illogarithmil - Tumblr blog

[illogarithmil]

I cannot stand the parodies of modern major general, they're overdone and simply not as good as the original. They've done them about everything, whatever topic, big or small.

And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.

The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.

The scanning of the lyrics in the meter is unbearable, they emphazise the syllables in ways that are untenable, in short in matters musical, prosodic and ephemeral, i cannot stand the parodies of modern major general!

[illogarithmil]

look man climate change is going to render significant areas of the world drastically less habitable, maybe even totally uninhabitable, within the lifetime of most people reading this. There will be hundreds of millions of climate refugees (maybe billions) within the next two decades. Given this, ultimately the long-term policy choice is to either find these people a place in the global north or carry out acts of genocide the scale of which will make hitler look like an amateur. All mainstream politics is committed to the genocide policy.

[illogarithmil]

Palestinian human rights organizations have shown that one in five Palestinians has been arrested and charged in Israeli military courts since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967. Each year, this figure adds approximately 500–700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12, who are detained and prosecuted in Israeli military courts. During the ongoing genocidal war across historic Palestine, Israeli carceral violence and arrest campaigns have only intensified. In the months prior to October 7, an approximate 5,200 Palestinians were detained in Israeli prisons. As of mid-March, that number exceeds 9,000. Over the past five months alone, Israeli occupying forces have arrested over 7,600 Palestinians in the West Bank, in addition to an unknown number of detained Gazans. Conditions are worsening for the imprisoned. Immediately following the war’s outbreak, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) placed prisoners in total isolation, prevented them from leaving their cells, and restricted access to water and electricity. The agency ceased providing what had already been poor-quality medical care and has dispensed inadequate food, enacting a starvation campaign against prisoners. Guards inflict violence, torture, and degrading treatment such as reportedly forcing captives to “bark.” IPS also banned visits for family members and delegates from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and severely restricted lawyer visits—cutting prisoners off from the outside world. My research inside Israeli military courts and prison visitation rooms—both as an anthropological researcher and a family member of prisoners—highlights the systematic nature of this violence and its justification through legal codes. Through an intricate web of military laws and orders, Palestinians become racialized—a sociopolitical process through which groups are seen as distinct “races” ordered in a social hierarchy. The Israeli carceral system racializes Palestinians as inherently “criminal” and thus deserving of punishment. Following the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, the Israeli military was vested with the ultimate authority of government, legislation, and punishment over the Palestinian population. This includes prosecuting Palestinians in military courts and charging them under the nearly 1,800 military orders that govern every aspect of daily life: conduct, property, movement, evacuation, land seizures, detention, interrogation, and trial. The orders include provisions for indefinitely detaining Palestinians without charge or trial through a policy inherited from British colonial practices. Over 3,500 Palestinians are being held in this state as of early March. Other provisions regulate the arrest and interrogation of Palestinians and how long they can be denied lawyer visits. With a near 100 percent conviction rate, Israeli military courts hand down absurdly high sentences, sometimes amounting to dozens of life sentences. Torture inside Israeli prisons and detention facilities is sanctioned by Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) rulings that permit the exercise of violence under pretexts of “security” and protecting “public order.” Enmeshed within this carceral reality is Israel’s labeling of most Palestinian prisoners as “security prisoners.” This designation masks the political nature of their imprisonment and sanctions violations against them. As opposed to Palestinian “security prisoners,” incarcerated Jewish settler-citizens receive rights such as making telephone calls, going on home visits under guard, the possibility of furlough, and conjugal visits. These rights are denied to the mostly Palestinian security prisoners, who are viewed and racialized from the start as criminals.

26 March 2024

[illogarithmil]

it's been a bad year for essential workers, mental health, small businesses and probably many of the people reading this, but it's been a great year for hot takes

[illogarithmil]

Stuck on the idea of vampires as a kind of reverse fae, or like someone's twisted, perverse attempt at moulding humans into fae.

They're repelled by liminal spaces.

A vampire could never enter fairyland, not just because they'd never be welcomed, but because most of the usual entry-ways are naturally barred to them.

They can't cross running water. They can't be seen in mirrors. They will wait forever at a crossroads, unable to pick a direction to go in. They can't even step over a thresh-hold unless there is absolutely no ambiguity about whether they are welcome inside.

They crave human blood, iron and salt, but are repelled by herbs and plants. They are supernaturally prevented from harming you unless the rules of hospitality have been invoked.

A fairy may replace your newborn child with something unnatural and ever-hungry. A vampire will do the same, but with your grandmother's corpse.

The fae are typically associated, even in stories where they're the bad guys, with flourishing and purity. Vampires, even in stories where they're the good guys, are typically associated with decay and corruption.

