#alignment systems

[ribstongrowback]

Of Law, Chaos, and that Dumbass Chart

people who try to "fix" the alginment chart in order to make it more truthful to the human experience in various ways make a fundamental mistake in understanding what purposes it serves within the medium it originates from

at the very start, it is useful to think of alignment as team jerseys, as i've said in the past. from a gameplay and storytelling perspective, this needs to be somewhat restrictive to create interesting interactions with a game system

in game, knowing someone's alignment provides some context as to whether or not you might be aligned with them, but mostly it allows to create many alignment-specific abilities, such as spells against specific creatures, for example.

this system is by no means perfect, but by being restrictive it allows for a very interesting amount of creativity within its boundaries. this should be stimulating, even, to you. you make a character that is chaotic.

this is by no means to say that the dnd alignment chart is good or even decent, it sucks ass, but it sucks ass because it fails at the things it would otherwise facilitate.

if you wish to include a similar system in your games, in your fiction, do keep in mind the purposes alignment may serve within your creation, how useful it might be, and do make it fraught. Make it flawed and unstable and reflective of a wider cosmogony that kinda sucks as long as it sucks in interesting ways.

as an example, recently i've been thinking about homebrewing a 40k campaign with a reskin of one of my own systems, as a style exercise, and i've been thinking about corruption. and i thought, i don't want a gauge. that's boring. instead, at the end of sesh you gotta do a lil "where's your character at mentally" by picking what emotion they feel most strongly between fury, pride, love, hope or faith.

each of these having a tracker, whenever ones gets too high compared to faith you'll be CORRUPTED and RUINED and start mutating or something.

this, of course, is nonsense. it's not bad to be madder at injustice than you are a simp for the god emperor of mankind. but this ideological framework does say something, while also carrying consequences in game

never forget: tabletop rpgs are not just for telling stories, they are, at the end of the day, still games.

[dollbotthing]

many of you on here agree with alignment systems that force people into categories based on things we have no control over. if you called someone with adhd “chaotic” or whatever, you are a jerk okay. this is why we can’t have nice things

[bafco-reliability]

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[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

At your side [End of Season 2]

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[theofficialastronomy101]

All Planets perfectly aligned the other night!

[comicaurora]

Funnily enough I know about Elric from my dad’s copy of Deities and Demigods. Yes, he has one of the old ones that has Cthulhu in it too.

every time D&D starts trying to tighten the screws on their licensing and make everyone pay them rent for the privilege of using their game I fondly remember all the blatant theft that D&D proudly laid its foundations on

[aeniith]

Someone in the comments was asking for sources on ergativity and antipassives.

Here are sources that concern both:

Polinsky, Maria. "Antipassive." The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity, edited by Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Lisa deMena Travis, Oxford University Press, 2017. Polinsky, Maria. "Antipassives in Crosslinguistic Perspective." Annual Review of Linguistics, vol. 6, 2020, pp. 173–193.

Janic, Katarzyna. "On the Reflexive-Antipassive Polysemy: Typological Convergence from Unrelated Languages." Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, pp. 217–232.

Bittner, Maria, and Ken Hale. "Ergativity: Toward a Theory of a Heterogeneous Class." Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 27, no. 4, 1996, pp. 531–604.

Here are a few sources on just ergativity:

Deal, Amy Rose. (2015). "Ergativity." In Syntax - Theory and Analysis: An International Handbook, edited by Tibor Kiss and Artemis Alexiadou, 654–707. De Gruyter Mouton.

Coon, Jessica, Diane Massam, and Lisa deMena Travis, eds. (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity. Oxford University Press.

Dixon, R. M. W. (1979). "Ergativity." Language, 55(1), 59–138.

Aldridge, Edith. (2008). "Generative Approaches to Ergativity." Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5), 966–995.

And some on antipassives in particular:

Sansom, Meagan. "Where Do Antipassive Constructions Come From?" Diachronica, vol. 34, no. 2, 2017, pp. 233–276.

Cooreman, Ann. "A Functional Typology of Antipassives." In Voice: Form and Function, edited by Barbara A. Fox and Paul J. Hopper, John Benjamins, 1994, pp. 49–88. Also, I want to draw attention to the work of my colleague from graduate school, Raina Heaten, whose dissertation is about the typology of antipassives: Heaton, R. L. (2017). A typology of antipassives, with special reference to Mayan (Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa). University of Hawai‘i ScholarSpace.

