howlingwolfking - Tumblr blog

[howlingwolfking]

vegans making honey a bee labour issue is the funniest thing imaginable because like, you picked the one animal that has already unionised

[howlingwolfking]

You run a Bakery, just a normal bakery, the only problem is that your customers at midnight to 6AM are mythical creatures who pay with gemstones and ancient gold and silver coins

[howlingwolfking]

people are always like "Oh a vampire wouldn't get horny while drinking someone's blood, that's like getting horny while eating a sandwich" and like man have you never had a really good fucking sandwich?

[howlingwolfking]

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

[howlingwolfking]

broke: channing tatum sucks at a french accent

woke: gambit is cajun. cajuns just sound like that man. idk what to tell you. iirc he even got “sha” right (as opposed to the french pronunciation of chère). he doesn’t sound the way his dialogue is portrayed in the comics bc in the comics they just threw in some chère’s and some non’s and called it a day. channing tatum had the accent DOWN PAT

[howlingwolfking]

got a major pest problem this year actually

[howlingwolfking]

[howlingwolfking]

All of my friends that work at wildlife rehab centers have had to untangle animals from this stuff, or had animals brought in that died in it. This is especially nasty for small owl species.

[howlingwolfking]

the absolute freudian nightmare that is petyr and sansa's dynamic. he is obsessed with her because she's like a young version of the woman he loved while also viewing her as the daughter that could've been his, but the cherry on top is him making her call herself alayne which is the name of his own mother. meanwhile sansa is forced to accept petyr as her father whilst having to endure him sexually pestering her on a daily basis. radioactive levels of creepiness over here.

[howlingwolfking]

what farming items in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i’m not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i’m underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won’t produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes

[howlingwolfking]

Just to give you an idea of what archival research looks like these days, in attempting to track down the September 1988 issue of White Dwarf for a recent post, I stumbled across half a dozen DMCA takedowns from Games Workshop, a file-sharing service which no longer exists, multiple archives which inexplicably have every 1988 issue of White Dwarf except September's, and a worrying number of false positives because many periodical databases seem to be unaware that the UK and US editions of White Dwarf are different magazines, and they keep mislabelling scans of the US January 2016 issue as the UK September 1988 issue because they have the same issue number.

You wanna know where I eventually did find a correctly labelled scan of the stupid thing? In a random-ass torrent that wasn't even Games Workshop related – it was, like, a collection of Spanish-language sourcebooks for Vampire: The Masquerade, plus the September 1988 issue of White Dwarf, a Czech translation of H P Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth, and a pirated copy of Policing America: Challenges and Best Practices (9th Ed.) for some fucking reason.

[howlingwolfking]

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.

[howlingwolfking]

[howlingwolfking]

And they were pier-mates!!

Happy MerMay

[howlingwolfking]

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".

[howlingwolfking]

my uncle killed my father and married with my mother and now i must *remembers that suicide jokes do nothing for my mental health and wellbeing* put on a play

[howlingwolfking]

Deadpool’s instructive video may save your testicles