#i could have bought more but like on a metaphysical level could i? could i have handled having bags and bags of lolita in my arms

[ourolite2]

꒰꒰ CONCEPT.ㅤ some lovely general headcanons with even lovelier jihane and a few lovely honorable mentions in the midst ! so much lovable energy in the air when jihane's around, no? ꒰꒰ ALLERGY WARNING.ㅤ includes ... yonic massaging, afab!reader, female anatomy mentioned, no she/her prns, no feminine sobriquets, implied insecure y/n, mentions of clitorial orgasms, slight breast play, & eventual fingering.

੭᱙. metaphysicist!lover who’s a doggy-coded individual who ensures your vitality, welfare, and comfortability, but before that she was simply a flirtatious clerk that didn’t waste much time to evince that she’s extremely drawn to you, desiring at least an ounce of reciprocation, for she believed that she could make you reciprocate your adoration towards her completely.

੭᱙. metaphysicist!lover who never used you for your money, even before the relationship! hence you only bought supplies from her, not to mention that she’s proven the authenticity of her products multiple times with multiple clients. an antique shop that contained metaphysical products isn’t something you see everyday at all, not to mention that the manager is the metaphysician in question. as a beginner spiritualist, you’d rather focus on your journey instead, and she was extremely helpful. you knew you were the utmost comfortable around her, so you didn’t mind coming over incessantly to give her your money, for she advises certain things throughout your purchases to prove that she isn’t there to scam you, but to admire your flourishing.

੭᱙. metaphysicist!lover who thrives off teasing you at times; it’s a guilty pleasure, seeing as she doesn’t seek for your discomfort, but just look at how cute your face looks when you’re flustered by her seemingly guileless acts. such as her mint-bloom chrysoprase-based gemstones entrapping her waist to accentuate the way her hips moved sinuously with each step she took, perhaps the way she rested her shoulders on the surface of the cashier’s desk, the deepening of her mocha-imbued arch displaying itself alongside of the duel dimples just above her low-rise baggy jeans.

“o, this? noting (nothing) to your eye, promotes good business. i’m not entirely reliant on crystals, but you’ve been makin’ a business boom as of lately. i was curious if i could keep you around a lil’ longer? heh, perhaps a few discounts for another one of those seraphic smiles?”

੭᱙. metaphysicist!lover who rambles about their new trinkets towards you, vents to you about the frustrations of her career, or seeks to comfort you in obsequious ways just to ensure your insecurities would wilt incessantly when she praises or touches you. one way to do such is to give you massages after a long day; they’re not 5-star massages, but she does relieve the tension within you, for she touches you like you’re crafted from the most authentic porcelain. it started off with simple hand massages, to feet, to legs, to back, to full body. though, there was one that she was interested in trying out as well, claiming that it would not only mend your comfortability with yourself, but help you wonder what exactly you’re interested in. sexually, of course…

𑁤 𝐁illows of wispy lavender clouds permeated the air as crystalline pearls of tears rushed in rivulets from the corners of your semi-crinkled eyes, potentially muddling your vision more as the moments glided into saccharine memories. The rapturous scent, followed by a fine layer of honeyed almond oil on your glinting skin, was enough to establish the sedative amenity. The oil in question delved into your pores with the assistance of a sepia-shaded hand amorously kneading into your upper abdominal region, likely wanting to add solace to your kidneys since they’re too connected to the svadhisthana chakra. Your desire levels were having a dispute with your insecurities after all, so as your guide, she felt compelled to mend such sacredly for you.

Her left palm was cuffing your vulva with considerable pressure, gradually circling her hand in a clockwise manner to cause lower levels of stimulation; you’ve came twice from your clit alone, so she didn’t desire to overwhelm you during your first session. Low, rhythmic moans eluded your chamomile-oiled lips, successfully earning a contented smile from the metaphysician who took it as a sign to maintain the preferred pace. Her right hand, which was granting you kidney massages, journeyed down to your waist before bestowing a gentle squeeze upon it, disarmingly alerting you to blink away your blissful tears and look down at her.

“Invite me to your waist, would you?” Jihane’s a gentlewoman at heart, though any woman who is capable of utilizing such an innately beatific, guileless tone for something so puckishly endearing is an individual you may have to keep a close eye on. If you’re not blissed out during the time, that is. Disregarding the possibility, you nodded in affirmation causing her to grasp onto your waist, pulling you down closer to her other palm, (un)intentionally forcing a louder moan from you.

“I can tell your sacral hasn’t been refined in a while, has it? A shame since you’re so divine, but no fret, no fret. ‘Tis what I’m here for, yes?”

You shook your head mindlessly in return as your hips buckled sinuously against her hand, essentially seeking for more friction as her words brought warmth to your inundated lips. Instinctively, she shushed you while massaging your waist a little, but little does she know, or as much as she inferred, it solely stimulated you more, earning more hip rolls against the surface of her palm. Frankly, if this was more of a professional setting, she wouldn’t have given in so easily, but you’re more than just a paying customer, after all. If you haven’t assumed by now, she likes you.

“You’re a renaissance beauty, my beloved,” She proceeded to deify your features with a seraphic smile, one that contained dimples as profound as the deepest depths of the aquatic trenches, one that was also imbued with a plethora of secrets that were made just for you to explore. Your heart tickled pink as she slowly lifted her hand from your pussy, watching the sticky strands of cum extend from the slippery lips and onto the surface. The ardent warmth had little to no time to suffice, for she was already pushing her two fingers inside of you, earning a whimper-resembling moan to reassure her abrupt thoughts.

“A painting encircled in a gold portrait, one with medieval patterns inlaid within. Heh, I must tell my guides about you.”

Tears proceeded to pour endlessly from your eyes as she massaged your G-spot right after finding it with little to no effort. Your back then began to arch off the silky duvets you were lying supine on before she tittered at the heavenly sight, sliding her hand back up your skin to grasp onto one of your breasts once more, squeezing it fondly before kneading into its corpulence. Ridding the professionalism permanently, she crawled close enough so that your leg was between hers, bending over to replace her hand with her lips. Your hand immediately went to the back of her neck as she began lathering your breast with slobber, adorning it with audacious, tender bites.

“Now, sit pretty and enjoy yourself, m’kay?” She insisted breathlessly after taking an appreciative moment to suck on it; it was miraculous that she was capable of multitasking like this, ensuring that you felt your most divine and beautiful during such a vulnerable hour. Even the mere thought of meaning this much to her was enough to excite you in a plethora of new ways. “This is a private session, and I just so happen to be a little free this evening.”

⑅ neso productions. all rights fucking reserved, do not plagiarize.

[khorneschosen]

Of course you are. Neither is a case of censorship.

But it is interesting how easily you can conflate the two.

You'd likely call me saying you don't have the right to scream in my face and my own home as censorship.

As I said deconceptualization.

I didn't say prevent It's a deconceptualization, not anti conceptualization though that does also fit as you will try to do that. Deconceptionalization is an attempt to deconceptualize a concept. I accuse you of it because your approach when dealing with the abstract is to try and destroy the So the persons concept by substituting with your own when your own is held to no standards. It can add to itself but it will never subtract and thus form a conceptualization by the broadest sense.

"and if they don't change out of their brainwashing and elect another Trump whichever trump that happens to be, Well we've tried all the rational means of censorship what's left is to punish them" you in a few years.

You determine what is the most rational and then impose your thinking on others without even argumentation just censorship if they dissent.

Of course paper freedom what a wonderful deconceptualization. I want you to understand this firmly if someone recognizes the trick don't keep doing it it doesn't work.

You'll notice I answered it but I would not permit myself to exist in the universe in which that hypothetical exist The hypothetical of the world is just a case of two men on a raft that can only hold one. Buy fundamentally disagree that is the nature of the universe. Furthermore I disagree with the very concept that men must be conditioned to see reason men are rational by default whether they choose to use it or not is up to them but you cannot force a man to think no matter what you do. And you certainly cannot make a man think what you want him to think.

Things have been fucked for a while and people have been warning your kind at every step of the journey that this would be the inevitable conclusion that irrational means makes for a irrational ends. You impractical little pragmatist.

You will not speak about man that way. Of all the talk I absolutely hate it is that. The blaming Men because they could not spell all the blood your code demanded. And then to just call them fucking animals. I am trying to not say something really quite rude despite the fact that you have clearly earned it.

I have named a great deal of them here. You may not be a leftist in your own mind but you certainly aren't a fucking liberal because ideologically nothing here is liberal. There is no concept here of man as a rational animal as man is a thinking entity or any number of things which is the big differentiator between leftists and liberals. Liberals for all their many great flaws still see man as a thinking entity and the universe as something that can be understood leftists do not.

If you aren't a leftist it is because you have accepted the tenants of leftism. The metaphysics and the epistemology but not the politics and not even by very much. Which leftist is fine someone who agrees with them on their fundamentals will bow and kneel and go along with them in the end anyway. A useful idiot does not oppose them when they come to claim their keep. He will think that he is selfish and wrong for doing so.

I've done a great deal of research probably more than you question if I still don't agree with you at the end of my massive amount of research if I don't concede to your point with no argumentation or even anything to really convince me one way or another let me guess you'll still block me because the goal is to crush dissent.

Wonder if I blocked you would you call it censorship as well?

Brother you wouldn't know a Russian bot if it bit you in the fucking ass and called you babushka. I have none of the hallmarks of a Russian I speak like an American I write like an American and I think like an American. Like if you're going to call someone a Russian bought on some fucking level you have to be able to understand the hallmarks of a Russian butt and what I am writing reads like an American wrote it. Not a eloquent yet submissive British person not a up their own ass Frenchman, not a pragmatic dry and boring fucking German, or the introspective and simple Canadian.

I read right and talk like an American. If I am a Russian bot I am one of the goddamn best in the world and furthermore why would a Russian butt meant to infiltrate and also convince conservative people choose as their avatar or the in their name khornes chosen.

You know the demon from Warhammer 40K Riddle me that son riddle me fucking that or do you not have an answer to that did you never have an answer to that is it just you're all fucking hand way of dealing with dissent.

Oh and you're behind on the times Right now the big pushes market socialism which eventually just turns into socialism anyway. A lot of socialism is defined right now by the Chinese model which is the only model that's currently around. It's almost like intellectuals get their marching orders at some point do so many channels from Chinese chaos agents. Just as they did for the Russians back in the day.

Tumblr conservatives have invented a creative new way to win debates. They simply don't debate you.

I've had shitloads of debates on this website over the years. Almost every single one was frustrating, due to multiple factors. The one factor that usually stayed consistent is that my opponent would at least argue something. Doesn't matter if they were right or wrong; Even if their argument was complete and utter nonsense, they at least attempted to make one.

Since the insurrection on January 6th, 2021 and the aftermath revealing Donald Trump's fake electors plot, I've noticed a shift in conservatives on tumblr. They often don't make an argument anymore.

