#discourse preview

[mitigatedchaos]

Which of the following is the most ethical?

MOON PRISON - Inmates are kept in an isolated facility on the Moon. Books, movies, and other materials may be made available, but there is only very limited network access. In each room there is a 3D screen which shows the view of Earth from cameras outside the facility, but aside from an atrium, the vast majority of the facility is beneath the surface to protect it from asteroid impacts. Food and a limited amount of replacement parts are produced on-site.

CYBER PRISON - Inmates are placed into life-sustaining pods, and then connected to a full immersion virtual reality simulation similar to The Matrix. This allows inmates to experience running freely in an open-world environment without putting ordinary citizens at risk, although the environment is somewhat lower-fidelity than real life. The facility is located on Earth in a remote part of Iowa. It is intended that the network is isolated. In the event of an emergency, inmates will be ejected from the pods.

CRYO PRISON - Inmates are stored in a state of suspended animation for the duration of their sentence. The technology is highly reliable, with few side effects. Inmates will be the same biological age at the end of their sentence as when their sentence started. In the event of an emergency, backup systems in each unit will attempt to safely bring the inmate out of cryostasis. With no food, active life support, or VR server farms, this is the cheapest option.

Feel free to provide your reasoning in the reblogs.

[atopvisenyashill]

rhaenyra haters will accuse the show of imposing modern feminism onto a period setting while also expecting hotd to pause in the middle of war crimes to monologue about "how every form of woman is valid, uwu." they would cancel elizabeth i for bragging about having the heart of a prince inside the body of a weak and feeble woman before fighting the spanish armada.

no omg that really gets me like when she got girlboss allegations for “i would rather be a knight and ride to battle and glory” her mom just called her a womb you guys i think it’s fine if a fifteen year old in a pseudo medieval setting awkwardly says “no mom i don’t want to be a baby machine i want to do something else with my life.” it’s just like yeah i agree they have this issue with completely stripping female ambition and often cruelty from primarily rhaenyra & alicent and this preoccupation with like “women would run the world better” and the type woman typically envisioned as a Girlboss was a glaring issue with the original series - not even speaking to the nonsense they made Arya, Asha, Lyanna M., and Brienne say but just look at the way they wrote Talisa. THATS a snarky, anachronistic woman of indeterminate class they clearly thought was Cooler than jeyne but in reality she’s empty.

but that’s not what’s happening here lmao like this isn’t asha straight up calling theon a cunt in the show despite her distaste for the word in canon, it’s rhaenyra being told by her mother “remember your job is to have babies” and rhaenyra going “no thanks.” acknowledging sexism exists and it sucks is not like, sexist itself and i know that i as recently as like two weeks ago phrased something in a way where i’m now like “hmm” why do we expect characters to give dissertations 😭😭 i love to accuse male writers of girlbossification but people on reddit love to use “girlboss” to describe just any woman aksjdjd

[deliriousblue]

finished the episode of peaceful property and i'm still thinking about it an hour later.....the thought crossed my mind when home startled at the mention of the car but i didn't expect them to actually go there because when is a show willing to have one of the lead characters literally have killed the other and have gotten away with it freely.

up until now we've seen home's family taking advantage of people and we've seen the way that home treats others (e.g. forcing peach to perform when they moved in). but now we're forced to directly contend with home not just being complicit in his family's actions but actually having himself done something that is inexcusable.

and on top of that the way that peach's tremor is explicitly a physical manifestation of his guilt over (in his mind) causing chef hong to die, directly preventing him from being able to pursue his chosen career. meanwhile home due to his family's wealth and status was able to go on with his life as if nothing had happened! they're similar right up until they're very much not.

also just loved how setting the episode at the restaurant let us get insight into peach while still fulfilling all the right notes as a ghost-of-the-week and the way that this time peach was the one to receive solace and let go of his (metaphorical and literal) ghosts....really good episode.

[beedreamscape]

WARNING FOR COMPLAINING 🥰

Now that all eps recordings are up... the ExU Divergence thumbnails are so ugly.

The image quality is weird, the lighting looks blown out, they look awkward, their outfits are mismatched.

And the people here (Divergence cast) are HOT. Ffs.

See? Cohesion! Sexy.

Look at it side by side with Downfall, and it wasn't even ExU proper. But Divergence's doesn't sell the tone of what we're about to watch AT ALL! Why those clothes? Why that gold frame that looks so awkward?

By all means do something to differ it from previous seasons but also make sure I can look and recognize that is Exandria Unlimited.

Please, this was THE season to put them all in black outfits or something grunge. Go raid Taliesin's old closet, you'll find them in there.

