prokopetz

[prokopetz]

Long-time follower - thought you'd like to know that I ran the "rats in the basement have legal title to the inn" inadvisible quest. Once the party established that the rats actually do own the inn, and that the human owners' defence was "they're just rats!", things escalated remarkably quickly and the innkeeper ended up dead. The rats ended up inheriting the inn after all, and it all worked out in the end (apart from the murder).

(With reference to this post here.)

I do wonder sometimes how many people have actually tried to run one of those goofy things. Glad to hear it worked out!

[prokopetz]

The plot of Metroid Dread really leans on Raven Beak's dickery to convince the player that all the bad stuff is the Mawkin's fault, and not think too hard about the fact that it also establishes that the Thoha have a standard protocol for "what if one of our science experiments escapes and subsumes the entire planetary ecosystem?" Like, yeah, it's pretty funny that we now have a canonical answer for why planets in the Metroid-verse are so weirdly flammable, but why do you have a standard protocol for that in the first place?

[prokopetz]

You can absolutely "prove" that you yourself are their secret identity if you try, as long as you otherwise satisfy the phenomenon's somewhat nebulous criteria for plausibility.

Costumed superhero whose secret identity seems to be subject to some sort of anomalous confirmation bias. It's not that you can't prove who they really are – in fact, quite the opposite: if you start digging for proof that literally anyone is really them, as long as the allegation is even remotely plausible you'll eventually start turning up credible evidence that it's true. It's unclear whether this is part of their powers, or whether it's a different thing.

[prokopetz]

YouTube: "You can't say 'die' out loud – what would the advertisers think?"

Also YouTube: *just showed me an unskippable ad involving a man cutting a live pig in half with a tablesaw*

[prokopetz]

Today's aesthetic: media from that very specific slice of history where use of the word "straight" to mean "not involved in organised crime" and use of the word "straight" to mean "not homosexual" overlapped.

[prokopetz]

Costumed superhero whose secret identity seems to be subject to some sort of anomalous confirmation bias. It's not that you can't prove who they really are – in fact, quite the opposite: if you start digging for proof that literally anyone is really them, as long as the allegation is even remotely plausible you'll eventually start turning up credible evidence that it's true. It's unclear whether this is part of their powers, or whether it's a different thing.

[prokopetz]

The plot of Metroid Dread really leans on Raven Beak's dickery to convince the player that all the bad stuff is the Mawkin's fault, and not think too hard about the fact that it also establishes that the Thoha have a standard protocol for "what if one of our science experiments escapes and subsumes the entire planetary ecosystem?" Like, yeah, it's pretty funny that we now have a canonical answer for why planets in the Metroid-verse are so weirdly flammable, but why do you have a standard protocol for that in the first place?

[prokopetz]

If you claim you had "Capcom funds an anime adaptation of a comic where playing fighting games functions as a metaphor for gay sex, on the condition that scenes involving gameplay of the source material's made-up fighting game be replaced with actual Street Fighter 6 gameplay" on your bingo card for 2025, you're a damned liar.

[prokopetz]

You seem to be knowledgeable of this sorts of things, so if you don't mind. I'm trying to learn about real-life druids. I'm barely starting, but still, from what little I've read I have no idea of how they ended up being stereotyped as "nature clerics" by DnD. Would you know how that happened?

Druids aren't "nature clerics" in Dungeons & Dragons; they share some of the same game mechanics with clerics, but the actual media inspirations the two classes are drawing on have very little overlap.

To the point, however, the greater part of the reason D&D druids are Like That is because they're basically Merlin (i.e., the figure from Arthurian folklore) as interpreted though a very specific pop-cultural lens. At the time that D&D was taking shape, it was often asserted by New Age writers that Merlin was a real, historical druid who was later incorporated into the Arthurian myth-cycle (a claim that's now generally regarded as false), and this idea got tangled up with popular media depictions of Merlin to produce a picture of druids almost entirely divorced from the historical reality.

Some of those media depictions are quite recent, too; for example, while you can point to precedents for the D&D druid's weaponised shapeshifting shtick in various folk-tales, the way it actually works in the game is nearly a direct lift from Merlin's shape-changing duel with Madam Mim in T H White's 1938 novel The Sword in the Stone (though most folks reading this post are probably more familiar with the 1963 Disney adaptation).

[prokopetz]

Like, I want to be clear on the sequence of events here. Eight years of problem reports from paying corporate customers: zilch. Three days of getting yelled at by millions of free-tier shmucks who don't give a shit about your product identity and just want to text their mom: instant results.