The fae turn ancient human burial mounds into fancy halls for their courts. Vampires take ancient human castles and let them grow mildewed and cobwebbed, exchanging the beds for coffins, turning them into burial places.

Fae don't tend to live among humans, but can generally pass for them with relative ease if they so choose. Vampires nearly always live among humans, but tend to find not revealing themselves a huge struggle.

I can't think of many stories I've read where fae and vampires even exist in the same universe, let alone ones where they actively interact. I feel like their enmity is almost more inevitable than that between vampires and werewolves, however.

The rivalry between vampires and werewolves is, essentially, the rivalry between two apex predator species who share a territory. (Even in stories where the werewolves aren't actually hunting humans.)

The vampires hate the werewolves because the werewolves interfere with their access to prey. The werewolves hate the vampires either because they consider themselves aligned with humans (the prey species), or because they are also predators and the vampires are competing with them.

By comparison, I think there's some story potential in the fae finding something genuinely creepy and uncanny valley about vampires.

They're immortal, like them, but also dead. They can be beautiful, like them, but that beauty is something they actively require humans to sustain. They like to inhabit beautiful and ancient ex-human dwellings, like them, but they actively work to make those places dark, damp and empty.

Fairies who are unflappable in the face of all sorts of Otherworldly monsters, can look an eldritch horror in the eye(s) without blinking, and have never been phased yet by any human, but will recoil from even the weakest vampire.

Vampires who hate fairies just as much, but in a more envious way. The way that the creature for whom immortality is a curse is bound to hate the creatures for whom immortality is an eternity of sunlight and laughter.

Maybe their touches burn each other. Maybe vampires can't stand physical contact with anything so alive and vital. Maybe immortal fairies become ill from too much exposure to the undead.

Maybe they fight over the human population when their territories overlap. The fairy need for servants and people to make deals with, competing with the vampire need for thralls and blood to drink.

Just… fairies and vampires. We need more stories about them interacting.

[illogarithmil]

We are so back.

[illogarithmil]

It's only imperialism if it comes from the imperialist region of Western Europe. Otherwise, it's just sparkling subjugation.

[illogarithmil]

Huge news for fans of RuneQuest, Glorantha, tabletop RPGs, and gender.

The Six Paths is Edan Jones's sourcebook about non-traditional gender roles among the Orlanthi barbarians of Glorantha, setting for the RuneQuest TTRPG. Beautifully illustrated by 2021 Greg Stafford Award winner Katrin Dirim, it includes six example characters exploring the gender identities. This Gold bestseller Jonstown Compendium release is Pay-What-You-Want*, with the creators asking you to please consider donating whatever amount you would have paid for this to your local LGBT+ charity.

If you do wish to pay, please note that the author share of proceeds are donated to the UK charity Mermaids, while Chaosium's share is donated to the Transgender Law Center.

[illogarithmil]

everytime i see an advertisement i think about how literally millions and millions of people were slaughtered and starved and imprisoned for thousands of years of history so that we could extract the resources of the world to culminate in the creation of a device that tries to beam a demon directly into my mind who then tries to convince me to hate myself so i that i Spend some more of my life to get tokens to buy shit that no one has ever needed or honestly even wanted.. like no one actually wants any of this shit, they just dont know that they dont want it yet

[illogarithmil]

[illogarithmil]

As a Jew I wholeheartedly believe that, folks who are pretending nothing is wrong and Palestinians aren't being murdered every day would have absolutely ignored the Holocaust and let my folks get killed without blinking an eye.

Americans have a lot of heroic fantasies about what they would have done during the Holocaust or chattel slavery, and the answer for a lot of them is absolutely nothing. They would have complained about the people actually doing things for being too disruptive. We Jews did the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and they would have called this terrorism. They would have also complained about MLK and Malcolm X, the former of which took the economies of entire cities hostage. Modern day disruptions don't hold a candle to historical disruptions.

In a two of more decades, people are going to use excuses like "I didn't know!" or pretend they were supportive all along, making tear jerking films about the Palestinian plight. We need to not let them do this.

[illogarithmil]

DM Tip: The Debt Always Comes Due

Isn't it weird how little we engage with gold as a real gameplay system? Sure, at low level wealth makes a great questhook, the party is usually hurting for a payout so that they can afford necessary gear upgrades/ubiquitous healing potion restocks/their next trip to the magic item shop. After a while though the promise of raw wealth loses its lustre, and the party is less likely to go out of their way to accept bounties, go off chasing treasuremaps, or accept gigs from shady patrons.

Generally I'd advise that this is a sign that your party are done being run of the mill sellswords, and it's time to hit them with a big epic questline that's focused more on emotional and narrative stakes than base currency. That said, sometimes you want to run a longer adventure arc that's centred around the acquisition of wealth, but to do that, you're going to need to go against the grain on one of the foundational assumptions that underpins D&D both mechanically and narratively.

