miscellany-of-a-chinese-priest

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ugh the Ancient Roman who joined our birdwatching club won't shut up about "bad omens" or "signs of impending war" 😒

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i had my gallbladder taken out last week. so i'm celebrating with pricefield.

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Fields of Mistria Celine x Pokemon

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Actual Stupid Pointless Bullshit by Game System

D&D: There's a purely good aligned spell that only good people can use. It causes an extremely contagious disease that makes people so horny they straight up die.

World of Darkness: Scientists radiate an aura of pure boringness so strong it kills pixies and that's why you don't see pixies anymore.

Chronicles of Darkness: "Actually, the psychic abuse monsters spawned from our nightmares are doing us a favour by beaming our worst fears directly into our brains until we die."

Call of Cthulhu: Fetishes are on the Insanity Table that you randomly roll on when you lose sanity so there's a chance you see Cthulhu and immediately develop a foot fetish so intense you have to be hospitalised.

Powered By The Apocalypse: Mechanically, everyone is pansexual. Everyone has to be pansexual. If you don't want to be pansexual, tough! We're married and you're in love.

Pathfinder: Inexplicable archfiend who specifically embodies the act of luring children into dark alleyways with candy to kidnap them.

Mutants and Mastermind: "So, we need enemies for a silver age superhero comic book game. What we got?" "Well, I've statted up a super-scientist gorilla, and an evil clown, and the vengeful souls of everyone killed in the very real Hiroshima Bombings. How's that?" "Yeah, that all seems tonally consistent."

Warhammer 40k: Hoo boy, how much time you got?

Warhammer: I don't think I can top vaporizing the fucking setting and killing everyone in the world for copyright reasons.

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neopets forum posts i reference all the time but nobody gets

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pink in the night

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i love games that play with impossibilities in the mechanics to create mood or storytelling through empty space. roll tables that have numbers too high or too low, dice that don't physically exist. i imagine there's a lot more you could do with it. tarot cards not in any real deck, 42 of spades, dice towers 100 dice tall

i've always been such a fan of blank space in narratives but sometimes the best use of your time really is just to spell it out. here's something you can't have. this is exactly what i want you to think about and know that you won't get, not in this game at least

in my lyric game about werewolves, your 'beast' stat goes up a die size for all the animals watching you, and if you get past a d100 you have to roll using the moon. in my most recent little bookmark game, you take a baby girl (your daughter? someone else's?) and leave her to be raised by humans instead of the fey, like you. it's a simple game. roll a d6 to find out what happens to her when you come back 10 years later. lower numbers are worse outcomes, higher good. pretty simple. the outcome for 6 is pretty good, she knows shes a fey and has some friends who know too, she's even happy to see you, and i couldve left it at that. but it was for the 36 word jam and i had some words left. so i made a 7 where her new parents also know and they still love her. and that just really changes the whole game for me. sometimes its sad and sometimes its less so. but even with your best chance at a good life for her shes never actually going to be loved for who she really is, and you did that to her. it might not be on her mind but its going to be on yours and you know you know you know its out of reach. thats what the whole game is about now, to me. the 7 you can't ever roll

i think the impossible mechanic is definitely something that fits well in a certain genre of game (lyric games or really absurd ones especially) but i wanna see it used more in general. what should the players be aware of the absence of? whats your mechanical haunting of the narrative? if yall have examples or self-promos feel free to drop em

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We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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Tactical Breach Wizards Spoilers but this part of this conversation is so funny because, like. Who're you calling nemesis-adjacent, Banks.

At this point in the game her and Jen are basically friends; they've joked around, bantered a bit, and the arrest and accidental murder from the beginning is basically forgotten. The only reason she's helped the resistance this long is because Jen asked nicely. In that SAME CONVERSATION Banks sort of flirts with her to distract her from her bad metaphor. This isn't even a "if you're rivals for that long you're just gay" she's just down bad and in denial. By the end of the game shes so horrendously down bad she fucking gets Jen a fake passport and if Jen starts the PI office in Liboli Banks WILL join her. fake ass nemesis I saw you laughing at her jokes

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I am so sick and tired of seeing the trans women around me being slowly hot coaled into the closet and into essentially being forced back into "Men who would really love being women but Can't because they Aren't". It is so painful stop fucking doing this to our trans women. Stop forcing them to be "Fine" with being called dude bro man he and biologically male stop it stop it stop it you are killing her. You are killing her.

