jdragsky - Tumblr blog

[jdragsky]

i hate how they market alexa as a ‘member of the family’ like that’s SO fucking blatantly insidious and terrifying also if i wanted an untrustworthy/cold/emotionless machine in my life i’d just talk to my fuckin father 

[jdragsky]

I think about how hayao miyazaki said that love is two people inspiring each other to live. and to live doesn’t just mean to be alive. living involves finding beauty in the simple moments of being. so to inspire someone to be in awe of the simplicity of living? that’s special

[jdragsky]

i actually don't care if this or that tgirl who was called out is, in fact, dangerous because the medium of the Callout isn't an effective vehicle for dealing with genuinely dangerous people in your spaces to begin with. it is a vehicle first and foremost for abuse, rumor milling and social murder, and any dangerous individual who's caught in the process is a matter of pure coincidence, not a result of the system working as intended. also i think the best way to make sure that abusive or predatory people get worse and even more dangerous is to socially isolate them and cut them off from anybody who could challenge them to change and own up to their actions. i don't support prisons for the same reason

[jdragsky]

the gregorian calendar is a roleplaying game

[jdragsky]

imagine you’ve been abducted by aliens. and they take you through their spaceship, and put you in strange robes, and stick a needle in your arm. there’s an enormous door covered in threatening symbols directly in front of you. one of the aliens hands you a phone with spotify open and mumbles something incomprehensible. you go yeah sure, alright, and you search up AJJ. the alien takes the phone away. soon you are behind the door, being laid on a table and wrapped under fabric, wires placed in your ears with an advertisement playing. as your head is weighted still with padding and you are thrust into the loud, thrumming white tunnel, you realize with horror that the alien with spotify doesn’t have premium.

[jdragsky]

kitten i have to be honest your misunderstanding of what 'death of the author' actually means is getting embarassing and mommy would prefer if you posted less or maybe attended some classes on literary analysis

[jdragsky]

if i ever interacted with you and it was awkward just know im sorry and painfully aware that sometimes i come off like a person who is having the first conversation of their life

[jdragsky]

diceless tatterpiggirl may be an indie darling, but for some reason none of the craps tables in catgirl las vegas are letting her play. that isn’t very “fiction first” of them!

[jdragsky]

It is so fucking embarrassing watching you promote liberal ideas against censorship. I thought you were better than that. It's bad when the UK punishes you for criticizing J. K. Rowling because they're serving capital, not because anyone should be allowed to say anything. Ideally they would have much harsher libel laws, and they would enforce them against capital rather than in its favor.

ideally the UK would be made of pudding. it's a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, dummy, all its laws are enforced in favour of capital and as a result it would be better if they didn't exist. libel laws and restrictions on speech in capitalist countries are in fact always bad for this reason and the UK's uniquely repressive ones are uniquely bad.

anyway freedom of speech is great, the reason the liberal conception of it is ridiculous is because it is fundamentally freedom of the rich to speak, like all bourgeois rights--read pat sloan's soviet democracy: all sorts of institutions in the early soviet union, from workplaces to schools, had their own worker-controlled newspapers in which the conduct of managers and administrators could freely be criticised and issues brought to their attention. this is a clear and obvious social good and what a real genuine freedom of speech looks like.

[jdragsky]

trying to clean my house [suddenly remembers im disabled] oh god the fucking fog

[jdragsky]

I'm sick of internet negativity, so let's combat it: reblog this and saying something nice/pay a compliment to the prev in the tags.

[jdragsky]

was at market today with my father (who is frankly a wild ape of a man) and i was trying to sell a single apple from my scrawny and shriveled tree. the apple itself however had a plump and rustic charm, almost flirtatious, and i thought to myself well surely someone will see the value in this apple and i can turn a tidy profit and go on my merry way. well no sooner had i attracted the attention of an interested buyer (a comely maiden to boot) than my father revealed to me that in his lackadaisical idiocy he had eaten the apple on the road. i asked him what exactly i was supposed to sell at market now, to which he responded im sure you’ll think of something, demonstrating to me that which i already knew: he was an imbecile with no modicum of grasp for the idiosyncrasies of mercantilism. but that was not the end of my troubles; nay, it was but the first chapter in a manuscript of misery, for as i turned to apologize to the maiden and endeavored to explain the predicament we now found ourselves in i could see stark displeasure writ plain across her previously affable visage. it was only then i realized her identity: marguerite, daughter of the baron, known for her fickle nature and her tendency to sic the village guard on those foolish enough to earn her ire, and though just minutes previously i had thought myself quite the intellectual giant (having nearly managed, you will recall, to sell a single apple to a lady of some means, sight unseen) i was forced to concede that i was said fool. it was then that i began to panic, and in my haste i offered the young mistress an apple even more enchanting than the first; one, i claimed, i had been saving for his majesty the king. well marguerite is nothing if not a covetous and prideful harpy, and thusly my promise quelled her bloodlust. she bade me fetch the apple at once, to which i replied that i’d need to return to my farmstead and i should be glad to present it to her at next weeks market. nonsense, said she, and insisted instead upon accompanying me and my incomprehensible dolt of a father back to our home immediately, escorted by a retinue of armed guards. now i imagine it is quite clear to those with half a head on their shoulders that i am in possession of no such apple, nor is it likely that a fruit of such splendor could even exist, and so frankly i am pretty much fucked

[jdragsky]

back in the 2000s and 2010s, "glomping" [1], sometimes done as a group in a "glomp circle" [2], was a disturbing niche nerd culture form of ambush sexual assault [3] and

[jdragsky]

So, it finally clicked that while the average person does in fact broadly comprehend that people are neither good nor evil - they're good and bad, and have free will - they also can't understand why some people would fully commit themselves to completely awful causes or to being a terrible person throughout their entire lives. They can't really picture how this works, because they can't imagine themselves choosing to die on a hill of Being A Terrible Person.

