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looming presence

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Deltarune Weird route spoilers

Headcanon

Felt a lil evil ▓▒░(°◡°)░▒▓

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*Who..? Who’s going to hear?

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sharing gay germs

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This interview needs to be preserved, for the future of Yuri.

https://teletype.in/@kati_lilian/SJA8KwjjN

Girls looking at each other: Obviously feel attached to each other, yuri

Girls looking away from each other: The opposite of above, the mutual antipathy shows strong emotion, yuri

Girl looking at another girl: Longing, obviously yuri

Girls looking towards same thing: Clearly have similar interests, sharing in an activity together, yuri

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I love everything about the rituals surrounding the Gavle Goat.

Mine and other’s genuine relief and excitement at the gavle goat burning due to the observation that the previous streak of it not burning lasted through some very tough years is proof of how quickly and organically religious rituals can arise, in this essay I will…

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You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is?  I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off.  Woopie. 

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homura never gives up

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the actual reason I consume mediocre media is because I have bad taste. the deeper secret pretentious reason is because I think there’s something very revealing about bad media that you don’t get with good media. when you watch a poorly executed plot point unfold, you see the machinery behind it. you see the gap between what’s actually on screen and the true goal the author is striving for. if it’s particularly awful, you can even measure just how poorly mismatched the author’s skills are with the story they’re trying to tell you. watching a poorly executed narrative play out feels like you’re discovering something, because you see all the wiring and guts underneath that better authors hide from you, in the same way that movies hide boom mics and books make you forget you’re turning the pages. if a story is good and executed well you just see the story. but I want to see the guts and wires!

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Panera has just released a line of swimsuits that say only SOUP in huge letters on them and I thought of you

PANERA? BREAD??

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Do you think Homura Akemi effectively utilized Girl Power when she became the Devil so she could be reunited with her girlfriend, who was God?

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*clears throat, which involves coughing up a lot of dust because I so rarely use Tumblr*

So 5e has a very rough hierarchy of cantrip damage dice.

d10: High damage, so the spell has no other notable effect. Firebolt, Primal Savagery, and Eldritch Blast are staple spells that are good against most creatures.

d8: Moderate damage, so the spell has a minor additional effect. Produce Flame also produces light. Ray of Frost induces a movement speed penalty to the target. Sacred Flame ignores cover and can be used behind glass/walls.

d6: Lower damage, so the spell has a significant additional effect. Thunderclap and Word of Radiance can hit multiple targets. Frostbite induces Disadvantage on [weapon] attack rolls.

d4: Least damage, so the additional effect is significant. Vicious Mockery induces Disadvantage on attack rolls [not just weapon attacks, as in Frostbite]. Sapping Sting knocks the target prone, which could be either Disadvantage on Attacks or reduction in movement speed depending on how the target chooses to react.

d12: Highest Damage, but has limited use. Poison Spray deals a damage type that many NPCs have resistance or immunity to, and targets the very common Constitution Save. Toll the Dead requires the target to already have been damaged, and targets the also very common Wisdom Save.

So to merge Firebolt and Produce Flame together, you’d have to choose whether “+1 damage” or “Free Torch” is the more worthwhile effect to include, and.... Actually, I kinda lean towards the latter. I don’t love that Arcane spellcasters have a “the obviously correct choice” option in Firebolt. I kind of get the choice with Warlocks and Eldritch Blast, since they have to make up for the fact that their entire class design is actually kind of weak and needs to be compensated for with a brokenly overpowered cantrip fewer leveled spells per rest necessitates a powerful cantrip that they can fall back on in between powerful spells. 

On the other hand, I do get the sense that WotC expected “Free Torch” to be a more powerful effect than it ended up being. The only time I ever see DMs really enforce vision/darkvision rules is if the mapping software being used enforces it―Foundry forced a lot of my groups to actually care whether someone’s holding a torch, because if they’re not, then some players legitimately can’t see anything. Which retroactively actually does justify that design decision, but Foundry didn’t exist six years ago, and Roll20 was barely handling dynamic lighting back then too.

*steps up to microphone and clears my throat*

Produce Flame and Firebolt should be the same spell.

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If fear was a song