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the thing about wang chong making that point re the magistrate is that, given what was popularly taken as settled fact about the capabilities of ghosts at the time (which was one of his pet issues), that was an extremely applicable point

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My conduct this year landed me on Santa Claus's fabled and controversial "Kill-at-all-Costs" List. Turns out the reason the big man and his people don't exercise that option more often is that they really aren't good at following through on it. Well outside their core competency. He's delegated to the elves, and they've got this ingrained assembly-line mindset that doesn't translate at all to the adaptable and fluid mindset needed for siege breaking. They just haven't adjusted their playbook at all from when they're doing rote deliveries. Armed Elves have been rappelling down my chimney one at a time into the roaring fire I've kept going nonstop for the last week. They haven't even thought to try my front door yet. Whole house smells like peppermint, which it turns out is what burnt elf meat smells like. Thought I was being super clever putting cyanide-laced almond milk out with the cookies as a last line of defense, but none of them have made it even the scant few feet to the side table where that's sitting. At the rate things are going the real danger is that I'm gonna forget what I did with that and accidentally drink it myself while I'm watching the show

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Just saw Wicked. I really enjoyed it, but I feel like all of the stuff about prejudice and how academic institutions offer people power and prestige in exchange for furthering the oppressive power of the ruling class really got in the way of the fun songs. I'd like to see a show with that kind of music, but it's about a middle aged policeman in the alps looking for his neighbor's lost cat.

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i love empresses who usurp their husbands’ authority and rule behind the curtain i love when they’re ruthless and dangerous and cruel i love when they’re terrible people who do terrible things just to know the weight of a jade seal in their palm i love you lü zhi i love you jia nanfeng i love you wu zetian i love you cixi i love you i love you i love you

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usamericans and europeans love to moralize objective economic categories by transposing the relations of oppression to a good-and-bad dynamic which affects everyone as individuals, so that a statement of fact without any bearing on their individual personhood becomes an accusation to them, one that must simply not be true because their self-imposed moralization goes against the real oppression they do face, an oppression which has of course also been unnecessarily been moralized, resulting in a completely self-fabricated contradiction between being oppressed (good and righteous) and benefitting from the oppression of others (bad and despisable)

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EIDOLON: Become Your Best Self 2nd Edition is available now!

EIDOLON: Become Your Best Self is a tabletop RPG for 2-6 players. Look deep inside yourself to find the power lying dormant within, nourish that power through the bonds you build with others, and use the reality-bending abilities it grants you to fight for your ideals, fighting against the pull of the Undertow, the psychic tides that dictate the collective unconscious!

EIDOLON uses our own Drawn From the Undertow game system, which replaces dice with a deck of tarot cards. Each action requires a draw, and each card dictates a new direction for the story to go. Play The Magician, and "you achieve an impossible success," but play The Tower, and "something terrible happens." Each character also chooses their own Resonant and Dissonant cards, which act as their own personal critical successes and failures!

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My friend Luke and I have been working on this game for the last three and a half years and we are now ready to let you all get your hands on it! If you enjoy story driven tabletop role playing and/or Jojo's Bizarre Adventure or the Persona series, you should check out EIDOLON: Become Your Best Self.

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Blades in the Dark inverts the order of bonus and penalty—having players choose their encumbrance penalty as they enter uptime and get to pick items carried at will during uptime—but this would be problematic to implement in a game with a lot of looting.

Another resource mechanic that doesn't tend to have this kind of problem is money, for that same reason that it's a positive rather than a negative. In that vein you could invert encumbrance and instead have carrying capacity as a resource that is spent when you pick something up and earned when you drop something off. This, I think, is another part of why Mausritter's system works.

There's also playing with the relationship between carrying equipment and bearing arms. Realistically, loadout for trekking cross-country with treasure and loadout for battle are very different, and it would take a few minutes to switch between them (dropping backpacks, stringing bows, fastening inconvenient bits of armor etc.). Lots of games handwave this inconvenience, but I think you could push it in either direction.

First, you could lean into it. Penalties for encumbrance don't have to be a big deal normally, but they're severe in any sort of intense action scenario. They're also very simple, no math: if you're wearing a backpack flanking attacks hit you automatically (or that sort of thing). Where the math comes in is the mechanics for switching loadouts. Heavier stuff takes longer to move. Heavier bows take longer to string. Tie something to your belt because it wouldn't fit in a bag? Well now you have to take time to untie it unless you want the penalty for fighting with stuff tied to your belt. This all of course would require pacing the game around the assumption that there will be an intense time pressure on the moments leading up to a fight (and also leaving one person unencumbered to scout ahead becomes invaluable since ambushes would be especially dangerous and knowing when a fight is coming lets you carry more loot).

