#Part of Asia/

[allimili]

Could I maybe get a hug from shadow milk?

I unfortunately wasn’t able preorder the official shadow milk plushie from the cookie run store. I was so excited to finally get my hands on one without relying on eBay and my dad said he’d let me use his card. But then I saw the shipping price..which costed so much. I did find a listing on ebay(that didn’t include the special package) but I honestly don’t know if it’ll be real, a bootleg, or a scam.

I also feel like such a leech on my parents for asking for stuff due to how much stuff costs these days. This is probably a stupid doodle request and you do t have to fulfill it if you don’t want to. I’m just feeling kinda bummed out over this

[littleprincehyun]

Baekhyun teasing Jongin and Sehun 😂

[savebylou]

I don't know if my mutuals and fans from India that are going to Louis' show will see this but I hope you all have the best time ever. I'm so happy that Louis is visiting India, I have no doubt that he will feel so much love and support.

I hope this is the beginning of a lot of shows of Louis there. Enjoy every second of it. You all deserve this so much.

[dawnbreaker-mylove]

We really need to discuss this fandom's lack of knowledge in Asian/Chinese culture.

Tw: mentions of incest

I wanted to comment on the people thinking MC and Caleb are considered "stepsiblings" by some people and think their relationship is incest/stepcest. I'm not a Caleb fan but you can tell that there are people here that aren't familiar with Asian culture.

It's common in this part of the world to use honorifics especially if you're older. I get random kids calling me "ate" (big sister) when I don't even know who they are. "Gege" or big brother is the same concept as that.

Because it's rude to call your elders by their name.

It must be the porn brain rot because even "onii-san" has the same concept but because of hentai, it's sexualized.

"big brother/sister" is a title of respect. Kids get smacked on the mouth if they call anyone older than them by their names (I've seen it, I've experienced it).

Also, in China, there are a lot of families that choose not to have a second kid. So the term "gege" has become a term of endearment (eg. Honey, sweetheart, darling etc.) because of the lack of siblings there. Naturally, if you'd have an older boyfriend, you'd call them "gege".

Moral of this story: do your research before you out yourselves for having an incest kink. Y'all are embarrassing yourselves.

[the-travelling-witch]

damn, i can’t believe twisted wonderland got its own twst server before the rest of the world got one, now you’re just rubbing it in

[gelthefunkyblob]

happy international womens day 😁😁I made ASEAN all women

Mainland sea

And quick lazy sketches of maritime sea, it was supposed to be an only mainland thing but I wanted to at least do something for maritime too💔

I guess you can tell which group is the favourite LMAO well I am a mainlander so..

[gabbyp09]

Re zero S3 ep 2 - second and third loop 💀

[spineless-lobster]

I found a snail shell today :)

[sweet-potato-42]

cool fun fact for sunday

East Asia and South of South America are Antipodes meaning that they are in completely opposite points on the globe.

This means that when Acau joins we will have ccs in oppolise places playing together. People who physically could not be further away from each other.

The ones in buenos aires would be the furthest but i doubt Carre will play so I think cellbit or bagi are next. (idk where exactly they live but I'm pretty sure they come from the south of brazil)

Here is a map of the world showing antipodes. The areas in orange are perfectly opposite to each other.

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

Swear to god this will be the last post I make about it but they finally address the whole 'south American' lostbelt thing only to 1: keep calling it the wrong location 2: still not get the right location

Like I need them to be so serious right now, it's not like the Aztec and Mayan civilizations weren't spread through Mesoamerica but they were not primarily Central American and all the named locations in this lostbelt are named after places in Mexico! Which is in North America! Which is very explicitly not part of Central America!!

[tagamantra]

Tactical Combat, Violence Dice and Missing Your Attacks in Gubat Banwa

In this post I talk about game feel and decision points when it comes to the "To-Hit Roll" and the "Damage Roll" in relation to Gubat Banwa's design, the Violence Die.

Let's lay down some groundwork: this post assumes that the reader is familiar and has played with the D&D style of wargame combat common nowadays in TTRPGs, brought about no doubt by the market dominance of a game like D&D. It situates its arguments within that context, because much of new-school design makes these things mostly non-problems. (See: the paradigmatic shift required to play a Powered by the Apocalypse game, that completely changes how combat mechanics are interpreted).

