mantis-lizbian

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"Trans girls have so many weird kinks! Wtf is up with that?"

Look inside

Crippling desire for unconditional love and acceptance

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????

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Yesterday my sister was going to complain about how things could have been different with our parents but stopped herself and said "No use treading through the multiverse"

Sooo true bestie that's going straight into my lexicon

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this is just a lil bugbear that's popped into my head just now apropos of nothing, but i can't get it out of my head without voicing it to someone so here goes:

the... let's call it "Crichton school" of global warming denialism based around "chaos theory says that due to all the variations in your skin and the hairs on the exact position of the back of your arm, you can't predict the path the drop of water's going to take" to say that climate models are wrong because they can't take all the variations of chaotic systems into account.

of course, if we're familiar with the flaws in this logic, we understand that what they're actually talking about is weather prediction, not climate, but like... this flaw still maps back onto the drop-of-water-down-the-arm analogy, because sure we can't say with perfect confidence what path the drop will take, but we can say with functionally absolute confidence that the drop of water will still go down the arm.

Crichton and those who use this argument (*cough* Jordan Peterson *cough*) are asking you to believe that because we can't say with exact certainty the specific path the water will take, it could just as likely wind up flying into your ear, out your nose, and land on Jupiter as it could wind up lazily trailing down to your elbow.

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Once again struck by nostalgia and I cannot remember the name of this game

It looked approximately like this

Incredibly simple/low level graphics, 2D browser game. Possibly on Miniclip or Agame. Probably played some time between 2007-2012

Goal was to tend to these little orange dot creatures. You could breed them (making tiny dots) and feed them (green dots of food?). Eventually they would get sick (turn green) and you would have to quarantine and treat them. They turned grey when they were old and unable to work or breed.

The final goal was to build a (space?) ship so they could leave and go somewhere else. I believe the spot for the Ship was in the top right the whole time.

There was at least one crater towards the bottom (marked on the bottom left there). The top may have had a cave, I don't remember any function for it. There may have been mood/progress bars on the UI somewhere. I think there may have been a dark grey panel to the right that gave updates on your little guys? Maybe?

I'd appreciate if anyone remembers the name ^-^'

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any time someone asks me to explain dysphoria i just send them the brian david gilbert "i wish that i could wear hats" video.

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Nothing but respect for our freedom fighters

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The policy states that after just three absences, schools will start intervention. If the student misses school for eight or more days, they will be referred to juvenile court.

I had a moment of "What the fuck?" and then remembered

America.

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re: stone tops and aftercare, I feel like there’s this expectation that your dom/top is not only going to create and lead the scene and give you sexual release, but also that afterwards they’re going to run you a bath and give you a massage and paint your nails because that’s what they ~love to do~ and because making you feel good is their reward. And it’s absolutely true that I want my partner to feel loved and spoiled, but that’s a lot of mental, physical, and emotional energy to expend without even getting a verbal check-in in return, even if we derive fulfillment from our partner’s pleasure. If you’re a bottom, especially a submissive bottom, start fantasizing about how you can make your stone top feel seen and special and important. maybe they don’t want sexual touch, but maybe they want a massage, verbal affirmation, gratitude and recognition. ask not what your stone top can do for you, but what you can do for your stone top.

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me. and. my. shaaaadowwww

strolling down the aaaaa-ve-nue (avenue, avenue)

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@importantcatpics

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I haven't seen this version anywhere so I made one!

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ConsensualFem™ where I'm already a trans woman and my wife reminds me to take my HRT cuz I'm a bit of a ditz

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Ironclaw Gushing, Part III: Assists

So, if you've tried out a number of TTRPGs, you might have noticed that assisting others on a skill check is one of those things that can be surprisingly difficult for a game to model in a way that is both 1) naturalistic and intuitive, and 2) "balanced" and not liable to utterly break the whole system without a bunch of arbitrary rules controlling who can help and how.

For example, say you need to lift a big, heavy rock in D&D. That's a Strength check. You want some help lifting it? Cool, you get advantage/+2 on the check. Oh, everyone in the party wants to help? ...Yeah sorry, no change. To be fair, you don't want someone to be able to just get a +8 on every check just because there's 6 people in the party, not to mention however many hirelings you can afford. Otherwise, Sun Wukong would easily be able to get out from under the Buddha's hand-mountain long before Tripitaka came along just by calling on all his monkey buddies.

This is a long one, so gonna put a cut here.

For Ironclaw, you can get as many people helping you out with a thing as the fiction makes sense to allow. Every single person helping will have a mechanical impact with their assistance, and they can do so without allowing the categorically impossible to become achievable. Furthermore, the mechanics even make it so that some tasks are simply too complex to allow for assistance to be meaningful (beyond helping to avoid a botch, at least)! "but how?" you ask! well, i shall tell you.