[llimerrence]

I never watched girl meets world. But what do u mean the two girls aren’t endgame??

[bad-aew-discourse]

AEW Double-or-Nothing Preview

AEW, a company that has been circling the drain for five years, has another premium live event tonight, so I'm going to spend my short time on earth dunking on a show I don't watch.

When Chris Jericho was in WWE, he was a legend and the first ever Undisputed Champion, but in AEW, he's the guy who had a mediocre WrestleMania 18 main event. A title with the prestigious lineage of the For the World Championship shouldn't be defended in a triple-threat match, against a guy with a generic "The Wrestler" gimmick and Hook, who will definitely be in WWE next month. This Shibata guy probably wins because he seems like Meltzer fave and that's the only person Tony Khan books for.

Ugh, Dean Ambrose has fallen so far that AEW had to make up yet another title just to give him something to do. He isn't even defending this made up belt against this guy I've never heard of! 🤣😂🤣 Anyway, this Takeshita guy definitely wins because champions always lose nontitle matches to build to rematches. Obvious. 🥱

Jeeze, will AEW please fire whoever is in their graphics department? They can't even be bothered to color in their Women's Champion! 🤣😂🤣 Anyway, Toni Storm isn't getting a reaction from the crowd, and Deeb, despite being a poor worker, is a natural babyface, so Tony should switch the title here because it is time to shake things up.

An absolute waste of natural superstar Roderick Strong who could be main eventing an important show like Main Event if he had stayed in WWE, yet here he is in the minor leagues babysitting a rookie who tattooed an attendance figure on his arm. I don't know, man. Will Ospreay just isn't developing as a star and really should have gone to NXT. Tony Khan probably puts the title on Ospreay here, even though he is completely not ready to be in that big of a spotlight. Expect a lot of blown spots. At least it will give AEW Botches plenty of content! 😂🤣😂

Why is this a premium-live event match?? These guys go out there and kill the ratings every week (according to the old guy podcast I follow), and and there is a absolutely no story. This is just a match happening to have a match with guys who get no reaction from the crowd. I know, I know, AEW is just indie wrestling workrate garbage, but a little sports entertainment wouldn't kill them. This is a good time to take a bathroom break without missing anything. Orange Cassidy probably wins, continuing Tony Khan shoving his pet projects down our throat

Trios match going to be so boring fr fr 🥱🥱

Another match with zero story?? Classic AEW!! 🤣😂🤣 Edge is an absolute legend who wrestled The Greatest Wrestling Match of All Time with Randy Orton, but he has done nothing since going to AEW. No feuds with his best friend. No being corrupted by Malakai's influence, possibly reverting him to being the evil Master Manipulator he used to be. Zero stakes, but AEW will probably paint over all of their botches with blood. I guess Edge wins, but it's really hard to care with nothing on the line.

Although I'm not watching this show, I'm still boycotting this match. The Young Bucks are the worst thing in wrestling. They can't work. They get zero reaction. And I think it's disgusting how they personally fired Cody Rhodes. Even worse, they are now featuring Jack Perry, a man who went up to famously good dude CM Punk and bullied Punk until the Bucks could personally fire him. Absolutely disgusting behavior, and their partner Kazuchika Okada is some indie loser no one has ever heard of. I feel so sorry for Daniel Bryan. He has to team with some goth kid trying to be Cora Jade and two guys who look like a diet version of The Revival. Let's just get through this mess so Bryan can get back to WWE and get his career back on track.

This match.

What a mess.

Mercedes Mone is a megastar, but her handling in AEW has been so, so bad.

Like, Mone is getting boos. She is your obvious babyface because she is the bigger star, and she is getting booed. Do you know how hard it is to get fans to turn like that?? Either Willow Nightingale has done a fantastic job getting people behind her (which, lol, I can't allow that possibility to fit into my worldview) or AEW is total garbage and will be dead by August. Expect an absolute heatless mess as the crowd hijacks this. Mercedes should win and be booked to be invincible, going over all of these AEW losers, but who knows what cocaine-addled Tony Khan will actually do?

How depressing is this?

Since winning the title last month, Swerve has barely been on the shows. If AEW were really behind him, he would be on practically every show, every week. He would be the focus in the opening segments. They would do countdown timers to his matches. He would be involved, even loosely, with the most important storylines like what is going on with The Elite. He would be facing adversity like having the stablemates he neglected turn on him.

But, no, I have seen none of that happen as I spend my Wednesday nights hate posting.

