gallus-rising - Tumblr blog

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not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]

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i love the phase "knock you into next week" because it implies that time travel can in fact be achieved with enough violence

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If Araki won’t let his characters rest, then I WILL

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realizing that sticking to the "do it bad" "do it scared" mentality implies theres also a "do it bored"

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The situation of the Congo Genocide is complicated because we are all implicated in it. We can’t ascribe it to a foreign policy state interest as we can regarding Palestine. It is something we, as consumers, all have a hand in and given the ubiquity of the resources involved, a lot of us are caught off of guard by this premonition of the type of wars to come. This is that nasty intersection of neo-colonialism and hyper capitalism that pits the Global South against the Global North. It’s a war of sustaining a way of life means imposing slavery and genocide on others. This is an instance of global capitalism and hyper consumption as a lifestyle and convenience is being pitted against the humanity of those we deem expendable.

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Good morning

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Bleeding heart dove

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toshiro is also autistic and clearly envies how much laios doesn't mask and is able to say whatever he's thinking outright (he literally says so after their fight). and he was raised as like a minor lord or whatever in feudal japan so he learned to mask early on and that combination of masking + raised in a high-context culture + being in a foreign land with different etiquette means that he'll go through herculean levels of discomfort to not upset any perceived group balance and only snaps when he's like three days away from dropping dead. which is also something he sees in falin btw and is a big reason why he's drawn to her. imo

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you don't get it okay... you don't understand......... .

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Honestly it's weird that roleplaying as we know it evolved from historical wargaming.

Like for example DBA rules contain some suggestions for running campaigns with narrative and "propaganda" so I wouldn't say that it's something incompatible, and 0E looks way more like wargames than say PbtA games do, but storytelling games were a feature of artistic salons for way longer and they appear much closer to roleplaying than rulesets for reenacting ancient battles on tabletop.

Salon games didn't have skill checks but neither did wargames and it's strange that nobody came up with simplistic skill checks to add uncertainty and realism to the game

I think the line is a lot clearer when the role of dice and rules in tabletop roleplaying games is correctly understood.

"Uncertainty" and "realism" are, at best, secondary to what the dice are actually doing. Even most tabletop RPGs get it wrong when they try to explain themselves – they'll talk about the rules as something to fall back on to prevent schoolyard arguments (i.e., "yes I did!/no you didn't!") from derailing the story, when in fact it's the exact opposite.

If we look at freeform roleplaying as an illustrative parallel, we see that, while newly formed groups may in fact fall to bickering when a consensus can't be reached about what ought to happen next, mature and well-established groups tend instead to fall prey to excessive consensus-seeking: the impulse to always find an outcome that isn't necessarily one which everybody at the table can be happy with, but at the very least one which everybody at the table can agree is reasonable – and that's a lot more constraining than one might think.

In this sense, the role of picking up the dice isn't to build consensus, but to break it – to allow for the possibility of outcomes which nobody at the table wanted or expected. It's the "well, this is happening now" factor that prevents the table's dynamic from ossifying into endless consensus-seeking about what reasonably ought to happen next.

Looking to the history of wargames, this is precisely the innovation they bring to the table. Early historical wargames tended to be diceless affairs which decided outcomes by deferring to the judgment of a referee or other subject matter expert, but the use of randomisers increasingly came to be favoured because referees would tend to favour the most reasonable course, precluding upsets and rendering the outcomes of entire battles a foregone conclusion. This goes all the way back to the roots of tabletop wargaming – people were literally having "rules versus rulings" arguments two hundred years ago!

(This isn't the only facet of tabletop roleplaying culture which has its roots in wargaming culure, of course. For example, you can draw a direct line from the preoccupation of early tabletop RPGs with punishing the use of out-of-character knowledge to historical wargaming's gentleperson's agreement to refrain from making decisions based on information that one's side's commanders couldn't possibly have possessed when re-creating historical battles.)

To be clear, I don't necessary disagree that salon games could have yielded something like modern tabletop RPGs. However, first they'd have had to arrive the the paired insights that a. excessive consensus-seeking is poison to building an interesting narrative; and b. randomisers can be used to force the breaking of consensus, and historical wargames had a substantial head start because they'd figured all that out a century earlier.

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I’ve seen people pass around the “hold up, I’m googlin’ something” image but it cropped out the part where he was googling “how many guys can one guy take”

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I was today years old when I found out Yusuke Murata uses BL as a reference to draw male characters in One Punch Man

Now everything makes sense

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uwguwg

we got color and the blob yippee

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Knitting youtuber: I like to knit for 25 minute long blocks at most at a time with a 5 minute break within each so I do not get injuries.

Me who did a 14 hour marathon on the weekend with a team of 7 spinners and knitters to shear a sheep and knit a man's jumper in as short a possible time:

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Yo.

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