On the other hand, you could swing away from that kind of realism and instead give bonuses for loadouts that follow certain rules. The thaumaturge gets a bonus to phlegmatic chants as long as they possess at least a certain quantity of copper and silver and no other metals. The heavy's mondohammer does more damage the more weight you pack inside, but swinging it might turn the stuff in it to different items of the same weight. The burglar can't pilfer this golden chalice because they would lose the momentum bonus they have for fitting all their carried items into rhyming iambic pentameter. You know, that sort of thing.

One time I was reading about encumbrance systems I ran into the idea that encumbrance systems often get scrapped even in games that supposedly care about logistics because they involve a lot of calculation that is actually detrimental to players. It's one thing to spend a lot of time calculating all the various bonuses your character has on the "make goblins dead" skill because that's math that is going towards making goblins dead, but math that's going towards potentially fucking you over? That's not great.

Now, with something like food it's quite easy to see something like "not full nor hungry" as a default state and the also have a state of "satiated" which would grant characters ACTUAL BONUSES FOR EATING instead of just slowing down the death spiral to incentivize actually keeping track of rations, but it's kind of hard to imagine a similar situation with encumbrance. You're either carrying stuff or you're not.

So the best solutions rely on making the math simpler or making the presentation so fun that it's fun to engage with. Like in Mausritter, which has a whole little minigame for handling the inventory. Anyway Mausritter is pretty fun.

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stop making fun of bad people for being fat or having small dicks or being socially awkward or whatever else you seem to think is a fair target. none of that shit has anything to do with why theyre bad. i don’t care if a nazi has a stutter or a terf has thinning hair or whatever. at best youre missing the point, at worst your comments are gonna hurt vulnerable people more than they will ever affect the shitty person you’re mocking. why are you so attached to these bullshit standards anyway?

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leftist media discussion: "While this show said "trans rights" directly without any ambiguity, one plot element of this children's show could be considered morally questionable after 25 degrees of separation, so the author must be a heckin fascist"

right wing media discussion: "Well it happened. The reboot of Female Protagonist Fights Unsubtle Allegory for Capitalism That I Was Too Young to Notice as a Kid -our last bastion of apolitical entertainment- has gone woke because they made a supporting character black"

centrist media discussion: "did you see the latest episode of Sword Hero Cleanses the Undesirables on crunchyroll? best show of the year imo"

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get okay with being some level of burden on others, seriously

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i think people who complain about paragraphs being too long should just read/write screenplays instead. some of us actually enjoy reading

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If the experiment were constructed in a different way, different facts and truths emerge. Experiments need to be understood as “constructed” and we need to recognize that both scientist and the object of science (morning glories in this chapter) are important players in this theater. What understanding emerges about morning glories does so through the particular intra-actions of scientists and experimental subjects (Barad 2007)—they together produce the “truth” about morning glories. To the extent that science fails to attend to this, science uncovers only a fraction or at times only a fiction of the story.

The results of my morning glory experiments were significant, showing that patterns of flower color were not random but rather the acts of balancing selection. But the results were produced through a carefully constructed and contrived experiment. The experiments were designed to be “good” experiments where the results were definitive with clear and easy interpretation, and where ambiguity was minimized. In this sense, the experiments were well designed. But what exactly do these experiments reveal? In order to be positive that the effects are solely due to the variables in question, experiments need to be carefully constructed. This involves artificially producing the experimental plants with known genotypes as well as carrying out the experiments in controlled and sometimes artificial contexts. In these particular experiments, in order to produce the experimental plants that were genetically identical (exceptfor precise variation in the w locus), several steps had to be undertaken. For instance, genetic crosses were carried out in plants grown in the greenhouse away from the uncontrollable lives of pollinators; seedlings were first grown in the greenhouse and then transplanted in the field; individuals that failed to germinate were replaced with similar genotypes to ensure a good sample size; plants were grown in controlled fields so the frequencies of the flower colors could be controlled; plants were planted in rows individually at regular intervals and equidistant from each other; plants were twined on their own bamboo stakes and not allowed to spread randomly on the ground or on each other (as they often do in the wild) in order to identify the flowers and seeds of individual plants; pests such as cutworms, deer, or other animals were kept out of the experimental plots. All the above were necessary to produce results with enough of a sample size to discern a pattern, and thanks to all of these I was able to finish a dissertation! And to be precise, I showed that under all the above conditions, balancing selection is important in its action. Yet because it is a reductionist science, I am left to wonder about the vagaries of everyday life, the random stochastic events that disrupt natural populations, the degree to which the design drove the conclusions. And there is always the matter of scale at which results emerge. Limitation of modern scientific life—graduate school, money, tenure clocks, resources, and weather patterns—all shape the knowledge the scientist, the context, and the culture of science and the plant co-produce.

