mostlylarp

[mostlylarp]

Everything should be banned in public lest I experience it without consent.

[mostlylarp]

it wasn't even weird for the time. there was just so much MORE of it than anyone else.

I feel like a lot of contemporary efforts to analyse the humour of Homestuck at its peak end up on completely the wrong track because they approach it as some kind of freakish anomaly, and lack the necessary context to understand the extent to which mainstream Internet humour circa 2012 was just Like That.

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strychnine > rat poison meme, you're truly suffering from success

Let me answer this with an essay for some goddamn reason.

The resource management mechanics have always been a source of comedy. Sometimes it's from taking a mechanic extremely literally, eg. does Artemy rush and crush his tinctures in P2? Is that the arbitrary reason why the bottles can't be reused (it's probably more to do with not contaminating them, but it's not super consistent what contents count as contamination)?

Or sometimes it is absurd without needing to nitpick, eg. in P1 you can catch rats in a bag and race them for money. Yes it's silly, but it's kind of a metaphor for the three protagonists competing to cure the town in their own ways. You're meant to consciously or subconsciously realize, watching your rat double back on itself and miss the obvious goal in front of it, that you're the rat. Put a pin in that thought.

When it comes to the mental health mechanics in P3, they're still taking feedback on them and tweaking them to make them challenging but also immersive, so there's time to let them know if anything is too absurd. But if done right in the final release, it will emphasize how important Daniil's mind is for him to function. You'll be constantly reminded that this isn't something to take for granted.

I also have a feeling that Daniil's apathy death represents the constant urge to kill himself he's dealing with, but the fact it turns everything into black and white film suggests it's not "canon" that he literally could shoot himself in any circumstance, right in front of anybody. The time travel mechanics involve him replaying his memories, chopping them up, and editing them as if they're a tangible film reel (for some reason that makes me think about famous incidents of Soviet censorship of physical media, and the supernatural turn that takes in Disco Elysium lore? maybe there's a connection here). If you let apathy sink in, that represents him—or you the player—giving up on playing this particular section, on editing this section of the film. He gives in to the suicidal impulse in part because you've relived this part of his ordeal wrong, and he abandons that reality to try a new one.

Which brings us to the strychnine. It is a poison, but a very small amount can make you high, and historically, people took that risk. It seems like there isn't a sensible limit to how much of it you can ingest as Daniil Dankovsky, though. Daniil's mind is fracturing more and more as he relives and rewrites his own memories. Keeping him immersed in the reality of each memory involves feeding him poison to get him high. What does that tell us? That he's not reliving these events so that he personally can survive them. Even if giving up on trying to fix the past is a suicidal act, the effort of trying to fix the past is also suicidal, self-sacrificial. This is how it was in Marble Nest. He wasn't reliving the day over and over to escape his own death—at one point he considers shooting himself to contain the infection.

The comedy of Daniil eating "rat poison" is in the impression that he, like suggested by the P1 rat races, is in fact one of the rats. His time looping seems so futile and doomed, and he is forcing himself to do it anyway by overdosing on a stimulant that was used in his time by athletes and academics, to the point where it transforms into its other, more dehumanizing use, killing vermin.

[mostlylarp]

A whole array of Rumpleteazer make-up looks sported by Dava Huesca in Cats: the Jellicle Ball aka Cats PAC NYC

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"Rationalism" is up there with "Objectivism" in terms of "definitionally funny things to call your own belief system".

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i have been noticing recently that people younger than me are too sensitive, while people older than me are not sensitive enough. which, if i'm correct, should be taken as a sign that the total reality penetration vortex is operating as intended -- within as few as five or six generations we may very well be producing babies who can directly perceive the wound at the heart of the world

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The United States Disappeared Tracker is “tracking persons politically arrested, detained, or disappeared by the Trump regime since March 9, 2025”.

[mostlylarp]

walking my dog

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People have objected to the comparison between D&D fans and gaylors in terms of imagined gayness but like. I'm sorry babes, but the gayness of D&D literally is imagined.

D&D has queer representation in its art and fiction, this is true. Does that representation actually matter for the sake of the themes of the game and its gameplay, as presented in the game? No. You can decide that your elf is gay, and hey, who wouldn't, but the game will just stare at you blankly and not do anything with that information. It's literally fluff in the same sense that your character having blue eyes or being left-handed is. As written the game has nowhere to go with from that information.

But even more so, the thing that inspired that post was people insisting that D&D's gameplay and fiction does somehow interface with queer experiences and is, actually, meaningfully about the experiences of a queer found family and sorry I'm not going to mince words here but that part you straight up did hallucinate.

[mostlylarp]

I think any marriage needs its running jokes, ones that you can repeat with variations, or make callbacks too.

One of my favorite bits is describing the romcoms I watch to my wife as though I have never heard of a narrative in my life.

"She runs a small plane company, and he's from a major airline trying to shut her down, so it's really anyone's guess what's going to happen."

"Get this, he's a stuffy office dork and she's a free spirit, and they end up stuck in the same cabin on a cruise. Sounds like a disaster, right?"

"They've decided to pair up and be each other's plus one at a series of weddings to feel less pathetic, but it's not like they like each other or anything."

So I told my wife that I hoped she would still enjoy me doing this bit forty years from now, and she smiled and held my hand and said that she'd never liked it, not even the first time.

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Laios heaven is Marcille hell it.s a very efficient system

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Your rules design does not need to be so clever that it somehow tricks GMs and players into the intended experience.

I believe this might have been already said by someone at some point, but I feel like what I have to say is tangentially related to this post and so I'm going to say it anyway.

When writing a TTRPG YOU CAN EXPLAIN WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A CERTAIN MECHANIC. It's legal. You won't go to jail for that. It's so helpful. Please do it.

I'm running early beta tests of my own ttrpg and all of my testers find it so surprisingly useful. The fact that the little explanation next to your rule has a little "this is to facilitate X amongst the players" or something like that at the end is of great help to the players and of even greater help to the GM, and I can't stress this enough.

[mostlylarp]

genuinely wheezing laughing at this description of dicken's awful pet with lead poisoning

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the true meaning of this post will be revealed in 2016

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what if it GETS her though 😥

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you contradict yourself because you contain multitudes. i contradict myself because i am wrong.

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