is my solemn magical advice.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Will never understand people who name their sons Nigel. Why do you hate them

[asteroidtroglodyte]

So I’m tracing the path of the Silicon Cycle through time on my lunch break (as one does) and I ran across this little gem from the Wikipedia page on Chert:

Shit, sorry, that’s a wall of text. Here’s the important bit:

3 cubic miles of Opal just grown each year from organisms smaller than a pixel what a marvelous world we are made from