#quarantimes

[vaporevon]

covid sucks but it literally cant kill me cause i beat its ass in the parking lot

[sixohsixoheightfourtwo]

update another person is now in the hole. good morning @bauxitt 🫡

and edit to add. belated thanks @mangoamango . for your support 🙏

I’ve got super into youtube climbing / bouldering / ninja warrior type videos and all i can say is. why tf isn’t there any magnus midtbo / anton fomenko RPF huh

[theskoomacat]

most googled: "why are the residents of Germany shouting and honking outside my window THIS time?"

[comicdiaries]

I initially stopped wearing makeup out of laziness during the quarantimes and just...never really started up again. Saves me time and money though, so I don't miss it.

[dazzleluminosity]

Every day I dream that Elliot Page will make a sequel to Whip-It. Show the world how absolutely goddamn easy trans-inclusivity in sports is, and write a tale of comradery and acceptance for a new generation. You gotta understand, the quarantimes hit roller derby hard. Leagues everywhere are basically a living, breathing bad news bears inspirational sports movie where we are scrambling desperately to rebuild our teams and keep from losing our practice spaces. This movie could save roller derby.

[bobcatmoran]

Tagged by @autumngracy.

[painfullymeta]

Games and Gender

(Apparently I'm gonna occasionally be using the tumblr for the sort of thing I used to put in my political blog, back in the ancient days when I had a political blog.)

I am used to being the only presumed-woman in the game. (I wish I could remember Sunflower's acronym, something like people-socially-classed-as or something like that, but I can't. Or is that it? Maybe!)

It's actually not as true as it feels like; probably the majority of games I've been have had multiple women at the table. One of my current games (that started in the quarantimes) has one cis guy involved *at all*. (Also in that one when I proposed a trans character the GM made sure to have a Little Talk with me to be clear on whether I was doing so from an in-group or an out-group perspective.) Board game night was pretty gender equal (partly because sensible gamers marry other gamers, heh).

But my tabletop group that's been running on and off for... I'm not sure how long but it's over fifteen years because it settled *at* my house when I was pregnant? Men, and me. That high school game group where I started? Usually mostly boys, an adult man, and, again, me.

Raiding World of Warcraft? Either my housemate or I spoke up in Vent once, and a hush went over the chat, and someone said, in stunned, hushed tones, "There are _girls_ here."

Even back to childhood, there's the thing where my brother got the Nintendo, and I did not. (We did inherit an Atari from our cousins and that became my default console. Which is part of why when some crypto-gamergater tried to suggest to me that maybe there was a valid point and "girls" really don't play those sorts of games I went off on an enthusiastic ramble about Joust, which made him withdraw from the field, though he did not turn into an egg and/or fall in the lava.) My parents, I guess, didn't catch on that the thing I most wanted to do when over at certain friends' houses was 'play their computer games'. (They did give me basically the entire works of Infocom one year, though.)

I didn't particularly want games to be about gender. And I don't have any of the horror stories I hear about - the sexual harassment at the table, either of the player or of the character, for example. But it's not like the surrounding world gives a shit about what people want, in it, is there?

Because all sorts of things wind up being about it.

In my teens, I hit on the time-honored tradition of "work through some of your shit by building a tabletop roleplaying character around it", and I made a character in part around my desire to work through some feelings around my experiences of sexual violence. (As is often the case for this sort of thing, she'd been through worse than I had. As is also often the case for people in that situation, neither she nor I explained this bit of the backstory to anyone that I can recall.) And one of the other characters at the table, played by a boyfriend of the time, came on to her, and it went ... badly all around. And afterwards, he asked me, from his tone I guessed faintly offended, "Explain Hellcat."

I don't remember what I said. I do know that I was not at a point in my life where I could talk easily about having been assaulted. I do know that I was worried that if I brought up that this was part of her backstory, I would get asked uncomfortable questions like "Why would you include that in a character's story?" from someone who had had no reason to think about how that sort of thing is a part of many, many people's stories, and imaginary people are not actually an exception.

It was in her story because I was trying to work through what it meant that something similar was in mine.

(I note: this was literally years before a particular conversation with an assault survivor made me feel I had actual permission to be fucked up by my own event. I wasn't even there yet. I was just trying to process it. It was a game. I could explore ideas. In the long run, I could experiment with what it was like to figure out how to be loved after a traumatic event.)

I don't always build characters around particular experiences, though of course they all have a bit of me somewhere in them. But there are these niggling things like that conversation where I wind up just... aware. Not generally as blatantly as "Explain Hellcat." But.

And I mean, once the Warcraft guys got used to the idea of 'there are girls here' they weren't a problem. But they still had that moment of shock, of almost disbelief, that's one of the reasons I'd heard of people saying they never raided, or never spoke on the raid chat. At one point I was out on a male toon (I tended to roll up a male and female character for each species) and noticed that the conversation was about female gamers in the regional chat, and I felt like I was an infiltrator.

And of course I had a slowly increasing awareness of my own dysphoria, putting pieces together over time, and increasing irritation with the boundary-policing of gender and a whole bunch of other things that one might expect come out of having a hobby for a while (see also back in the ancient days when I had a political blog) of arguing with TERFs recreationally. Which is a whole different topic. But it comes around to a thing that's been annoying me for _years_, which is why I wrote [gestures upwards] all that right now.

There was a survey that came out after I started considering myself nonbinary. And it was asking for participants who were women in gaming hobbies. It was very, very clear on being trans-inclusive, by which I mean it said "this survey is open to anyone WHO IDENTIFIES AS A WOMAN".

Which I did not.

Did I have experiences that were likely relevant to "women in gaming hobbies"? Oh hell yeah. I've noted a few of 'em up above there.

Was I welcome to answer the survey? By the reading of the rules: nope. (Was I allistic enough to answer the survey despite it explicitly excluding me? Also nope.)

Which loops around to one of those transmasc experience things that I have also seen other people talking about: the need some people have to make the experience of gender clean-cut and clear in ways that it very much is not and cannot be.

I don't have the socially preferred "always known" narrative, and even if I had had it, there are places it wouldn't have fucking mattered. (Certainly not with an adolescence in an environment where I don't think I heard the word "lesbian", even, let alone got any information about the existence or possibility of trans people. Nobody was out at my school, about anything. And even if I'd known I'd have had no idea what to do with the knowledge.)

(And I *didn't know*. The puzzlepiece-shape of 'socially uncertain straight girl nerd' and the puzzlepiece-shape of 'autistic gay(?) transmasc/nonbinary nerd' are actually very similar puzzlepiece shapes and how the fuck am I supposed to tell the difference between "I don't understand this social thing" and "I don't understand this social thing (because it smacks of gender, specifically)" anyway? Certainly not at fourteen in the early 90s! I've been making "I was behind the door when they handed out the manual for that gendered expectation" cracks for TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. And I can date it that precisely because I started articulating any of this stuff when I was on usenet!)

Until I was, like, thirty, I was, as far as I *or anyone else* could perceive, an awkward straight girl/woman who could really have used learning words like "asexual" that didn't hit my social environment until notably later and who had a focused interest in queer-lens readings of Christian theology despite being neither queer nor Christian. That's the life experience I had. And there's eggy shit in there, sure, I noted some eggy shit *right in that sentence*. That doesn't change the nature of the internal experience and the external perception. Then it was a decade of increasing anxious exploration of gender and what I was, including an extended roleplay of a gay cis man (Kinsey 5, not 6, but) that grew out of some fanfic writing I was doing, which led to discovering that his skin was much more comfortable than mine to inhabit.

I still don't know what I am. I have anxiety about whether my transmasc nonbinary ass is male enough to be gay; whenever I'm doing an intake questionnaire or something that asks me about orientation I just sit and. Stare. For a bit. Because I don't feel entitled to claim 'gay', I haven't been there, my adolescence was not that, but I damn sure ain't straight either. (Anymore? I didn't have the internal experience of doubting it back when. The closest I got was noting an attraction to geek-as-gender masc people, as a geek-as-gender person; my wisecrack for years has been that I'm exclusively attracted to engineers and MIT students.) I appreciate it when these forms have an option for 'queer' because at least that doesn't ... require me to chop up my life until I can arrange the parts into something that has simple words and a simple, clear narrative that can elide my actual history.

And that's what people want, a lot of the time. If a trans man doesn't disavow his experience as a girl and a woman (whether or not he was aware of the disjoints there), he must not be "really" a man. If he tries to speak on his experiences with gendered nonsense or misogyny, he's speaking out of turn. He can either have credibility as himself *or* credibility as a person with a past, and because of that tension he can't _really_ have credibility as either, there's always that half-spoken "but—" that comes in.

If I speak as a woman about the gendered experiences I have had, I betray myself, and undermine any attempts to claim a space as not-a-woman.

If I speak as not-a-woman about those same experiences, then I am told I don't have standing. What I experienced wasn't _real_ whatever, because that only happens to women. (A lie, I will note, even when only said among the cis; I have met male rape victims, including at least one who was raped by a woman. I have met cis gay folks whose experiences with violence have absolutely had a context of feminization.)

The experiences still happened. I'm still here.

But no matter what I do, there's always an excuse to not hear me.

"This survey is open to anyone WHO IDENTIFIES AS A WOMAN."

(I am pretty sure they didn't mean to shut me and those like me out, but I am also pretty sure that to the extent they considered transmasc people existing at all, they assumed that we would be okay with playing at being women long enough to participate. Because the cultural assumption is that we're only playing at being men, after all, and womanhood is where we live, because there are consequences to it that are inescapable. No matter how much we want to gnaw it off like an animal stuck in a trap and carry on three-legged and free.)

Wherever my life goes from here, I don't know. Particularly not in the current moment. But I'm 100% sure that there will be people who are surprised by it, and they might even include people at my gaming tables.

But again back to that time-honored tradition of "work through some of your shit by building a tabletop roleplaying character around it"?

Both my tabletop characters at the moment are fairy-obsessed trans men; both of them have a history of asexuality that is partially linked to dysphoria (though Celyn is also just straight-up grey ace and genuinely baffled by his current feelings); both of them have a primary relationship with a man and are primarily oriented towards men. (Danny is both more gender-flexible and orientation-flexible, heh. Also species-flexible. And an exclusive monsterfucker....)

Anyone who's surprised by anything I do about this hasn't been paying attention. I kind of look forward to seeing what happens. Sometimes a guy's gotta be a gremlin.

[dicepunks]

New (Rest of an) Episode: 1.54B - Nightfall, Part II

So this one has already been in the feed for a couple days, but work has been so all-encompassing this week that there wasn’t bandwidth for both the editing/rendering/uploading process and the “telling people about the thing we worked so hard on” process. So, with apologies for the messiness of getting the finale all the way distributed to the listening public, we are so, so pleased to present to you…

Dice Punks Episodes 1.54A & 1.54B - Nightfall, Parts I & II!

I, Adam, am (figuratively) allergic to self-promotion or self-congratulation, so this is hard for me to say, but: I think this is good, that we did a good job with this campaign and this finale, and that it will be fun to listen to!

Nearly five hours of campaign-climactic listening, with a gratis Dice Peeks after-show in the main feed to celebrate! And atop that, our campaign-retrospective discussion/hangout epilogue episode will go live tomorrow evening.

So join us in all this actual-play audio-entertainment revelry, join one of our stalwart patrons over on AO3 for a delightful coda once you’ve listened to the finale, and also join me, Hollyhock God ordinaire, below the jump for some post-campaign musings, if that sounds like your thing!

So here we are, the end of our first full campaign. Perhaps unsurprisingly, looking back on our first full campaign to have wrapped has me reflecting on the origins of the podcast as a whole, so if that’s of interest to you, you’re reading the right post!

Our first episode, 0.1 - The Dice Punks Play Dicepunk, went live on 14 April 2021, but it was recorded well ahead of time in late 2020. It grew out of a Quarantimes diversion earlier that year, in which casual chatting online with friends who were also stuck at home turned into a weekly-to-biweekly campaign in a system & setting I’d been interested in trying out since 2009: Over the Edge.