And, so, Swerve is defending his title against an absolutely heatless tag team wrestler, Christian Cage, who hasn't done anything of note since the TLC matches of the early 2000s. Why would anyone care? Swerve has no history with any members of Cage's Patriarchy, especially not Nick Wayne who got attacked in his own home and bloodied in his dead father's ring last year. Swerve and Cage never lost a high-profile tag team match at AEW's biggest show, which also happened to be the time Swerve turned on his friend AR Fox to side with Christian Cage which might matter if Swerve were doing a redemption arc. Just . . . I don't know. This is a perfect example of why no one in the r/AEWSucks subreddit cares about AEW.

So, there you have it, one more AEW premium live event that no one will care about or even watch. If you want to see some actually good wrestling with stories, you should check out yesterday's King and Queen of the Ring from Saudi Arabia and certainly not AEW Double or Nothing LIVE on PPV and Bleacher Report from Las Vegas, Nevada.

[springlock-suits]

Oughhh saw a discord server link for something I might like but ough.. scary...

[comicslina]

Me dodging all the leaked Batman 138 spoilers like

[bubmyg]

nails are gold happy golden release week

[mitigatedchaos]

2027: Youtuber Astroblob336 attempts a "distracted driving" prank, appearing to eat a 5-course meal while his car is driving down a highway, to views of stunned onlookers. He is pulled over by a police officer. A crew member for the shoot, who has been controlling the car using a phone app and a game controller from the trunk, pops put of the trunk, startling the officer.

The police officer draws his gun, but does not fire. However, in attempting to step back from the officer, the crew member enters a lane of traffic. The driver of a fuel tanker truck witnesses this and swerves to avoid hitting them. The truck rolls over on its side, and the tank hits both the police car and the Youtuber's car before igniting, killing all three people in its path.

This becomes an issue of national discourse, as the crew member's family sue the police department, alleging the officer created a dangerous environment, while the police union sues the Youtuber's estate, alleging that the original distracted driving prank was itself a crime and caused the dangerous situation, including the loss of the officer's life.

[shenefelts]

Discourse On the Method by René Descartes But In The Past Tense (Not To Be Philosophical) Page Preview

Find (am) & Replace (was)

Whatever happened to Stupid Town?

People used to blow over from it all the time.

Now it’s like they can’t find their way back.

[welcometoteyvat]

I think this has stewed in my thoughts for long enough that I'll release it to the void: lowkey I still don't get the difference in reaction between natlan and sumeru (design wise, skintone wise idk. not talking about the plot). maybe it's just fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, but at the same time it just feels like nobody cared after the initial shock/disapproval because there were multiple attractive guys or something (or because it still looked vaguely historical fantasy??? or bc idk expectations?? what people expect out of a region inspired by mena (broadly) vs latam/africa??????). sumeru's reaction was so positive i felt like i was losing my mind with how everyone seemed to be enjoying the characters. I suppose having good writing or having round characters/dynamics makes people more forgiving of the design or everyone was satisfied enough with sumeru designs after the initial wave of redesigns idk idk

[psychhound]

announcing spiritkeep: a therapeutic ttrpg

howdy all! some big announcements!!!

first, im nearing the end of my master's program, studying rhetoric and writing, games, and educational psychology. im about halfway done with my thesis, and figured it was time to make an announcement …

my thesis, entitled "designing ​spiritkeep​: therapeutically applied RPGs as a discourse community" is … about what it says on the tin :) in it, I look at the practice of TA-RPGs, which are TTRPGs run for the express purpose of inducing therapeutic growth. TA-RPGs are usually run by a clinician, like a therapist or counselor, or a certified therapeutic game master. my thesis is looking at the needs of therapeutic game masters as a community and asking … what do they need from TTRPGs that isn't currently available?

the thesis takes concepts from rhetoric, linguistics, game studies, literature studies, psychology, and more to ask the question … what would a TTRPG specifically designed for therapeutic use look like? i examine concepts like bleed, close to home characters, dramatic rehearsal, performative speech acts, fixed vs growth mindsets, information processing theory, and more. i also look at criteria set forth by current TA-RPG practitioners for what makes a good TA-RPG, and examine five current games against those criteria. then, i put together the research into a foundation for spiritkeep, a dedicated TA-RPG

spiritkeep is designed around the goal of helping teens and adults heal from complex trauma

that said, its perfectly suitable for a homegame as well, as long as everyone is on the same page and approaches it with the mindset of collaborative growth. all in all, it's still going to be a fun game and a good TTRPG!!