This void in their comprehension is where the myth of the Ontologically Evil Person is very likely to come and settle in sooner or later, because it seems to finally provide an answer that makes sense of otherwise senseless cruelty and violence. Agonizing questions like "Why would my boyfriend spend so much energy on making me feel like shit and breaking me down?" "Why would this historical figure decided to kill all of these people?" and "Why would this guy go start a cult and murder everyone?" are finally given an answer, and the formerly-bewildered person finally has some peace of mind.

Because of this, the myth of the Ontologically Evil Person is incredibly hard to get out of people's minds once it takes root. For one thing, bad ideas are like bad habits; it doesn't really work to tell people to Just Stop With Them, because without something else to take its place? They're going to fall back on it.

And if somebody's been traumatized from abuse? The last thing they want to hear is that they're basically dehumanizing their abuser and that's not cool, because it feels to them like the other person is taking their abuser's side and telling them to get fucked. Even if this not what's happening, the survivor's brain is currently operating on fight/flight/fawn/freeze mode, and a brain operating fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode is keyed to making snap decisions to try and remove you from the danger as soon as possible, which means categorizing everything into black and white. This person couldn't care less about the history of eugenics right now; literally all they care about is being safe.

"Okay, so if the Ontologically Evil Person doesn't exist, how the hell do you explain those fuckers over there?" some of you are probably asking.

Here's the deal. Literally every human being alive can and will do terrible things if they're sufficiently scared and desperate. They're in no position to appreciate that nearly all asshole behavior can be explained by a lack of critical social and self-management skills, or by a lack of access to self-improvement (including being too traumatized to trust means of self-improvement).

People who are scared, insecure, and under high levels of stress will often cling to anything that makes them feel better, because they want to feel safe and secure and not in psychological and/or physical agony. (Stress does an absolute number on your body, too.)

Being reliant on a shitty behavior, belief system, or product for some measure of feeling secure and safe is how you get people saying things like "If I didn't act mean, everyone would just walk all over me!" or "I was really depressed before I found this, so if I gave it up I'm going to get depressed again, and I might hurt myself." (And there might be some truth to this one! This might indeed happen if they give it up cold turkey, and without finding an alternative!) It's how you get people conducting """scientific""" studies to """prove""" that their bigotry is totally justified and not at all irrational. ("Well of course these people are genetically inferior, they wouldn't be poor and disease-ridden if they weren't... what do you mean, systemic inequality and uneven healthcare access? No that's obviously fake and made up by More Bad People.")

People also act in unhealthy ways to deal with personal insecurities implanted by parents or society. You have people out there whose parents drummed it into their heads that second place was for worthless losers, or that no one would love them if they didn't look or act a certain way. You have people who absorbed the idea that acknowledging the basic humanity of shitty people means that they have to forgive them and personally help them get better and just suffer through the abuse in the meantime.

This is how people choose to die on the hill of Being A Terrible Person. They weren't ontologically evil. They were scared, and they thought they saw a fortress on the top of that hill that would keep them (and perhaps also their loved ones) safe.

[jdragsky]

[jdragsky]

one thing that's interesting to me are the games with a low rate of Having Read compared to Having Played (for the queen, fiasco, and interstitial are all outliers here). i think this speaks to games that are very easy to play or you mainly pick them up if youre planning on playing them? vs. like wanderhome which has a very high rate of Having Read because people often enjoy reading the game just for the sake of reading it, and also because of itchio bundles

Visualizing @haveyouplayedthisttrpg's data

A while ago, I posted this over on the Indie RPG Newsletter but forgot to also put it here. If you haven't heard of Have You Played This, the blog runs polls about various RPGs and people can reply if they've played, read, just heard of it, or not even that.

Here's the highlights:

On average, these polls get 470 votes.

For the majority of these polls, more than 50% of respondents said they’d never heard of the game.

Out of 81 games that have been polled, only 33 games had even reached the eyes and ears of more than 50% of the respondents. Most people haven’t heard of most of the games!

And here's the image:

The image is a bit compressed. So if you’d like to read it comfortably, you can head to my google sheet and see it at full scale.

While this far from definitive (there’s also a huge variance in the number of votes for each game), it’s interesting to get a sense of what games are relatively popular. For example, Thirsty Sword Lesbians seems to be about as well-known as Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay on tumblr. Would you have guessed that? Actually, maybe, you could’ve. But would you have expected to see that Mouse Guard and Mausritter are roughly as popular – maybe tumblr just loves mice equally.

Also bless everyone who said they’d never heard of Pathfinder.

[jdragsky]

i BROKE MY BONG so i taped it up and my girlfriend sent me this