#intrinsically valuable

[uncanny-tranny]

I'm begging abled people to stop saying, "I'd rather die than have [disability]!" or, "how could you not choose to die?" about disabled people being disabled. This especially for those who have an acquired disability.

Maybe this sounds harsh, but if you value the function of your body to the point where you would sacrifice your life over it, that's your business and solely your business. However, that disabled person exists right now. They exist in the same world as you, with a disability you personally would rather die than have. They are alive right now. How the fuck are you going to choose to treat them? Because telling them or implying you'd want to die than be like them is certainly not a good sign.

[thebarebackhobbits]

singles inferno is like the perfect example of men not actually being interested in women but in the social status among their male peers for being associated with certain women. theres a reason they all go after one or two "popular" women like seulki in season 2 or jia in season 1. it's less of a genuine interest in them and more of a boost in social standing among other men, especially the other men there. because they fit the beauty standard they are seen as more "valuable".

i genuinely think the men see them more as social currency rather than people. this is why jinyoung's disparaging comments about so-e are especially disturbing when you think about it like that. also the way that every male contestant completely ignores sejeong when she seems like a very nice, humorous person. is it because literally nobody there is interested in her? or is it because she doesn't fit the beauty standard and therefore can't be leveraged for their own gain? hmm.

[slutdge]

Idk how to express what im going through anymore, imagine being skinned alive while listening to michael cera's cover of clay pigeons

[tattedpetticoats]

The best jewellery is the jewellery you find on the floor of the goth club and claim as your own

[olfactomancer]

Sooooooooooooooo……I went for The Chop™️

My hair is short.

Like pixie short

And honestly, it looks fucking great.

Considering doing a sexy lil photo set when I get done with work so I can show you beautiful people the new hair

That said I was super stressed about the dysphoria possibility it honestly I feel so much more femme and fulfilled with a short cut like this. Kind of a beautiful moment for me and my confidence I think. I of course recorded it because I feel like this is a pretty significant transition milestone as it’s my shortest my hair has been since starting e.

Anyway, mild rant over, sexy pics coming soon. Maybe with titty, and bulge!

[dw]

i also asked him like a week ago what he likes abt me and he was like "i love that you're incredibly charismatic you're the life of the party it doesn't matter if we're here at the bar or at the study space at school people are paying attention to you" which i was drunk so i was like 😍 but looking back i think it's so weird and i told him when i cut it off i was like it feels like you like me and want to know me for what i can show or how i can perform and not who i am. like idk saying maybe "confidence" or whatever would be different but it makes me feel like he only cared abt getting w me bc he wanted to see if he could pull and parade around some pretty shiny toy and the extent of actually wanting even a friendship w me ends there

[spacelesscowboy]

i hate doing the readings for this class they make me so upset

[fellhellion]

Deep cut Tunes lore but as someone who was like. Genuinely into TJLC at age seventeen I promise you a story not ending the way you think it would is not the end of the world

[seraqhites]

philosophy 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

[bmpmp3]

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

[saturnisfallingdown]

spn season 8

sam 3 minutes deep into a glow filter flashback: amelia… you saved me… but i know that we cant make this work… not how we dreamed of….. present day dean, about to get his throat ripped out:

[the-golden-ghost]

🔺for davy; how would YOU describe your upbringing?

"1 to 10? 10, certainly."

"Okay, if I had to admit it, I'd say I wouldn't have survived as long as I have if they hadn't taught me what they taught me. I know cruelty and human nature aren't synonyms for each other, but I learned early that they're pretty damn close, and it's better to be cautious than foolish. It wasn't an easy lesson, and it wasn't one I enjoyed learning, but if I'd grown up naive and trusting and open - would I have lived this long? Not likely. Someone would have taught me, along the way. I guess in a sense I'm lucky it was Agatha. That way there was never any real loss in it. A lot of people mourn their naivety; when they lose it. I suppose it's a blessing to never have had it at all."

[zedecksiew]

DECOLONISING D&D

In 2019, after seeing yet another round of alarmist discourse in Xwitter about how Dungeons & Dragons is FULL of COLONIALIST tropes and patterns, and needs to be revised, SCRUBBED of its PROBLEMATIC FILTH---I rage-tweeted this brainfart:

"Decolonising D&D"

I've seen this thread round the community, since. Humza K quotes it in Productive Scab-picking: On Oppressive Themes in Gaming. Prismatic Wasteland quotes it in Apolitical RPGs Don't Exist. Most recently, it was referenced in a 1999AD post about Western TTRPGs (an interesting discussion on its own merit; one that already has a counterpoint from Sandro / Fail Forward.)

If folks are still referring to it five years later, maybe I should give the thread a little more credit? Perhaps the fart miasma has crystalised into something concrete.

In the interest of record / saving this thought from the ephemerality of Xwitter, here is the text in full, properly paragraphed, and somewhat more cleanly expressed:

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"DECOLONISING D&D"

Firstly: saying "D&D is colonialist" is similar to saying: "the English language is colonialist".

If your method of decolonising RPGs is to abandon D&D---well, some folks abandon English; they don't want to work in the language of the coloniser. More power to them!

For those who want to continue using the "language" of D&D---

Going forth into the "wild hinterland" (as if this weren't somebody's homeland);

to "seek treasure" (as if this didn't belong to anybody);

and "slay monsters" (monsters to whom?)

Yeah. There's some problematic stuff here, and definitely these aspects should make more people uncomfortable.

But! I think it is an error to "decolonise D&D" by scrubbing such content from the game.

That feels like erasure; like an unwillingness to face history / context; like a way to appease one's own settler guilt.