in spiritkeep, you play as a smalltown taskforce with the shared goal of restoring your currently struggling community to a thriving state. you go out on missions like finding resources, diplomacy with neighboring cities, researching ecological problems, and more, while you slowly make your town a better place to live. spiritkeep includes collaborative worldbuilding, a large assortment of playbook options like the Wayfarer, the Knight, the Ghost, or the Shepherd (all designed to hit where it hurts, at least a little!), and a brand new system inspired by PBtA, FitD, BOB, WoD, and more. while the game is designed around grappling with identity and learning how to grow, it can also get a bit tactical and crunchy!! the new dice mechanic makes you think on your feet with every roll

this announcement is also to say that i am beginning the initial crowdfunding of the game through itch. right now, im trying to raise funds to pay the fee to my school to make my thesis open access, meaning anyone can read it. then, remaining funds will go towards things like resources, consultants, art for the kickstarter, and everything else i need to get this project off the ground. ideally, ill be able to team with a publisher to cover the logistics of business while i can focus on the game itself. once the game is finished, there will still be plenty of playtesting, consulting, and other work to do. but!!! this post marks my first steps towards what has been my dream for years now

this sale is how im starting the funding process. it includes the zine preview of my thesis, covering my chapter outline and big concepts, and also my first TA-RPG: with breath & sword, a solo game to help players calm down from anxiety. both items have community copies available: please feel free to grab one if you can't contribute !!

questions, comments, or partnership offers can be sent to psychhoundgames @ gmail(.)com

thanks y'all!!! wish me luck!!!! 🥰🥰🥰

[destinationtoast]

Hello! I keep hearing that fandom culture has changed, and there are less comments now than there were years ago. Have you noticed this in your analysis? Is the percentage of comments being left today lower than before?

Hey! Thanks for the question -- it prompted me to start collecting data about comments (after procrastinating on it for a while, because I had to write new code to gather comment data). I've also seen other discussions from folks also thinking about how to do this kind of analysis (like in the fandom data projects community) -- hopefully we'll end up with multiple people attacking this from different angles and getting a variety of data about comments!

I'll give a sneak preview that partially addresses your question and contains some good news. If we look at the fraction of AO3 works that get at least one comment (focusing just on one-shots for now), I think things have gotten better over the past decade on AO3*:

In other words, it tentatively looks like more works were getting at least one comment in 2024 than in 2014 (for a variety of time periods). One caveat, though -- if a bunch of works with no comments got deleted in the interim, there will be survivor bias here. I'll try to look into that possibility later. Another caveat: this is based on only like ~100 randomly selected works from each year -- this may all change with more data!

Another interesting tidbit: I still see some of the 2014 works getting comments. In fact, ~30% of works have gotten new comments over 5 years after they were posted, and it looks like ~10% of one-shots posted back in Mar 2014 got a new comment in 10 years later, in 2024.

I'm still doing other analyses; there may be other factors that better match with the discourse around how comment culture has changed. It could be that comment activity peters out faster now than it did back then, for instance. Or the total number of comments left on the popular works is less now than it was back then (though my current methods may not be able to capture that). Edit thanks to quick eagle-eyed readers: it's likely that some of what people are thinking about is ratio of comments to hits -- that is hard to compare in 2014 to 2024, because we don't know which hits came from which years. But I am working on some analyses along those lines. :)

If you have other hypotheses about what's changed in commenting culture, feel free to share! I'll look into what I can.

Some methodology notes:

*I've been tackling this by comparing AO3 one-shots posted in early 2014 to one-shots posted in 2024, and comparing activity in the days/weeks/months immediately after the works were posted. (To start with, I'm only scraping the first page of comments for each work -- meaning the first 20 comment threads -- so there are lots of comments I'm potentially missing for the really popular works. But for many works, this captures all the comments, and I think it may be sufficient for a lot of the analyses I am interested in.)

I'm choosing to focus on 2014 vs. 2024 because 2024 is close to now (but it's been long enough for comments to have settled down a bit), and 2014 was well after AO3 was established (thus it was already a pretty lively time on AO3). I don't want to collect data about every single year because it's too time intensive/too hard on AO3's servers. But if people think that I should be looking at different years, I'm interested in feedback.

Because it's only been ~10 months since March 2024, I am limiting a lot of my analyses to only look at commenting activity the first ~10 months after works were posted in both cases.

[jesncin]

Not to push my luck and talk about Johnstantine and King Shark again, but I just want to discuss how,,,sad it is that these characters get treated so differently by fandom and how their legacy has been deeply unkind to non-white characters.