This translation involves the use of the antipassive. You probably know what a passive voice is. But have you heard of the antipassive?

A passive essentially takes an object of a clause and makes it a subject, for a variety of reasons, including moving the focus, eliminating the need to explicitly state what would be the subject of the active voice version of the clause. So “Namí ate the apricot” would become “The apricot was eaten (by Namí)”

The antipassive essentially does the opposite. It takes a transitive verbal phrase and makes the *object* either disappear or demotes it to an oblique role. So what is necessarily a transitive verb otherwise, like “scare”, becomes intransitive. So it’s a little like saying “Namí has been scaring”. Only in English, that’s not really a good clause, so I translate it as “Namí has been scaring people”. With this indeterminate word, “people”, it doesn’t really matter WHO Namí has been scaring, it’s anyone and everyone who goes down by the river, potentially. The point is Namí and the fact that she’s acting weird.

Languages that have an ergative-absolutive verbal alignment are particular likely to use antipassives. This is because, in this type of alignment, the agent of a transitive and the subject of an intransitive are treated differently (the latter is treated syntactically like the patient of a transitive). Thus, the agent (ergative) gets promoted to absolutive and thus the former patient is demoted and less emphasized. The opposite is true for passive voices—they tend to be common in nominative accusative languages.

Rílin actually uses a split ergative system! So it gets both. :P

[permasleepymoth]

TransID flags! :D

I’ve always the Cloud Age Alignment System was really cool, but I haven’t been able to find any flags for it! So…I made them! :D

Lil chart thingie I found for the different names and symbols :3

Flags

I take flag and coining reqests!! Check my pinned post if you are interested!

[beargyufairy]

Sailor Moon

Sailor Venus

Sailor Mars

Sailor Mercury

Sailor Jupiter

[vatt1vv]

I’m being a hater real quick. You trans women sy truthers have your fun I too enjoy imagining sy with tits…. HOWEVER it’s way too simple a solution to sy’s gender weirdness. He has way too much of a complicated relationship with gender for it to simply be ‘Teehee estrogen would save him’ break free from the gender binary embrace genderqueer sy

[lurkiestvoid]

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.

(This essay was originally by u/walkandtalkk and posted to r/GenZ on Reddit two months ago, and I've crossposted here on Tumblr for convenience because it's relevant and well-written.)

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online. But you almost certainly don't how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you -- individually-- angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks' goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners -- especially young ones -- to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don't realize how well it's working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it's much scarier than you think.

How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users.

Russia began using troll farms a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the United States

In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government's first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

Here's what Prigozhin had to say about the IRA's efforts to disrupt the 2022 election:

"Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once."

In 2014, the IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment was to use those false social-media accounts, especially on Facebook and Twitter -- but also on Reddit, Tumblr, 9gag, and other platforms -- to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mocking, ad hominem arguments that incite American users.

In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to rejected major candidates. On November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist's Twitter urged Black Americans: "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote."

Russia plays both sides -- on gender, race, and religion

The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it's not just an effort to boost the right wing; it's an effort to radicalize everybody.

Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men. According to MIT, in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named "My Baby Daddy Aint Shit." It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers. It serves two purposes: Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.

MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.

On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women's March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack on the movement. Per the Times:

More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.

But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest: They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite. Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour. That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked: They drove the Women's March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization.

Russia doesn't need a million accounts, or even that many likes or upvotes. It just needs to get enough attention that actual Western users begin amplifying its content.

A former federal prosecutor who investigated the Russian disinformation effort summarized it like this:

It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore. It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.

As the New York Times reported in 2022,

There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, [Russian disinformation] workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.

China is joining in with AI

[A couple months ago], the New York Times reported on a new disinformation campaign. "Spamouflage" is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S. The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained about Soviet disinformation, the strategy is not to invent something totally fake. Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”

The influence networks are vastly more effective than platforms admit

Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called Fabrika. Fabrika's operators have bragged that social media platforms catch only 1% of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other platforms.

But how effective are these efforts? By 2020, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. And Russia doesn't just target angry Boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter. And, even, on Reddit.

It's not just false facts

The term "disinformation" undersells the problem. Because much of Russia's social media activity is not trying to spread fake news. Instead, the goal is to divide and conquer by making Western audiences depressed and extreme.

Sometimes, through brigading and trolling. Other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the U.S. the West over and over, until readers assume that's how most people feel. And sometimes, by using trolls to disrupt threads that advance Western unity.

As the RAND think tank explained, the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts, to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates, them. And it's not just low-quality bots. Per RAND,

Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. ... According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.

What this means for you

You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed. It's not just disinformation; it's also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.

It's why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms. And a lot of those trolls are actual, "professional" writers whose job is to sound real.

So what can you do? To quote WarGames: The only winning move is not to play. The reality is that you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users. Unless you know whom you're talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you -- politically or emotionally.

Here are some thoughts:

Don't accept facts from social media accounts you don't know. Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform. Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths. Or they'll spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.

Resist groupthink. A key element of manipulate networks is volume. People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support. When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it's easy to think the crowd is right. But "the crowd" could be fake accounts, and even if they're not, the brilliance of government manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think. They'll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal server or subreddit.

Don't let social media warp your view of society. This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts -- and the opinions -- you see across social media are not reliable. If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media. It is not always right. Sometimes, it screws up. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

Edited for typos and clarity. (Tumblr-edited for formatting and to note a sourced article is now older than mentioned in the original post. -LV)

P.S. Apparently, this post was removed several hours ago due to a flood of reports. Thank you to the r/GenZ moderators for re-approving it.

Second edit:

This post is not meant to suggest that r/GenZ is uniquely or especially vulnerable, or to suggest that a lot of challenges people discuss here are not real. It's entirely the opposite: Growing loneliness, political polarization, and increasing social division along gender lines is real. The problem is that disinformation and influence networks expertly, and effectively, hijack those conversations and use those real, serious issues to poison the conversation. This post is not about left or right: Everyone is targeted.

(Further Tumblr notes: since this was posted, there have been several more articles detailing recent discoveries of active disinformation/influence and hacking campaigns by Russia and their allies against several countries and their respective elections, and barely touches on the numerous Tumblr blogs discovered to be troll farms/bad faith actors from pre-2016 through today. This is an ongoing and very real problem, and it's nowhere near over.

A quote from NPR article linked above from 2018 that you might find familiar today: "[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we'd surely be better off without voting AT ALL," a post from the account said.")

[gurggggleburgle]

Now I love our sex plants as much as anyone else but going off PIDW meta lore given its a male oriented fantasy the whole nature of there being a plant that sex pollens every few feet is funny but not accurate. As someone who's read/watched way too much hentai aphrodisiacs tend to come as drug forms or are a poison from a monster. More likely are you to come across something that dissolves clothing, or traps you in a compromising position, or simply creates opportunities and excuses for fetishes. Sex pollen as a trope is more a fanfic and female driven project element.

So let me propose while a few variants of papapa flowers existed before they were more relegated to scary tentacle plants and the like. But because the genre has shifted from stallion novel to danmei suddenly there's a riging surge in a new species of fuck flower and Qian Cao Peak is floored. Sure there were plants that could be turned into fuck or death aphrodisiacs but not sex pollen outbreaks. How are you supposed to prep for that? What does allergy season become!! And how does Peak Lord Shen keep finding a new species every other week? What's the biology in the plant world here???!!!

[forsakenanchor]

🔪 can we agree that where jonathan sims is a avatar of the eye, jonny d’ville would probably be a avatar of the slaughter if he was in tma? i dont know i had this thought late at night and had to share

🔪 speaking of do we think that ivy would be avatar of the eye considering shes the mechanisms archivist? or somethin else, do we think that all of the mechanisms are marked by the slaughter at least, because some of them i wouldnt nail for avatars of the slaughter but i definitely see them all being marked by the slaughter or maybe even the end

[bronzeflower623]

Anybody else started to seriously consider converting to the change religion after playing in stars and time or is that just a me thing

[puppiemk]

yqy too is in there in the pre-cqm timeline, i dont think sj would tell him beyond that sy is dead because that feeling he and sy werent worth saving after that reuinon had at the iac. sy would be verbally upset, but sj would argue why should yqy know the full truth

while yqy is drowning in even more guilt, and horror

[your-bigender-big-brother]

Damocloidian: A maverine-aligned identity that is part of the Galactian Alignment System.

This term comes from damocloid, a type of minor planet with an eccentric orbit. - 💙💚