doodle-mole - Tumblr blog

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Sketch of a Quartet of spirit ladies from different world

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Sometimes you need to learn to play the guitar, sometimes you need to insert some self-help quote into the sermon, and sometimes what it takes to put butts on the seats is forecasting the weather on the guts of a chicken once or twice a week. Priesthood requires some sacrifices.

And some of those bleed, yes.

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

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It must be the age during, but I can't stand "skill issue" as a substitute of "not with that attitude"

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Magical Cow Girl

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Stickers seen around NYC in the days after cops opened fire in the NYC subway, shooting a fellow officer, two bystanders, and an alleged "fair evader" they were attempting to apprehend.

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At this point they're not very far from the Pokemon "your monster was holding an egg that coincidentally matches species with the female/non-ditto creature you left with us" logic

I've remarked in the past that one of the problems with Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro is that they want to downplay a lot of the uncomfortably horny elements which have historically characterised the game's implicit milieu, but certain key parts of the game's brand identity are tied up with those horny bits, and they're not willing to give that brand identity up, so they end up doing daft shit like keeping dragon-blooded sorcerers as a core class while acting like "one of your parents fucked a dragon" is the least likely explanation for how you got to be that way, resulting in a text with a strangely coy tone.

The 2024 Player's Handbook carries this policy – and the resulting tonal incoherence – forward. This is how it describes draconic sorcery:

As we can see, it even walks back the 2014 Player's Handbook's oft-mocked discussion of "bargaining" with dragons for power, in favour of proposing scenarios involving accidental exposure to draconic magic – as though a draconic sorcerer is some sort of dragon-themed Spider-Man – while grudgingly acknowledging the possibility of actual dragon-fucking almost as an afterthought.

And then it uses this image to illustrate the Draconic Sorcery subclass:

"Might".

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No, by a mixture of being already used to having similar concerns with software in general (and the "it is now safe to turn off your computer" message engraved in my brain) and also half the games I play I rarely turn off (just leave them sleeping on the Switch)

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New Alt-Right Playbook! This one's on spurious claims and how they don't even need to be ARTICULATED to follow you around.

If you wanna keep this series coming out (and maybe help it come out a little faster) do please consider backing me on Patreon or subscribing to me on Nebula.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, you are the kind of progressive leftist with a platform who gets a share of harassment - seasonal or perennial - from reactionaries. In this situation, you will, inevitably, hear one who positions themself as a reasonable moderate ask, “Why Don’t You Respond To Criticism?”

There’s a lot going on in that question, more than is obvious, and it’s worth understanding.

First is that the question is not only directed at you. It exists as a marker, showing up in your Q&A’s, comment sections, or Twitter threads, to imply to anyone paying attention to you that there is some wealth of legitimate criticism you have long ignored. There may well be a specific point this person is referring to, but it’s often left unspecified or generalized, so that the content - and the quantity - of the criticism is left to audience imagination. It is meant to publicly undermine your legitimacy.

Second, it’s meant to make you question whether there is some legitimate criticism out there in the din of people screaming at you. You’re not perfect, and a knock-on effect of being harassed is you get numbed out, unable to discern good faith from bad, often removing yourself from the streams through which your peers used to correct you because of the endless flow of garbage coming through those channels now. But the only way to verify the ambiguous claim that there is criticism worth responding to is to once again strap on waders and climb in, which is often what your critic really wants.

Third, the question isn’t really “why don’t you respond to criticism?” Odds are, you do respond to some criticism. People in your position are often addressing or pre-empting criticism all the time, arguably too much. No, what this nonspecific question is really asking is, “Why don’t you respond to my criticism?” They’ll let it sound like you’ve been ignoring everyone, but they mean “why are you ignoring me?” They are going to insist you owe them a response, that their critique, regardless of your opinion of it, is valid, and demands immediate attention. Odds are there are dozens of people saying the same, all at once.

Fourth, odds are good that you have, in fact, addressed their specific complaint, but not in a manner they will accept. This one person’s criticism is likely not unique, you may have covered it somewhere in your output purely because you know what kind of arguments are getting thrown at you and you want to cover your bases. There’s a decent chance your critic doesn’t actually consume enough of your work to have seen it. But it’s maybe even more likely that they are aware of your counter-argument - possibly one of your fans directed them to it - but don’t consider a response legitimate unless it is directed at the critic. Covering it in a different context or on a different platform doesn’t count. They are owed a statement they can respond to directly, because they want the argument to continue. Really, the question is, “Why don’t you respond to my criticism on my terms?”

Finally, even if you did respond to them by name, it’s likely your response would still be disqualified. If you were to summarize their argument in any way, they would claim you are building a straw man. If you isolated any specific critique, or pointed to the cruelty that accompanied it, they would claim you’re cherry-picking. You must, it seems, first present the criticism, full and unabridged, before you may respond to it. Which is to say: the only “correct” way to respond to criticism is to platform the critic.

And there are dozens who expect this of you. Who will tear into you for not addressing, in meticulous detail, every single critique they’ve ever tossed your way, and, in the same breath, make fun of you for talking too much. Because they don’t want to move on from “Why Don’t You Respond to Criticism?” As a rhetorical tactic, it’s pretty ace. To announce, before the argument is even stated, that it is thus far undefeated? ::chef’s kiss:: Because any response you make will keep the focus on you and not their argument. “It’s not worth responding to.” “Well why should The Accused get to decide what is and isn’t worth responding to?” “I have responded, repeatedly.” “Well why didn’t you respond in this particular way?” None of this looks at whether the argument had any credibility to begin with, only at whether your rebuttal is following procedure.

Take, for example, the hypothetical criticism that you should not listen to me because I am just four eels in a trenchcoat. How would I respond to that? What can I say that isn’t exactly what four eels in a trenchcoat would say? “I’m not even wearing a trenchcoat”? Well, the first thing four eels would do when people start to catch on is wear hoodies. Show my birth certificate, saying I was born a single entity to a human mother at a weight four newborn eels wouldn’t add up to? Well, did that work for Obama? Or did the guy saying the birth certificate was fake get elected President? And, of course, anything I have to say about how fascism has evolved on the social internet is suspect if I can’t even prove I’m human. What do fish know?? We stayed at war with Iraq for seven years after the government announced the Weapons of Mass Destruction we were looking for never existed, and some people, to this day, still think we found them. What hope would I - a warm-blooded mammal who would make very mediocre sushi - stand in the face of that? [bell chime]

So, if you ever see this claim out in the wild, “why haven’t you responded to _____,” ask: do you know what _____ is, do you yourself agree it’s a valid question, and are you sure it hasn’t already been answered? And don’t repeat the question unless you’ve got three yesses.

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This is intensely depressing, but on the other hand it means the AI enthusiasts will all self-isolate into their own bubbles and leave everyone else alone so there may be a silver lining there

imagine you get ratiod by your own robot echo chamber

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I 100% understand where you're coming from, but that's just Bluth-animated cheesecake filtering the matching voice over resulting in a performance so over the top it sounds forced

Also she's bubbly and in a bubble so it's a visual pun too, I guess?

so true

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Sometimes a Son’s Greatest Fear is Becoming His Father

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I glanced at this a little to quickly and read "THERE ARE NO MONKEYS"

there are nokeys

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🔥Relatable🔥

The heat is back 🥵

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—salvador allende’s final speech, 9/11/73

this week marks the 47th anniversary of the US-backed overthrow of salvador allende. allende was the first latin american marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy. under allende, universal healthcare, tuition-free education, minimum wage, worker safety protections, free school lunches for children, and other socialist programs were implemented. according to the national bureau of economic research, blue collar wages rose 56% in 1971.

after allende moved to nationalize chile’s US owned industries and align with socialist cuba, nixon (who’d already been carefully monitoring allende’s rise) gave direct orders to the CIA and the US state department to “put pressure” on allende’s government. while the US publicly worked to sabotage chile’s economy with trade restrictions and aid denial, the CIA secretly collaborated with reactionary forces in the country to undermine allende’s credibility and ultimately overthrow him in a bloody coup.

in allende’s place, the US helped install military leader augusto pinochet who returned “freedom” to chile through re-privatization and the extra-judicial murder of an estimated 3,197 chileans. despite pinochet’s reputation as one of latin america’s most brutal fascists, the US supported his regime without issue. “i would say they are dictatorial,” nixon later conceded, “i would also have to, on the other side, indicate that they are non-communist and that they are not enemies of the united states.”

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Draw Your OCs in Swapped Clothes Challenge (mine) Part 2, featuring Eirani, Elana and Iago

Draw Your OCs in Swapped Clothes Challenge (self-imposed) Part 1, featuring Ângela and Lídia

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This post has planted in my head the thought that Frog Fractions is (most likely unintentionally) a statement on "spoiler culture"

how to recommend the frog fractions trilogy without spoiling it

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Draw Your OCs in Swapped Clothes Challenge (self-imposed) Part 1, featuring Ângela and Lídia