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There's no way I'll run into another weird NPC

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Zijn we weer y’all

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Making the Werewolf: The Forsaken/Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist situation worse on purpose by running a game jam whose only rule is that each submission's title must abbreviate to "WTF".

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My last personal experience with linux was 20 years ago, so I'm assuming it must have gotten better. But I sometimes see issues on game discords I'm in, and then it's almost always 'how do I get this 3rd party thing to work on linux.'

I know @prismatic-bell plays heavily modded Fallout 4, and I don't doubt vanilla Fallout 4 works perfectly fine on linux. But how moddable is it? Like, does something like the script extender work on linux? Does Vortex? I think that's something to look into if you want to make the move from windows.

I swear to fucking god. I would claw out OneDrive from my computer if I could. I would burn down their servers if I could. I would run down their stocks to the ground if I could. I hope every single one of their workers gets a better offer from a competitor in the next 24 hours. I hope every single one of their light bulbs explodes at the same time. I hope every single carton of milk in their fridge will always be expired.

Stop backing up my fucking files.

Stop asking me to back up my fucking files.

Stop taking my fucking files off my fucking computer.

I don't want a fucking reminder in three fucking days. Let me fucking say no.

Fuckers.

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The Glorious 25th May, how do they rise up?

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That person is so impressively ignorant it's actually embarrassing. Imagine thinking India of all places is an ethnostate. India, a nation of one billion people. If you want to show you don't know anything about ethnicity, ethnostates, or the history of India, and you get all your information from equally ignorant sources, this is the exact way to do it. Also way to tell on yourself that you think India is the nation of one billion interchangeable brown people.

Believing that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state on Jewish land and supporting the Israeli people and their right to live safely in their homes is not the same thing as supporting every action of the Israeli government and/or military. This is not a difficult concept and I certainly don’t need to constantly explain or justify myself to every random anon demanding one who hasn’t figured out yet that the real world operates on a level beyond “This Side = Good vs. That Side = Evil.” It’s not a game or a fandom or a superhero movie. This is real life. It’s messy and complicated and endlessly hard to fathom.

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Just an hour in, and the Chicago Liveshow is absolutely wild. WTF is going on.

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So, fellow jews in the Netherlands, am I losing my mind, or has Hollandia Matzes had some serious shrinkflation in both size or thickness?

I have the orange bags of ten (since I don't live in Amsterdam, those are easiest to get), and in the past two bags were more than enough for the whole of pesach. But I opened my third bag this morning, and my eating patterns haven't changed that much.

Anyone else also noticed this?

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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Vampire: The Masquerade, Private Nightmares | Project Ghostlight Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Additional Tags: POV Outsider, Slice of Life, The DMV, POV First Person Summary:

Nobody will worry about a broken door, won't they...

I wrote some Project Ghostlight Fic.

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It would be nice if any piece of official vtm media with a catholic priest as an antagonist would have the courage to go:

"One of the people in this room is part of an organization that has started wars, in person and by proxy, that have killed millions; that has manipulated and overthrown rulers; that has brutally murdered dissidents, opponents, and innocents alike; that has hoarded wealth; that has destroyed cultures and that has caused misery in all four corners of the world. And the other is a Vampire."

It's just frustrating.

(This is about the final confrontation in VtM Swansong, mostly.)

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An addendum, as someone living in a parliamentary democracy. When I say that I hope the government falls (and yes I hope my current shitty right wing government falls,) what I mean is that I hope the parties forming the government stop cooperating so they lose their parliamentary majority and have to call for new elections.

When I say that, I'm not calling for the destruction of the system of government or the dissolution of the nation state, or anything like that. (Until this post I didn't even realise it could be interpreted like this.)

something that definitely isn’t the root cause of the issue but probably isn’t helping the discourse is Americans failing to understand that when an Israeli says they “hate the government”, they are often using “government” in a totally different way than Americans are

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I think my most cancelable opinion might be that I enjoy raisins in baked goods

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You know, I'm of the opinion that Fëanor had some points, but then went about the worst possible way in proving them. But recently, I went to look up the timeline of the Years of the Trees, and you know what, he was completely right about being furious with Finwë remarrying.

From:

The middle column is Sun Years, and considering that the Valar probably took some time to decide, it's barely a 100 years between Míriels death and Finwë wanting to remarry. For an elf, that's the blink of an eye.

Míriel is presumably healing in Mandos, and Finwë can't be bothered to wait. Is she even in a decent mental state to make the decision about coming back? Who knows. Fëanor certainly wouldn't. If it'd been a 1000 years or more, I'd be okay, fair enough, but it hasn't.

Barely adult Fëanor is getting his mother taken away for literally the rest of eternity, hardly any time after she died, not knowing if she's healed enough to even make the decision. He's absolutely right to be spitting mad.