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Strap in for the Soresu form III Obi-Wan lightsaber post. This is gonna be a sad one, girlies. We’re getting into Obi-Wan’s Fucking Trauma. 

Qui-Gon’s death changed literally everything about Obi-Wan’s life, right down to the lightsaber form. Still a Padawan himself, he had to watch as an extinct monster from his nightmares* utterly took apart the form he’d learned since he was a child, and then, to complete the destruction, slaughtered the teacher who’d taught him the form and raised him. The devastation of Qui-Gon’s actual death had to be the last in a cascading series of horrors that started with the gut-sinking realization that Qui-Gon was losing. And if all of that weren’t enough, Obi-Wan also loses his own lightsaber in the same duel, a psychological blow to his personhood which we don’t have to guess at the significance of. Obi-Wan tells us the cost of it himself in AotC: this weapon is your life. 

The Duel of the Fates on a sheer physical level is a devastating thing to consider. It’s a grueling, full out running battle, the likes of which we don’t see elsewhere in the saga. The beauty (and pounding musical score) of the fight distracts from the sheer brutality of it. Maul is physically attacking them at every turn; he manages to kick Qui-Gon hard enough to knock all 6’3 of him off his feet; he dumps Obi-Wan into a fall that seems to be several stories high. We don’t see Obi-Wan get back up off the floor with Qui-Gon’s body at the end of the duel, and I’d be surprised if he was physically able to even stand again so after the adrenaline faded and the soreness and exhaustion took over. He just been whirled in a lightsaber blender. 

I can’t imagine how hard it was for him to pick up a lightsaber again after the trauma of that battle - much less, a new, unfamiliar one, not the kyber crystal that had been his since he was a child. The new canon’s emphasis on the spiritual relationship between a Jedi and their crystal makes this detail even more excruciating. The Ataru form itself must have felt broken and unusable. How can you put your trust in a form once you watched it be broken so ruthlessly?

And this is where Obi-Wan is so endlessly beautiful as a character. He goes through this horrifying experience of violent unmaking, and instead of avoiding lightsabers as an understandable trauma response, or picking up an overwhelming power and dominance form like V, he remakes himself into a master of Soresu: a form of simple, complete defense. He doesn’t attempt to become a weapon of attack like Maul did to disintegrate Ataru; he makes himself invincible, untouchable, with a perfect defense. Soresu works the pieces that fell apart for the Jedi in the Duel of the Fates to an advantage. It is a form of ultimate endurance, of playing out your opponent and staying up in a fight until the attacker is exhausted or angry. It preserves and it lasts. It is philosophical. It is considered. It lacks the showy flash of Makashi or Ataru and returns to the basics, even working in some of that battlefield meditation that Qui-Gon so believed in. And in that simple economy, it’s gorgeous and effective. 

I have to wonder: is Soresu, on some level, a form of kinetic self-soothing for a person who faced an incredibly traumatic battle at a young age? Does Obi-Wan use it that way?

All of this is perfectly in keeping with the themes of the character. Obi-Wan’s story remains about life, about hope, about survival. The word he uses to describe the Jedi to Luke in the OT is important to me. “Jedi knights were the guardians of peace and justice.” Guardians. And what better lightsaber approach for a person who sees his role as one of protection than a form whose signature move is called “The Circle of Shelter?”

*Maul, of course, is a tragedy in his own right, but that’s a different post. 

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My one friend group can't stop saying, "See you in hell!" in a cheerful voice instead of, "Talk to you later!" and my other friend group can't stop calling things "penis" instead of "cool" or "good", so I just unironically uttered the phrase, "Sounds penis, see you in hell," as I got off the phone.

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found a baby turtle in my sewer and used AI aging techniques to work out what it would look like as an adult and used google reverse image search to find images of its parents who were in a nature documentary in 2017 and used harsh economic sanctions to encourage them not to lose their baby in the sewer again

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Another fun thing I do with customers - specifically parents of very small children who don’t know they’re alive yet - is directly imply I think the coffee is for the baby, not the parent. and lemme tell you, like 70% of parents eat that shit up. They immediately go along with the bit and start discussing it with their newborn child, while the baby just stares at us like 😮

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Gwen (Part 2) - Gator Days