It’s a very rules-light system with a very 1990s, conspiratorial edge to it, so I figured it’d be a good way to get Drew and Joanne into their first major forays into tabletop gaming, as well as giving myself a fun opportunity to try out a system and setting I’d wanted to play in for a while. And so it was! Every week, we spent a few hours just telling an amusingly absurd story together.

We conducted these sessions over Discord, and someone, I don’t recall who, eventually mentioned that we could use a bot to record the sessions for posterity. That suggestion then led to someone expressing an interest in participating should I ever decide to podcast a campaign. I responded that people should not joke about such things if they didn’t want to get roped into an ongoing podcast-recording commitment, and just like that, the kind-of-a-joke turned into starting a podcast.

Things moved very quickly and very slowly after that. I’d already been thinking of a mad, quixotic follow-up campaign to OtE in an ill-advised combination of the REIGN and Nobilis systems, using a setting of my own devising. This ill-advised idea was motivated by:

my desire to finally try playing Nobilis 2nd edition, after having read about it years before (also in 2009),

my love of the One-Roll Engine used by REIGN, and

the hundreds of hours I’ve spent playing Dominions 3, 4, and 5, and sharing the stories generated by those fractally complex systems with whoever I could rope into listening.

So I pitched the system idea to people, we played a one-shot to test the system, then we started drawing up characters. In the meantime, I had found there was a system out there already called Dicepunk, so I contacted its author to ask about the name we were considering. Between us, we decided our first episode would be a one-shot in a game using the Dicepunk system, and so our Psionics one-shot came to be!

After that, of course, Nightfall had taken shape, and we got started building a backlog ahead of launching the public feed. We started off recording in Discord (as a backup) and Audacity (for the higher quality, local recordings), but moved pretty quickly to Reaper, a digital audio workstation that didn't constantly lock up my desktop. And thus have we carried on through all kinds of things: Drew getting COVID just before some early recordings, Des getting brought into the main cast, Dask ascending, the campaign running a good 25% longer than I initially thought it would, and more.

Throughout Nightfall, our listenership has remained very modest, and our patron count has fluctuated between 2 and 3 people, but even in the planning stages, our attitude was always that if even one person listened to the fruits of our efforts, it'd be well worth it. And you know what? It has been!

So! I'm going to be trying to do a lot of promotion in the next month or so, since good jumping-on points aren't that common in campaign-based actual-play shows... but I'm not good at it, and we don't exactly have an advertising budget. (The awesome people who give us their real, actual dollars have bought TTRPG books and improved audio equipment for us, but no ads as yet!) If you're so inclined, we'd love for folks to share posts like this around, give us a listen, rate and review us, recommend us to anyone they think might like our stuff, maybe even check out patreon.com/dicepunks and dicepunks.com!

If you've read this far, we appreciate it, and we hope you'll like what we do -- coming up, we have more Extreme Meatpunks Forever, a mini-series in Unknown Armies, a Halloween special, and a new campaign in Hard Wired Island!

[to-the-fishies]

My uncle (my mother's brother, the one who lost a leg as a young man) passed away last week; my aunt found him last Wednesday. Age 72. Pulmonary embolism.

All 3 aunts on that side are carrying on with what they need to do: addressing the bank accounts, passwords, death certificates, records.

They expressed surprise that he died sooner than them: "He didn't smoke, rarely drank, stayed fairly active, didn't need meds" - whereas each of them has diabetes, high blood pressure, weight issues, a joint replacement or 4.

"We figured he'd outlive us all."

I pointed out that they were V---- women, ergo of the L---- family, and therefore they could reasonably expect to live forever.

It just hit me today, looking through photos to find pictures of him (and, incidentally, pictures of my mom with styled hair), that Grandma V, who had dementia for 10 or 15 years before she passed at age 92...Grandma V died in 2019.

It's only 4 years later. He lived 20 fewer years than his mother did. Grandpa V. died at 81, so Uncle lived 9 fewer years than his father.

That IS startling, and will probably ache more later. Right now I'm still startled by the changes in my mother since quarantimes; my brother and I are trying to encourage her to get her hair cut for the funeral.

