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A brief summary of Danbooru, 9/19/2018-present

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Even if Doc Brown himself isn’t a good example, I could see the trope evolving very naturally from everyone trying to piggyback on BttF’s success. So Doc Brown founds the “Mad Scientist Uncle” trope, which afterwards picks up the amorality that Doc Brown himself never had as more conventional Mad Scientist tropes find purchase with the imitators.

The reformation of the Genius Inventor With Grand Ambitions And No Concept of Right And Wrong archetype from “stern cautionary tale of man’s hubris” to “weird uncle” is kind of fascinating to me, because I’m pretty sure it happened within my lifetime, but I can’t pin down when or how.

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I’m just happy they don’t have Hunter speak in “surfer dude” accent.

“I’m a faun, you dork.” (x)

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I usually use it to mean “text wall incoming”.

I love how “there’s a lot to unpack here” can mean both “this is utterly inexplicable” and “this is actually completely explicable, but I’m sure as hell not going to be the one to explick it!”

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I’ve been sitting on this information for well over a year, waiting to announce it with a bit more pizazz, but I guess I’ll just say it now.

-1784338777788894343 was an incredibly famous seed in the old days of Beta Minecraft that, like every famous seed in the old days of Beta Minecraft (Glacier, anyone?) was presumed ruined when beta 1.8 came out and changed the way the map generated. But, if you load up the seed in modern Minecraft (or really any version after the 1.7.2 “update that changed the world”) you will find that the hollowed out mountain that made the seed famous back in the day is back (or at least roughly two thirds of it is)! You’ll spawn a short walk west of the hill, but just navigate towards 0,0 coordinates and it’ll be there.

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Crossover fanfic written collaboratively on a forum, but the two source materials are so different in tone that their fandoms have almost no overlap, so 90% of the writers don’t care about the other side, resulting in a power-level argument in fic form, basically like type A except who’s doing the outdoing and who’s looking foolish or cowardly changes hands every chapter, with a side order of the fic constantly undoing its own plot points.

AKA “The Imperium of Man comes to Gensokyo”.

I’m not sure what’s worse:

crossover fanfic where the author clearly hates one of the franchises involved, so it’s all about characters from the one outdoing characters from the other and making them look foolish and cowardly; or

crossover fanfic where the author loves both franchises so much that everyone is terribly impressed and ends up spending half their time monologuing about how admirable and awesome their designated counterpart from the other franchise is.

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Of all the nerd sex symbol archetypes, “perpetually scowling girl whose only visible emotion is being vaguely annoyed at everything” perplexes me the most. Since when is grumpiness sexy?

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(with reference to this post here)

Look, if it had so much as a different color scheme, I would have let it slide. But a fat skeleton with a blue “jacket” and black pants strikes me as hard to chalk up as a coincidence!

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(The original idea, for anyone else who may reblog this)

The immediate reaction was that the “casual” fighter descriptor was something of a misnomer - the game is still asking for a fair degree of finesse from the player, even if that finesse is more streamlined and easier to pull off. Which seems like it’s kind of the point? But...

“Thing is that the average player doesn’t want to do deliberate inputs at all, so unless actions are so slow that you have no choice but to wait (ala Dark Souls), they’ll wanna mash buttons.

Like... when I play  fighting games with casual friends, they just want to pick the coolest-looking guy, try to see all their silly moves, and eventually someone wins. The more random it seems the better.” -Trotim

The way you immediately backpedaled with “this is an idea for a casual fighting game, I’m not saying all games need to remove execution barriers”, implies that you don’t consider this a game “for” the hardcore crowd, but that means that you’re going to be tying to sell this to people who don’t have the patience for any of the precision or finesse of typical fighting games, because if they had that patience they’d be in the hardcore crowd. Those are the only people who are going to care about 896 specials or upblock, and if they like the 20 move long muscle-memory dependent combos to the point that they’ll turn up their nose at any game that doesn’t have them, then that only leaves a small sliver of “middle-ground” players who will be interested in what this game has to offer, from a mechanical standpoint at least.

“I support streamlining execution, but when hardcore FGC people are against it, what's the point? No one else will get that deep into them.” -Trotim

For what it’s worth, I quite liked your idea (I wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise). I’m very much an outsider to the Fighting Game scene and only kind of half-understood what you were saying, but what I could pick up I was very on-board for, and I think the issues with the genre that keep me from getting into it are the same issues that you’re trying to correct as an insider here. There could be a large potential audience of people like me who would be receptive to this game, but those people aren’t going to be “casual” players, just a different breed of hardcore.

the discussion has probably long passed in the time i’ve been asleep, so can you just give me the gist of it?

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No love for the Atomic Bong?

Alternative proposals for things to drop on your opponent’s base in Fallout 76:

Bath Bomb: Raises the water level throughout the map. A great idea if your base is on higher ground; otherwise, not so much!