TLDR: If you want your party to be motivated by gold past their first big pay off you should consider using a "wealth hurdle", which in short is a narrative and gameplay challenge that forces them to collect not only more gold than they already have but also more gold than they could get doing what they've been doing so far. This can be anything from a crimelord calling in a debt on them or one of their allies, a powerful monster swooping in and demanding tribute, comissioning some grand construction, or funding the defence of a region. Having the hurdle active should cause problems for the party, and not clearing the hurdle before a perdetermiend deadline will immensely bad things to happen. This will force the party to take risks they otherwise wouldn't, giving a high degree of focus to their subsequent adventures that they wouldn't have if they were content.

What we're trying to fix:

At it's core, D&D is a power fantasy, and a good chunk of its gameplay mechanics regardless of edition are about acquiring new strengths, options, and assets. These assumptions are likewise built into the genre and narrative structure of most campaigns: Heroes undertake quests usually for the promise of some reward, gain experiance/hit milestones along the way, and eventually stumble across some kind of loot drop at the end. There's nothing strictly wrong with this, but it does mean that all the resource problems the heroes face in the early game (and the inbuilt motivations that come along with them) are all but resolved by the time they hit the next gameplay tier.

This is complicated by the fact that outside of 3rd party options there's not much to spend money on. The DMG (which you should totally ignore) say you shouldn't let them buy magic items, and the common wisdom would say "let them buy a keep", but that solution only appeals a niche selection of adventuring parties.

Using Weath Hurdles turns acquiring gold not just into a quest goal but a gameplay challenge, forcing your party to scour the land for potential sources of wealth (and risk upsetting whoever or whatever happens to be currently holding it) and take on challenges they'd never normally attempt if there was only survival/personal enrichment at stake.

Food for Thought:

Tradional d&d structure has the party getting a huge payout at the end of their adventure in the form of a bosshoard or questgiver reward which is a very backloaded "you can have your dessert after you finish your greens" sort of attitude. Consider switching it up sometimes: have the party's patron or employer give them a small stipend to spend on kitting themselves out, have an early game treasure haul so the party can have a mid-arc shopping episode. This is especially useful in higher level games where your party may go weeks to months without a level up as it preserves the feeling of progression and gives them new toys to play with in between the big character defining abilities.

Recently I've been learning my way around blades in the dark (can't reccomend it enough btw), and just like any other time I've wanted to learn a new ttrpg system I'm having to do a bit of neural rewiring when it comes to figuring out how to write and run sessions of the game. Coin in BitD is both an XP (used for upgrading the party's shared crew sheet) a resource (burned to upgrade the results of various rolls) and a stat ( rolled to see if the players can lay their hands on various hard to come by items). It didn't really click for me until my first group messed up really badly on what was supposed to be their introductory adventure and pissed off the local crimeboss. I was just going to have him bully them, lock them up and then have a jailbreak the next session ( it's what I'd do in d&d), but on the fly I had the idea that he'd let them go with a massive debt they needed to pay off, which forced them to either pay him a percentage of their takings on all future jobs, or do small jobs in utmost secrecy so that they could build up their own strength under his nose.

Interestingly enough, the d&d game where I thought player wealth as a resource was most interestingly used was Dimension 20’s starstruck Odessy, which was a conversion of the amazing fanmade  starwars5e system. Starstruck is a parody of hypercapitalism and aptly uses money as both a narrative and gameplay feature. One character is stuck paying weekly insurance premiums on a debt he would never be able to pay down forcing him to act recklessly to acquire wealth in the immediate future. Another character was a economic and political power player and some of the best moments in the series come from her high stakes wheeling and dealing and bouncing money between accounts while the rest of the group engages in epic space battles; the rest of the crew might’ve barely got their ship out of the dogfight, but she’s the one who ensures they can pay for the repairs once they get to the space dock.   None of this would be possible without completely ignoring the normal constraints of wealth per level: gaining and losing huge sums based on moment by moment player decisions, The need for them to play along with the absurist gig economy to boost their rating and get better paying jobs, making a devil’s bargain with a corporate sponsor all so that they could risk their lives in a deadly arena fight all for the (very unlikely) chance of winning the equivalent of a million GP.  Not every campaign should, or even could so focus on money in this way, but it was FASCINATING to watch it in action. 

Artsource

[illogarithmil]

Happy pride month from Edward III of England and Philip VI of France

[illogarithmil]

Polemical definitions of magic are fun. Everyone less materialist than me is a magician.

[illogarithmil]

know the difference!

[illogarithmil]

you've been salmonsharked reblog to salmonshark someone else

[illogarithmil]

Happy 24-6-01!