With that done, let's specify even more: D&D 5e and 4e are the forerunners of this kind of game--the tactical grid game that prefers a battlemat. 5e's absolute dominance means that there's a 90% chance that you have played the kind of combat I'll be referring to in this post. The one where you roll a d20, add the relevant modifiers, and try to roll equal to or higher than a Target Number to actually hit. Then when you do hit, you roll dice to deal damage. This has been the way of things since OD&D, and has been a staple of many TTRPG combat systems. It's easy to grasp, and has behemoth cultural momentum. Each 1 on a d20 is a 5% chance, so you can essentially do a d100 with smaller increments and thus easier math (smaller numbers are easier to math than larger numbers, generally).

This is how LANCER works, this is how ICON works, this is how SHADOW OF THE DEMON LORD works, this is how TRESPASSER works, this is how WYRDWOOD WAND works, this is how VALIANT QUEST works, etc. etc. It's a tried and true formula, every D&D player has a d20, it's emblematic of the hobby.

There's been a lot more critical discussion lately on D&D's conventions, especially due to the OGL. Many past D&D only people are branching out of the bubble and into the rest of the TTRPG hobby. It's not a new phenomenon--it's happened before. Back in the 2010s, when Apocalypse World came out while D&D was in its 4th Edition, grappling with Pathfinder. Grappling with its stringent GSL License (funny how circular this all is).

Anyway, all of that is just to put in the groundwork. My problem with D&D Violence (particularly, of the 3e, 4e, and 5e version) is that it's a violence that arises from "default fantasy". Default Fantasy is what comes to mind when you say fantasy: dragons, kings, medieval castles, knights, goblins, trolls. It's that fantasy cultivated by people who's played D&D and thus informs D&D. There is much to be said about the majority of this being an American Samsaric Cycle, and it being tied to the greater commodification agenda of Capitalism, but we won't go into that right now. Anyway, D&D Violence is boring. It thinks of fights in HITS and MISSES and DAMAGE PER SECOND.

A Difference Of Paradigm and Philosophies

I believe this is because it stems from D&D still having one foot in the "grungy dungeon crawler" genre it wants to be and the "combat encounter balance MMO" it also wants to be. What ends up happening is that players play it like an immersive sim, finding ways to "cheese" encounters with spells, instead of interacting with the game as the fiction intended. This is exemplified in something like Baldur's Gate 3 for example: a lot of the strats that people love about it includes cheesing, shooting things before they have the chance to react, instead of doing an in-fiction brawl or fight to the death. It's a pragmatist way of approaching the game, and the mechanics of the game kind of reinforce it. People enjoy that approach, so that's good. I don't. Wuxia and Asian Martial Dramas aren't like that, for the most part.

It must be said that this is my paradigm: that the rules and mechanics of the game is what makes the fiction (that shared collective imagination that binds us, penetrates us) arise. A fiction that arises from a set of mechanics is dependent on those mechanics. There is no fiction that arises independently. This is why I commonly say that the mechanics are the narrative. Even if you try to play a game that completely ignores the rules--as is the case in many OSR games where rules elide--your fiction is still arising from shared cultural tropes, shared ideas, shared interests and consumed media.

So for Gubat Banwa, the philosophy was this: when you spend a resource, something happens. This changes the entire battle state--thus changing the mechanics, thus changing the fiction. In a tactical game, very often, the mechanics are the fiction, barring the moments that you or your Umalagad (or both of you!) have honed creativity enough to take advantage of the fiction without mechanical crutches (ie., trying to justify that cold soup on the table can douse the flames on your Kadungganan if he runs across the table).

The other philosophy was this: we're designing fights that feel like kinetic high flying exchanges between fabled heroes and dirty fighters. In these genres, in these fictions, there was no "he attacked thrice, and one of these attacks missed". Every attack was a move forward.

So Gubat Banwa removed itself from the To-Hit/Damage roll dichotomy. It sought to put itself outside of that paradigm, use game conventions and cultural rituals that exist outside of the current West-dominated space. For combat, I looked to Japanese RPGs for mechanical inspiration: in FINAL FANTASY TACTICS and TACTICS OGRE, missing was rare, and when you did miss it was because you didn't take advantage of your battlefield positioning or was using a kind of weapon that didn't work well against the target's armor. It existed as a fail state to encourage positioning and movement. In wuxia and silat films, fighters are constantly running across the environment and battlefield, trying to find good positioning so that they're not overwhelmed or so that they could have a hand up against the target.