Bee Bomb: Self-explanatory.

Box Office Bomb: Afflicts everyone in the targeted area with lackluster personalities and unconvincing relationship chemistry.

Carpet Bomb: Blankets the targeted area with an expertly fitted layer of beige twill.

Cherry Bomb: Just drops a really big cherry on your opponents’ base.

Dirty Bomb: Reduces enemy morale by making everything in the blast radius feel vaguely grimy in a way that no amount of showering can fix.

F Bomb: Releases a chemical agent that induces compulsive profanity, rendering verbal communication impossible.

Logic Bomb: Grants targets a blinding flash of insight into the terrible futility of war, allowing you to sneak up and hit them in the head.

Power Bomb: Picks up everything within the blast radius and puts it back upside-down.

Time Bomb: Literally blows the enemy base into next week.

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We make jokes about grown men not understanding object permanence, but I think this is the first time I’ve heard of someone seemingly understanding object permanence and trying their level best to actively spite it.

There’s a deliberate and frightening message here: “Things only deserve to exist when they are directly relevant to me. As soon as I, personally, am ‘done’ with something, it has no value and needs to be destroyed.” It speaks to a horrifying megalomania, and a seething hatred of anything that does not entirely revolve around him.

But it’s Trump, so you know, tell me something I don’t know.

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Wait a minute, is the plover an actual animal? I always thought this scene was listing plumbers as migratory animals, and I was just like “yeah that checks out, it’s Monty Python after all. Probably a British joke I don’t get.”

a simple question of weight ratios

YES BUT IS IT UNLADEN

submission by @salparadisewasright

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Somehow, I had interpreted the initial “which is where the player characters come in” as meaning that the player characters are themselves the recipients of all that “spoiled virtue and rotten whimsy” - which is why they’re player characters in the first place. In this way, all of the munchkining and “hold my beer” shenanigans the players get into is framed in-universe as the very symptoms of the problem the players are nominally supposed to be solving.

D&D adventure concept: it turns out that the Fairy Queen doesn’t actually do anything with the sparkles-in-your-eyes and memories-of-a-summer’s-day and other sundry intangibles and abstractions she’s been scamming mortals out of for the last few centuries.

Whatever she had planned for them didn’t pan out, but she never ordered her minions to stop collecting them; by the time it became clear that the project was a no-go, expectations had already been set, and when you’re the Queen of the Fairies you can’t very well admit to having a bad idea.

She’s just been discretely dumping them down a disused well for hundreds of years, and the resulting effluvium of spoiled virtue and rotten whimsy has begun to contaminate the drinking water of a human village downstream - which is where the player characters come in.

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THE OUTLINE

For decades, the pinnacle of the American Dream was to own a sprawling house with acres of kitchen space, multiple guest rooms, and a pool shaped like a Fender Stratocaster. This is why many Millennials grew up watching MTV Cribs, and probably also why so much porn is filmed in mansions. But not long after the 2007 housing market crash, a different kind of real estate dream was born: chucking the expensive mortgage payments and downsizing to something simpler, easier to maintain, and above all, smaller.

The tiny house has been called a spiritual cousin of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the ultimate “simple living” book and a fixture on high school reading lists in America. Starting around 2008, people inspired by that dream built the first wave of tiny houses: cute, exquisitely designed little dwellings that compressed the essentials of a home into a compact space rarely larger than 400 square feet. Their finished wood floors and paneling, recessed mood lighting, and kitchen counters with built-in dog beds made them a fixture on Instagram and in lifestyle magazines.

But today, tiny houses are more than a fad for people looking to trade in their suburban homes and city apartments for something smaller and quirkier. Across a handful of prohibitively expensive U.S. cities, tiny homes are being presented as an affordable housing solution, and in some places, as a way to house the homeless.

(Model of the Plugin House at Boston’s City Hall plaza.) 

In Boston, Mayor Marty Walsh’s Housing Innovation Lab (or iLab) is running a public interest campaign for a new build-it-yourself product called the “plugin house,” which homeowners can build in their backyards and rent to low-income tenants. Each plugin house is made of polyurethane panels that can be screwed together with a hex wrench, and costs roughly $50,000 to build. For that, you get a modest interior that’s spacious enough for a stove, a toilet and shower, a queen-size bed, and a desk. And if you’re a homeowner, building a plugin house in your backyard offers another benefit: the opportunity to be a landlord and generate rental income.

Designed by People’s Architecture Office principle and Harvard Graduate School of Design fellow James Shen, the plugin house was tested in China before its stateside debut. A video from the PAO website chronicles this test run. The Beijing unit belongs to a young woman referred to as “Mrs. Fan,” who grew up in an old courtyard house in Beijing; her parents have since relocated to an apartment, but retain ownership of the property. After tying the knot, Mrs. Fan thought long and hard about whether she really wanted to plump for an apartment that she could move into with her husband. The plugin house, which Mrs. Fan built with the help of its designers in her parents’ courtyard space, allowed her to renovate and happily remain in a place she loved — at a price she could afford.