Johnstantine has a fantastic, well-written run that portrays a dimensional character with palpable humanity. It's to the point fans treat John like a real person that shouldn't be joked about because "he matters to people! He survived the AIDS crisis!" (while conveniently leaving out characters like Ray Monde or Davey) even when he is a fictional character at the end of the day. I'm not a fan of modern bi-jokes galore flandarized DC!John either and I recognize Vertigo!John's historical importance as a queer character, but I don't like fandom's attempt to moralize liking him "the correct way" by acting like he's a real person. Some of yall talk about him like he's Kevin Conroy or Howard Ashman or Freddie Mercury and that's odd. Like yes it would be distasteful to write those real people into flandarized characters and ships, but John isn't real. He is at the mercy of whatever writer writes him, for better or worse.

Ultimately John is a fictional character, and that's okay- you can have preferences on how he's written over decades without moralizing your tastes. I don't get this "he's flandarized into ships with cartoon characters" sentiment like what do you mean? John himself has been a cartoon character as often as Zatanna has been. If a ship like JohnZee isn't one of these flandarized fandom ships, then what are you talking about? Nanaue? The usual punching bag to the "Johnstantine is being flandarized" discourse, right?

And that's when I get sad. Because Nanaue doesn't get to have a well-written debut story the way John did. No, King Shark is from Superboy 94, a run that largely takes place in Hawai'i. With a deeply racist and orientalist depiction of Hawaiian characters and myth. Nanaue is appropriated nearly whole cloth from Hawaiian mythology and has since then been mostly brought back as a "big idiot brute" joke character often divorced from his indigenous roots. I've been told countless times that people didn't know King Shark is a native character. He doesn't get the dignity of characters like the Monkey Prince get to have under Gene Yang's pen. We're lucky if DC even remembers that part of him.

And yes I recognize that myth!Nanaue and DC!Nanaue are entirely different figures. But it's disingenuous to see how this character was adapted from native religion with his name and backstory attached, then portrayed as a "thuggish buffoon"- to be a neutral adaptation without racist or ableist connotations.

I look at these new preview pages for Supergirl and it's depressing. We now have "Princess Shark" a Sharknado joke villain who Supergirl just dunks into the ocean and flies off as the story centers a white girl. I wonder if they'll even bother giving Princess Shark a Hawaiian name. They sure didn't bother giving her native clothes. The optics would've been weird, so whitewashing King Shark's native roots is clearly the better option.

There's all this talk of dignity to fictional white guy Johnstantine (a character made by white guys based on Sting, a white guy). When, the irony is, if there is any character more based in reality when it comes to the Johnstantine x King Shark ship, it's Nanaue. He's the one who has basis in real Hawaiian beliefs, mythology, religion, and history. I get that DC's treating Nanaue as a joke most of the time, and it's wishful thinking to believe the white dominant fandom would do better- but at least I want us to think about it.

Hawaiian culture and history are victims to cultural genocide from violent colonization. Adapting a character from their myth is not a neutral act. Ignoring that history and whitewashing it is not a neutral act. If we recognize that John is a politically important character as a punk from the 80s-90s during the height of the AIDS crisis, then can we even give a fraction of that energy to non-white characters? Even when they're not well written? Just because DC doesn't respect these myths, doesn't mean you should too.

[dangermousie]

Most of the time Twitter discourse on anything gives me hives but this is the most spot on comment about this drama I have seen.

This is a girl who thought she’s not worthy of a pot of soup or a 88y cake or a 100y skirt. How much more so of Sang Yan’s love and care? Her family, people who are mandated to love her, viewing her as a burden and worthy of nothing, really really messed her up and it takes years to climb out from that kind of thinking.

Breaking off with him back then is such a realistic self-sabotaging move that my heart hurts. She’s not worthy in her head but also he’s worthy of someone better (she explicitly says that to her friend that is what her thinking was) and I bet there is a side of “he too will soon enough realize I don’t deserve it better end it first” there. Breaking off and then retreating from anyone because she doesn’t think she should have anyone’s care or attention at all. Oof!

The thing is, in modern day she is slowly shedding this - she knows she does not need to put up with her mom’s awfulness, she has a cat (at least a creature to love), a friend and I think is slowly emerging from her shell.

One of the spoilers I have from the novel is that at some point she point blank tells him she will woo him/chase him and also in preview for ep 12, she totally fakes sleepwalking to hug him. And honestly in addition to romance deliciousness, this is just a huge sign of healing for her - chasing him means she is beginning to accept she is worthy of good things, of pleasure and love, that she can fight for them.

Now I need her to buy herself a cake for the fun of it.