[ardn516thephotographicimage]

Tanguy Delavet

"Im a Paris based photographer and videomaker. Centred around expressions, shapes, colours, light, and imperfection, my work focuses on capturing the energy and identity of the people and the places I encounter. I am in constant pursuit of a feeling, of a mood... of small clues to help me communicate what it was like to be in that moment and enable the viewer to feel present while looking at the images. My previous collaborations with various brands and magazines include: Jacquemus, Calmann Levy, Foudre Magazine, Bad to the bones, Nike, Élite Paris, Leica, Wagram, Silent Model."

= From the contact area on his website 

Tanguy Delavet Contact. (n.d.). Retrieved 08 23, 2024, from https://www.tanguydlvt.fr/contact

Curfew - Ouch, it's 10 p.m., to have to go home quickly, we're going to be checked.

Choice - Take time to discuss about everything, nothing or picking up a call ?

Quarantime - It offers us the luxury of taking our time, silently, in a place in perfect opposition to this principle.

This diptych was produced in 2019, far from the virus, where humans could guess their feelings, their boredom, anger, joy, concentration.

Researching another photographer I found Tanguy Delavet well known for shooting popular brands. I personally like his Sous-terre collection which is all about 'below the life' looking deeper and observing empty and silent places and how it shows emotion with people in the shots and how an empty image can also evoke an emotion. I like the tonal range and the saturation of his photographs which I definitely think I should integrate into my photographs moving forward.

[t440]

quarantime was 4 years ago (head in hands)

[99corentine]

Oh my gooosh this looks amazing! That is so ridiculously sleek and polished. The leather cover! The map insides! The silly Skyrim fic I wrote in black and white, and temple's art!!

I can't thank you and @thetempleofmara enough for the ridiculous amount of work you've put into all of this. I am blown away. Never ever in a million years did I think the fic I started because I was feeling sad in quarantimes would get to this point, or be this beloved.

I'll aspire to this level of awesome when I try to make my own binding T_T Though I'm a long way off this level of talent.

first bookbind in a WHILE… whoopsies

This fic was written by the amazing @99corentine !

Read “GOL HAH DOV” here!

And the incredible typeset was made by @thetempleofmara who put so much work onto it along side the stunning art!!

Check it out Here!

I had to change the cover up a bit bcs im bad at math and some letter were too small to cut out

Please send them both some love!!

[datubooty]

looking up gbbo 2021 (i’m behind) while i’m only on episode 4 because 🤷‍♀️ sometimes you want to see gifs of the cute brown girl 🤷‍♀️ and wow yikes there was drama during quarantimes

[adamsvanrhijn]

turning and facing the shelves every time somebody walks by me in the grocery store like some kind of edwardian housemaid who’s not supposed to be seen or heard by her ladyship

[mizufae]

I am reblogging this from deep in covid quarantimes because last week somehow this was determined by tumblr to need a mature label. So I appealed it, and I just received notification that my appeal had been reviewed and they are sticking by their decision.

Not that I expect tumblr’s absurdly vague definition of mature to have literally any consistency at all, but I have to point out the nonsense of this. First of all there is zero mature content in the actual post, it’s a direct link to a Twitter thread that has a video embedded, which you watch on Twitter, not tumblr, and the thread has no mature content either, just some innuendo and giggling. The video itself is of a guy in the 80s doing a calisthenics routine for a segment on a BBC variety talk show. Like, I don’t know how much stodgier and family friendly you want to get, you know? Admittedly, the man is wearing a mesh crop top and incredibly small shiny shorts, and he at one point rolls his hips a lot. But he is fully clothed, the context is not sexual, and the woman they cut to at the end of the clip is thinking contemplatively but says and does nothing lewd either. Yes, you can make out the shape of his genitals under the shorts, and yes, he is conventionally attractive. But if this needs a mature community label, so does literally all ballet, honestly all dance, including links to videos on other websites. So would literally any workout video, especially anything involving the glutes, or a woman in a sports bra, or someone doing downward dog in a yoga routine. Last I checked, everyone has a body, including minors. If some fully clothed hip thrusting in the context of a warm up routine from the 80s is mature, then middle school was the most mature time of my life.