Do you live in the West? Do you live in any Asian urban metropole? White or Person of Colour(tm)---you are already complicit in colonialist / capitalist (yes, of course they are inextricably linked) behaviour. (I can't speak for urban metropoles elsewhere, but I bet they are similar centres of extraction.)

Removing such patterns from the TTRPGs you play might let you feel better, at your game table. But won't change what you are.

I think it is more truthful and more useful NOT to avert one's eyes from D&D's colonialism.

The fact that going forth into the hinterland to seek treasure and slay monsters is a thing, and fucking fun, tells us valuable things about the shape and psychology of colonialism. Why conquistadors in the past did it; why liberal foreign policy, corporations, and post-colonial societies do it today.

Speaking personally:

I write stuff that evokes / deals with the context I'm in---Southeast Asia. An intrinsic part of that is looking at the ways colonial violence has happened to us---as well as the ways / reasons we now, supposedly free, perpetrate it on others.

A long chain of suffering. Heavy stuff.

I also write for people who want to have fun / kill monsters / pretend to be elves, of course. But for those people who want to consider serious stuff like colonialism: I offer no FIGHT THE POWER righteousness, no good feeling, no answers.

Only discomfort. Because the truth is uncomfortable.

Here's a screenshot of the Author's Note for Lorn Song of the Bachelor:

"Any text inspired by Southeast Asia has to reckon with colonialism ... This text presents a difficult situation; there are no easy solutions. "... If I offered a mechanical incentive for you to fight colonial invaders, you wouldn’t be making a moral decision, but a mercenary one. "The choice you face should echo ... the kind of calculus my grandparents faced."

I stand by that.

Also: might we be more precise and more careful about using the term "decolonising", please?

Here I quote Tuck and Yang's landmark and (sadly) still trenchant "Decolonization is not a metaphor":

"Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies ..."

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Further Reading

So this post isn't just me reheating a hot take, here are some touchstone writings from around the TTRPG community about colonialism as a subject and mode of play in games:

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"Jim Corbett was called upon to hunt down another fifty maneaters over the course of the next 35 years. Together, those tigers had killed over 2000 people, for much the same reasons as the Champawat Tiger - injury, desperation, starvation, and habitat loss. Would you look at that. The root cause was British colonialism."

D&D Doesn't Understand What Monsters Are from Throne of Salt

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"Another effect of having colonizers in my setting would be giving players the opportunity to drive them away from the islands, their home. This maybe just be for the catharsis. After all, isn’t catharsis a big part of why we play roleplaying games?"

I’m Adding Colonizers To My Setting from Goobernut's Blog

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"When you have a slime boy and the other characters are a really fat lizard and one's playing Humpty Dumpty, it completely shatters the straight-faced serious authoritarian illusion of race, and replaces it with complete fucking nonsense. I love the idea of proliferating the number and types of "races" into absurdity, to the point where the entire logical structure of it collapses in on itself and race as a category ceases to become coherent or meaningful in any sense."

Interview with Ava Islam - Designer of the RPG Errant from Ava Islam / The Lost Bay

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"Perhaps most critically, the fundamental basis of power is not land or even money but manpower. That’s what local rulers fight over, and what Chinese commercial networks export, in return for unique island products. It’s what the European colonists really need (even if it’s not what they most desire). There is rich loot to be grabbed in the form of spices, Spanish silver, Indian gold, sea cucumbers (the Chinese love ’em), perfumes, dyes, cloth etc. so there’s ample opportunity for piracy, trade and smuggling, but the key to long-term success – the key to independent survival – is nakedly and unquestionably uniting people."

Counter-colonial Heistcrawl: previous high scores from Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse

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"They worked their own land—which they dispossessed from American Indians—or became small shop owners or opportunistic gold diggers or bounty hunters or itinerant ranchers. To me, substituting these situations for one ruled by industrial monopoly ignores that the Wild West is a perfect example of how capitalism operates outside of (or prior to) mass industry, instead being composed of self-employers and self-sustainers."

Fantastic Detours - Frontier Scum from Traverse Fantasy / Bones of Contention

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"... using the Western framing and D&D's baked-in imperialist and capitalist structure to get people earnestly participating in the experience of forming imperial power structures and the early roots of regional capitalism ... The PCs aren't the drifters on the train or the townsfolk watching with apprehension - they're the railroad itself."

An Arrow for the General: Confronting D&D-as-Western in the Kalahari from A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

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[probablybadrpgideas]

I am actually the opposite of a fungus in that you can actually only kill me in a way that matters, because human life is intrinsically valuable.

So write that down first of all.

[kitsu-katsu]

Riz's whole arc with Baron starting from him lying about dating somebody to fit in and then transforming into Baron being a representation of Riz's fear of being left alone and behind, never more important than a hypothetical lover to his friends he's trying his damndest to keep together, working himself to the bone to keep them afloat and prove himself valuable to them because at his core he feels once everyone's found a lover he'll be left in the dust, an intrinsically visceral aro fear, all about not being accepted or not being understood for not wanting or not being able to feel that kind of connection the way everybody else seems to. He lied about dating. He's afraid they'll leave him behind for lovers like he will never have. That he won't compare to a romantic partner in his friends' eyes one day. It's all about the lack of romantic partnership

Some people with zero media literacy: He's not aro because Brennan actually said he's ace, so nothing's confirmed! He's just ace. His arc is about being ace actually because Brennan said so. Brennan said he doesn't have a romantic partner because he's ace. There's no way this is a thing about people always confusing the term aro for ace. Nope. He's just canonically not aro. Just ace