The Violence Die: the Visceral Attacking Roll

Gubat Banwa has THE VIOLENCE DIE: this is the initial die or dice that you roll as part of a specific offensive technique.

In the above example, the Inflict Violence that belongs to the HEAVENSPEAR Discipline, the d8 is the Violence Die. When you roll this die, it can be modified by effects that affect the Violence Die specifically. This becomes an accuracy effect: the more accurate your attack, the more damage you deal against your target's Posture. Mas asintado, mas mapinsala.

You compare your Violence Die roll to your target's EVADE [EVD]. If you rolled equal to or lower than the target's EVD, they avoid that attack completely. There: we keep the tacticality of having to make sure your attack doesn't miss, but also EVD values are very low: often they're just 1, or 2. 4 is very often the highest it can go, and that's with significant investment.

If you rolled higher than that? Then you ignore EVD completely. If you rolled a 3 and the target's EVD was 2, then you deal 3 DMG + relevant modifiers to the DMG. When I wrote this, I had no conception of "removing the To-Hit Roll" or "Just rolling Damage Dice". To me this was the ATTACK, and all attacks wore down your target's capacity to defend themselves until they're completely open to a significant wound. In most fights, a single wound is more than enough to spell certain doom and put you out of the fight, which is the most important distinction here.

In the Thundering Spear example, that targets PARRY [PAR], representing it being blocked by physical means of acuity and quickness. Any damage brought about by the attack is directly reduced by the target's PAR. A means for the target to stay in the fight, actively defending.

But if the attack isn't outright EVADED, then they still suffer its effects. So the target of a Thundering Spear might have reduced the damage of an attack to just 1 (1 is minimum damage), they would still be thrown up to 3 tiles away. It matches that sort of, anime combat thing: they strike Goku, but Goku is still flung back. The game keeps going, the fight keeps going.

On Mechanical Weight

When you miss, the mechanical complexity immediately stops--if you miss, you don't do anything else. Move on. To the next Beat, the next Riff, the next Resound, think about where you could go to better your chances next time.

Otherwise, the attack's other parts are a lot more mechanically involved. If you don't miss: roll add your Attacking Prowess, add extra dice from buffs, roll an extra amount of dice representing battlefield positioning or perhaps other attacks you make, apply the effects of your attack, the statuses connected to your attack. It keeps going, and missing is rare, especially once you've learned the systematic intricacies of Gubat Banwa's THUNDERING TACTICS BATTLE SYSTEM.

So there was a lot of setup in the beginning of this post just to sort of contextualize what I was trying to say here. Gubat Banwa inherently arises from those traditions--as a 4e fan, I would be remiss to ignore that. However, the conclusion I wanted to come up to here is the fact that Gubat Banwa tries to step outside of the many conventions of that design due to that design inherently servicing the deliverance of a specific kind of combat fiction, one that isn't 100% conducive to the constantly exchanging attacks that Gubat Banwa tries to make arise in the imagination.

[knightofleo]

"How do you feel about spraypaint-gate?"

[have-you-seen-this-animal]

have you done vinegaroons???

Not yet!

Also known as vinegaroons, in reference to their defense mechanism of spraying an acid that smells similar to vinegar at their attacker.

[blacksunrequiem]

Disclaimer: I wrote this post as an enthusiast for Dune: Part Two (2024) and the ‘seductively sick’ portrayal of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. Any other thoughts or comments are welcomed and appreciated! TL;DR: The aesthetic choice of Feyd’s blackened teeth aligns well with the widespread custom in ancient Vietnam — a sign of beauty, maturity, and even brutality. Read more below. Original photos belong to their respective owners.

Teeth blackening in Dune: Part Two (2024) through the lens of Vietnamese culture

One thing that mesmerizes me about Feyd in the 2024 Dune movie is his blackened teeth. Not only does this provide an impressive physical appearance for Feyd, but it also reminds me of a long-lost fashionable custom in my home country.

Original inspiration. As far as I know, the film crew creatively invented this aesthetic for the movie from the inspiration of the black mamba (a type of venomous snake in sub-Saharan Africa) and images of geisha with black teeth. Similar to folklore and legends, other countries and ethnicities also dyed their teeth black with their local traditional recipes.

Vietnam-specific. Particularly in Vietnam, teeth blackening was once a popular aesthetic choice for both commoners and noblemen. As teeth blackening was a sign of elegance and decency, it was prevalent for Vietnamese women to adhere to this practice. This custom was deep-rooted as early as 400 BCE and grew so profound as an indicator of being ready for marriage or fierce on battlefields. Side note, Vietnamese people would not dye their teeth black until they came of age; it was indeed a statement of maturity.

A clash between the East and the West. It is also hilarious that until the early 20th century in Vietnam, white teeth were regarded as barbaric; only animals, savages, and evil spirits would have white teeth. During this time, one may casually make a sarcastic remark about pretty girls with white teeth such as “Oh you’ve got a pretty face but your teeth are as white as doggo.” On the contrary, in the eyes of the French colonists, the locals had impressive straight teeth but those were “as black as sewer pipes”.

Cannibalism? In some online discussions, internet users theorize that Feyd’s blackened teeth may indicate cannibalism. This fan theory is reasonable enough, because during World War I, to curb the abuse and bullying from the larger and stronger Moroccans and Senegalese mercenaries to the smaller Annamese counterparts, a French officer spread the rumor that black-toothed people were cannibals and could devour two legs in just an hour, terrifying the African mercenaries and bringing peace to the Annamese ones.

How to? So, without the privilege of wearing an Invisalign filled with black dye like Austin, how did the Vietnamese dye their teeth? In short, one must generally undergo the following stages to dye their teeth black: mouth sanitization, red dyeing, black dyeing, polishing, and maintenance, which on average took around three weeks. It was reported that the first teeth-dyeing session would rather be physically painful due to swelling mouth and lips, stinging sensation of the dyed teeth, and strict dietary restrictions (e.g., refraining from fatty and hot food, smoking).

On another side note, I don’t know exactly what the food that Feyd chewed in the early morning attacking Sietch Tabr and degrading Rabban, but to maintain the sheeny stylish black teeth, ancient and older Vietnamese often practiced betel nut chewing.

Dear Dune fan fic writers, please consider adding this long-lost social custom into your fics; multi-cultural representation would be greatly appreciated and respected.

Please let me know if you want me to delve into greater details of the teeth blackening tutorial in Vietnam. I may do a part two on this for my lovely Feyd and Vietnamese culture if you guys are intrigued!

[calvalia]

Hi there Cal. Love your outfit by the way! I wonder if you have been to a bunch of tropical islands in a region far to the east of Greece. I think the locals call it Nusantara or something. Have you met the people there? What do you think of them?

Well! Back in my day, they called these islands "Atlantis", though scholars of your time refer to it as "Sundaland."

I have a hymn written just about this, actually!

*pulls out baglama*

I haven't been there in a while though! Perhaps a visit is in order~

[marshmallowgoop]

Belated 2024 parts collection!

These are a few video parts I did for a collab and a couple MEPs (Multi-Editor Projects) last year. While I would have liked to participate in more, I'm glad I managed three. It was fun to try editing with other sources than just Detective Conan—and to focus on a different aspect of DetCo than I usually do with Sonoko and Makoto in the one Conan part!

The first part (using the anime film Belle and the Wicked song "What Is This Feeling?") is one of five that I edited for the DynamIC Duos collab event at BentoVid. Participants were secretly paired up to make an AMV to the theme "Opposites," and there was a bit of a game of guessing the pairs... but I was pretty obvious because of my subtitles! Still, it was great working on this video with my collab partner Kia, and you can check out all 10 parts here!

The second part uses Cascada's "Ready for Love" and the second season of Birdy the Mighty: Decode (and all episodes save 5 and 11), with the full video here!

The third part uses The Ready Set's "Love Like Woe" and Episodes 173, 268, and 993 of Detective Conan, as well as both volumes of the Movie 23 manga and TV Special 6 (Episode One: The Great Detective Turned Small), with the full video here!

(And because English-language access to Detective Conan is limited, and I like to plug what's available when I can: there is an official English translation of the Movie 23 manga! While it's only available in Southeast Asia, MPHOnline does ship internationally, and they have a few other English-language manga titles (like Zero's Tea Time) that aren't available from Viz (and without the FUNimation dub name changes).)