Mrs. Fan’s story is a crucial part of PAO’s effort to take the plugin house overseas to cities like Boston. In order to sell the plugin house idea to the general public, Boston’s Housing Innovation Lab had Shen and a team of volunteers erect a 360-square-foot model plugin house in the middle of city hall plaza. When I arrived at the unit to take a look, it was bustling with visitors from the nearby financial district. The house itself was unfurnished, but artists had sketched images on the walls that depicted where either the landlord or the tenant could place certain objects: a shower, a bed, a washer and dryer, a vase of flowers. One wall was covered with photos of Mrs. Fan cooking and relaxing in her Beijing plugin house. Even with furniture in it, Mrs. Fan’s house was elegant in its white-walled minimalism: there were no piles of magazines, tupperware containers, or clothes to be seen. Standing in the Boston house — which contained no real bed, stove, or toilet — I could only imagine how claustrophobic I might feel if the house was actually filled with stuff.

(Model of a 3D-printed house by ICON.) 

James Shen isn’t the only young urban innovation designer proposing the tiny house as an affordable housing solution. In Austin, a company called ICON — which recently partnered with global housing nonprofit New Story — is taking a similar approach by producing 3D printed houses. To demonstrate that it’s possible to build a cheap, code-compliant tiny house in less than 24 hours, ICON and New Story unveiled their first single-story 3D printed house at this year’s South by Southwest. Soon, ICON’s Vulcan printer will head south, to begin building houses in Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia: not necessarily in the backyards of homeowners, but wherever housing for the poor can legally be built.

Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon, a startup known as Dweller (founded by a former City of Portland housing official!) is helping homeowners build prefabricated tiny house rentals in their yards. Though not as easy to slap together as a plugin house or a 3D printed house, the Dweller units are scaled for minimalist living, just like the tiny houses many of us dream of, and the homeowners who build them pay nothing to Dweller up front on the conditionthat they rent the unit to tenants. (Dweller takes 70 percent of the rent, and the homeowner gets to keep 30 percent.)… 

… But does the idea of living smaller really retain its sexiness when it’s applied to affordable housing? Remember, the tiny houses that you see in magazines spreads aren’t just tiny: they’re gorgeously elegant. Better yet, they’re transportable: you can put a tiny house in your backyard or you can take it to a starlit ridge in the Sierras for a weekend of glamping.

Tiny house ADUs like the plugin house offer plenty of simplicity, but they don’t offer much in the way of elegance or mobility. (A tiny house ADU would be hooked up to the local utilities and thereby immovable without modification.) And when you slice those two features out of the tiny house picture, the whole thing starts to stink. Literally. As Boston area writer and tiny apartment dweller Gene Tempest explained in a brutally honest New York Times piece last summer, the minimalist dimensions of a tiny house can exacerbate the wear and tear of your furniture and absorb the weeks-old odor of food that you cooked. These little indignities are things that people with modest incomes already experience in regular old apartments. But when you compress all of that into an even tighter space — not by choice, but out of economic necessity — the downsizing isn’t so much a lifestyle enhancement as it is a demotion.

(Continue Reading)

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In an effort to be proactive in actually playing games and building relationships with people that aren't tied exclusively to RJS's output, I have created a Discord server for the purpose of setting up sessions of games unrelated to RJS. Anyone who may be interested in playing and discussing an eclectic mix of indie multiplayer games is absolutely encouraged to come join in! https://discord.gg/8WmXvpM

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Templates like that are forbidden.

You can't defeat a natural disaster, but Flandre kicked that Meteor's ass.

The meteor is also a banned topic as of now.

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Neither Princess Peach, nor Bowser, nor anyone privy to the events of Super Paper Mario ever set foot in the Mushroom Kingdom between the time of the “marriage” and Count Bleck being defeated. By the time news that there ever was an official marriage between the two would have a chance to get home, the full context of the event would be known and the marriage would obviously be annulled. Thus, Super Paper Mario never gave Bowser a chance to experience the Mushroom Kingdom as “king”.

The significance of their wedding causing the end of all worlds also has nothing to do with their royal status; the idea of them being married causes a multiversal divide by zero error simply because the two are that emotionally incompatible with each other.

Random Headcanon: The reason the Mushroom Kingdom has a Princess but no visible nobility is that it’s a constitutional monarchy where the vestigial role of sovereign has evolved into an appointed position whose occupant serves as a combination PR ambassador, master of ceremonies and national mascot. Bowser does not understand any of this, and would be unpleasantly surprised if his schemes to coerce Princess Peach into marrying him ever panned out.