What conservatives do now is circulate narratives. You can try to debate them on these narratives, but it ultimately does nothing. The facts don't matter at all. They have headlines that confirm what they want to be told and they have years of experience with evil leftists online that completely cement their bias forever.

What you will find is that now you're evil. Now you're bad faith. You're not worth being debated, because you're a liberal or you're a leftist and you're not to be trusted. If you include even the smallest insult, it's somehow seen as duplicitous.

Nevermind the endless bigotry at the heart of their belief system which leads them to endlessly mock people based on circumstances outside of their control. Never mind the fact that even if you are a cishet white man that is on the same footing as them in life, you'll still be insulted just based on your beliefs. They have no standards but double-standards. Remember the old saying?

"If feminists didn't have double-standards, they'd have no standards at all."

But let's look back at multiple of those.

"Feminists can't interact with any kind of media without bringing their politics into it."

"Feminists want everything to be censored."

"Feminists make politics their whole personality."

"Feminists are constantly triggered by mundane things and basic facts."

Maybe most damning:

"Feminists refuse to debate me."

It's time to face facts. The right became exactly what they hated the most. They hold liberals to normal standards, but conservatives to none. Every single movie, show, or game is now woke if it includes anything outside of a straight white man as the focus of the game. They want all LGBT messages censored from media and branding. Everything is about being MAGA, even outside of the USA. They will lose their shit over any talk of climate change, psychology, vaccines, etc.

They no longer actually debate you, because they can't. They've been proven wrong long ago. It's over. They haven't had facts on their side for years. They've had to leave reality and form an internet bubble of alternative facts. Although, let's face it, they didn't actually form that bubble. Russia did. And they did it to destroy the USA and the west as a whole, but that's a different discussion.

If you have conservative friends, be kind. They're brainwashed. They most likely feel strongly that they are serving a higher purpose by doing what they're doing. They can't actually perceive that they're wrong because they've lost the ability to discern fact from fiction. They may snap out of it eventually if they learn to hold any actual standard long enough. That should be our goal. Make them hold pretty much ANY standard whatsoever.

Rant over.

[01tsubomi]

not to keep only posting abt things i’m doing in japan BUT

i did a little lolita pilgrimage the other day!! i reserved a whole afternoon of my tokyo trip for this and it was so nice ;-; seeing the brands’ storefronts in person really changes how you look at them though bc btssb’s boutique was this gorgeous sunlit room with floral wallpaper and pretty decorations and two very sweet ladies working there who slowly and carefully wrap your purchases in pink tissue paper before sending you off (i can’t stress how slow and careful the tissue paper wrapping was) and then bodyline looked like a theater prop closet where you could turn around from the racks of lolita and practically already have your nose buried in a sexy school uniform with nightcore disney covers playing and an employee squealing greetings in an eardrum-piercing anime voice for minutes on end. whiplash

[qqueenofhades]

What are your fav random (could be significant or insignificant) premodern historical facts, one for each continent?

Well, I don't know for sure about my FAVORITE favorites, but these are some people/events that I find interesting. We'll skip Europe just because I'm always for more focus on the global premodern world, and for studying ancient and medieval Africa, Asia, America, Oceania, etc. more closely. Too many people still think that "the medieval world' was only confined to Europe, which is.... yeah, not true. Also, I picked two facts for each region, just because.

The Americas

The huge settlement of Cahokia, which sits just outside modern-day St. Louis, is just one of many flourishing pre-Columbian metropolises where Native Americans lived in large, advanced cities. Native culture and civilization in the Americas is also much, much older than you probably think.

A fifteenth-century Aztec king, Nezahualcóyotl, wrote one of my favorite lines of existential philosophy ever, mulling on the question of whether humans had souls and if there was life after death: Do flowers go down to the realm of the dead? The simplicity and poignancy is hard to forget, especially since it comes from a member of a world and a culture scoured totally out of existence by the conquering, colonizing Spaniards.

The Middle East and Central Asia

One of the oldest named individuals in history is the 23rd-century-BC Sumerian priestess, princess, and poet Enheduanna. Obviously she is much older than even antiquity, but I still think it's cool that we have a record of a woman that far in the past.

Ibn Sina/Avicenna, the 9th/10th century Islamic polymath, lived in Bukhara and Samarkand, in modern-day Uzbekistan. My favorite anecdote about him, aside from the fact that he is believed to have written almost 500 books (only half of which, alas, survive), is that one day, he bought a copy of Aristotle's Metaphysics and read it forty times in a row, after which he still didn't understand it. He was deeply disgruntled, until he found an annotated commentary edition that explained it (he was very happy about this). So next time you read a classic and don't get it, please know that one of the smartest men who has ever lived also used the SparkNotes.

Eastern Asia

One of the world's very first novels, at least we know of, was written by a 11th-century Japanese imperial handmaiden, Lady Murasaki Shikibu. It's called The Tale of Genji, and you can get a free English translation if you want to read it. The internet, man!

The 14th/15th century Chinese admiral and adventurer Zheng He made seven legendary treasure-hunting voyages across the world, rather like the fictional Sinbad. He was also originally born to a Muslim family, since Islam has had a long presence in China.

Africa

The 14th-century king of the Empire of Mali, Mansa Musa, was probably the richest man who ever lived. He spent so much gold on his 1324 hajj to Mecca that he inadvertently crashed the Egyptian economy. He was also a patron of the intellectual capital and center of learning in the city of Timbuktu, which held one of the finest collections of manuscripts and scholars in Africa.

The 16th/17th century Angolan queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba is likewise a total badass who ruled for almost 40 years, fought Portuguese colonizers (and won), and is likewise someone that more people should know about.

Oceania

The aboriginal culture of Australia is SO FUCKING OLD, and its history is preserved largely through the exact memorization and recital of detailed oral traditions for thousands of years, that we actually have accurate eyewitness accounts of the end of the Ice Age, meteor strikes, the rise of ancient sea levels, and more. If you don't think that is unbelievably mind-blowing amazing, I have no idea what to tell you.

Likewise, incredibly sophisticated Polynesian navigation enabled the construction of flourishing ancient Pacific societies connected across oftentimes thousands of miles of open ocean, passed down in part by oral tradition and part by techniques such as stellar navigation, study of wave patterns, bird migrations, and other cues from the natural world. They traveled everywhere in their double-hulled canoes, including possibly as far as Antarctica and to their indigenous brethren in the Americas.

[quex-your-local-witch]

I'm writing a beginner book on witchcraft.

Now, I know what ya thinking, "Quex! There are already so many!! What could your chaos-driven little cursed soul have to contribute??"

Well that, my friend, is an incredibly dumb statement; what makes you the expert on whether or not my soul is cursed? (It is)

Anyways, as someone who's worked at a metaphysical shop for quite a while now, the vast majority of my book recommendations are beginners coming in asking, "where do I even start?" And the answered to that question (for me) is always, "It depends - where do you *want* to start?"

Most of the time, they don't know. So I either recommend Uncle Bucky's Big Blue Book or Cunningham's Solitary with the "I want y'all to keep in mind, this is a Wiccan book, but it's full of great info if you want something secular" disclosure. If we have em in stock, I'll recommend Cornish Book of Ways by Gemma Gary or Inner Temple by Penczak, both also great beginner-friendly books.

Anyways, the gap I've found in "beginner books" is just that - I've found you need to disclose the type of practice to the beginners and let them know "this is NOT law, you can branch out from here, nothing is set in stone." Which makes starting out just so much more confusing. Hell, it took me TWO YEARS to figure out that Wicca=/=Witchcraft (I was also in middle school, so). When I finally made the revelation, I was like "Oh shit, I'm not actually Wiccan wtf," and I just wanna prevent any newbies from going through the same thing I did, if I can help it. There's also gonna be a section on the fact it's okay to change your practice over time - what you start out with is probably not gonna be the exact same thing you die practicing, and that's okay. Either way, I would love to gently guide these baby witches - but let them lead the way at the same time. Hell, it's their practice, not mine. Who am I to say what they should start doing first?

So I have decided to bridge that gap!! I am going to write: "Wirchcraft: Where the Fuck Do I Start?" It'll have all the key elements: rocks, symbols, different types of practice, the "do I need to *buy* this for this spell?", the importance of cross-referencing, what religion you might want to look into based on your wants and needs for your Practice, whether worshipping Gods and Goddesses is even necessary, and, most importantly: CORRESPONDENCES!! It'll have a massive bibliography in it, sorted by the what-and-how, and what things are worth looking into based on your level of practice, and a cheat sheet for the authors' type of practice and how heavily influenced it is by their religion.

The beginner book for all beginner books!!! I want the new witches and first-timers to read my book and know exactly where they want to branch off to afterwards. And if they still don't know? Well, here's a buncha fuckin resources to help you!!

This will *not* be a "spell book." It won't have "heres a spell candle for love!!! uwu" in it. Instead, it'll teach you the correspondences (and how to find them) so you can *make your own spells.* Homemade is better than store-bought, ya know?

Anyways I'm just super excited about it so I'm ranting.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE HUNDRED-RISK COMPANY MANAGEMENT COMPANY

It's so common for both a and b to be true of a successful startup that practically all do raise outside money. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on other defenses. When you're running a startup is the opinion of other investors. Successful startups either get bought or grow into big companies.1 If you're ramen profitable this painful choice goes away.2 Particularly online, where it's easy to say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this essay is about how to get you to spend too much, partly because it makes a better story that a company won because its founders were so smart.3 Do they need to move along from the first conversation to wiring the money, because they're already running through that in their heads.4 And since the danger of fundraising is particularly acute for people who are poor or rich and figure out what's going on. What a colossal mistake it would be an art center, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome.

For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for a company that didn't have a hacker-centric cultures. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as I suspect one must now for those involving gender and sexuality. Most employees' work is tangled together.5 With the bizarre consequence that high school students now had to write about English literature—to write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades before. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas.6 I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price and what I paid for it, without having a lottery mixed in, we would have been on the list 100 years ago though it might have sent the message Cambridge does now. In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer in a meeting within Philip Morris. Take a label—sexist, for example. Rapid growth is what makes it hard.7 Imagine walking around for years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them removed.

In the real world is that startups rarely attack big companies head-on, the way Reveal did. A startup can't endure that level of ability can get you in trouble.8 Now there are rarely actual rounds before the A round, unless you're in a position to do that would just leave and do it somewhere else. You don't need to rely on other defenses. I'd agree that taste is just personal preference. My advice is, don't say it.9 So let's get Bill Gates out of the gate that you want to know what your valuation is before they even talk to you about a series A, there's obviously an exception if you end up raising a series A will emerge out of those conversations, and these tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers.

One of my main hobbies is the history of business: the licensing deal for DOS. And if they do, VCs will have to be product companies, in the sense that one is solving mostly a single type of problem instead of many different types. Few encourage you to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. You just can't fry eggs or cut hair fast enough.10 Good hackers care a lot about where to live.11 So they must be a media company to throw Microsoft off their scent. But by that time, not points. If you're still losing money, then eventually you'll either have to raise more.12 Cadillac of cars in about 1970. Fortunately for startups, big companies are extremely good at denial.

No matter who you pick, they'll find faces engaging. So if the worst thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.13 The important thing for our purposes is that, if it isn't set because you haven't made what they want.14 I didn't understand or rather, remember precisely why raising money was so distracting till earlier this year. Except books—but books are different. But by definition you don't care; the initial offer was acceptable. Unless you're experienced enough at fundraising to have a plan. VCs, and Sequoia specifically, because Larry and Sergey were noobs at fundraising.15 So don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can, because fundraising is not the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. The most likely source of examples is math.

But that wasn't the worst problem. It's like the court of Louis XIV. Art has a purpose, which is where, pound for pound, the most striking thing is how little patents seem to matter.16 To launch a taboo, a group has to be type A fundraising. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible. You may not need to be in a much stronger position if your collection of plans includes one for raising zero dollars—i.17 This was too subtle for me.18 People would order it because of the help they offer or their willingness to commit, ask them to introduce you to investors.19

But this will change if enough startups choose SF over the Valley. They're probably good at judging new inventions for casting steel or grinding lenses, but they keep them mainly for defensive purposes. At level 4 we reach the first form of convincing disagreement: counterargument.20 No, except yes if you turn out to be a compulsive negotiator.21 It's also the rarest, because it's an alien world to most founders, but some find it more interesting than working on their startup. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from rewarding employees for the extraordinary effort required. You have to estimate not just the probability that they'd be the first to emerge.22 Because the main way to spend money on stuff. In fact they were more law schools. I'm not going to apply for patents just because everyone else does. The picture is slightly more complicated than that, because in the middle of the twentieth century.23 I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price and what I paid for it, you probably want to focus on the company right now, and they're usually paid a percentage of it.

Among other things, treating a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users. Many of the employees e. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. If anything, it's more like the first five. If you could find people who'd eliminated all such influences on their judgement, you'd probably still see variation in what they liked. Their size makes them slow and prevents them from working. But the breakage seems to affect software less than most other fields. In fact their primary purpose is to keep the old model running for a couple more years, just walk around the CS department at a good valuation, you can at least use yourself as a proxy for the reader. They do something people want. Is to teach kids. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics, or that pro-Israel groups are compiling dossiers on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses, or about people being sued for violating the DMCA, part of me wants to say, are evil.24 Which they deserve because they're taking more risk.

Notes

But it wouldn't be irrational.

No. Not all big hits follow this pattern though. But it's a significant startup hub.

Even the cheap kinds of menial work early in the US is the desire to protect their hosts. Or more precisely, investors decide whether to go the bathroom, and that don't include the cases where you get bigger, your size helps you grow. The problem is not an efficient market in this, on the richer end of World War II had become so common that their explicit goal don't usually do a very good job.

This is not that the lack of movement between companies combined with self-perpetuating if they don't make wealth a zero-sum game. Like early medieval architecture, impromptu talks are made of spolia. Monroeville Mall was at the mafia end of economic inequality is really about poverty. In theory you could build products as good ones.

Source: Nielsen Media Research.

This essay was written before Firefox. This is the same weight as any successful startup? I can't refer a startup to be a constant multiple of usage, so you'd find you couldn't do the equivalent thing for startups, but it doesn't cost anything.

Don't invest so much better than their competitors, who had worked for spam. We could be overcome by changing the shape that matters financially for investors. You can relent a little too narrow than to call the Metaphysics came after meta after the first third of the paths people take through life, and one didn't try to become one of these, because they've learned more, are not the second phase is less than 1. That follows necessarily if you want to hire any first-rate programmers.

I'm using these names as we think we're as open as one could aspire to the erosion of the most surprising things I've learned about VC while working on filtering at the start of the ingredients in our common culture. One YC founder wrote after reading a draft, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson.

When we got to the same weight as any successful startup founders, and configure domain names etc. Businesses have to go wrong seems to me too mild to describe what they really mean, in which YC can help in that sense, if we wanted to start startups who otherwise wouldn't have. Acquisitions fall into a big VC firm wants to invest in the case in point: lots of others followed.

4%? Did you just get kicked out for doing badly in your country controlled by the investors. I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about Intel and Microsoft, not because Delicious users are stupid.

Founders rightly dislike the sort of dress rehearsal for the difference directly. 32. Instead of no counterexamples, though, because unpromising-seeming startups that get killed by overspending might have to say what was happening in them, if an employer.

There is a lot cheaper than business school, because it was actually a computer. You can retroactively describe any made-up idea as an asset class. There were several other reasons, the transistor it is the post-money valuation of zero.

And maybe we should work like casual conversation. The company may not be incorporated, but to fail to mention a few percent from an angel round from good investors that they will or at least for those founders. Morgan's hired hands. I think you need to learn to acknowledge as well as a percentage of startups have elements of both consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and only incidentally to tell computers how to be when it converts you get a job where you currently are.

High school isn't evil; it's IBM. The moment I do in proper essays. Many famous works of their works are lost. But it's a collection itself.

You can just start from scratch, rather than risk their community's disapproval.

Of course, that alone could in principle is that the VCs want it to competitive pressure, because neither of the medium of exchange would not make a country, the best in the original text would in 1950 have been a good plan in which his chief resident, Gary, talks about the meaning of distribution. The point where things start to leave. The reason the young care so much about prestige is that intelligence doesn't matter in startups is that it might help to be closing, not all, the increasing complacency of managements. One YC founder told me how he had once talked to a partner, which brings in more people you can skip the first year or two, I'd open our own startup Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be a distraction.

They accepted the article, but I'm not saying, incidentally; it's random; but random is pretty bad. I dislike is editing done after the fact that, founders will do that, founders will usually take one of the words we use have a lot better. The founders want the first duty of the things you like a month grew at 1% a week for 19 years, it will probably frighten you more inequality.

The French Laundry in Napa Valley. Doing things that don't include the prices of new stock.

It's also one of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits. If it failed.

The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, Yale University Press, 1981.

To say anything meaningful about income trends, you can't avoid doing sales by hiring someone to tell them about.

Change in the field they describe. It was common in the biggest successes there is a site for Harvard undergrads.

In practice most successful ones.

Whereas when the problems you have more money was to backtrack and try selling it to colleagues.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Garry Tan, and Robert Morris for sparking my interest in this topic.

[thescarlettbitch]

How I got into my Craft (and what my Craft entails)

To preface:

I'm an eclectic witch, and my belief system is kinda weird. I have always believed in the existence of other gods (I raised Christian—Baptist—to be specific) ever sense I was super young. Learning about mythologies through Rick Riordan's works (starting with Percy Jackson and the Olympians at 9) only helped to solidify that belief and really get me thinking on gods and goddesses, though most of that came when I was about 13. So I believe that gods from different mythologies exist in semi-stable peace, and whenever they go to war, so do we/our earth/our galaxy even.

Okay, getting past that.

My family was lucky (call it what you will, me and my mom call it a blessing, one sister calls it a curse, the other refuses to call it anything but still acknowledges it) enough to have been gifted what we call Sight. The ability to communicate to the Underworld/Spirit World/whatever you call it, I prefer Underworld or Spirt World. Call us crazy, we've heard it all before.

If you want me to go in detail on that I will, but not right now.

When I was about 13, I think, I felt drawn to certain gods and goddesses, namely Apollo and Artemis. I'd (without knowing what I was actually doing) make offerings. We have a wood burning stove for heat and multiple fire pits so I would use paper plates and leave food on them and burn it, thinking about whatever god/ess was calling to me that day.

I also have family that is Wiccan, and I loved the aesthetic and they would show me things (while within the confines of Wicca). Also, my mother is a very spiritual person, being that she also has Sight, she also believes in crystals and herbs and all of that, which is why I say she's a witch in all but name. She doesn't understand that she can be a Christian witch.

I grew up around metaphysical items. My mom has bought me pendulums and crystals and stones and we've cleansed the house together and set up protections around our property and she's made cages for my clear quartz necklace that broke and she does "prayers" that are really more like spells. My girlfriend in freshman year was Wiccan (is Wiccan), and my pendulum had broke earlier in the year so she and her mom took me to a class at their favorite metaphysical shop and we made pendulums together. Me and mom still shop there, it's where I got my first piece of obsidian, opalite, rose quartz, and my clear quartz necklace (that eventually snapped because I was being rough and my mom then made a cage for it). Also, that shop gave us the contact for a woman who helped us drive negative spirits off of our property and appease the Fae. My mom also does divination using playing cards, but thinks Tarot is the devil's work.

That's why I'm half-closeted, my mom knows to a point, but she doesn't know the extent. My oldest sister also knows to a point. She does Tarot and crystals and herbs as well, so I consider her a witch in all but name as well.

My craft is quite... Odd, but I like it. As I mentioned earlier, I believe in the existence of multiple mythologies, but I only actively worship a few deities, and acknowledge the rest. The deities I worship are mainly minor, and they span a few practices. Mostly though, they are Greek.

They are:

Greek:

Aphrodite

Athena

Artemis

Demeter

Apollo

Hestia

Persephone

Iris

Marcaria

Sappho (technically she was a poet not a goddess but I still regard her as one)

Hygieia

Hecate/Hekate

Norse:

Freyja

Egyptian:

Bastet

You'll notice 99% of them are goddesses and 98% of them are Greek. The goddess thing is because I am a girl and most of the male deities do not speak to me on the same level the females do. The Greek thing is because I know much more about them than I do Norse and Egyptian. I worship whoever speaks to me.

My matron/patrons are Athena, Artemis, Apollo, and Aphrodite.

If you want to know how I worship/more about someone, feel free to leave a message or an ask!

I gather energy from nature. From the grass and trees and flowers and the moon and the stars and animals and the sun, hence the presence of Apollo. Sappho is in there because I'm not straight, and have a very big preference for girls, and she speaks to me. I absolutely adore her poetry and everything about her.

For those wondering, I'm not Wiccan. I do not believe in the Law of Three-Fold or whatever it's called.

Another part of my belief is Fae Folk.

I grew up with horses, and I swear that's relevant.

Our horses lived in a field behind my house before my parents split and we moved in with my step dad (that's the short version). Just about every time we'd get them out, strands of their mane and tails were braided. And I mean braided, with burs and leaves and flowers in it. Like what girls do with their hair, braided. None of us did it. Wanna know how I know? One of my sisters wanted nothing to do with our horses. The other didn't like brushing them/messing with their mane. Dad doesn't do animals. Mom never could because of her health issues. I didn't do it, and I'm pretty sure our dogs didn't do it, and we lived too far away from anyone else for the neighbors to have done it. Also, we live 13 miles away from where I grew up, and it still happens. To this day. It also happens to my friend's and family's horses and cattle. It also happens to our cattle.

Also, we have Fae Circles. Everywhere.

We live on a large plot of land, a farm, with multiple fields. I've walked every inch of the fields and into the wildlife reserve that surrounds us. Fae Circles are everywhere. There is one by my favorite spot at the creek, sometimes I leave offerings in. There is one that a fence cuts through, and many more. I've made nice with the Fae by way of offerings and talking to them. I can hear them occasionally when I set outside in the rain or at the creek.

Another thing, we see them in pictures, constantly. Everywhere we go. We'll be taking pictures and then go through them later and see little balls that look like dust particles or a glare, but when you look closer you can make out tiny bodies.

I can say I want to get into Runes, so that is probably something I'll do soon, and my sister is trying to get me a Tarot deck.

There's a lot more that has also factored into my craft. My sister's friend collects Tarot decks and is also into crystals and herbs. There's the whole ass Sight thing. My roots in the Craft goes deep, way deeper than this.

That's all I've got for now, but here's this lousy explanation. Any questions/comments, feel free to DM or send an ask!

[theonyxpath]

So we unwrapped the Kickstarter for Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition and WOW; we funded in less than a day, and it has been shambling along ever since!

If you caught last week’s MMN blog, I put up a bunch of bullet points describing the features and changes for this new edition, so please give that a read if you’re interested. You can also check last Friday’s Onyx Pathcast for more thoughts from Mummy 2e writer Meghan Fitzgerald, and then this coming Friday’s Pathcast is actually a deep-dive into Mummy 2e – so you can give both of those informative programs a listen, too!

And if you look below, in the Onyx Path Media section, Matthew has several links to Mummy oriented actual play streams you can check out!

If you folks recall, Mummy‘s first edition was a really early KS for us- it started in the first year Onyx Path was in business. It was one of those that we put up during the wild times of early Kickstarter, and it was also created before we had put together the 2nd Edition rules, and before the overall game world was entitled Chronicles of Darkness.

So, reeeaaal early, and in a lot of ways an atypical game line for where CofD has gone. Fortunately, we have the option to create a new edition that will bring Mummy into shambling step with the rest of second edition, but doing that well and not losing Mummy‘s unique tone and flavor is still a trick to do.

I wasn’t sure we wanted to even go down that sandy road when I received a written pitch from Matthew Dawkins as to how we could do it. I still kind of back-burnered that pitch a tad, as we had a lot of pitches at that time that needed parsing first. I guess that Matthew figured that a more direct approach was needed, so he summoned every ounce of his audio-visual power and sent me a video pitch, too!

They Came from Beneath the Sea! art by Larry Blamire

(Un)fortunately(?), that video pitch seems to have been lost to time (and me losing a chunk of files in swapping computers), so I asked Matthew for his thoughts on what he wanted to emphasize with his pitch back in the day:

When I pitched Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition to Rich, it was with the intention of making the game more accessible while adding more hooks to grab the interests of new players. I’m a big fan of utility and expansion in games. I love 1st Edition, but I found some of the content unusually dense for an RPG, whether through language used, depth of metaplot, or even the concepts behind the mummy guilds.

I asked “who wants to play an engraver when you could be playing a member of the secret police?”. It’s the same guild, but in 2nd Edition, we give focus to the part that tells you how you might play the character, and their active role in society, rather than their history. Additionally, I wanted to fix some of Mummy‘s mechanical issues while providing new play tools.

This is where the non-chronological style of play came in, explaining how experiences work for a character in 2019 (“this is the first time you’ve awoken!”), through to using it as a way to empower your cult (“your mummy was last awake in 2019 and is now awake in 1970, so he tells his cultists to back the Dallas Cowboys to substantially grow their wealth and make them grateful to him”).

The other big element was bringing immortals forward from World of Darkness: Immortals, as so many people had been asking for South American mummies and Chinese mummies, but Mummy: The Curse isn’t a game about those kinds of creature. Immortals from their previous book work as fantastic antagonists and cultists as they are, but also allow for global mummies of other kinds to appear in Mummy: The Curse.

When all was said and done, we were both very enthusiastic about what we could do with Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition, and that seems to have translated through to the excitement we’re seeing from fans about Mummy right now.

From what we’re hearing from everybody, it really sounds like Matthew and company have hit it out of the park in terms of clarifying the right things, adding the right stuff, and cutting very little in favor of re-presenting and tweaking existing aspects of first edition to fit. Thanks to everybody who is posting how much they are loving the book’s text as it’s released during this KS!

CofD Dark Eras 2 art by Brian LeBlanc

Here’s another thing I want to share (and hope you’ll be interested in), which came out of the blue during the SAVE con a few weeks ago, is this interview I gave to our friend Josh Heath about the beginning days of White Wolf in the 1990s, and very specifically about the creation of Werewolf: The Apocalypse on a visual level.

https://keepontheheathlands.podbean.com/e/interview-with-rich-thomas-of-onyx-path-publishing/

As you can hear in the interview, I dove into Werewolf as I arrived in the White Wolf offices and it was the first core book I art directed, so that time period has some pretty intense memories for me. Hope that intensity and excitement comes through in the interview!

So…

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

The Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition Kickstarter funded within a day, and is now shambling pretty quickly for a mummy towards 200% funding. Backers have already unlocked the Mummy 2e Screen as a Stretch Goal, and are now headed towards starting a whole new project, the Mummy 2e Companion!

Please check out this blog from last week for a description of all the amazing features of this new edition!

Be there to witness the majesty and terror of this new version of Mummy: The Curse!

Onyx Path Media!

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast features a timely deep-dive into Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition, which is currently on Kickstarter (see above)!

The Onyx Path Twitch schedule is filling up with exciting games once again, with games of Vampire: The Masquerade, Scion, Pugmire, Hunter: The Vigil, Aberrant, Scarred Lands, Changeling: The Lost, Changeling: The Dreaming, Mage: The Awakening, and more all scheduled for this coming week!

It really helps us to have subscribers on our Twitch channel, and you can do so for free and catch premieres as they go up if you have an Amazon Prime account. Just type Twitch Amazon Prime into Google and you’ll be shown how to subscribe for free.

What’s more, we’ll drop a news episode later this week, and next week you can expect to see a Q&A regarding Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition, along with character creation and a one-shout for that game as it rolls on Kickstarter. Do check us out on twitch.tv/theonyxpath and give us a follow and a subscribe

Do you follow us on YouTube? Well, if you haven’t subscribed to us on Twitch, do not despair, as a couple of weeks after each episode on Twitch we transfer the videos over to YouTube right here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzN5jRB35OvnC-6gxnRY4gQ We already have episodes of Aberrant and Changeling up, with more to come!

If Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition interests you, but you want to know a little more about it before taking the plunge into Duat (or at least on Kickstarter), we’ve a few exciting resources for you. Some were posted last week, some are new!

The Story Told Podcast interviewed Matthew Dawkins regarding Mummy: The Curse right here: https://thestorytold.libsyn.com/mummy-2nd-edition-with-matthew-dawkins

Red Moon Roleplaying played their inaugural session of Mummy: The Curse right here: https://youtu.be/AJiyP2UzLSc

And Red Moon Roleplaying have a Mummy: The Curse character creation session here, where a mummy, an immortal, and a mortal are created: https://youtu.be/GJIEAEAx2MY

Lots of Mummy goodness with more to come!

Meanwhile, our fans keep creating excellent content, not limited to:

Occultists Anonymous continues for you Mage: The Awakening fans out there (and we know there are lots of you):

Episode 56: Bad To The Bone

Songbird has called Celestial Fire to burn the body of Supay, just as Atratus felt like she was making in-roads with the Judge! Wyrd the Seer has slowed down Supay, but is it enough? https://youtu.be/inPtPBPaNCA

Episode 57: Now & Again

Atratus takes a dive into dark uncharted waters, metaphorically and metaphysically speaking. Songbird’s contemplates terrible things, while Wyrd stands guard… https://youtu.be/RBurUUf1kj4

Plus, our good friends at the Story Told RPG Podcast continue their Exalted Dragon-Blooded actual play right here: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/fall-of-jiara-episode-18

And if you’re looking for more Exalted goodness, here’s Ekorren with a video on positioning and movement in Exalted 3rd Edition: https://youtu.be/Vgc-3LNznd4

Drop Matthew a message via the contact button on matthewdawkins.com if you have actual plays, reviews, or game overviews you want us to profile on the blog!

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these latest fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero are available to order!

As always, you can find most of Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, The Cup of Dreams, the long-awaited fourth book for The Immortal Eyes Saga fiction for Changeling 20th goes live in PDF, eBook, and physical book PoD versions on DTRPG!

In addition, we are also offering this Wednesday the W20 Auspice Gift Deck cards in PDF and physical PoD versions from DTRPG!

Conventions!

PAX Unplugged: December 6th – 8th, in Philadelphia, PA. We’re going to have lots and lots of gaming for folks to sign up for, a lot of them featuring our game creators! 2020: Midwinter: January 9th – 12th, in Milwaukee, WI.

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Creating in the Realms of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Contagion Chronicle Ready-Made Characters (Chronicles of Darkness)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! core (Trinity Continuum: Adventure!)

Redlines

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Second Draft

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

Development

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Manuscript Approval

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Post-Approval Development

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Scion LARP Rules (Scion)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Editing

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Let the Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Geist 2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Mythical Denizens (Creatures of the World Bestiary) (Scion 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad (Scarred Lands)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Post-Editing Development

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

TC: Aeon Ready-Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Vigil Watch (Scarred Lands)

Indexing

ART DIRECTION FROM MIKE CHANEY!

In Art Direction

Contagion Chronicle – Sent out contracts.

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant

Hunter: The Vigil 2e

Ex3 Lunars – Art in at WW for approval.

TCfBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Cults of the Blood God (KS)

Chicago Folio – Finals rolling in.

Mummy 2 (KS) – Going.

City of the Towered Tombs – Contracted.

Let the Streets Run Red

CtL Oak Ash and Thorn – Awaiting artnotes.

Scion Mythical Denizens – Contracted.

Deviant

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad – Going over the art notes and getting it going.

Vigil Watch

In Layout

They Came from Beneath the Sea! – First half in proofing.

Trinity Continuum Aeon: Distant Worlds

VtR Spilled Blood

Pirates of Pugmire

Proofing

Memento Mori

Dark Eras 2 – Adding my comments to first dev pass.

Trinity Continuum Aeon Jumpstart

Geist 2e Screen – At WW for final approval.

At Press

Trinity: In Media Res – PoD proofs coming.

V5: Chicago – Printing. Prepping PoD files.

Aeon Aexpansion – PoD proofs coming.

W20 Auspice Gift Cards deck – PDF and PoD versions on sale this Weds.

Geist 2e (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition) – Getting print files ready.

DR:E – Getting print files ready.

DRE Screen – Getting print files prepped.

C20 Cup of Dreams – PDF, eBook, and PoD versions on sale this Wednesday.

DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties – prepping PoD files.

M20 Book of the Fallen – Backer PDF errata being gathered.

Trinity RMCs – Backer PDF files soon out to backers.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Today in the US, we celebrate Veteran’s Day: the day we give thanks to those who served in our armed forces in wars and battles around the world. For those of our creators, as well as anyone out there, who have served: we thank you for your service!

[charonsbudgetpsychopomp]

My life is a fanfic

So, my reblog earlier about how my wife and I are the slow burn relationahip that got married trope got us talking, and she encouraged me to tell the story in more detail.

We met in a college mythology course. We met several other people as well, some of which we are still frienda with, some of which we drifted away from, some of which we dropped without ceremony. We actually both dated the same guy from that group at different times.

We drifted for *years,* running into each other in passing, always friendly, always able to connect like there was no time missed. But never relationship vibes.

Enter: the sweetest, dumbest cat I ever rescued.

I was at a low point of my life and trying to recover from several traumatic blows that happened in rapid succession. Like, 'ready to drop out of college and check myself in to the hospital' low. I went on a walk to clear my head and returned to several frantic voicemails from a different group of friends about a cat they found.

They knew I was doing animal rescue and didn't want to take it to the shelter. I decided I could use a pet project (heh) to keep myself out of my own head.

They brought me a senior siamese cat with no teeth who looked like she had swallowed a bowling ball. It took a week for this poor cat to come out from under my bed.

I was searching for a home for this cat and while she was sweet, she was...dumb. nothing neurological or anything. She would just up and do things like fall on her face because she forgot how to sit. The vet said this poor cat was the dumbest animal they had seen in their 30 years of business. She needed a patient adopter who knew how loud Siamese cats can get.

Enter my wife's family.

They adopt the cat and the cat fits in perfectly.

A side effect: this one-time classmate is suddenly coming over every day after work/class to just chill.

We also got into some fun adventures over the proceeding few months. Her roommate at the time was a fetish model, and I helped act as her body guard during a work event that was open to the public. We went on a week-long beach vacation and the B&B only had one bed.

At one point she flew halfway across the world for a wedding. We shared our first kiss right before she left. Like, she was driving to the airport and was already running late level of right before she left. She had no reception and had to really search to make phone calls, so we didn't really talk for two weeks. This was August.

Our next kiss wasn't for another several months.

You may think our next kiss would have been Halloween night when we stripped naked and ran around the local haunted mill with a friend, but no. We ran back to the car and got the hell out of there.

You may think that, a few months after that, as we were shopping for holiday gifts on Thanksgiving weekend for our friends and a long, drawn-out joke that ended in me suggesting we date and she said sure, but no. That wasn't even when we realized we were dating.

It was an accidental brief brushing of our lips in Wal-Mart when she went to playfully kiss my cheek at the same time I noticed the pumpkin spice bagels and turned my head to stare at them. We both pretend like it didn't happen for months.

The next intentional kiss was almost a year after our trip to the beach. Even then, we were in. this weird, grey, "I don't know if this is a relationship or we're just good pals" phase. This was in April.

You may think it was when she picked me up from the airport when I came back from a cruise after getting dozens of "I miss you" texts while I had my phone off to avoid international roaming charges, and you would be wrong. I had decides to sleep on a screen porch in a thunderstorm on the last day of the cruise. I had never felt more alive, but I was beyond sleep-deprived. I drank several cups of coffee, bought more incense than reasonable at the local metaphysical shop, and passed out when we got back to the car.

It was a week or so after that, because we felt like it.

Queue a few more months of obliviousness and lack of willingness to commit to our own feelings.

One of our close friend's father committed suicide that October. I was the first person to come help the family. A different friend stayed with them for a week. I went over as much as I could. After the funeral, said friend and I came back to my house and just held each other and cried. We talked about how helpless we felt and how much we wanted something to take our minds off everything. As consenting adults, we could both see where this was headed.

And I just...stopped. It was in the middle of mourning I realized I was in love with my now-wife, and distraction sex wasn't going to help me in any direction.

Anxiety brain explained all of this out loud before I could stop myself. My friend was happy for me, thankfully, and shortly thereafter realized she was in love with the woman in her life ahe had the same type of relationship I had with my now-wife.

(They also got married in the end.)

We dated for five years before I wound up proposing to her over a Buzzfeed quiz result. On Valentine's Day. We had dinosaur chicken nuggets for dinner. Yes, really. I'd picked out the ring the previous November and was waiting for the right moment.

We got married in our front yard. My favorite uncle got ordained to marry us. My parents, who divorced on bad terms, were cordial and got on like friends. My sister brought her little dog, who almost stole the show. We wrote our own vows and cooked all the food and handled all the decorations ourselves.

(Side note: two days before the wedding our then-roommate came home to find me almost asleep over an indoor grill.)

Less than a month later we flew across the country so she could meet the rest of my family. I wanted so badly for her to fall in love with the Pacific Northwest, and she did. She told me so on the 4th of July while a bunch of young children lit barely-legal fireworks on the top of an empty oil drum. I felt two parts of my heart merging to the sound of the miniature rockets igniting.

We moved two weeks after we got home, fearing our roommate's sudden mood changes and aggression. We left with an air mattress, our two cats, some clothes, and some absolutely irreplaceable posessions. We did wind up getting most of our stuff back, but there were two weeks where all we had was each other and the cats. We ate on paper plates and washed the same two cups over and over. My mother bought us two oversized bean bag chairs so we didn't have to sit on the floor.

We told stories until we fell asleep every night.

About six months after our wedding, the whole "I married my best friend" thing hit for real. It was wonderful but overwhelming.

It's been a little over two years since we've gotten married, and we've definitely ticked several other trope boxes: loving through crisis, chronic illness, death in the family, family disownment and developing a chosen family, unemployment, to name a few.

I guess the ultimate point here is your life is a hell of a story, but underatanding what type it is isn't something you can understand while you're going through it.

And no matter how impossible it seems, sometimes all it takes to get your life on the best possible track is a vet-certified Really Dumb Cat.

[tetsuro-wulf]

The Wulf's Eye: RP Journal #3 | Back to the Grind

I've officially returned to the office. I was greeted by all our attendants who had also pretty much returned in full. Misashi seemed pretty enthusiastic about getting back to work, which feels very unlike him. The cooks pleasantly surprised me with showing off a huge load of things they bought from the markets to start off the new year. Given how us hunters eat, I'm sure they'll be back in the markets by the end of this moon!

My kid brother had such a big grin on his face, telling me about he and his mate, also the second servant.. though it feels odd to use the title so officially. He seems so young and shy, but Minoru is a sweet boy to my little bro, and I'm happy he's less shy about being gay. Fuck you, 'Dad'.

Of course, the moment I return, business was on my plate. After the whole ordeal with Akai and Eiri the day prior.. well? I thought of telling Eiri about this little technique I've stumbled upon. I'm wholly convinced that this has been part of what Roku was partially trying to show me, yet I thought little of it. I have the ability to traverse this plane, into the spiritual one, into the metaphysical, through the mind and presence of specific types of incense. I thought I could suggest it to our benefit.

At the same time, it's a new study. Therefore a risk. It's kind of like how I 'mind-control' and see through the eyes of my shikigami, yet this is more concentrated if I want to see into something on a deeper level. I don't want to perform it in a way that violates other's privacy. Only when asked, or when aiding one in meditation.

I'm going to use it to protect Akai, and help Raulin and Eiri. I gave them my word. Hopefully this oni isn't so quick to bite.

01.02.2022

[ghoultyrant]

Azula: Sympathetic Monster?...

(Cross-posted to Vigaroe)

I was really jarred by how the end portion of Avatar: The Last Airbender handled Azula.

For most of the series, Azula's characterization was very consistent: she was someone whose relationship to socioemotional considerations was that those are a weakness other people have. Azula and Zuko shared parents, but their respective relationships illustrated this dynamic through contrast:

For Zuko, his mother was a warm and loving parent, and when she disappeared this was a bit of trauma that seems to have permanently changed how he interacted with the world. His father was someone he respected and wanted to impress, and even after he was permanently scarred by the man he still seemed to desire to gain Ozai's respect. These relationships mattered to him on a deep and inescapable level, and even his relationship to Azula built on this idea: though virtually every interaction we see between the two is one where Azula makes Zuko miserable, when she first showed up in the show and acted like a caring sibling, he wanted such a scenario to be real desperately enough that instead of being suspicious on the basis of her past behavior he actually bought this inexplicable change completely up until an officer made the mistake of referring to Zuko and Iroh as prisoners.

Zuko can't stop craving positive familial relationships even when there's a persistent pattern of open and deliberate abuse.

Azula, meanwhile, is abhorrent to her mother and doesn't seem terribly bothered by this idea. Her father's unpleasant treatment of her brother is something to smile about, or even help arrange to happen. Zuko's suffering is a game, not something to be bothered by, because she doesn't care about him. She doesn't seem to care about any of them, or indeed about anyone at all except perhaps herself -and that's more assumed than actually illustrated.

This extends much further than just their immediate familial relationships. Azula's 'friends' are minions she coerces/terrorizes into working for her. Zuko starts the series with no peer-type friends that we ever see unless you count the edge case of Mai, but with a sister who treats emotions and social connections as a weakness to be picked on it would be pretty amazing if he did have any friends.

This is a very consistent point of contrast between the two characters, one that tells us a lot about Azula's character, and it's a character that's pretty difficult for most people to sympathize with. She's the kind of character that often gets labeled a psychopath or sociopath, and which is often treated as unambiguously an evil so dark that the audience is not intended to feel even slightly bad if justice comes in the form of a gruesome death or the like.

... and then the end of the series tries to tell us Azula wants the love of her parents. That she tormented Zuko because their mother always loved him and not her, and she couldn't understand why. That she did everything she did because she desperately wanted her father's approval, so much so that when he leaves her behind to go be Phoenix King this is pretty much the last straw for her sanity. That she actually did care about her friends, and tormented and terrorized them because... she thought making them fear her would do a better job of ensuring loyalty than making them love her?...

The whole thing is bizarre. In the first place, it's irreconcilable with literally everything about her character prior to this interpretation being invented. In the second place, the story is actively undermining it as it's introducing the concept: we get a flashback showing that Azula was a horrible little monster all the way into early childhood, and also get flashbacks implying that Ozai was actually a pretty okay father prior to his wife being taken away from him -and these flashbacks are happening after the series has started trying to sell us on the idea that Azula wasn't born evil. The first flashback I'm referring to directly undermines this idea by depicting Azula being a monster for no clear motive in early childhood: the second undermines it indirectly, by making it so you can't explain L'il Azula's awful behavior as being a product of her desire to chase her father's approval, since it goes back to before he was modeling/encouraging awful behavior.

More than the actual plothole/narrative plausibility angle, though, what bothers me most is... a thing that needs a bit more grounding.

So let's get to that.

One of the major background elements of Avatar is being humanizing and sympathetic. Our first 'antagonist' is Zuko, and though he's on the 'bad guy' side the show quickly lets us know what is motivating Zuko and makes it clear he's a figure deserving of sympathy and potentially even pity. He's not simply the enemy who we must defeat/foil/evade/etc, but a person who has good and reasonable reasons for his own actions, and it's just unfortunate they place him at odds with the protagonists.

Zuko is the strongest example of this, but especially in the first season it's fairly typical for entities to start out framed in a manner that suggests straightforward 'bad guy-ness' and then the story reveals that it's not as straightforward as that, or is entirely untrue. A rampaging spirit monster assaulting innocent villagers for no obvious reason turns out to be hurting and angry because of real metaphysical harm done to them, and once they are made to understand that things will get better and that the people they've kidnapped weren't behind it the rampage stops and the kidnapped people are returned. An insane and hostile king turns out to be an old friend playing tricks. Etc.

Unfortunately, the writers seem to have struggled to hold to this consistently. This humanizing, sympathetic approach to people is applied to a fair amount of entities, but... not to everyone, and even the people it gets applied to it gets caveats. With the semi-exception of Zuko's sympathetic backstory not showing up until the episode after the two pilot episodes, generally a hostile character is either revealed to be sympathetic before the episode they were introduced in ends, or the story never tries to humanize them. Zhao is a straightforward gloryhound villain whose karmic death is treated as wholly deserved, and no attempt is ever made to follow up on any possible tragedy in his death. We never meet any of his loved ones, let alone see them being heartbroken by his death. We never see him have any friends, or at least not any friends who aren't themselves treated as fairly one-dimensionally villainous. The one-off Fire Nation officers running prisons in the Earth Kingdom and the like are generally one-dimensional villains we're pretty much supposed to view as deserving a righteous punching. When we meet the Dai Li and their master, the whole thing is an Orwellian nightmare that's never suggested to have a sympathetic reason for existing, and which deliberately keeps its own king out of the loop on important matters because... it's a sinister Orwellian organization, that's just what you do if you're an evil power behind the throne.

Azula and, to a lesser extent, Ozai, end up suffering because the writers seem to have spent most of the story running on Villain Tropes Logic, and only later on remembered that this is supposed to be a narrative in which everyone is a person deserving of humane and sympathetic treatment. Ozai's handling is plausible enough, but this is more due to the fact that while Ozai's influence has been made apparent all the way back to the third episode of the series, Ozai himself has been a largely undefined shadow figure, motives and goals inscrutable enough you could drape just about anything over what we see and end up with something plausible.

Azula doesn't benefit from this murkiness. She's had a strong and consistent character that has been developed consistently and clearly on-screen over a notable number of episodes, and attempting to rework her into being a Terrible But Sympathetic Person is like building a house in a swamp and then when you realize you're not happy living in a swamp you... change the wallpaper.

This is obviously bad practice in the first place, but there's also a subtle dehumanizing element to this attempt to humanize Azula, and that is the thing I'm uncomfortable with. In effect, the story's handling tells us that the Azula we knew is not someone who it's okay to view with sympathy, or treat humanely or with empathy. It has to invent a new version of Azula who, instead of being essentially exempt from the usual socioemotional experience, is actually deeply tied into it and just being awful as part of that.

This is frustrating, because the Azula we knew could be treated in a humane and empathic manner. Just because Azula doesn't really value these kinds of connections and experiences doesn't mean she's inherently destined to be a monster where the only acceptable response is to put her out of everyone else's misery. A different environment could have shaped Azula differently -it's likely that she'd always have had a streak of pragmatism or ruthlessness to her, given what we see, but it's easy to imagine how Ursa could have made more of an attempt to understand why her daughter was eg torturing small animals for fun and then adjusted how she handled Azula's upbringing. The Azula we got has a backstory that paints her as almost feral, with a father who's barely present, a mother that doesn't really want to have anything to do with her, and no evidence of any replacement parental figures to shape Azula into thinking about the world differently.

If you take a girl who isn't all that interested in social connections in the first place, give her tremendous latitude and power simply because of who her parents are, and then never allow her to experience anything like a partnership to see the benefits it brings and understand what is necessary to reap those benefits, is it really a surprise when she ends up viewing the world through a lens that makes human relationships a weakness? She got all the power she could want without ever having to befriend anyone, and she got to see her father become a broken man when her mother was taken away, not to mention see how wimpy Zuko was as a child coddled by their mother.

This is easy to use as a base to keep Azula's awful canon behavior while framing her as a human being we should try to empathize and understand. Restructuring her motives into being pretty much the exact opposite of her entire character up to this point is unnecessary, a bit disheartening, and while the show could potentially have tried to make some 'No So Different' point about Azula and Zuko it... didn't. There's kind of an interesting point that the show is consistent about having them both be Sympathetic Evil when it's framing them as seeking the approval of their father, but it gets lost in just dismissing Azula as crazy where Zuko's behavior was treated as completely sane when he was doing pretty much literally the exact same thing.

It's a frustrating finish to one of the series' strongest characters.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

MAKER'S SCHEDULE, STUPID

There are plenty of other places to work; in most of the initial sales of the Apple II came from people who bought one to run VisiCalc. They could buy some stock in this company. Some torture nerds for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor. It was impressive even to ask the questions they asked were new to them, and startups were selling them for a year's salary a copy. Com, where you go looking for problems without knowing what you're looking for. To anyone who knows Mark Zuckerberg that is the Valley's equivalent of the Welcome to Las Vegas sign: The Dish. You can start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful. Conversely, the extreme version of the two parties cancel one another out, with no expectation of getting anything in return. After Facebook stopped being for Harvard students, it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while. I'm going to start a startup while you're getting those n years of experience.

Good thing for the Democrats that their screen lets through an occasional Clinton, even if you're never called on to solve advanced problems, you have to reinvent stuff for yourself, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned. Icio. It's hard to find a field of math that truly has no practical use. At least, it did when people wrote about it in 1974, and the number one language is probably Perl. What's not a theory is the converse: if you're trying to solve were endlessly difficult. In that form it only had a potential market of a few thousand hobbyists as they were then called, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction. Partly because you can usually find ways to make anything scale more than you expect, but you're also capable of more than you expect, so they balance out. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy. Now the standard excuse is openly circular: that other languages are more popular. This sucks.

No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people start to use it in different ways. The world seemed cruel and boring, and that's a much bigger part of being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of implementing some fabulous initial idea. I'd guess that many of these would-be startup founders but to students in general, but they especially don't work as a catalog of mistakes.1 The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it. If there's something people still won't do, it seems likely enough that it would be stupid to try the experiment and find out. Fundamentally that's how the most successful companies. I described above—it won't flush out the metaphysical singularity. And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. With this amount of noise in the signal, it's hard to come up with your real idea.

It's probably no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. Universities seem the place to start. The narrow focus makes it a sort of puzzle, and you're generally surprised how fast you can solve it. You never know when this will strike. Let's try to discover them because they're useless, let's try it, the way Stripe delivered instant merchant accounts to its first users was that the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills. Movie studios? But in practice that never happens. If you do it unconsciously. C: Assembly language is too low-level. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If your company makes software to do x?

Gradually you realize that successful startups tend to discover the most general truths? Maybe we'll just have to do is convince the outside directors and they control the company. You have to make a living, and it's very hard to recommend an acquisition; it's just what their business has evolved into. Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. In 2002, most people who can help you. Who knew? If you want to do. Police investigation apparently begins with a motive. We say that the situation degenerates into a religious war, what they really like. They made search work, then worried about how to solve it.

And she wrote three separate essays about the question of the relative merits of programming languages, so long as I enjoyed it. It just has to be a harmless cyst.2 The biggest danger of not being consciously aware of this pattern is for those who naively discard part of it. Bush seemed old and tired.3 Do they want me to do something differently. I know I learned from studying philosophy. The VCs would get same number of shares for the money.

If companies want hackers to be productive, they should. I could only figure out what it's doing. Whereas Bill, if the rumors of autism are true, knows all too well. Bigger companies solve the problem. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the concept of users is always inaccurate, even if it would be tedious to let infect your private life, we liked it. You can sit down and consciously come up with shifts to the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.4 This seems a good bet. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then. But the problem with that description is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. Philosophy 101. I'm not sure why this is so. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing; the kind of things they say to one another.

Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. And the probability of a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be in this business; it's just too annoying to see a bunch of consequences. You can't watch people when everyone is watching you. The first component is particularly helpful in the first stage and handed the thing over to marketers. It was small and powerful and cheap, as promised. When Steve Jobs started using that phrase, Apple was already an established company. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Quiet is another matter.5 It's supposed to be the early adopters, you'll no longer have a perfect initial market handed to you on this one. It is not found in nature.

Notes

A smart student at a public event, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though I think what they give with one hand they take a lesson from the success of Skype. I say is being put through an internal process at work.

SpamCop—new things start to get a poem published in The New Yorker. Most of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits. The situation we face here, the more subtle ways in which only a sliver of it, this is also to the modern idea were proposed by Timothy Hart in 1964, two years investigating it.

College English Departments Come From? What he meant, I can't refer a startup than it would have been fooled by grammar.

In a project like a wave. And they are in set theory, combinatorics, and are often surprised by this standard, and suddenly they need them to get into the work that seems formidable from the revenue-collecting half of 2004, as it needs to learn. That may require asking, because companies don't advertise this. Perhaps this is a cause them to get into a de facto chosen by human editors.

I think the company is Weebly, which have varied dramatically. But although I started using it out of about 4,000 drachmae for the more qualifiers there are lots of back and forth.

[epochxp]

Wargaming and the 4th Armored Division

Shoulder Patch of the 4th Armored | Wikipedia

I decided to cover the 4th Armored division because, for a division that achieved as much as they did, they don’t always get the press in wargames that perhaps they should. And second? Well, my grandfather rode with them. He was a proud member of Company F (Light Tanks), 25th Mechanized Cavalry Squadron, 4th Armored Division. If the 4th was the tip of Patton’s spear, then the 25th was the pointy end of that tip.

My Grandfather, SSG Albert C. Elfman (Left) | Jason Weiser

My grandfather was instrumental in many ways in being part of my becoming a wargamer. He not only bought me a copy of Tactics II, but his stories about the 4th Armored were, in many ways, instrumental in my early wargaming purchase choices. He talked a lot about the division’s role in the relief of Bastogne, and the headlong drive of the division across France, and, later, Germany. 

As I got older and read more, I learned about the fights at Arracourt (which could be called the “Kursk of the Western Front.”), Singling, and the Lorraine campaign, which was just as bad as the Hurtgen Forest, but without the close terrain.

But we’re here to cover where the 4th Armored has been seen in hex and counter wargames. So, without further ado, let’s get started. I can’t promise I will cover EVERY game the 4th has been in, but I will try to reach as many as I can.

Board Game Geek

The 1981 version of Avalon Hill’s Battle of the Bulge is the second wargame I ever owned, and it’s still my favorite. I never played the 1965 version, and I really didn’t think much of the Smithsonian version at all. To me, the 1981 version is still my idea of a perfect medium to low-complexity Bulge game that still holds up well today. Are there better state-of-the-art games out there? Of course! There’s GMT’s Ardennes’ 44, (which I have been meaning to play) and MMP’s Ardennes SCS game (which I did play and really enjoyed, but it’s a monster game!). If I want to be able to finish a game in four hours, this is the one I reach for thus far. I still have a battered but serviceable copy in my collection today! 

Board Game Geek

The 4th is one of the weaker American armored divisions in the game, which makes sense as the 4th started the Ardennes offensive in a rest period after the drive across France and the Lorraine campaign. The division was understrength, and many of the vehicles needed depot-level maintenance. But it’s a tribute to the elite nature of the division in as beat up as they were, they pulled out of their rest areas, turned north, and attacked within 48 hours of being ordered to do so. I admit, as a nine-year-old, I’d save these counters for the epic drive to Bastogne against the German Fallschirmjager, who held the southern edge of the siege lines. History often repeated itself.

Board Game Geek

I remember not intending to buy this game when I saw it in the local hobby shop, but considering my grandfather was standing right there, I felt I had no choice. As it turns out, I am glad I did. Avalon Hill put out quite a few solitaire games back in the 80s, and all of them were great fun. Patton’s Best was no exception. What I really liked was that the entire combat calendar of the 4th was included in the game, and you could play it as a campaign. It was a really neat feature, and the game is still quite popular as people have made up tanks for all the major combatants of the war.

The tanks in the game run the gamut. Just about every mark of Sherman that served with the US Army is in the game. Sadly, there are no Stuarts or Chaffees, as those were the tanks my grandfather rode in to war. But people want Shermans when they want American tanks of the Second World War. 

I’d really recommend this game for those of you into solitaire games.

Amazon.com

This game came out last year, and I remember thinking, “Boy, I’d like to get a copy,” but the almost $200 price tag deterred me a bit (Sorry, Gramps!) That said, I did go to Board Game Geek and looked at the counter scans, and lo and behold, look what I found?

Board Game Geek

The red circle denotes the fact that, for the first time that I had ever seen in a hex and counter wargame, someone did a counter for the 25th Mechanized Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron. Thanks, Decision Games. If I can ever get a copy, I am going to play this just so I can metaphysically bond with my grandfather again, if only for a little while. The game comes highly rated on BGG, and it looks like a monster, but for my grandfather, I will brave it if I get the chance.

There have also been a few smaller press games about the Lorraine campaign by High Flying Dice Games and Revolution Games. I don’t own either of them, but they sound like they might be worth trying. Lou Coatney also published a game about the Lorraine campaign as well. 

Board Game Geek

I got a chance to play this game over VASSAL and I liked it. I haven’t hated an SCS game yet, so I really do enjoy the system as a whole, and it shines in Bastogne. The game does an incredibly good job of reflecting the challenges of the weather and the terrain. Naturally, the 4th Armored doesn’t appear until close to the end, and only then with the 37th tank battalion under the irascible Creighton Abrams himself, as well as an attached company from the division’s 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion. The units are as powerful as most German armored units, with only the 2nd Panzer’s units being more so (but they will have moved on by the time the 4th Armored shows up). 

Board Game Geek

In more tactical games, Avalon Hill’s Panzer Leader had a scenario about the 4th Armored’s encirclement of the French city of Nancy. West End Games’s West Front Tank Leader had a scenario based on Aaracourt and another about the 3rd Army’s crossing at Oppenheim, in which the 4th Armored participated. There is also an Advanced Squad Leader campaign for the Singling campaign.

All in all, the 4th has a bit of a presence in quite a few games. I am sure I have not named them all, as there are a lot of European Theatre of Operations (ETO) games out there. But I hope it has you interested in the ones I did name.

Further Reading

Patton’s Vanguard, The United States Army Forth Armored Division by Don M. Fox, McFarland Publishing, 2015

Final Battles of Patton’s Vanguard by Don M. Fox, McFarland Publishing, 2020

Patton at The Battle of the Bulge, by Leo Barron, Dutton Caliber, 2014

At Epoch XP, we specialize in creating compelling narratives and provide research to give your game the kind of details that engage your players and create a resonant world they want to spend time in. If you are interested in learning more about our gaming research services, you can browse Epoch XP's service on our parent site, SJR Research.

--

(This article is credited to Jason Weiser. Jason is a long-time wargamer with published works in the Journal of the Society of Twentieth Century Wargamers; Miniature Wargames Magazine; and Wargames, Strategy, and Soldier.)

[twosidestarot]

Readers in Profile: Siobhan of Radical Tarot

If you've been around these parts for many moons, you might remember my interview series, Readers in Profile, in which I sit down with some of the many cool cats in our tarot community to talk shop. It's been a while since we've had an instalment of this series, but I'm very glad to be breathing some life back into it with one of my favourite radical cardslingers, Siobhan of Radical Tarot.

Siobhan's one of those readers who inspires me in my own practice, because she never takes a boundary or brick wall as a given. Siobhan's writing and thinking about tarot always, always stretches this old art form into new shapes, and her compassionate, curious, and expansive approach always manages to find new ways of seeing the cards. It's pretty magical! 

Let's get to it, shall we?

Hi Siobhan! Tell us a little bit about yourself as a tarot reader and a human person. 

I'm a person that both starts with and rallies against a series of labels. Black. Poor. Anxious (or crazy depending on who you ask). Empathic (or crazy depending on who you ask).

I came to the cards with a great deal of fear. Growing up where I grew up there were doubts or questions about my place in the world. I never fit. There was a constant question about my worth. Metaphysical differences complicated these issues. 

When I was younger, I saw and heard which were not of the physical world. And I knew back then to keep my mouth shut. Because I was raised in a family that while very Christian and relatively conservative, still acknowledged the unseen. They had to, there were too many unexplained incidents shared between us. 

What is your tarot origin story? 

By the time I handled the first tarot deck, I was searching very hard for a way to feel safe. I wanted to believe that there were mechanisms through which I could wrangle my own intuition. I wanted to make peace with the part of me that whispered me bits of information that I shouldn't know about myself and others. 

I wanted to turn my gift off and on at will, and I had a hunch that the tarot was the way. Even if the cards themselves did nothing, I thought they might at least train my mind so that I might get a say in when I would pick up on things. I hadn't met anyone like me other than my grandmother and other relatives.

I set out to learn about my premonitions at all costs. Even if it meant studying witchcraft and things I was raised to believe came from the devil. I came to the cards out of kind of psychic desperation. I would come to learn as I got older and met more metaphysicians and practitioners that this isn't a typical way to come to the craft. Most come looking to tap into more, not less. 

I used the Tarot not to contact spirit realm but to limit contact. I felt that if I could give myself a spiritual outlet, time and space where it was ok to deal with the unseen, maybe the unseen would stop flooding the rest of my life and my dreams. And sure enough, things got better. 

The spellcraft I did, and the cards that I pulled signaled to my brain that there was a time for such things and that it wasn't all the time. I could sleep easier, and I had substantially less fear. 

The only reason I ever even laid eyes on a tarot deck was through a dear friend. Through school, I was exposed to media that my family couldn't afford, anime, comics, and of course, tarot. My best friend showed me her mother's Morgan Greer deck. 

There was a definite weight to the cards. Even though I don't remember the art blowing me away. I don't remember fear or trepidation handling the cards. Even though I had been raised to be afraid of them. 

How does tarot fit into your life day-to-day – what are the regular practices you use to connect with and learn from the cards?

I notice myself pulling cards in waves. When I feel like I would be put at ease by knowing how something is going to turn out, when I'm anxious or stressed about the future or when I notice that I'm fixating on something from the past and I want to let it go. 

I pull my cards when I'm biking through a particularly beautiful trail, and feel at peace, and when I am visiting places of power. Geographical locations where I feel strong spiritual presences or a spike in energy for whatever reason. 

I notice that even on the days when I don't pull a card, I'm thinking about the images. This is how I really came to embrace pulling cards face up. I was doing in my head anyway, so it made sense to pull the cards this way as well. 

I reach for my cards when I need to make a decision where I would normally second guess myself or look for someone else to tell me what to do. I'm recovering from a time in my life where I didn't have a lot of confidence in my decision making or even my perception of reality. I have an old habit of looking for reassurance outside of myself. 

The cards help me to remember that I can look to the unseen for answers and also that there are parts of myself that I can draw from. That I almost never need to look anywhere further than my own judgment.

Do you integrate tarot into any other aspects of your spiritual or creative practice? 

One of the most unlikely spiritual combinations in my life is tarot and sexuality. I’ve pulled cards Face Up, consciously rather than at random, for Tantric rituals before. And lately, I've been drawing cards for my kink. 

This is partially due to one of my decks, Manara's Erotic Tarot. It's a hard deck to read. It's one of those made of images that weren't intended for tarot. I don't usually like decks like these. But it's comic art. And I do like comics, so it ended up being one of my first decks. But it's a dark and obscure deck. 

It focuses entirely on the male gaze, something that was interesting to me when I was younger but in the last decade or so, underwhelms me. It has some pretty kinky images. At least, at the time, indie decks have pushed the envelope in recent years.

I was already interested in kink when I bought the deck, but I wasn't so experienced at the time. I hadn't been exposed to the range of fetishes and kinky activities that I have at this point. So I used the deck but didn't really hear it, you know? 

Years after I bought it, after much more kink play, I recognized one of the images on the card as something I had (almost) done. There were cobblestones in the picture and a partially nude woman flashing traffic at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. This card really came alive for me after I'd seen the Arc in person for myself AND after I'd done a brief stint modeling for fetish photography. 

I'm outside with a photographer one day wearing this corset and these heels and not much else, and it's a real struggle balancing on these cobblestones in 7-inch platforms, and I was cold and nervous about being so scantily clad in the middle of the financial district. I had to use the restroom and the photographer, being a bit of sadist suggests I go right there in the middle of the street. 

I tell him absolutely not. 

But I go ahead and imagine what it would be like, the relief, the release. I imagine what it would be like to be a person who has no shame about doing this very private act in a very public place. It would feel free. The kind of freedom and bliss you can only get doing something extreme. 

This is the image on the nine of cups in the Erotic Tarot. It has this puddle beneath a woman in the photo. And after this fetish shoot, I realized it's not rain water underneath her. It's not the exhibitionist flashing that causes her to bite her lip. 

Once I could understand this deck, it changed the way I looked at all the others, opening up a world of interpretation concerning all kinds of sexuality that had never occurred to me. 

In your professional work, are there any pro tips or insights you’ve picked up along the way that you’d like to share? 

At least two things stand out to me about reading tarot for others. Both things that it took me a long time to realize. The first is whether or not the reading is about you. The reading can be about you. Many people read tarot this way. Some realize it. Some don't. Some do it pro this way. 

They read tarot to fulfill a need that they have, and this is the primary focus. And I suppose on some level this will always come into play. Any interaction between humans will involve, hopefully, the needs of everyone getting met. The difference I am focusing on is one of primary-ness. 

Some people never bother to ask themselves the question of what is primary to their tarot practice. Are you looking to feel wise? Magical? Holy? Caring? Useful? Are these needs primary? Are you looking to be of service? 

And even if you think you mean to serve, it can be tricky to see the root of why we do the things we do. Until we face something annoying. The no-brainer. The stupid or infuriating things. These things are the clues. The pregnancy questions. The questions about a third party. The questions where some people feel the ethics are plain as day and not even worth looking at. 

These are the places where we find out our real motivation. Are we drained or are we angry when we receive the less-than-ideal questions? If we feel any heavy charge when reading, there's something we're taking personally or a need that we feel is not being met. 

If we don't happen to have the awareness to notice moments like these, we may spend our entire practice thinking we are doing one thing but in actuality doing another. This comes back to a question I've asked before on my blog that I got from Betty Martin, an educator that I love: "who's it for?"

The second thing is what a reading actually entails. We all know it can take days, months, or years to learn the cards, the symbols and their meanings and our own personalized interpretations of the archetypes. We all agree on that part. But what about communicating the reading to the querent? What about doing so without unintended triggers, microaggressions, miscommunication? What about how we listen? 

Many of the people who want readings may not have another outlet to express their issue. What about recognizing when to refer someone for services outside the realm of tarot? And if you read tarot professionally there are several more layers of expertise that it wouldn't hurt to cultivate the same as with any business. What exactly does it mean to be spiritual or emotional triage for someone? 

Having a business is its own journey without even considering the part where we learn to use the cards. There are so many ways to both run a business and use the tarot that it really behooves a person to know why they do what they do. What their values are. And yet there are so many who don't know these things about themselves. Discernment is key. 

Discernment of the teachers that we choose to learn from, the words we use, the attitude with which we approach other humans. It takes a lot of actions, daily habits, and work to handle all those things with grace and integrity. And not everybody will want to invest what is needed, and not everyone will realize that they don't want to right away. 

I just have to ask – what would be your five desert island tarot (or oracle) decks? Which ones couldn’t you live without?

If I were on a desert island, I'd honestly really focus on my God-given divination tools, words, breath, and dreams. One day you ask me this question I might say the Margarete Peterson. One day maybe the St. Croix. One day Thoth (No really, it might just have to be Thoth. That deck seems to scream at me.) And maybe that means I'm a bit ambivalent about the decks I've seen so far. And maybe there's room for me to fall in love and for this to change. 

The further down the rabbit hole I sink toward minimalism and toward letting go of objects, both of which are pretty important to me lately, the less I notice preferences that I used to hold so strong. I sometimes think about a year-long ritual I could do that involves getting rid of every deck I own, til' I own one or maybe even no more decks. To test myself and see if I could remember the impermanence of everything. 

I read a book years ago, I don't remember which one in it said, "a witch has no possessions." And me, with my Aspie-leaning heart, took it quite literally. That I couldn't call myself a witch until I had nothing or until I did not consider my relationship to things one of ownership.

I don't identify as a witch anymore. But this concept works well with my more recent Buddhist approach to things and so still serves. And when we think about the earth, isn't this for the best? The mindset that is the most sustainable is to be attached to absolutely nothing, not even the bones we breathe through. Not the most fun way to look at this question I know...

Where can we find you? 

You can find me blogging at radicaltarot.com. It’s a good idea to sign up for my newsletter. Between my column on Little Red Tarot, random publications, free monthly tarotscopes, and seasonal professional readings, there’s kind of a lot to keep track of. 

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You can probably tell now why I love Siobhan's tarot brain! I highly recommend her Little Red Tarot column, and do make sure you get on her mailing list so you never miss your monthly tarot scopes!

[aion-rsa]

Soul Ending Explained: What Happens Next to Joe?

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This article contains Soul spoilers. You can find our spoiler-free review here.

What are you going to do with your life? It’s a looming question, and one that a few days ago Jamie Foxx’s Joe Gardner thought he knew the answer to. He was going to play jazz, professionally, and break into the music industry—specifically as the pianist for Dorothea Williams’ jazz quartet. But standing there on the ramp toward the Great Beyond, and staring at his second chance back on Earth, he’s posed the question again by a well-meaning Jerry.

So just what are you going to do with the rest of your life? For the first time, perhaps since he was a child, Joe didn’t have a firm answer. He simply says, “I don’t know but I’m going to live every moment of it.” And with that we see Joe, resurrected from the dead, step out of his home and actually look at the world around him. So what does he do next?

To answer that, it’s worth considering the journey he’s just been on throughout Pixar’s Soul and why it ended the way it did.

After Joe fell down a manhole in Lower Manhattan, he was catapulted into a cosmic adventure that took his soul from the end of the line to back where it all began in the Great Before. It was in the latter location that he bought himself at least a little more time by becoming a mentor to 22 (Tina Fey), an unruly soul who refused to embrace the concept of life. On paper, he simply taught her life is worth experiencing by putting 22 inside of his own body, where she discovered flowers smell wonderful, the sun is warm, and pizza really is delicious.

However, that’s the surface level version of events, and one writer-directors Pete Docter and Kemp Powers are refreshingly uninterested in settling for. While Soul savors the hijinks of putting Joe in the body of a cat, and 22 accidentally learning to talk smack at Joe’s neighborhood barbershop, those experiences are not why 22 decides to experience life. At least not entirely.

Joe thinks they are when he admonishes 22, saying she never found her purpose, and the only spark of life she felt was his. But it’s a fallacy to think his “spark,” a sense of inspiration felt by playing music and jazz, was his purpose or reason to live. While the inspiration is what makes Joe’s life worth living, it is not the whole of what his existence should be about—which might explain his greater frustration with his life, his mother, and his job as a part-time (soon to be full-time?) elementary school teacher.

One of the Jerrys helpfully spells this out for both Joe and the audience: a spark is not a purpose. It’s a naïve rabbit hole many a soul falls down to think they exist for one reason. And indeed, by reinforcing this narrow view of the world onto 22, Joe fails her; and he brings her lower than she’d ever been with her other mentors.

Joe realizes this after he finally gets to play with Dorothea Williams. The rest of his life appears to have arrived; he’s played jazz with his idol and she recognizes his talent. He might’ve just broken into the very narrow (and shrinking) world of professional jazz. Yet it doesn’t feel like a victory because there is very little in his life to celebrate it with. He might reach “the Zone” when he takes the Blue Note stage, but he can’t live there. If he tried he might become a zombie like other soulless automatons who wind up there, like the Wall Street hedge fund manager we saw earlier in the film.

He does return to the Zone though…. by joining Moonwind (Graham Norton) on a magical hippie pirate ship ride to the Zen place between the physical and metaphysical realms. Yet he does this simply to find 22 and learn the hard lesson he taught her.

By insisting that life is about one thing, one purpose, and that 22 can’t find her own, he offered her exceedingly negative reinforcement. This is not to say that Joe intentionally harmed her; he’d grown to like 22 as a teacher might celebrate a prized pupil. But as with many teachers and parents before him, Joe is forced to become aware of the dangers of negative reinforcement, and essentially demeaning a young mind’s spirit and unintentionally pushing them toward apathy, or worse, resignation.

And 22 is certainly resigned by the climax, giving into the cynicism of every harsh word she’s heard over the centuries and millennia from mentors. When Joe enters the dark void she’s created, like the other zombies who lost their souls to their obsessions, he sees all the cruel things 22’s other mentors have said to her, but none is quite so monstrous as her vision of Joe: an enormous figure she imagines is screaming down at her, insisting she has no reason to live or exist.

By seeing his own mania through the eyes of another soul, Joe sees his failures clearly, both toward 22 and himself. It is only then he is able to break through to 22 and give her the inspiration she needs to embrace life… and in the process he saves his own.

This occurs literally at first, with the Jerrys so impressed with how Joe’s mentored 22 that they allow him to continue on this mortal coil without fear of the calculating Terry. However, it also means he’s saved himself from becoming obsessed and robbed of his inspiration, even if it is with a career on the stage.

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So what does Joe do next with his life? Well, to be honest it is left entirely up to the viewer. As a personal bit of speculation, I wonder if there was a rewrite or internal debate at Pixar about this, because many of the story elements of Soul seem to point to Joe realizing his life is fuller as a teacher than as just a pianist. In a brief early sequence, we see him at the elementary school, and he looks more enthusiastic talking about jazz and explaining why students should celebrate “getting in the zone” than he did on the night he played with Dorothea.

And at the barbershop, he discovered his barber once dreamed of being a veterinarian but then life got in the way, and he wound up as a barber—yet Joe’s buddy remains happy with his ability to “save lives,” just as he saved Joe’s hairstyle. I personally wonder if an early draft of the screenplay had Joe decide he would rather be a full-time teacher at an elementary school than join Williams’ quartet.

In an interview with Den of Geek‘s Don Kaye, director Pete Docter certainly seems to suggest as much. When we ask about how the Soul ending evolved, Docter revealed an original vision for the ending had Joe running into 22 again… at school.

“We storyboarded a bunch of stuff where [Joe and 22] met,” Docter says. “One of them was in New York. 22 was like a student that Joe later recognizes. In another one, she actually ended up in India as a kid living there.” However, Pixar embraced an ambiguity toward 22’s destiny that seems to lend itself just as much to Joe.

Says Docter, “In the end, it’s kind of one of those things where I feel like if the audience falls in love with these characters, I would rather that they have their own answer to where they ended up than trying to provide all those answers for them. For me it’s really a great joy when you can create these things that have a life of their own, that sparks a whole story for someone else.”

Which is why I prefer a different road for Joe’s second chance at life. Ever since he was a child, he dreamed of making a career out of his love for jazz. And for more than 30 (or 40?) years, he struggled with jazz not loving him back. That he finally got his foot in the door is an achievement of sacrifice and perseverance that I imagine many a Pixar artist, creator, and filmmaker can relate to. Should he really throw that away because he learned success isn’t the end-all be-all of existence?

I’d argue no. But he did learn he needs to fill his life with more than jazz and more than his passions. Life is an experience unto itself to be passionate about. It’s the lesson he imparted to 22, and that she in turn imparted to him. At the end of the movie, he has many choices to make, and the viewer can decide in their own heads what direction he goes. But what is not up for debate is that Joe has learned not to take life for granted. Now he can seize the whole day, as opposed to just the fleeting moments where his spark soars.

As Docter also reveals about the ending, “That last last line… used to be, ‘I’m going to enjoy every moment of it.’ And one of the animators, Dave DeVan, said, ‘You know, that line bumps me because it just doesn’t seem real that I could enjoy every moment of my life.’ And so to ‘live it’ does seem more truthful–I might be suffering, I might be said, I might be disappointed, but I’m going to be connected to it. That’s a more realistic goal, I think, for us.”

It’s also more realistic for Joe, how ever you choose to imagine he ends up.

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