In addition, my experiments with morning glories assumed a “genes versus environment” paradigm. Genetic lines of morning glory were formed to create uniform genetic contexts in which the only variant was the flower color at the w locus. The flowers were then grown in fields where little else grew. The experiments could not explore whether or not genes interact with other genes, or if the expression of genes at times depends on their environmental contexts in complex and even unpredictable ways. My carefully constructed experiments were not designed to capture the complexities of environmental contexts outside the experimental cycle. Latour’s invocation of scientific experiments as theater is an apt analogy. The theater is itself built as an “objective” event with the scientist’s own history and social identity deemed irrelevant, the experimental organism is stripped of all context and agency, and the objects of study are manufactured to minimize variation. The play itself is conducted on a stage that is carefully manipulated to produce as generic and sterile a location as possible so it can then be reproduced easily in other generic and sterile locations. With the observer, organism, and location set aside, the play unfolds to reveal some “truth” about biology and nature.

It is not that I contest the impulse for clarity that drives the research design and methods that I used in my training; it is more that this theater stands for pure knowledge about nature. Furthermore, so much is left out of the story of morning glories. I worry about the myopia produced by the rigid and futile effort to set boundaries on nature and culture that precludes and excludes so much complexity. How would the morning glory change if the boundaries were abandoned?

In many ways, I am arguing that most biological experiments (including my own) are, if we are precise, naturecultural experiments themselves. They are only deemed natural or rendered purely biological by ignoring the cultural contexts of theories, plants, and humans. Innumerable social and cultural assumptions are deeply embedded within the experiments and therefore in knowledge we produce about the natural world. Identifying these assumptions and reconceptualizing scientific practice as directed at the entanglement of nature and culture requires interdisciplinary effort. My primary argument is that if the biological sciences care about producing knowledge about nature and the humanities and social sciences care about producing knowledge about culture, both should be invested in the stories told about morning glories and other organisms.

Ghost Stories For Darwin, Banu Subramanium

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Something something weeks where decades happen...

"Bringing back this classic post" my friend, you are reblogging a post that was made last month.

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If one capitalist being shot by a vigilante scared them this much and forced Blue Cross Blue Shield to abandon their cheap stake anesthesia policy, imagine what organizing the working class into a revolutionary army would do!

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Sigiled Guildmage Submission by CraftyCreeper64

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Mad historian—I'm imagining a hyperbolic Woodrow Wilson: a mastermind of the retroactive justification of historical atrocities, and the architect of present ones. This happens in an episode of Star Trek TOS where they go to a planet ruled by a Nazi regime only to learn that its architect is a human historian who got stranded there and reproduced Nazi politics in order to take over.

Mad archeologist—Uncovers legendary or supernatural sites in a reckless/destructive/corrupt manner. Heinrich Schliemann and/or the villain in any Indiana Jones movie

Mad classicist—Probably more of a classicist in the sense that he thinks he's Caesar or Alexander because he can smugly quote the ancients than any kind of actual scholarship he's doing. Pretty sure this is that guy from Watchmen's deal

Mad legal scholar—They actually already have these in real life and they are responsible for most extant jurisprudence

Mad linguist—I'm hesitant here because this idea presumes an understanding of language, the mind, and social power that I very much disagree with, but this would be the engineer behind all those scifi mind-control languages that stop people from being able to think for themselves. I can't think of an example of this character in fiction, but somebody had to figure out Newspeak, right?

Reply to or reblog this post with a supervillain theme you'd like to see more of - whether it's underutilized, could be executed better than it has been, or just hasn't been used at all to your knowledge.