Strangely enough, this also means Fëanor is the only elf to experience an Edain concept of death. It would have been interesting what he would have made of things if he'd lived long enough to actually meet any Men.

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It’s so hilarious to me that people spent all this time the past year and a half boycotting and protesting Israeli goods, and now they’re flocking to RedNote in the wake of TikTok being possibly banned.

China has literally one of the worst industrialized oppression of Muslims on the planet. Like actual internment camps, forced labor, apartheid, and forced sterilization. Like r u serious.

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I wanted to explore the idea of people who dislike C3 not engaging with its themes because I haven't actually seen anyone making the argument give a full rundown of said themes, and this may end up being several posts. I'd like to start with anticolonialism. Perhaps it is a theme; if so, I think it's presented exceptionally badly, in a way that appeals uniquely to white westerners desiring to see themselves as a combination of victim and savior, rather than as a complex issue in a story centering the colonized. It got very long, so it's under a cut.

If this is the theme with which we as the viewers are not engaging, I'd argue neither is the work itself - it's largely projection. As many others have pointed out, the use of Marquet, a setting inspired by Africa and Asia (and presented in a highly stereotyped and Orientalist way in Campaign 1 no less) as nothing more than a casual backdrop with little engagement with the cultures present, and with much of the story elsewhere, undercuts that badly. I'd actually argue this is a recurring issue with Critical Role's works; Ank'Harel appears and is even fleshed out more in Call of the Netherdeep, but the story follows, and mostly takes place, among the Calamity-era ruins being excavated and amid faction squabbles concerning them. The culture and politics of Ank'Harel remain a distant second to the greater mythology of the Calamity, and again, after the society and culture and everyday people of the more European-inspired Wildemount took such a front seat in Campaign 2, it seems like a worrying pattern. Given the increased sensitivity and investment towards the cultures based on those in our own world that (for the most part) did the colonizing, and the "set-dressing", as others have called it, status of Marquet, perhaps this world is not a good one to tell that story. What's also interesting, and telling, is that the African and Asian - especially West, South, and Southeast Asian - was even a defense within the fandom: the reason so few of Bells Hells were from Marquet, we were told, is because the cast is white. In that case, and given how Marquet is so poorly integrated into the story that multiple beats relying on knowledge of the Apex War fall flat, why didn't we set this in Issylra (notably, the continent in which modern, mortal-driven occupation efforts are occurring)? And more importantly why are we trusting a group nearly entirely made of white culturally Christian Americans to tell what is argued to be an exceptionally leftist story on religiously-motivated colonialism if we can't even trust them to play a character from a real-world culture heavily impacted by said colonialism?

Another rather significant wrinkle is the fact that those wishing to release Predathos in the service of destroying the gods were happily working with the Kreviris Imperium, who desired to colonize Exandria. Remember how everyone was just talking about how the poor Ruidians would die if the planet were destroyed and how they're the victims in all this (and honestly, I don't disagree that the commoners of Ruidus, especially those without psychic powers, have a uniquely rough deal) when the planet cracks? Well, let's talk that through. I think the role of the Vanguard's Ruidusborn in this is rather important, ie, if they are throwing off the colonialism of the gods (to be discussed later whether I consider that valid), they are doing so by stepping on the necks of the common people of Ruidus. And if those people will be doomed by the release of Predathos, it is Bells Hells who doomed them.

The people of Ruidus were told of their manifest destiny of the Blue Promise by their governing body (which also served, effectively, as religious leadership, with mind control). I think "Propaganda" is a poor real-world metaphor for "sends dreams of the land promised to you each night, making you both jealous of what they have and very much influenced by their culture, while you have no dreams of your own" but it's the best I have, but that itself occupies an interesting space. It's a great beat for sf, but this actually leads to a rather worrisome metaphor regarding the nature of cultural influence (which was spoken of on a 4-sided Dive and is often cited here, and I think the way it's discussed fails to consider the implications). The idea of cultural hegemony and globalization is a very real one. It can occur within one's country (I, a non-Christian American, am well acquainted with many Christmas songs and traditions and am given Christian holidays off work but must use vacation for my own). It can also occur outside of it, as with globalized beauty standards - white ideas of beauty leading to light skin being prioritized in India, or double-eyelid surgery becoming common in South Korea. The situation on Ruidus therefore has some interesting implications. What does it mean for them to have inherited culture from Exandria - but at the hands of their own government that seeks to colonize Exandria? Is this a good way to explore these topics, when Exandrians are neatly excluded from the spread of their own cultural hegemony (as they had no idea) and are also poised to become the victims in this colonization? This idea, incidentally - that the people of Exandria exist in an impossible in-between space in the colonization metaphors, blameless victim yet free from the ugliest consequences of being a colonized culture - will recur, and I think that is the most damning evidence that this is at best a story of anticolonialism stripped of nuance and complexity.

In a further exploration of the cultural impact of colonialism, what does it mean that, again, I, Jewish from birth and raised in a Jewish home and sent, even, to a Jewish school through middle school (though not a Jewish preschool) have a pretty thorough knowledge of not just Christmas songs, but could probably name a bunch of individual Christian denominations and maybe even the intricacies in how they depict their crosses - while generally having freedom to practice my religion within the dominantly Christian US, if not equality in doing so - but Bells Hells, living under the presumed thumb of the gods, can't reliably tell their symbols or domains? Others have already covered this but if the gods are the dominant force, why have Bells Hells managed to largely avoid any actual consequences for godlessness other than "when I asked for something, I didn't get it?"

Why have all the governments we've seen, save Vasselheim (which, again - we haven't ever spent a ton of time in, so why did we go to Marquet again?) failed to convey religious dominance at the hands of the gods? The Clovis Concord, Tal'Dorei, Whitestone, Niirdal-Poc, Syngorn, and as far as I can tell Ank'Harel, Jrusar, Bassuras, Court of the Lambent Path, and the Stratos Throne (and if the latter isn't then Imogen and Ashton grew up in its borders without any religion forced upon them) are all secular governments that at most have outlawed Betrayer God worship. The Empire (in which Ludinus Da'leth has been a major political force for centuries) has strong restrictions on worship of all but six gods, and if you look at the first Tal'Dorei Campaign setting, it was at the timed conceived of as banning all deity worship. The Dynasty is a theocracy for a non-pantheon entity, engaging in missionary work but largely depicted as (if I may, oddly) devoid of violence. While Uthodurn's King Imathan Talviel is himself a worshiper of the Arch Heart, Uthodurn appears to have no state religion. Indeed, I'd say, as again, someone of a frequently persecuted religious minority, who lives in a country with a dark history of forced conversion of the native colonized people into Christianity [the Native American residential school system] I'd say that for a world in which the gods are objectively real? Exandrian governments are bizarrely lenient and bloodless when it comes to religion. Only the Dynasty even has a state religion of the aforementioned locations, and they don't even outlaw worship of non-Betrayer gods. The Empire, Concord, and Dynasty have, at most, fines or incarceration for worship of illegal deities. Hearthdell lost more people from their own attack and from the people teleported away by the solstice than from the missionary work; you think the might of Vasselheim couldn't have slaughtered the entire town if they went in? The only places we know of as even possibly more brutal are the Betrayer-worshiping Iron Authority, which remains vague and undescribed (weirdly, actually, given that the Crown Keepers might have gone there in the time between EXU Prime and Bells Hells); and Aeor (execution by hanging for deity worship).

I am not saying that any outlawing of religious worship (nor lack thereof) is a good thing, but we live in a world where people have - and still are - killed for gods for which we have, in my opinion, no proof of existence. It is unbelievably telling that the grievances provided (Tuldus, Ludinus, and members of Bells Hells) are all entirely individual experiences rather than anything systemic. It's people mad at their small communities or their parents, and that anger is valid, but it is immensely dangerous to take one's own individual negative experiences and treat it as systemic. This is the underlying motivation of how countless people are radicalized into hate groups (see: MRAs/incels, who are mostly mad at their mothers or at the fact that increased rights for women means women don't have to date or marry men if they don't want to - men are still the dominant class here, but their perceived individual slights and their extrapolation to this as systemic dominance of women is the radicalizing factor). The fact that Exandria has failed to set up a world where this is any sort of religious hegemony - Vasselheim is certainly important, but they aren't even a centralized governing body of worship a la the Catholic church, let alone a force outside of Othanzia, and are seen as an ally by the nonreligious Percy and Keyleth - again lethally undercuts the idea of this as anything but the most softened and childish discussion of colonialism and religion. Even Deanna's question to Pelor regarding Hearthdell reveals it as inaction - a failure to stop - rather than a command to act. It's at the level of how we teach American kindergarteners of the first Thanksgiving, except unless the entire narrative is wholly unreliable this is the actual story of Exandria. One giant pulled punch.

To quickly cover other items highly relevant to any sophisticated discussion of decolonialization/postcolonialism/colonialism in general that are absent from Campaign 3, and indeed Exandria as a whole: as multiple other fans have discussed, there is no concept of people of mixed race if the gods are the colonizers here. There is insufficient discussion of how, for example, many colonized or oppressed cultures have adopted western religions and see them as highly integral to their culture today - Catholicism in Central and South America and parts of Southeast Asia; Islam in other portions of Southeast Asia; Christianity within Africa and among African-Americans descended from slaves. This does not make the original forcing of said religion right or just; but any discussion of decolonization must account for the wants of those colonized, and I find that Campaign 3 fails to do so. The lack of meaningful conversation with common people across Exandria is something many of us have brought up. If we assume the members of the Accord are not necessarily speaking for those they rule, why do we have no concept of how the people at large of Whitestone, Gelvaan, Jrusar, Bassuras, Uthodurn, the Silken Squall, the Empire, the Dynasty, and the Tal'Dorei Republic feel? And if they are speaking for those they rule, well, we know how they feel.