It's kind of funny how Teams users have been complaining for the better part of a decade that the minimum width of the dockable chat windows is too wide, and Microsoft has basically been telling them to get fucked, then they discontinue Skype and tell all of its former users to switch to Teams, and within 72 hours of Skype going down for good, Microsoft suddenly pushes a "critical" update for Teams that gives it more flexible dockable chat windows.

[prokopetz]

It's kind of funny how Teams users have been complaining for the better part of a decade that the minimum width of the dockable chat windows is too wide, and Microsoft has basically been telling them to get fucked, then they discontinue Skype and tell all of its former users to switch to Teams, and within 72 hours of Skype going down for good, Microsoft suddenly pushes a "critical" update for Teams that gives it more flexible dockable chat windows.

[prokopetz]

(The New Age connection is also where a lot of the weird, ahistorical nature worship stuff comes from. There are other influences, of course, but if you take Neopagan "ancient witch-cult" bullshit and smash it together at high speed with mid 20th Century literary depictions of Merlin, you're already about 80% of the way to the D&D druid.)

You seem to be knowledgeable of this sorts of things, so if you don't mind. I'm trying to learn about real-life druids. I'm barely starting, but still, from what little I've read I have no idea of how they ended up being stereotyped as "nature clerics" by DnD. Would you know how that happened?

Druids aren't "nature clerics" in Dungeons & Dragons; they share some of the same game mechanics with clerics, but the actual media inspirations the two classes are drawing on have very little overlap.

To the point, however, the greater part of the reason D&D druids are Like That is because they're basically Merlin (i.e., the figure from Arthurian folklore) as interpreted though a very specific pop-cultural lens. At the time that D&D was taking shape, it was often asserted by New Age writers that Merlin was a real, historical druid who was later incorporated into the Arthurian myth-cycle (a claim that's now generally regarded as false), and this idea got tangled up with popular media depictions of Merlin to produce a picture of druids almost entirely divorced from the historical reality.

Some of those media depictions are quite recent, too; for example, while you can point to precedents for the D&D druid's weaponised shapeshifting shtick in various folk-tales, the way it actually works in the game is nearly a direct lift from Merlin's shape-changing duel with Madam Mim in T H White's 1938 novel The Sword in the Stone (though most folks reading this post are probably more familiar with the 1963 Disney adaptation).

[prokopetz]

You seem to be knowledgeable of this sorts of things, so if you don't mind. I'm trying to learn about real-life druids. I'm barely starting, but still, from what little I've read I have no idea of how they ended up being stereotyped as "nature clerics" by DnD. Would you know how that happened?

Druids aren't "nature clerics" in Dungeons & Dragons; they share some of the same game mechanics with clerics, but the actual media inspirations the two classes are drawing on have very little overlap.

To the point, however, the greater part of the reason D&D druids are Like That is because they're basically Merlin (i.e., the figure from Arthurian folklore) as interpreted though a very specific pop-cultural lens. At the time that D&D was taking shape, it was often asserted by New Age writers that Merlin was a real, historical druid who was later incorporated into the Arthurian myth-cycle (a claim that's now generally regarded as false), and this idea got tangled up with popular media depictions of Merlin to produce a picture of druids almost entirely divorced from the historical reality.

Some of those media depictions are quite recent, too; for example, while you can point to precedents for the D&D druid's weaponised shapeshifting shtick in various folk-tales, the way it actually works in the game is nearly a direct lift from Merlin's shape-changing duel with Madam Mim in T H White's 1938 novel The Sword in the Stone (though most folks reading this post are probably more familiar with the 1963 Disney adaptation).

[prokopetz]

Destined mortal enemies reincarnating across the ages, except the destiny in question has no power to ensure that either of them takes up a suitably heroic occupation in any given life, so sometimes it ends up having to go to considerable lengths to keep their rivalry alive and relevant in circumstances that absolutely are not conducive to it.

[prokopetz]

I want you to picture an animated version of this seguing directly into unedited footage of Juri Han doing that one weirdly foot-fetishy super finisher on Chun-Li.

If you claim you had "Capcom funds an anime adaptation of a comic where playing fighting games functions as a metaphor for gay sex, on the condition that scenes involving gameplay of the source material's made-up fighting game be replaced with actual Street Fighter 6 gameplay" on your bingo card for 2025, you're a damned liar.

[prokopetz]

If you claim you had "Capcom funds an anime adaptation of a comic where playing fighting games functions as a metaphor for gay sex, on the condition that scenes involving gameplay of the source material's made-up fighting game be replaced with actual Street Fighter 6 gameplay" on your bingo card for 2025, you're a damned liar.

[prokopetz]

I vaguely remember you saying something about writing a code to switch up you profile pic and I'm wondering, did you do something with your username? 'cause humm... I think Tumblr is stealing people's names and giving them to you, at least temporarily...

Tumblr is a highly functional website.