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lead them or fall.

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Vox Machina vs. Mighty Nein

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jock and nerd (and goblin)

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I’m not sure who the DM is, but they’re suffering.  (Also I can’t decide if I’m actually implying that Jaskier is the broody one in a modern au OR if the created their characters as wink to the other one and have now evolved into using them to nag and tease each other all the time.)

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1920s D&D

Here are some 1920s tropes and ideas, for a “modern” world d&d campaign, that I like to think about. 

To be clear… there’s not too much modern about this. Because in my mind, this world is filled with fantasy creatures and humans alike… it is set on Earth… sorta? But not sorta… Don’t mind me… 

 - In order to become an adventurer, one must enroll in and be accepted by an adventuring academy. Think… boarding schools or private schools. Edit: your adventures could easily start here or be graduates from an adventuring academy. Edit(@terrible-night-choices): OR your adventuring academies have become corrupt and your adventurers are the academy’s rejects

-  Weapons infused with elemental magic (who needs gunpowder?). 

- The Underground (or Underdark, or Under-what-have-you) is the sewers and the abandoned, first attempts, of the subway system(s). Home to Beholders, Drow, Duergar, Mind-Flayers, and Orcs. 

- Cars, trains, and other modes of transportation need magic to operate. No gasoline needed. Limits the use of automobiles to those with magic or those who can afford a magic-wielding chauffeur. 

- Mafia faction. Like the The Harpers, the Emerald Enclave, or the Lords’ Alliance but… gangster.

- Tieflings in fedoras or newsboy hats. Tieflings with bobbed hair. Tieflings. 

- Prohibition but it’s magic potions that are illegal instead of alcohol (or both) 

- Magic potions are brewed in basement bathtubs and smuggled by Tiefling Al Capone into speakeasies. 

- Magically hidden speakeasies

- Jazz Bards

- (Oath-breaker) Paladin based law enforcement. Edit: I suggest Oath-breaker because of potential corruption in law enforcement or too many years on the job seeing too many horrible things. 

- Investigator agencies that specialize in arcane and supernatural crimes

-  Druids as flappers

- Vampire “loan” sharks. You “loan” your blood… they give you money.. or drugs… or information… or resources. 

- Necromancers use the undead as factory workers. Round-the-clock labor for cheap. 

- Undead labor unions

- Strikes against factories because many of the living have been laid off in favor of undead laborers. 

- Anti-magic gambling houses. No cheating allowed.

- Goliaths and half-orcs as bouncers.

- Pawn Shop for magic items

- Dragons as a mode of flying transportation. Edit(@lampyboi): Dragons as bank owners/big business owners. Edit(@lampyboi): Dragons as even more secretive creatures. As the other races have progressed, they’ve created ways to fend off the dragons leaving dragons little choice but to hide or face extinction. 

- Skills such as; first aid, biology, and psychology for clerics 

- Skills such as; firearms and law for fighters (specifically crime-fighting fighters) 

- Baseball Bat weapon

- Baseball games and a whodunit mystery

I’m going to convince my buds to do a 1920s d&d one-shot, if you have any other ideas post them!!!! okay byeeeeee

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Leliana flirting with the Warden.

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I feel like there’s needs to be, like, handbook for authors who post on Ao3 for effective metatext.

By metatext I mean like tagging, summary, and authors notes (especially initial authors notes at the beginning of a fic). The means by which we communicate to our readers what they’re getting into.

Because we kind of all have to learn it by osmosis and there are conventions but nobody’s really taught them at the start, so there’s inconsistencies and misunderstandings or people just not knowing things through no fault of their own.

This ends up breeding frustration and confusion and in the worst cases resentment, hurt, and aggression.

I’m severely tempted to make such a handbook and get it circulating.

I think it would do fandom a lot of good.

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playlists for professional procrastinators pt 02

you are chasing discomfort: mostly movie scores, instrumentals, unsettling aura, perfect for spacing out, feels like sitting on the floor while the room around you is spinning 

silver mist: movie +gaming soundtracks, instrumentals, also really nice for falling asleep, feels like mornings in february

you are cramming for exams at 3am: calm instrumentals, actually helpful for deep focus, piano, occasional lofi of course, perfect to listen to when you are the only one still awake

purple neonlights: lofi, minimalistic beats, mostly instrumentals. apologising in advance for the amount of lofi anime openings but the aot brainrot got me bad

mint chocolate: feels very similar to purple neonlights, but with vocals. mostly korean chill rap/indie/rmb, feels like summer evenings and dozing off in the sun 

maths fuelled anxiety: feels like you have chugged a litre or two of coffee, drum and bass, electronic, more for low stim tasks and for waking yourself up, created this playlist out of irony but now i listen to it unironically 

bloodsworn death: this too is more for low stim tasks, mostly nordic folk, ambient and dark folk, soundtracks feat. vikings, game of thrones and skyrim, makes you want to forge a sword and raid a small town in england 

bayek: playlist based on bayek of siwa, the main protagonist of AC: origins, a game i love to pieces. only instrumentals, can feel like a fever dream, gives you the feeling of crossing deserts and exploring tombs 

viktor v: another character playlist based on victor vale from vicious by V.E Schwab. has lots of vocals and more distracting tracks, makes you feel like a villain or at least an antihero. feels like the colour grey 

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i love pdfs

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I [250M] allowed myself and my friends [954M, 951M, 6732F] to be captured and used as lab rats by a pharmaceutical company because I thought it could end disease and also find a way to finally kill us. AITA?

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The beautiful background art of Kimi no Na Wa (Your Name)

Art Book (Japanese): Kimi no Na wa Official Visual Guide

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monochrome mom pt 2 with bonus dad n daughter

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Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

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iced coffee my beloved

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on the first day of classes professors will usually ask us to fill out a little notecard with our name, pronouns, major, and email. one dude in one of my history classes was very clearly one of those Anti-SJW Bullshit People and went “Uhhh pronouns? Ha, what’s that supposed to mean? I’m clearly a dude I don’t understand what you’re asking” and the professor just looked him in the eye and went “If you don’t know what a pronoun is then maybe a college level course isn’t for you” and i think about her every single day of my life

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game: here are two choices ur decision will affect the story

me: