#going into completely new spaces with completely different people and systems to learn

[standfortheangels]

Okay. As frustrated as I am and as much as I still feel I should be protesting... The Tumblr staff/Devs/execs have made it pretty clear that they couldn't care less about customer feedback, so.. I guess there's not much point in going entirely silent on here. They probably wouldn't even notice anyway, and obviously the reams and reams of posts loudly hating the new changes are not making any impact.

Still not quite sure about stopping it entirely, so I think I will still continue to queue up protest posts, but.. I think I might as well throw the normal stuff back in too, kinda have a mix going? I don't Want to seem as though I'm over it and going back to normal. I'm not over it. At all. You can only have your feelings ignored so much before something snaps, and I definitely snapped with this latest move.

So.... I have signed up for a couple different places. I'm now on Dreamwidth (not sure that it's for me, but we'll see), Pillowfort, and I'll be adding one or two more very soon.

Not sharing my names on these places right now because I'm not fully set up yet, but once I am, I'll post those and add them to my pinned post too.

For a while I'm going to try being active to some extent on everything, get a feel for how it all works before I jump in with both feet. Then once I know which site or sites I like best.. I guess I'll figure it out from there. We'll see how much staff have annoyed me by then. -_-

[vergess]

Please, please explain how to install and use linux like I'm 5 years old. I'm so sick of windows adding AI and other bullshit to my already struggling elderly laptop but I'm really not good with computers at all so I have no idea where to start with Linux.

Okay, so, I'm going to break this down into steps I would give the average tumblr user first, and then if any of them are confusing or use words you don't understand, ask me and I'll explain that step in greater detail.

Step 0) BACK. UP. YOUR. SHIT.

NEVER EVER EVER CHANGE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM WITHOUT A COMPLETE BACKUP OF ALL YOUR FILES.

Step 1) Learn your machine. You need to know:

How much RAM you have

If your processor is 32 or 64 bit

How big your hard drive is

On windows, you can find out all of this by going to the start menu, typing "about" and opening the first result on your system instead of the internet.

For additional instructions, visit this page.

Step 2) Pick your Linux.

There's like 10,000 kinds of Linux, each tailored to particular functions that the end-user (that is you!) might want to have. The sheer amount is very daunting, so first I'm going to give my suggestions, then I'll explain how to pick for yourself.

For Mac users, I suggest Kubuntu. For windows users, I suggest Mint Cinnamon. If your laptop is really REALLY old, I recommend Sparky Stable, which is the lightest weight Linux I would ever suggest for a new user. In every case, download the version suited to your processor (32 bit can be labelled "x86" or "32 bit"; 64 bit is always labelled "64 bit").

If you want to try a different type of linux, you'll need to make sure your laptop meets the "minimum specs" or "system requirements." These numbers tell you how much RAM, processor and hard drive space the linux will use. (That's why you needed those numbers at the beginning.)

Step 3) Collect your supplies. You're going to need:

An ISO burning program compatible with your current system, like Balena Etcher.

A copy of the ISO file for the Linux you want to use.

Your laptop.

An 8gb or larger USB flash drive.

Step 3) Make a bootable USB drive

Install Balena Etcher, hitting "okay" and "next" when prompted. Last I checked, Etcher doesn't have adware attached, so you can just hit next every time.

Plug your USB drive into the laptop.

Open Etcher.

Click "flash from file" and open the ISO file with your Linux on it.

Click "Select target" and open the USB drive location. Hit the "flash" button. This will start writing all the linux installer data to your flash drive. Depending on the speed of your machine, this could take as long as 10 minutes, but shouldn't be much longer.

Step 4) Boot to the USB drive

This is, in my opinion, the trickiest step for a lot of people who don't do "computer stuff." Fortunately, in a rare act of good will, Windows 10 made this process a lot easier.

All you'll need to do is go to settings, then recovery, then advanced startup and pick the button labelled "use a device."

This tutorial has images showing where each of those is located. It's considered an "advanced setting" so you may get a spooky popup warning you that you could "harm your system by making changes" but we're not doing anything potentially harmful so you can ignore that if you get it.

Step 5) Try out linux on the flash drive first.

Linux installs using a cool little test version of itself that you can play around in. You won't be able to make changes or save settings, but you can explore a bit and see if the interface is to your liking. If it's hideous or hard to navigate, simply pick a new linux version to download, and repeat the "make a bootable USB" step for it.

Step 6) Actually install that sucker

This step varies from version to version, but the first part should be the same across the board: on the desktop, there should be a shortcut that says something like "install now." Double click it.

Follow the instructions your specific linux version gives you. When in doubt, pick the default, with one exception:

If it asks you to encrypt your drive say no. That's a more advanced feature that can really fuck your shit up down the road if you don't know how to handle it.

At some point you're going to get a scary looking warning that says 1 of 2 things. Either:

Install Linux alongside Windows, or

Format harddrive to delete all data

That first option will let you do what is called "dual booting." From then on, your computer will ask every time you turn it on whether you want Windows or Linux.

The second option will nuke Windows from orbit, leaving only linux behind.

The install process is slower the larger your chosen version is, but I've never seen it take more than half an hour. During that time, most linux versions will have a little slideshow of the features and layout of common settings that you can read or ignore as you prefer.

Step 7) Boot to your sexy new Linux device.

If you're dual booting, use the arrow keys and enter key to select your linux version from the new boot menu, called GRUB.

If you've only got linux, turn the computer on as normal and linux will boot up immediately.

Bonus Step: Copy Pasting some code

In your new start menu, look for an application called "terminal" or "terminal emulator." Open that up, and you will be presented with an intense looking (but actually very harmless) text command area.

Now, open up your web browser (firefox comes pre-installed on most!), and search the phrase "what to do after installing [linux version you picked]"

You're looking for a website called "It's FOSS." Here's a link to their page on Mint. This site has lots and lots of snippets of little text commands you can experiment with to learn how that functionality works!

Or, if you don't want to fuck with the terminal at all (fair enough!) then instead of "terminal" look for something called "software manager."

This is sort of like an app store for linux; you can install all kinds of programs directly from there without needing to go to the website of the program itself!

[funnier-as-a-system]

hey sorry for adding to the number of vents in your inbox but we really need some advice and we’re too afraid to let our plural friends know abt this </3 dont feel pressured to answer if you dont know how or dont want to ^-^

i almost never hear other voices in my head(space?) & thats like. THE symptom of being a system. sometimes i’ll ask into the void if anyone is there or try to switch out of front and . nothing happens. for the past 6 months ive been heavily questioning whether or not im really plural or if i just dissociate and think im a different person sometimes and this is really the main reason why i think im probably not a system; the only times i have ever actually felt like there are other people in my head are when i was very badly dissociated (usually caused by extreme mental distress)

a little help would be truly appreciated but again, u dont need to answer ^^ either way if ur reading this, i hope you have a lovely day!! we love your blog 💖🙏

Hey, there!

I want to reassure you and let you know that it's perfectly fine and possible to be a system without hearing anything internally. Internal communication does get a lot of focus in the community, which is why it can be seen as "the symptom of being a system", but in truth, I don't think there's such thing as a defining symptom of being a system outside of the literal definition (which in itself can vary a bit from system to system). All of us are different; we all go through different things, have different experiences, live different lives. You don't have to be able to hear or even sense others inside your head to be a system.

If you say that you think you're a different person sometimes, well, that sounds pretty system-like to me! Besides, it's not unusual for things like this to only really be noticeable when you're Going Through It™. That's when a lot of symptoms tend to rear their heads the most, I'd say.

And ignoring all that, it took us years to become as skilled as we are with internal communication and switching on purpose. Six months can feel like a lot when you're questioning, but you're also trying to learn two completely new skills. You shouldn't expect yourself/ves to be perfect right off the bat, and you shouldn't judge yourself based on what others define their systemhood around. Again, you can be a system even if your brain is silent and you can't get anyone to switch with you. If you feel like you're a system, you're probably a system, regardless of whatever else is going on up there.

We hope you have a lovely day too, anon!

[serejae]

I DONT FEEL LONELY WHEN I SEE HER | SEOK.MATTHEW

WHAT ! - matthew bf thoughts for my menda😇

WHEN ! - (warnings) fluff, kissing, petnames

WHO ! - i get you. ill be completely new to a group but THATTTTT one is my man. ANYWAYS I HOPE YOU ENJOY MENDA BOOKIE SNOOKS😇

! - dating matthew is like a breath of fresh air, he isnt too distanct nor suffocating

! - i think thats mainly based on the fact that he took time to study and know you before he asked you out. by the time it was your 1 month he already (been) knew the temperature you like certain drinks, how much milk is too much in your cereal, and if we wanna be normal, when you need space

! - i feel like the trope that most resonates with matthew to me, is bestfriends brother. him and his sister have such a cute bond that i feel like he’ll recognize some of his sisters friend, but when it was you it was different. he couldnt pull himself away, his sister quickly caught on and realized what he was up to (before helping you both out)

! - matthews favorite parts of his day is definitely the morning and nights time. how he’ll wake up with you in his arms taking some time to admire you before carefully sneaking off and getting ready for the gym. he’ll wait for the clock to go off at a certain time that he memorized to start making your breakfast and drink, cause by the time you get ready and freshen up it’ll be the perfect temperature

! - speaking of gym, i see some people describe matthew as friendly, in which yes he is BUT HE DOESNT HAVE EYES ON ANYOJE BUT YOU. in his mind you guys already have a white fenced house with a dog and 3 kids running around. but i digress, he’ll call you and work out while talking to you because there’s nothing that gets him more pumped than you. if any other person tries to talk or hit on him he’ll act like he cant hear them through his headphones as he speaks to you

! - he loves the night time, because after a long day or you both being tired and stressed at least he knows he can come home to you and relax with you in his arms again. he loves how his day begins with you and ends with you

! - if hes away he’ll definitely buy a stuff animal that reminds him of you before the trip and take photos of it doing the most basic things “look were on a breakfast date:)” captioned to a photo of a breakfast platter with the stuff animal sitting infront of it sitting straight up (he adjusted it making sure ur postures always right)

! - his family loves you, they hear all abour you 24/7. his family knows that when matthew cherishes something he means it. mattthew has a big heart that he doesnt take for granted , he’ll try to bring you over to canada as much as he can to bring you to his family, talk about his childhood town, as well as trying his favorite childhood snacks

! - you dont have many arguments with matthew but when you do, he does get rather defensive wanting to defend himself but after a couple arguments with you he learned that being defensive wouldnt get him anywhere, so he tries to keep his composure. on those days he does slip up, he reflects why and what made you two get here. afterwards he’ll try to start a convo so you both can go back to normal and the way he missed

! - sometimes to matthew he gets tired of the basic ways of showing affection. he loves physical touch yes, but he knows you know he basically latches onto anyone he loves. so he decided to make a new system for you, and just for you. he loves you more than the words i love you, i love you isnt enough to describe his love for you so he tweaks it a little. he’ll say phrases that make your heart flutter

“i wanna be with you in every life time”

“you make me believe in love”

“you make me feel safe”

“you look like the in bloom instrumental”

! - matthew would love to indulge in your interest, could be as adventurous as rock climbing to as calming as bird watching. he never complains. if you like it , he does too

! - he loves to try new things with you. he wants his first to always be with you, if the members invite him to go to a new amusement park he’ll drag you along or go later with you because he knows he’ll constantly be in a state of mind of “yn wouldve liked that”, “i wish yn couldve seen that”

! - please. before there was rizz king matthew, the amount of tries he took on you. you were his first victim at all his flirting attempts. more of them making him look silly than 🫦🫦 but youd never tell him that. for all he knows he is your rizz king❤️

! - everything always relates back to you somehow. if someone asked him what happiness meant to him the conversation will lead back to you. if someone asked him if he knew the technique of how to make the best slime, its still gonna lead back to you

! - yeah sure you’ll have to fight jiwoong and gunwook every so often for your own boyfriend but hes worth the fight right? or at least thats what he constantly tells you 🤨

! - when matthew loves you you know he does, not because he tells you all the time but its the little things he does that remind you “im right here if you need anything”

[readingsbynish]

What’s holding you back? PAC reading

choose the pic you feel called to

any feedback is appreciated so much . tip jar is here . thanks for reading.

More PACs coming soon !

1st pic

…In with the new

the energy in this group is earthy, naturally content and maybe a bit reserved or introverted. It’s easy for you to enjoy staying in your comfort zone and that’s exactly what’s holding you back. You need to let go of doing things the same way you’ve always done them.

It’s time for new routines, habits, and patterns that align with the person you’ve grown into. I need you to work on your self expression. This includes but isn’t limited to updating your playlists, wearing different pieces and colors, trying or cooking new foods, learning a new skill or hobby, etc.

Add some creativity to the parts of your life where you only been focused on practicality. Hobbies and creative pursuits are directly aligned to your life’s purpose so you may find out more about yourself than you ever thought.

I want you to take up more space in your own life with things you like. Make the time to get the rest you need and do the things that fulfill you before burning yourself out. Rebuild that connection with yourself and your support systems so you can pour from a full cup.

2nd pic

Everybody ain’t your friend

What’s holding you back is the relationships that you have in your life that are no longer serving you. The idea that you can bring everyone to the top with you is directly harming you at this point.

You need to pay attention to the way certain people are treating you and how they react when things are going well for you and otherwise. There are jealous people in your circle not only saying negative things about you but actively working towards your “downfall”.

Moving forward, I need you to start gatekeeping yourself. Stop supplying people with information about your personal life to later use against you. If you’re working on a project or getting a position, don’t talk about it until it’s already complete.

There are people who want the best for you and you need to be spending your time and energy with them. The grass is always greener where you water it, so nurture those relationships with your day 1s and support system.

I whole heartedly suggest getting in contact with your spirit guides to boost your discernment .

3rd pic

The Original Thief of Joy

Whats holding you back is comparison. The idea of what you could have had or where you should be right now is actually less than what you deserve. You need to see how everything that is meant for you will find you in its own time. Misdirection is a protection and whenever one door closes another one opens.

You are on divine timing, so being at a certain level by a certain time is not realistic for YOU. Don’t be afraid to show yourself and others that it’s never too late to go after what you truly want in life.

Some are being called to take a leap of faith right now by switching career fields or starting your own business. If this is you, your efforts will be blessed more than what you can imagine. The choices you are making right now are leading you to exactly where you need to be.

Believing in yourself and your abilities is key. This group has done a lot of inner work and has a lot to contribute to the world. I’m sensing healers, readers and artists but not limited there and in your cases, this is your birthright. To fully rise into your power, i need you to work on your self worth. The only thing stopping you is that you are telling yourself you’re not ready or you don’t deserve it. Show the universe you know you deserve it.

[theoneiroveil]

Did you wake up on October 1st, 2016 to a very strange channel in your subscription box on Youtube?

Well if not, here is a little bit that channel.

Soursalt is a series that began in 2016 with roughly 600 people waking up subscribed to it without knowing. That's a very real thing that happened, which is a great selling point of the story.

Over the next few days these weirdly edited potato-quality home videos get uploaded and nobody has any idea what's going on. Some descriptions keep changing, some are pieces of conversations, etc. People are immediately hooked because what the fuck is going on? Then Madman Re starts getting mentioned, is it a place, a God, Freddy Krueger, who knows. More cryptic and weird dream videos get uploaded and then suddenly there's a break. This is the end of the prologue of the story.

Suddenly, we started getting rapid fire uploads a few months later of these two idiots making a really shitty ghost hunter parody knock off sketch. This is basically meant to be like a needle in the haystack for viewers. There are moments in these videos that are completely filler and just dumb comedy or filler -- b u t there are teases that something is up sprinkled within these videos. You'll have one of them mention the path looks different (implying they scouted it out before hand), or they'll hear or see something the camera just straight up doesn't see of pick up. This continues on until it's obviously getting dark, but we don't see their journey home. Instead, a few days later, we're treated to another sketch. This time shit gets fucky.

The two do the Ghost Guy routine on a haunted road by the woods, but as the move past the housed area towards the side of the park, their patience with each other starts running thin, they start hearing strange things, and feeling off. After taking a break off the road in a nearby Gazebo, they find a mysterious grave site and a stuffed monkey. Here, we learn out of character that they were filming at locations posted on a strange forum ; the same one implied to have launched the Soursalt spread.

After getting covered in some shit, blood and rot the characters introduce the audience to the Madman of Re as Aidan "Ghost Guy" Calloway touches the Window of a spooky run down bus and a ghastly hand touches his back -- all separated thematically by … a Window.

And this is where Soursalt takes you, into the Window; a terrifying physical nightmare space that seperates the viewer from their body and traps them in their own mind, a mind that can be easily manipulated by the Madman of Re.

BUT WAIT

This is only the end's beginning.

Timeskip -- Seven Years Later:

The story returns with Eulacram on the eve of the Spread's seven year anniversary following Aidan as he struggles to live with the trauma of his past and present following the events he experienced in Soursalt. It's at this point where the shattering of Aidan's mind takes literal form and we're presented with various versions of him through a system that he calls the Crucible Channel.

Meanwhile, another entity has pursued the same goal as Madman Re and sought out those that were victims of various Spreads to put together what it calls the Eulacram Tribute, a tournament of survival that allows those touched by the Oneiroveil (the dream realm the Window is in) to compete for an evolution of their flesh. Aidan and the other Spread victims are unknowingly pulled into a shared dream where it seems reality is once again being manipulated as their lives are being toyed with. However, Aidan's access to the Crucible Channel may be prove useful in saving him and the other victims from this new nightmare.

Eulacram is designed both as an Epilogue to Soursalt and its own series. While Soursalt is to be seen as a more found-footage style story, Eulacram utilizes the idea posed by the prologue that the entity can create videos with dreams, to showcase a cinematic-like view of events within the story. Some episodes can transition between hand-held, cinematic handheld, and cinematic third person, to allow for a unique approach on telling the story.

New viewers of the series can pick up with Act 1 or Act 2 Eulacram (on 10/1/23) without having fully watched Soursalt or Eulacram's prologue ; which will allow for an easier transition into the new content while everything you need to know will be given to you through the story. Viewers of the past content, and even those part of the first 600 subscribers will get the full experience though, as they will have seen the journey of some of these characters from the beginning, understanding the trauma that led them to becoming who they are today.

Soursalt // Eulacram is unlike any other web series you have seen, or dreamed. It's dark, gritty, there's a talking lizard, it's sharp and brutal at times ; but comedic, light hearted and emotional at others. The characters feel real, their pain feels real. If you're looking for web series horror that breaks the mould, takes risks, and isn't afraid to pop out an eye or two… or three… or ---

Then on October 1st, 2023, you should wake up to a very strange channel in your subscription box on Youtube.

This is that channel.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

As people may know, or at least be unsurprised to learn, I am a rather obsessive collector/organizer of data. I am a big fan of having everything I like in a digital file that I own (rather than renting access to it via streaming), and of making sure they're all organized and labelled with sufficient context.

[Note that I'm coming back to add now that I've finished writing this whole post: what follows is a pretty boring description of how I bought a bigger hard drive this week, to facilitate my aforementioned hobby. It contains multiple pictures of my laptop. At the end there is a screenshot of names of all the comedians in my comedy folder. So only click on the cut link if, for some reason, you think that sounds interesting. If you do think any of that topic sounds interesting, shoot me a message or something because we should be friends, if you share my enjoyment of something so objectively uninteresting.]

For the first few years that I did this, I kept most of my comedy stuff on a few different external hard drives, that were between 500GB and 1TB each. Different ones had different types of media on them, and I'd switch around when I needed different folders. It got difficult to keep the drive still while I was using the computer, so I purchased a pocket thing that adheres to the back of the laptop, so my external drive could live in a pouch on my laptop's back while drawing its power, like a parasite:

This was my laptop situation for quite a while. The sticker, of course, an homage to Nish Kumar in the lockdown season of The Mash Report.

About a year and a half ago, when I finally got a job with more financial stability, one of the first things I did was splurge on a 5TB hard drive. I took all the stuff that mattered from my various smaller hard drives, and was able to combine it into one giant folder, labelled "comedy", on the 5TB drive.

I went with 5TB because it seemed to be the biggest drive you could get while still having it small enough to work with my system of living on my laptop's back. Anything bigger than that be far less portable, and too big for the adhesive pouch. Even the 5TB one was thicker than the 1TB ones and that stretched the pouch, but I got it to fit in there.

I logged everything in my comedy folder in a spreadsheet, which I also kept in that folder. Keeping track of dates, locations, and lineups of performances. I established a system of having a subfolder for any comedian for whom I have at least two files, and then everything I have by them will go in their sub-folder. Audio or video comedy files that feature more than one comedian will be copied into all relevant folders - ie. if it's a mixed bill of five comedians who all have sub-folders, I'm making five copies of it. This is fine because 5TB is huge and I don't need to conserve space. I just need to feel the satisfaction of completism in my organizing system.

This worked well for quite some time. However, recently, the size of my comedy folder was creeping... not up to 5TB, but at least up toward a point where I had to start considering ways to save storage space, when adding new files. In the last few months, I've started adding a lot more video files, in the type of stuff that I used to only have in audio form, and obviously the video takes up a lot more space. I love having video versions of things because obviously it's fun to see the comedians, but I didn't want to have to start hesitating to add videos because of space constraints.

So I was thinking of making another upgrade - from the biggest of the hard drives that would still fit in my laptop's parasite pocket, to the next level, where hard drives would need to plug into an outlet because the laptop's USB port won't give them enough power. I started Googling prices, considering how big I should go. I figured at least 10TB, maybe 12.

Then, last week, I got a video of an excellent comedy night, I had so much fun watching it, but it was 3.5GB, and I needed to paste in five different copies of it. One for the John Robins subfolder, one for the Ian Smith subfolder, one for the Celya AB subfolder, one for the Nish Kumar subfolder, and one in the Mixed-Bill (non-Kitson) folder. And that is too many times to copy 3.5GB, if I have to be conscious of space. That will get unsustainable.

So I went to Best Buy's website, saw that they were selling a 14TB external drive from a reputable company on quite a good sale, and bought it. It was actually less expensive than buying the 10 or 12 TB ones, due to the sale price, and I figured that if I'm going to do this, I may as well go big.

Of course, I was concerned about how I'll use it, since I often use my laptop when I'm not just sitting at my desk, and I don't want the hard drive knocking around. I tried Googling whether they have bigger adhesive laptop pouches, for the bigger hard drives, but didn't find any. Then it occurred to me that I could just make one. I purchased a case for my new hard drive, and some adhesive Velcro that can attach to fabric.

When it arrived, I attached the case to the back of my laptop with Velcro, put the drive in it, and it worked great. Until I realized that this new drive has vents on the side. I don't know exactly how this all works, but I do know enough to know you probably shouldn't cover up vents on electronics. Which means I should not be placing this thing inside a case while I'm running it, the way I could place the smaller ones in their pouch while using them.

It took me far too many minutes of coming up with the obvious solution, to just stick Velcro directly on the back of the hard drive, and stick that to the Velcro on the back of my laptop. I tried that, and it worked surprisingly well:

(Pictured above: on the left, the old hard drive pouch that is visibly stretched from having the thick 5TB one in there when it's clearly not meant for ones that big; on the right, my new monster of a hard drive, attached directly to my laptop with Velcro)

Of course, this meant there was no more room on my laptop for the Kumar sticker, so I moved it to the side of my bookshelf, with the rest of my Britcom stickers:

(Pictured above: the Kumar sticker, a couple of Higgldy Piggldy Enterprises stickers that I took off the package in which Kitson's CD was delivered, a Taskmaster seal, a sticker of Nish Kumar with a coconut on his head in Taskmaster, and two cards that Ed Gamble threw into the crowd at The Wrestling event a couple of years ago, which a friend of mine who attended the event picked up for me)

The laptop did work even with that new giant hard drive strapped to its back, so I now have that option if I'm using my laptop somewhere without bringing other accessories. But I quickly became concerned about how much stress the weight of the hard drive would put on my laptop's hinges over long-term use. To avoid that, I figured that any time I'm just using my laptop in my bedroom, it would be nice if I could secure the hard drive to the "lap desk" thing that I keep under my laptop, so it'll keep still and stay nearby without putting its weight on those hinges. And I had Velcro, so I can secure anything to anything.

Unfortunately, my old lap desk was not wide enough for my laptop and the giant hard drive next to it. Because they don't usually make lap desks with the thought that they'll need to be wide enough for a 15.6-inch laptop and a hard drive that's 5.3 inches wide. So I went back on the internet, and browsed for ages to find a lap desk that would be wide enough for both to sit side by side. Finally I found one. Purchased that. Began to realize this great sale, getting a 14TB hard drive for only $250 - this is rapidly turning into well over $250, if you add the cost of the Velcro and the case and the new lap desk. Though I had been considering buying a new lap desk sometime soon anyway, as my old one was falling apart.

Okay. So. The lap desk arrived. I put some Velcro on it. By now I've gone wild with power over this new Velcro - I've already used it to hem my curtains and fix a hole in one of my backpack's internal pockets. I'm super excited that I can just attach stuff. Including a giant hard drive to a new and huge lap desk, rendering the drive portable:

I feel like I'm in one of those gaming subreddits. "Want to see my setup?" Pictured above is my new setup, with the actual hard drive out of the picture so you can see the Velcro. My setup mainly consists of Velcro, at this point. Velcro, and a behemoth of a hard drive that contains, among other things, approximately 800 hours of Daniel Kitson recordings (that's not a joke, I've just checked and the actual number is 798).

I've spent the last few days setting up the new hard drive. Part of that was easy, as I just moved the giant comedy folder. But I also added some stuff. I'd previously kept some of my John Oliver collection on a separate hard drive - the Last Week Tonight and Daily Show stuff - now my entire John Oliver collection is together, where it belongs, in the shared folder with Andy Zaltzman. I brought over a few extra sitcoms that I'd been leaving out because they take up too much space. And I re-organized some stuff. Cleaned it up a lot by adding a "misc. stand-up" folder for video and another for audio, so that stand-up recordings by comedians who don't have their own sub-folder can go in there, rather than just being loose in the main folder.

This newly cleaned up version of my hard drive is so much more organized that I can even almost fit the entire main folder into one screenshot (just a bit of text cut off at the end, but it's pretty close now - while before, it went on for ages with un-filed recordings):

(Disclaimer: Just because someone's name appears on that list as a comedian to whom I've dedicated a sub-folder, does not mean that I endorse everything they've ever said. Or, in maybe one or two cases, anything they've ever said. It just means I collect comedy like a magpie. I mean, obviously this folder has mostly stuff I like. But it's also just stuff I collect. This paragraph is basically here because I don't want anyone looking at the Alfie Brown folder, and saying, "Oh, I guess she thinks racial slurs are a cool way to be edgy." I also do not condone anything Alun Cochrane's said since about 2018 - frustratingly, because I found him quite funny before that, I'm still mad at Adam Hills for how hard he's defended monarchism since getting those letters after his name, and I do not co-sign any of Alan Partridge's political views. In that alphabetical list, those are four comedians just in the As with whom I disagree.)

(All those names in the above screenshot do look like a good template for a game of fuck marry kill, though.)

Anyway, that's how my week's been. Next week I'm going to try backing up the new and improved folder to my cloud space, without frying my hardware from overheating while uploading about 3TB of data. My laptop's been overheating lately, and unfortunately, my knowledge of IT stuff is, like, half a step too low for me to have the confidence to take it apart and try to clean the fans inside. But my laptop has been a trooper in data transfers all week, I'm sure it won't let me down now.

[sophieinwonderland]

What do you think a plural-inclusive future would look like in terms of religion? Since I know you’ve spoken about religion before.

Would all headmates have to convert to be accepted into a church/practice? The majority? Or just one?

How would another headmate breaking a religious taboo (e.g. one headmate being a Muslim, but another eating pork) be handled? As far as it being considered a sin.

What about closed religious practices? Would they go by the body’s ethnicity or each headmate’s? How would this work for introjects who practiced that religion in source?

How would major religious organizations who participated in/promoted exorcisms go about making amends to the plural community? And how could you make sure future spaces for that religion (e.g. the Catholic Church) were plural safe?

If you’ve answered all this before, sorry to bother you with it again. It’s just that a new headmate of mine might be religious and now I’m thinking about it.

A lot of these questions are complicated by the fact that religions aren't a monolith. I assume the different religions are going to have radically different approaches to plurals.

As far as being accepted goes, there are plenty of religions out there that allow for you to have multiple religions. Many types of neo paganism, for example. But even the ones that don't probably aren't going to banish a system just because therer are members who have other religions, or for sins committed by some of the headmates.

For example, Christianity is a proselytizing religion. Most churches wouldn't turn away a non-believer who attended their church because they would see them as a person they could convert to God.

So what would a proselytizing religion do if a system came in and only some of them were believers. My assumption is that they would try to convert the others.

Theologically speaking, there are a couple possibilities for how they would interpret plurality. The most likely is one of system responsibility. Basically, the whole system shares a single soul and is responsible for the actions of any member. Which means that if one member is a non-believer, then it can condemn the entire system to hell. In this case, I would assume that Christians would want to do their best to convert the other members and save their soul.

I imagine that a less popular interpretation might see the soul as divided so that only the headmates who believed could go to heaven. For anyone who held this interpretation, my guess is that they would still try converting the non-believers, but for thw sakes of the non-believers rather than for the sake of the believer headmates.

Whatever the interpretation, the important thing is that churches would respect the identities of the headmates as their own people, referring to them by their names and pronouns, and not viewing them as demonic entities or something similarly dangerous.

Beyond that, it is really going to come down to the individual churches and what they choose to believe.

And from what I understand, many "closed culture religions" are also not necessarily uniform.

Some religions like Christianity are completely open proselytizing religions that make it their mission to convert as many people as possible to their belief system.

Some mostly open religions are open to sharing their practices with the world but may have more strict requirements to actually become a member.

Some religions are completely closed in that you can only be a member if you were born into that culture.

But other religions are semi-closed and don't want to share their practices with outsiders, but are willing to accept converts who seek to learn, and these may have complex rituals for becoming an official member of the religion.

Overall, I think it's just going to come down to the individual religion with how they want to accept new members. It would be silly of me to make a decree for how all religion should treat plurals who want to be members when every religion has its own cultural history and background that shaped their practices and why they do what they do.

Questions like these are great ones. But I think when we get there, these are questions that will need to be asked of each individual religion. And even separate sects in denominations of those religions.

[theautisticdoctor]

Have you ever been screened for adhd? I see that there is a lot of overlap in adhd and autism diagnosis. How was it for you?

Autism and ADHD do have a lot of similarities, as well as ADHD and (c)PTSD. I am officially diagnosed with autism and cPTSD, but I do also score very high on the ADHD spectrum. I got asked once if I wanted to get officially tested, but I refused because at that time my brain just couldn’t handle another label. I absolutely despise labels and getting them put on me gives me massive stress, because I feel so inadequate and as a failure (I’m still working on that). My autism also got kind of buried under all the other labels that got put on me, and I felt like it was going to happen with this again. I don’t do well in adjusting or acknowledging new things and it takes ages for me to accept these labels.

Just like autism, ADHD is also a neurodevelopment disorder, which means it would have been there in my childhood, so for me it is most useful to look how I was as a child. As a child I was not hyperactive at all, only disorganised with a lot of executive dysfunction, impulsivity when high stress levels occurred and easily distracted with bursts of hyperfocus and -fixation. My brother however has always been hyperactive, impulsive, and easily distracted (although he’s also diagnosed with cPTSD). He for example as a 2 year old managed to jump out of the high chair more often than actually sit in it or rock and bounce it back and forth so hard that he would flip over with chair and all. So he is definitely an ADHD’er. Me you could have put in a corner of the room and completely forget I even existed, which therefore also happened, because I wouldn’t make a sound, wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t crawl away from my designated space. You could give me a toy and I would be satisfied with it all day, figuring out all ins and outs, when I was done playing I would start taking it apart and would put it back together, over and over again. Where my brother would throw his toys through the frontwindow of the car (literally) because he was just bored with them and needed more stimuli. My cPTSD diagnosis makes it very complicated to distinguish what symptoms are from traumatic stress and what has been there since before the structural stress (because the structural stress also started in very early childhood) from ADHD or autism.

For me I think it is more helpful to look at it from a holistic perspective instead of adding more quite meaningless labels for a group of symptoms that one might have, I just have a neurodevelopment disorder with a spectrum of symptoms. I have made an inventory of those symptoms and the scope of these symptoms is already a huge disability for which I need to make adjustments to my life. Labels should be used as a tool to help people and their support system understand, figure out and learning to cope with their symptoms. The label is solely there to serve a purpose, but it doesn’t give you any clue about the extent, severity or suffering of the person. In my practice I always tell my patients that I’m treating a person, not just the lab results or diagnoses, and I expect others to do the same with me. I hate it when people only look at results or labels and create their entire treatment plan based on that, you should look at the human that’s sitting in front of you.

The autism spectrum has a major overlap with the ADHD spectrum. This overlap includes things like sensory issues, stimming, emotional regulation difficulties, impulse control difficulties, executive dysfunction, interest-based nervous system, interconnected thought processes and patterns, hyperfixations and -focus or special interests, social differences and difficulties, communicative difficulties, rejection-sensitivity dysphoria, and making eye contact difficulties. In both disorders the amount of stress or overwhelm is what can make the symptoms worse. Some specific symptoms to ADHD are the cravings to new things and experiences, attention and focus regulating difficulties, which could make it harder to read social cues, inhibition difficulties, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness. Whereas some of the specific symptoms to autism are the cravings to routine, order and familiarity, with craving for strict adherence, intuitive disability to read social cues, self soothing through repetitive behaviour, thoughts and routines. When my stress levels rise I tend to move towards the ADHD spectrum, but it keeps contributing to my rising stress levels, so I am thinking it is more masking / coping than actually ADHD. I think, I therefore really fit the autism spectrum better than the ADHD spectrum. But I don’t know, maybe I’ll be ready one day to get myself actually tested, because it also wouldn’t really surprise me if I was.

[kadextra]

so on a whim I started reading omniscient reader’s viewpoint manhwa

..and got hooked on the story so hard that I easily blasted through all available eps in less than a week. istg they put dr*gs in this thing it’s so good???? 😭

[SPOILER WARNING! big ramble ahead. if you’ve never read it, leave this post. consider checking it out you won’t be able to put it down]

lets get this out of the way first.

RAHHHHHH KIM DOKJA….. KIM DOKJA I LOVE YOU

GUYSSSSS 🥺 LISTEN. HE’S SUCH A GOOD PROTAGONIST. MY TRAUMA BOY. MY DUDE WITH THE POWER TO INFODUMP PEOPLE TO DEATH. YOU SELF-SACRIFICING IDIOT. his cunning intelligence makes him super attractive what can I say, I LOVE smart mcs with ambiguous morality and self sacrificial nature

here’s a big ✨shut your mouth✨ to every character who’s said he’s ugly- get your eyes checked, get a job get away from him (I know it’s because of the fourth wall’s filter it’s not their fault I’m just being silly)

the fourth wall is such a cool power to have. the complexity of how it acts based on his perception of fiction vs reality as the reader …. that’s very interesting and well thought out!!! how it lowkey has a consciousness too and it’s so tied into his mental state makes me want to psychoanalyze this guy even more. probably one of the most unique powers I’ve seen created and explored in a story tbh

I think the entire system of how the world works is really well done in general. constellations watching the apocalyptic bloodbath via livestream and sending donos to their favorite little guys shouldn’t work as well as it does and cracks me up so much 😭 (uriel is the best). I enjoy learning about all the irl different fables, history & mythologies too. plus doing my own research is fun! I did a deep dive through the web to learn about dokkaebi folklore lol I’m having a good time

I also related hard to how dokja read TWSA throughout his life, the story was a companion for him. got choked up bc I reflected on how much my own favorite companion stories for years mean to me. there’s been situations I’ve thought “what would (character) do?” dokja saying stuff like “what would joonghyuk do?” felt like I got called out <3 I’d probably be the same as him if my favorite characters suddenly came to life

anyways yeah I caught up with the manhwa looked online and discovered it comes from an already completed novel with over 500 chapters and the manhwa is barely a third into adapting it though it’s been releasing every week for 4 years. and that it’ll take like 10 more years to finish. I then planted my face in my hands and screamed with despair

I’ll shrivel up waiting to see what happens……………heyyy woahhhh.. whats this light of salvation ? the novel file just completed download on my phone ? that’s crazyy wow I opened it ? im scrolling it right now ? omg I’m telling myself in the mirror “pace yourself, try to space your reading out do NOT read too fast” ?

jokes aside im excited, first I’ll take some time to read back through the earlier chapters for extra context of scenes! >:D after I finish doing that…. pls pray for my self-control to try stretching this for as long as possible. I’m pumped to see what happens next with this demon king part so maybe I’ll read along with the manhwa unless I get too impatient heh

to conclude- I had no idea the fandom of orv was so passionate. while closing my eyes to spoilers, I was looking at beautiful fanart and animatics (watched this one and ascended that’s one of my fav rin songs). I can tell how much you guys love the story, there’s always going to be people like me who get interested so keep it up :D if the fandom does end up reading this, ummm *knocks on the door* hi im new

I will likely talk about it more in the future!! tagging under “#kade reads orv” ! might draw fanart on my art blog too bc brainworms <3 happy reading everyone

[muriellelibrary]

ARTISTS AT THE READY 6: an OCT

Hey tumblr. I'm here to spread some late stage love for something a group of us has put together. Or, well, continued together. I'm going to start with the absolute basics, since some folks might be new to it, so here we go.

ARTISTS AT THE READY 6 is open and taking auditions!

What is Artists at the Ready (AatR)? It's an OCT! What is an OCT? An Original Character Tournament! But what does that mean? It means a bunch of artists/writers get together and have a bit of friendly competition involving characters they made up! AatR particularly focuses on telling these stories as comics and uses a bracket tournament system (like... uh, sports ball?) where two contestants are pitted against each other and the judges pick a winner based on certain criteria. It's about using competition to practice your storytelling.

So then! AatR is currently looking to being a SIXTH tournament. The first happened in 2009, back during the OCT boom on deviantArt. Many of the old entries have been deleted, but there are still some up there if you want to take a gander. (We are still posting a little on there as well, for posterity.) The second was in 2011, which had so many entries there was an off-shoot tournament called Ready or Not. The third, fourth and fifth took place in 2013, 2015, and 2018 respectively. I personally participated in 3 previous ones.

What makes AatR different from other OCTs is the premise. Most OCT have you create/use characters and place them in a specific world or scenario with a specific theme and a handful of side characters provided by the judges/people running the tournament. AatR differs in that one of the characters you bring to the story is YOU! You, the artist! The premise is that you are invited to a mysterious world known as The Real and you, the artist, end up there... ready or not. There, you will meet other artists, and possibly the people running the tournament, the Judges. BUT. What made it fun was that you got to summon your own characters to have them join you on your journey! Everyone has a "tool" that brings out a set number of OCs. (It was originally 3, but now only 2 get summoned.) So you get to hang out with your creations and... well, probably fight for your life because story thrives on conflict but there never was a rule you had to actually "fight" your opponent, just interact with them and their characters. It's about who tells the better and more compelling story, really.

(It's a little like pokemon. You are the trainer and you have two pokemon to summon. They could fight for you, or maybe help you get around or go completely out of control and try to eat reality. The world is your oyster! Except instead of pokemon, it is your favorite homemade blorbos!) Every previous season has had a few provided locations, a few judges with characters, and messengers. Messengers are creatures/things that bring you your invitation. After that, they can be used in any way to help you tell your story. Or don't use them at all. Things are very open-ended and what we provide is totally optional. The previous stories from past seasons ARE VERY MUCH OPTIONAL. Use what you like, throw the rest away. This go around, the only location we have is the Deadline Bar. It has no specific place in time or space, and no specific layout/theme/interior. Make it what you will. Our messengers are equally undefined, inky animals of your choice.

Personally, I have made some of the best friends I have through OCTs and every time I have participated, it has helped me grow as an artist and storyteller. It can be a grueling experience if you try to tell a grandiose story, but time management is also an important skill for anyone to learn. I loved it and would love for others to love it too. If any of this intrigues you, or has you hopping up and down to throw artistic hands with other artists on the internet.... please come check us out. All the basic rules are on the deviantArt page, the twitter/X page, and far more in-depth material along with cool folks to chat with can be found on our discord. The deadline for the auditions is OCTOBER 11th, which gives you just about the same amount of time to make one as you would have for a round during the tournament. OR just hang out in the server, talk art and maybe participate in some of our Spectator side contests. YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO COME JOIN US AND I BID YOU A WARM WELCOME TO THE REAL! ...just... watch that first step...

[samgirl98]

Mending a Family 25/?

Prev | Next

Jason finds a new hobby; Jazz starts thinking about her future. Danny isn't completely miserable at school.

Danny didn’t want to admit it, but he was having fun at school.

Three weeks after starting school, Danny had settled in.

He had made a small group of friends. They could never replace Sam and Tucker, but they were fun. His dad had been right. (Not that he would ever tell him that.) Even if the courses were a bit boring sometimes, being around people his age was nice.

Still, he didn’t want to admit it out loud.

It helped that the school he was enrolled in taught differently to the American education system. Plus, he was learning French.

The school had a more hands-on approach to learning. He built machines and diagrams. Reading out loud could have been more exciting, even if they read at a more advanced level. During those times, he usually zoned out.

Danny found out he loved to draw. The most he had drawn back at his home dimension had been basic things or schematics of his inventions once he was older. Here, the school took time to get the kids engaged. They put different things in front of the kids and even let the children model for their classmates if they didn’t like drawing.

Right now, the teacher was teaching them how to make bracelets. It was nice to do things with his hands.

So, yeah, maybe his dad and Jazz had had a point, and school was good for Danny. That doesn’t mean he would tell them.

____

Jason had been bored during the day for the last three weeks.

Ever since Danny had started school, Jason had more time in his hands than before. In Gotham, he slept during the day after a long night of patrol, ruling his criminal empire and giving out necessities to the children and homeless in his territory.

Now, he would wake up, take Danny to school, and teach Jazz defensive moves and how to use knives and guns. That only lasted three hours. By ten o’clock, he was done and bored. Jazz refused to let him take care of Ellie the whole day.

“Go out, Jason. Find something to do, and stop trying to take my baby from me.”

So, here he was, walking around the little village.

That’s where he saw her, a 1967 red Mustang. The car had seen better days, but Jason could tell if he put in the time and effort, he could restore her. He jogged up to the little auto shop.

An older man was sitting on a rocking chair and chewing tobacco. His teeth were yellow, and he had wispy white hair. The wrinkles left deep trenches on his face. He smelled of car oil and tobacco.

“How much for the Mustang?”

The older man looked at Jason and spat the tobacco into a bucket. His greasy shirt read Hank.

“You sure you want that old junk, son? It hasn’t been used since 1986 and has been rotting on this parking lot since.”

“Yeah, I want it. How much?”

“Y’know, having someone fix her will cost a lot, right?”

“I know how to fix cars. I can have it hauled to my place and start fixing her there.”

Jason could go to old junkyards to find parts. He’d have to buy equipment, too; he didn’t have any at home. It’s not as if he didn’t have the money for such a project. He was actually getting excited at the thought of fixing the old car.

“If you’re sure, I’ll leave it at $600.”

“Deal,” Jason said.

Jason paid for the car with his card and waited for Hank to give him the keys. He looked in the car and was surprised to see it still had its original seats. Leather seats, too. As expected, it didn’t turn on. Jason saw that the engine was rusted.

Hmm, he would have to take it out and see if there were any salvageable parts. Now, to figure out how to get it home.

Jason turned toward the older man and noticed he had a nice array of tools and two lifters. An idea started forming.

“Are you willing to rent me a space so I can fix the car here? I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get the car moving, but I’m more than willing to pay.”

The man was chewing on more tobacco. Jason started fidgeting the longer Hank stayed silent.

“I wouldn’t use it when you need the lifters, and I’d still pay for a daily fee. I’d keep the car in the same parking space you’ve had it in.”

Hank spit out the tobacco and took out some more, “Sure, why not? Let’s talk price, kid.”

Jason smiled. He had found something to do.

Danny could tell his dad was happy when he picked him up from school.

“How was class today, chum?”

“It was nice, I guess. I painted some fruit and learned how the weather is predicted for the week. We even built our modal of a weather balloon.”

“That’s nice,” Jason said. “Anything else?”

“We started a new book. Charlotte’s Web. It’s not the worst.”

“Oh, I loved that book when I was younger.”

“Hmm,” Danny hummed, “What did you do, daddy?”

“I bought an old car that I decided to fix up. The man I bought it from has an auto shop and is letting me fix it up there. Maybe, if you’re interested, we can go on the weekends, and you can help me.”

Danny thought about it. He remembered all the times he helped Jack with inventions. He missed building things. This would be different, though. He wouldn’t be building weapons that could kill a race of beings. He would just be helping his dad rebuild a car. It was a normal father-son activity.

“I would like that,” Danny said, “I would like that a lot.”

____

After Jason left, Jazz started thinking.

In a few years, Ellie would start school, too. She wouldn’t have much to do with Ellie gone.

Jazz used to have dreams. She wanted to go to an Ivy School and study psychology. Those dreams had been dashed when the Fentons attacked her younger brother. Suddenly, she was responsible for a de-aged Danny and Ellie. She was glad for Jason’s help, but her whole world had become the children.

Jazz put Ellie down for a nap. She took that opportunity to look into online classes. After all, just like Jazz had been pushing Jason to do things for himself, she had to think about her mental health and find ways to stimulate her mind.

She’d bring it up with Jason to see what he thought.

She spent the rest of the day looking into online school programs. After all, she deserved to do things for herself every once in a while.

The elder Nightingales are finding things to do for themselves, yay! Anyway, I hope you like this chapter.

So I no longer have Covid 😃 but that also means I'm going back to work and won't be able to update as much as I had the past few days. Sorry about that. I will try to update one of my fics at least twice a week. No promises, though.

@itsberrydreemurstuff @idontgetpaidenoughforthisshit @skulld3mort-1fan @theauthorandtheartist @emergentpanda-blog @jaggedheart11 @fisticuffsatapplebees @booberrylizard @fantasticbluebirdfan @thegatorsgooseoose @cyrwrites @kjoboo91 @crystallicedart @amaramizuki666 @spekulatiusmuffin @meira-3919 @kilasmess @bubblemixer @lexdamo @wonderland-daisy @mj-arts-n-stuff @amyheart19 @dolfay @the-church-grimm @undead-essence @aph-mable @lizisipancardo @purrloin77 @writer-extraodinaire @charlietheepic7 @sinfulloccultist @nootherusernameworked @coruscateselene @chaoticchange @itsberrydreemurstuff @gmkelz11 @feral-bunny31 @paroovian @thatonegaybitch68 @d4ydr34min9 @overtherose @fandomwandererer @vipower001 @thordottir45 @blackrabbitt3t @rosecinnamonbun @bianca-hooks123 @epilepticnerd @dat1angel @consouling @flamingenchiladadragon @all-mights-asscheeks @ender-reader @fuyu-bitch @ravenswife

[impossiblepackage]

say, i heard you reblog a post about role playing games. do you happen to know of any ones that i, a beginner, could feasibly get into in this day and age? i tried DnD but a combination of not having anybody to play with (whether irl or online) and a dissatisfaction with low level boringness kind of made it fizzle out for me

oh hey an ask from 3 months ago that I didn't even see. hi.

ANYWAY. First things first, i cannot recommend @theresattrpgforthat enough. Ain't nobody better at recommending rpgs than that blog right there. Now, on to my thoughts.

If you want a DnD-like rpg, Pathfinder 2nd Edition is gonna be my first recommendation. It's harder to find games for on account of being significantly less popular than dnd5e but it's probably the 2nd most popular game. It's also completely free, with everything being hosted on https://2e.aonprd.com/. It's got everything except adventures, those ya gotta buy. For the next 10 days, there's a humble bundle that includes PDFs of lots of the pre-remaster legacy books, and includes a couple adventures, including a whole adventure path going from level 1 to 20. As a whole, the game is different to dnd but it's recognizable. Big fan myself, and paizo isn't a bunch of pricks. The setting is also super gay. There's a potion of trans your gender, and one of the main religions in the world is the worship of 3 gods in lesbian polycule.

Ironsworn: probably my favorite RPG, period. (also has a space version, that works the same way). It is narrative focused, and designed for solo play or in groups with no GM. Works just as well by yourself, as a duo, in a small group, or in a traditional way with a few players and a GM. It's structured around it's vow system. Your character makes a vow, you decide how difficult that vow should be to accomplish, and as you do things that advance it, you mark progress. Eventually, you make a roll to try and fulfill the vow, with the difficulty determined by how much progress you've made. If you fail that roll, it's bad. Cool thing is that just about everything works that way. Undertaking a journey, delving a dungeon, fighting a dude, it's all handled with the same system. It's a game about perseverance and struggle and relationships, both with people and with places. also very fun to play for writing practice. It's mechanics are rooted in it's setting, but there's no reason you couldn't play it in basically any setting. the youtube channel Me, Myself, And Die is, essentially, Critical Role But It's Solo RPGs, and he did a great season where he played Ironsworn, check it out. Also, Basement Fort on youtube did a duo playthrough. I've only seen the first episode but it seems like a fun watch, as well as showing off duo gameplay.

the Witcher RPG: i haven't played this myself or even looked at the books yet, but everything I've heard about this game has me super excited about it. the general consesus seems to be "yo this is wayyyy better than I thought it would be, why aren't more people playing this, what the fuck". If somebody more familiar wants to talk about it, that'd be dope.

gonna ramble about the rest much less, LIGHTNING ROUND OF RECOMMENDATIONS

Dungeon World: same genre as dnd, but much less crunchy gameplay. Much easier to learn.

Kids On Bikes: it's Stranger Things but as a ttrpg.

Call of Cthulhu: get spooky, idiot. The players are investigators unraveling some mystery or another, and trying to keep their sanity in the face of some cosmic bullshit.

Lancer: it's about mechs! closer to anime-style mechs than battletech style, from what I can tell. I've heard good things.

Vampire: The Masquerade: you will NEVER guess what this is about. It's a classic, it's great, it pretty much redefined the way I think vampires should work. The new version of Werewolf: The Apocalypse is coming soon, and I'm real hyped for that, too.

Shadow Of The Demon Lord: my understanding is that this game is basically "DnD 5e, but good".

[elbiotipo]

Notes on technology in Campoestela:

Most spaceships are single-stage-to-orbit. They have rather standard jet engines to lift off from the ground like a standard plane.

To get into orbit, they use a rocket engine that uses a solid fuel made of a HIGHLY combustible (yet stable) carbon-nitrogen compound which allows a better fuel than anything previous. This was first discovered by Iranian scientists who named it "Nafta".

(sí, Beto tiene que estacionar su camión espacial para cargar nafta)

Nafta was a big discovery on its time, allowing cheap SSTO rockets. Nowadays it's produced in many worlds and widely available. It also has uses as weaponry, but it's not that efficient.

Nafta is used for lift-off and orbital burns. For manuevering in space, there are small jets on the nose and tail of spaceships, similar to the Space Shuttle.

Spaceship piloting is still not an easy task, but it's comparable to being a jet pilot, about 4 or 5 years to master. Hard, but something on the reach of many people. People from the generation ship clans are a bit more used to it and often represent an outsized part of space pilots, but there's always many wellers (from down the gravity well) who get their licenses too.

The hardest thing is always landing. Especially given all the different gravities, atmospheres, orbits and such you have to learn in each different case, even with all the automation in the world. Many spacers feel confident sticking to one or at most two or three planets they know.

Pilots that only do shuttle or cargo runs in the same star system or planet are called "Starters", because they go around the same star. It's rude, but many spacers do it.

FTL travel is another thing. FTL travel is done using a ring-like structure that projects a bubble around the ship and takes it to a (completely made-up for the setting) dimension called the Aether. The Aether is one of the meta-dimensions (there might be more) that uphold reality. Conveniently, you can use it as a shortcut to travel between stars, which project "shadows" on the Aether.

The Aether has its own navigation, with currents and whirpools and areas of thick dark matter (which, for cinematic purposes, actually look like bright nebulae) There are routes that are easier to travel and navigate, and these are where the most visited worlds are. Even stars that are close in real space might be very hard to get in Aetheric space, so there's routes that can take you all over the galaxy in a week, while many other places are out of reach.

Navigating the Aether is very similar to flying a plane through a cloudy sky. Some spacer says it's even easier than flying in real space.

Staying on the aether depends on how much you can keep the fields upholding your "bubble". This depends on the energy of your ship. Big ships can travel all over the galaxy but they have enormous energy consumption requirements.

Smaller ships (such as Beto's Mastropiero) dock with a ring-like structure that allows them to make short jumps. The average jump in an explored route is about 12-48 hours, so it's much like aircraft flights.

Exploring new aetheric routes is something that is very romanticized but in reality is a tedious process of jumping, cataloguing new systems (many of them empty and useful only as refuelling stations), seeing where the streams go and end, how they change, and more.

There is no FTL radio or live communication. There is a kind of aetheric radar that allows you to see incoming ships and do some morse-like communication, but it's not very efficient, there is no such thing as a galactic internet (though it's said ancient civilizations had one)

Aether travel engines require very sophisticated manufacturing and materials, which were hard for humans to develop. This was long only in the hands of governments and corporations, but after the Machine War, accessible aether starships hit the civilian market.

Smaller ships are still used by governments (more like loose "leagues") to do what big ships can't: supply satellites and equipment to remote bases, small-scale transport of engineers, researchers, aether "meteorology" and exploration, etc. This is very much like bush planes in remote regions or the role of Aeroflot in developing the USSR.

While humans in the setting, like most species, are composed of many different leagues, cultures and organizations, their technology is remarkably consistent. This is because cheap and reliable spaceflight depends on very reliable standarization. Some of the spaceship parts used six centuries after Gagarin are still the same used in the Soyuz. The ISO is perhaps one of the most enduring legacies of human civilization, along with FIFA.

[tmagpposting]

The Fears and TMAGP

It seems to be a pretty popular theory, or at least a popular possibility acknowledged in the community, that things will function differently than they did in TMA, and our previous categorizations won’t necessarily hold up. A lot of people seem to be split on this, and I’ve seen a lot of other content that positions episodes/incidents in TMAGP in the same framework used in TMA. I wanted to offer my two cents on this issue, after thinking about it for a while now. Basically, I don’t think TMAGP will use the same system for quite a few reasons, both logistical and lore related. Massive (like, seriously series ruining) spoilers for TMA past this point if you haven’t already listened, as well as minor ones for TMAGP up to ep. 4. 

I specifically decided to write this after seeing this post, where a lot of other people have brought up good points in the reblogs. I think we will get something different from Smirke's 14/TMA's categorization of the fears regardless of how much they've actually changed from the previous series, for a few reasons:

1. The fears have probably changed or evolved in some way, especially since the Web (at minimum) had the capacity to learn and plan, and they've already brought about one apocalypse so far. They could've changed from learning from the events of TMA, or just inherently warped from the process of being pulled from another universe and spit back out into a different one (maybe they were altered in transit by being in an extra-dimensional space, or they merged with some similar cosmic force that was already in present in TMAGP's universe when they got there, the possibilities for how this could go are basically endless and I’m honestly so excited). This change could also work really well if it came about because of some combination of the above, since these options aren’t mutually exclusive in the slightest. Personally, I really hope it involves both but highlights the first option in some way, since it'd be really fun for past listeners of TMA to see the fears get more formidable by becoming more strategic as well as see events of that series directly influence this one in such a huge way, and it wouldn't necessarily detract from the experience of new listeners if they did this subtly. Either way, I think it'd be stranger if they behaved exactly as they did in TMA, given everything that happened in the finale.

1.a. Specifically, the fears now have the explicit incentive to cooperate with each other, even if they represent "opposites" like the Buried and the Vast, because all of them must inherently be present in an apocalypse as we saw in TMA. Assuming that it still works the same way, the fears will probably work more in harmony and synthesize elements of each other more than before (even far beyond the Web influencing each in turn) because we've seen that this is a more advantageous course of action for them to take if they want to successfully complete a ritual. This is also supported by the massive amount of keywords the OIAR categorizes incidents with: categorizing incidents using various traits/specialties/calling cards from the original Smirke's 14 as they work together in various combinations would inherently create a ton of different specific keyword combinations, mathematically/logistically speaking.

2. The fears are inherently very hard to categorize as abstract inhuman forces that don't really function in a way humans innately empathize with or like humans think they should. They don't work like gods with similar cognitive processes to humans, like how a lot of avatars thought of them/wanted them to work to some extent, and they're just as willing to prey on non-human life to generate fear and sustenance, just look at the Flesh. As we saw, Smirke's list didn't fully work in the first place, since all the fears had to get pulled through to cause the apocalypse or any ritual would inherently fail, and they functioned less as 14 separate things than as 14 different organs/systems inherently connected in some way by the same nebulous conceptual body. Think of the metaphor from later in TMA with the ants in an ant farm perceiving human hands, eyes, etc. as different antagonistic entities rather than a single contiguous being (i forgot which ep this came from or which character said it, if anyone knows tell me and I'll add it in). Basically, even if they haven't changed at all from TMA, the people of TMAGP could decide on a completely different system of categorization simply because it's arbitrary at the end of the day, given how abstract and nebulous the fears have always been.

3. As several others have said, given that TMAGP is aimed to be friendly to new listeners who haven't necessarily listened to TMA before, it makes more sense to use a new system. This is good for the show for 2 reasons. First, this takes away some of the advantage TMA fans would have in the process of theorizing if everything worked the same way as it did in the previous podcast, especially since TMAGP is more interactive given its ARG element (which I am woefully uninformed on, to be fair, i have next to no idea what's going on with that aspect of the show, and if anyone knows more about how/where to get in on it, lmk). Second, it is actually more rewarding for past fans of TMA to be able to experience this theorizing process in full/from scratch without necessarily knowing major things about what’s going to happen (like how the fears will work), potentially for a second time if they were involved in theorizing about TMA as it was first being released.

4. Having a new and different system, particularly one that is less rigid and more nebulous than Smirke's 14, would work a lot better with TMAGP's emphasis on including guest writers on the show, in addition to working better in terms of the story itself as I outlined in the previous points (at least imo, though I have no experience running a project like this, so this is HIGHLY speculative on my part). Trusting a ton of other people to follow specific rules and emulate Smirke's 14 in a way that feels authentic to TMA, when that was almost totally written and conceived of by Jonny on his own, seems like it would be really difficult to pull off without ensuring each guest writer is also intimately familiar with TMA and/or incorporating a ton of editing and oversight to change episodes to fit better with TMA lore after they're initially written. It could definitely be done, but I think it'd be pretty hard, and it seems like it'd create a lot of redundancy and potentially wasted effort for the editors and producers of the show as well as the guest writers.

If anyone sees something I missed or didn’t touch on, please add on to this post, and if you have evidence to the contrary I’d be interested to see that, too. I’m really interested to hear the fandom’s thoughts on this overall, since it’s an issue I’ve seen coming up in the background a lot lately, but I haven’t seen a post explicitly addressing it yet.

[sysmedsaresexist]

I sent this ask to a different blog but I don't think they're going to post it... I'm so sad, I'm screaming into the void. I'm scared. I'm sending to you because you're where I learned so much of this

Did i say anything wrong? I put so much work into this ask, I grabbed a screenshot partway through, so this isn't EXACTLY the same ask, but it's very close, I had to rewrite some.

from one DID system to another, please, hear me out, I'm desperate to be heard

Literally NO endos claim to have DID

There's like two, and they still say it's caused by trauma but they were systems first and later trauma made their system unstable

If endos want to demedicalize CDDs, why would they claim to have it? It's a roundabout way to achieve the same goal, it's just extra steps

Endos are literally fighting to get away from CDD spaces, do you actually see endos in the DID tag? The cdd tag? NO

They're in the plural tag, a word they choose to separate from the more clinically associated "multiple" of MPD, they're in the syscourse tags because they're allowed to participate, syspunk is less than a month old and it should be a meme at this point because they already had anti endo as a tag

They are literally saying they are systems that are UNRELATED to CDDs, not that they want to demedicalize being a system System doesn't belong to DID, look at IFS, psychological anthropology, or multiple theory of self, jungian archetypes, or does that mean we should be angry about "computer system" because it dehumanizes us?

And stolen terms? We know who came up with system hopping, it has never been used in RAMCOA. Do any of you actually know where tulpa came from? Like the actual word? Do you know who Alexandra David Neel is? The white woman who invented an imaginary practice that didn't actually exist (What she wrote about is not the same as Buddhist emanation), and created the word tulpa based on another white guy's mistranslation to entertain more white people during the Vietnam War?

So they have new words, they're trying to create more new words, there's so much real, actual research by real doctors into this phenomenon of nonpathological multiplicity in ways that exist outside of clinical psychopathology

The only overlapping word is "system

Plurals tend to get really upset when you use words like alter for them, they don't want to be medicalized at all, they understand what DID is and say, "| don't fit that description", and they're allowed to say that

If I, a DID system, feel I'm healed and integrated and choose to drop the DID label, no one can stop me, and we can't stop people from not picking it up to start with

Why can't anyone have actual conversations about this stuff, I'm so anxious because it seems like people are purposefully trying to misunderstand and lying about how bad the problem is

"Existing" isn't enough to qualify as misinformation, and it seems the only incorrect and unverifiable facts are coming out of the anti endo community.

I'm just so scared and sad.

I just want to know it's going to be okay

First -- I'm glad we can post this for you. I highly recommend screenshotting asks you send to people! It's helped me a lot with my paranoia in the past (did I send that on anon? Did I send that at all??) and it's a good record of your words for later.

Second.

I agree with you, I really do. This is so frustrating, and the self-described anti-endos who have recently flooded system spaces on tumblr are completely unwilling to look at the facts. They're obstinate and stubborn as mules, and unfortunately, that is not going to change. Most of them, if not all of them, are either children or caught in a current cycle of abuse with no way out. Most if not all are currently fighting for survival. They are not in a place to accept others; they can barely accept themselves.

People are purposefully ignoring information. People are purposefully avoiding it.

And it is not, and never has been, your job to fix their issues.

These are people who have always been unwilling to listen. They are children who cannot, for their own reasons, listen at the moment. For whatever reason, they are not in a position to accept endogenic plurality exists, and the more they are pushed, the more they will spit up their vitriol on the puke towel that is syscourse (or, worse, "syspunk").

It is sad. It can be scary. But it's not on your shoulders to fix them.

At the end of the day, you have to ask: what is most beneficial for me in this moment? Next, what is most beneficial for my family in this moment? Then, what is most beneficial for my followers in this moment? Then, and only then, are you getting to "beneficial for the tag to see," if you get there at all. The ask you sent them is lovely, and needed, but they are not ready to see this sort of thing, I can guarantee it.

That's why I'm glad it's here: so others can see it.

The last point I'll make is... Please make sure that you are valuing the correct things in your life, anyone reading this. If syscourse is stressing you out, please make sure to take appropriate breaks and check your brain. Remember that this is largely an online issue; the real world is quickly progressing to be more plural accepting and more accepting in general, and there are far bigger issues than an idiot crosstagging misinformation in a niche online discourse. I'm not trying to say this isn't an issue, and it should absolutely be spoken out about, but make sure to take care of yourself while you do. Anti-endos and pro-endos who are idiots online are not the end all be all of system activism. In fact, they rarely fit that definition.

Please do not let these places completely wreck you emotionally. You deserve so much better than that.

Sending love to all our followers; good luck staying afloat out there. <3