When you assist someone, you make the same check as the one the person you're trying to help is making, but against a difficulty 3 (regardless of what the original check's difficulty is - it's up to them to actually handle the complexity of the task, they're directing you on how to help, basically, and your check is simply to see how well you follow their instructions). If you succeed, they get a bonus d8 added to their dice pool.

So yeah, you can - in theory - have 100 people helping you, and they'll all be able to potentially chip in an extra d8, but having 100d8 isn't gonna magically let you roll a 16 in a system were 11 is the highest possible achievable difficulty. Indeed, anything with a difficulty above 7 isn't going to benefit from assistance (apart from how many dice would need to roll 1s in order to botch), even while it is (theoretically) possible for a skilled character to do. That's just something you've gotta do on your own.

Of course, where sheer numbers can help out is on checks that require multiple successes. But sometimes, these things can still make sense to have a bunch of people helping making it easier to complete - or more likely, to complete it faster. The example the book gives for a task that requires multiple successes (not when it's talking about assisted checks, mind) is building a bridge, and 20 guys working on building that bridge could certainly complete the project faster than 5 could. But other situations, it would make sense to instill a limit on how many people can help even outside of how it would break the mechanics.

For example, healing an injury requires 24... well, points of healing, but one of the ways to get healing is through Medicine checks from someone with the Doctor Gift - we'll get to all of these things, don't worry - but for now, we'll just look at it as a quota of 24 checks. Just the way that healing and treatment works (irl, not simply in-game), it simply wouldn't make sense to let two dozen Doctors treat someone's broken arm to heal it in a single day. And that'd be theoretically possible using RAW by each coming in to do their own checks, without even getting the assistance rules involved. What I'm probably going to do at my table is say that only one check can be attempted per day, and the most points of healing that could possibly be gained by a single check is half the patient's Body die size, regardless of the number of successes. So most Doctors would only benefit from having a couple assistants on a single patient. Past however many make up the difference between the Doctor's own d8s and half the patient's Body die, they're pretty much just making sure the patient doesn't get a nasty infection and die immediately.

Now, importantly, there's one more thing about Assisting that i haven't mentioned yet, and it's the other major reason built into the mechanics to create a natural incentive to not just hire a hundred people to help you with every single check: if any one assistant rolls a botch, the entire check automatically fails. Sure, 100d8 could guarantee you don't botch, but in order to get that 100d8, you need 100 people to not botch, themselves, or else you effectively botch. Whatever their dice are, chances are uncomfortably good someone will botch whenever you're rolling for that many assistants. Now, in practice, I'd probably not play this quite as written, because - setting aside how artificial and unlikely it would be to actually want to roll 101 checks, at the table - any check that actually naturally allows for 100 people to help out is probably gonna be along the lines of building that bridge where, sure, it's possible for a single stonemason's fuckup to completely collapse a bridge at 90% completion, but... more likely, it's just a massive setback that'll undo a day or two of work.

While, again, I don't expect this kind of thing to actually be something that's likely to happen at the table, I do at least like to think through how I would handle things the system theoretically allows at the extremes anyway, because it can help guide how you might handle the more scaled down examples that might be more likely to happen at the table. And for me, I think I might do something like... the overall check is an automatic failure, and a number of successes already achieved are undone equal to either the total number of botching assistants, or a cumulative half the achieved successes for each assistant (so 50% for 1 botch, 75% for 2 botches, 87.5% at 3 botches, etc.). Should this cause you to wind up with a negative number of successes, then the whole project is botched.

Of course, this is a way more convoluted way of handling things than the actual rules, and isn't likely to come up naturally in a way that makes narrative sense in most games, so with that in mind, I'd say the actual rules, as they are written, are perfectly reasonable. I'm just the right kind of autistic to want to take this kind of system further, even if it means more maths and bookkeping.

Back to Part II

P.S. In the interest of full clarity, the book does actually recommend instilling a cap on assistants, and that the number should probably be 2 in most cases. So with that in mind, it does kinda circumvent the possible issues - both positive and negative - caused by 100 helpers. But I ignored that for this post because I like how the way the game models assistance naturally limits its effectiveness in a way most games don't, and so - especially for most situations that are likely to naturally come up in gameplay, the number of assistants that it would make sense within the narrative strikes me as an effective enough limit abusing the mechanic too much. Of course, we'll see how things turn out in actual play, and I do plan to report on that.

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Gloria & Tam, Vampire girlfriends. From an upcoming comic project I'm SLOOOOWLY working on.