I finally want to discuss that weird and, in my opinion, nonexistent irl space between actual colonizer and the colonized that mortals occupy. I personally reject the idea of the gods as colonizers given what we've seen in Downfall and because the metaphor is rather messy given the mythic scale. However, let's let treat them as such in this moment. Exandria was populated by titans. The lore is (possibly deliberately) vague and at times contradictory here, but either the titans lay dormant for a time after the gods arrived but before mortal society developed; or they lived in harmony with said mortals (who were created by the gods). They assisted, in some tellings, of the sealing of Predathos by the gods. They then, for unknown reasons, either awoke, or turned on the mortals; in the resulting schism they were killed and sealed by the Prime deities and the mortals. The Betrayer gods were those who wished to leave. The Betrayer gods too were sealed. The last known titans, sealed but not dead, were either destroyed or banished by the Ring of Brass during the start of the Calamity in order to prevent complete annihilation. The titans are now dead. Per Ashton's commune with them, there may be something that will rise again should the gods be eliminated; [only] the strong will survive it.

Questions to consider:

Why are a number of fans arguing that this story is one of anticolonialism so eager to place blame on Asmodeus and hope Predathos eats him first, when he is arguably the ringleader of those who most hoped to leave Exandria to the titans while they were still living? Do you hate the leader of the one most willing to decolonize? Or is the issue that this would also mean abandonment of the mortals, in which case, which is worse - destabilization or maintenance of a current situation (ie, the status quo)?

If the gods are colonizers, why isn't Predathos? It is no more a native of Exandria than they are. We know the gods were driven by an existential danger to their lives (which may or may not have been Predathos). Did Predathos lead the gods to Exandria and later corner them there, setting all of this in motion? Or is Predathos no different from them, driven to Exandria out of the need to survive? Given the titans opposed Predathos as well it is difficult to paint it as their savior (and the idea of an external savior of the colonized is, as discussed, one with unfortunate implications)? What is Predathos, and why is it better than the gods, if you believe it to be?

What are mortals here? They are not colonizer, nor are they native. I've discussed the (also very unfortunate) implications of treating sentient beings as ecology metaphors, but given that mortals truly did have, per the story, no agency in arriving on Exandria but were rather created here, are they akin to a non-native species? Such a species can be either invasive or beneficial, which fits with the idea of mortals being unique in their ability to change. Mortals were the ones under threat from the titans despite, again, being neither colonizer nor colonized; mortals participated in their destruction.

Where do the eidolons - seemingly unaffected by all of this - fit in? For a story about how change and newness might bring a better world, why the focus on the long-dead titans instead of the nature spirits that have seemingly taken their place? Why are many of Bells Hells constantly looking back and not forward?

And that last point feels particularly salient. The people of Exandria - a people whose opinion, again, in this campaign, it feels we have failed to explore - exist in an in-between state. They are more the heirs of the colonizers, in this assumption that the gods are colonizers, than the colonized. They cannot undo what the gods did. The gods can at this time only act through them.

What does it mean that we as the audience are intended to see ourselves most in a people who were not themselves those doing the colonizing, who are now under threat from colonization, and who might cooperate with the driving force behind that colonization? What does it say that our mortal viewpoint characters put more effort speaking to and for the dead than to the living? What does it tell us that many of them see themselves as the victims? What does it say that past campaigns had multiple characters subjected to actual systemic oppression (the twins, Jester, Molly, Veth-as-a-goblin, and Fjord all experienced racism) and explored the concept of the other (the Dynasty) and Campaign 3 never did? And when we add that to all of the above - that this world has failed to set up religion as even remotely close to both the meaningful and the oppressive force as it is in our own, despite the gods being real, that the grievances are individual and not systemic, that nearly all actions by the gods are motivated not by greed but by survival - is this an anti-colonialist work? Does it grapple with the problems of decolonialism meaningfully? Or does it let a white American viewer fantasize about a world where they are the oppressed, under threat of colonization, where their personal grievances are all forms of systemic oppression, cleansed of their own complicity in these systems, and where they can never be blamed for their actions because this is all so hard to choose- despite a far softer and gentler world than the one in which we actually live. And does it do so in a work they were going to watch anyway because they've been watching since well before this was introduced, thus permitting them to pretend they are experiencing a sophisticated anticolonialism narrative without having to go through the effort of actually reading that linked pdf of Orientalism they reblogged?