#its just not as easy to do very complex builds

[felicityislands]

had a brief moment of weakness and nearly reinstalled sims 4 and then i remembered the fact i have 3 exams coming up in the next week and the amount of time it would take to reinstall that game is not even worth it

[howdydoodydodis]

I definitely wish I could see more takes on C3 from people who aren’t steeped in western cultural Christianity.

I think a huge problem I’m seeing in some attempts at meta with C3 is that there is a subset of viewers who do not understand the place, value, and meaning of real world religion. It breeds takes like “well throw the gods out! Who needs them! They caused characters and the world pain! Free Vax from the Raven Queen!”

I throw that last one in there because it is the most ridiculous yet frequent and is really the crux of the issue. Vax’s story is very much about faith and the importance of faith and devotion. If you place no value on that you’ll end up grossly misunderstanding the character and the nature of his tragedy.

I’m going to out myself as an atheist, but I think the issue with a lot of these takes are that they come from internet atheists who are either resentful of and hostile toward religion because of personal experiences or do not know any devout people in their lives who they respect and can empathize with. And while I am not trying to downplay the very real phenomenon of religious trauma, when healing from it it is crucial to realize that all spiritual traditions are not synonymous with the one that harmed you. I would really implore more people to explore why many good people find spiritual traditions and religion to be a source of solace, community, and meaning before writing off the idea wholesale as something only functioning as a means of power and control that people can be educated out of believing. I encourage you to branch out and here are some examples of things I’ve done to challenge my own judgement over the last ten years: read the writings of gay Catholics exploring the queerness of Jesus. Read some beautiful poetry written by a trans man who specializes in Anglican theology. Explore religious observances different from the ones you experienced and attend a Seder. Go if a coworker invites you to a celebration of Ganesh. Learn the significance of solstice celebrations because your coworker is officiating one for a Wiccan event. Break fast at sundown during Ramadan with in solidarity with your roommate.

Deciding that all fictional religion must be an allegory for a specific kind of toxic nationalistic prosperity gospel Christian cult found in America will only limit how you engage with both fiction and the real world. It took me a long time to get to this place about it and I hope I’ve put the spark of curiosity and not judgment into at least one person reading this.

[wip]

Please make it possible to hide users' posts without blocking them. Like, in cases where a person hasn't done anything wrong to be blocked, but you just don't like their posts.

Answer: Hello, @deithwen!

As it turns out, we’ve received this feature request a lot over the years. Usually, it comes in as wanting the ability to “mute” other blogs on Tumblr. While we would love to build it, we’ve balked at it a bit because of its technical and product complexity. Let us explain what that means:

In terms of technical complexity, our current blocking feature is closest to how “muting” would work. Our current blocking feature may seem simple, but it’s very complex because of how big Tumblr is. Every time we fetch a list of blogs for you or anyone on Tumblr, we have to also fetch the list of who you’re blocking, and who’s blocking you, and filter out anyone with that block relationship. This mapping of who’s-blocking-who is stored in a directional way right now, so the “cost” of loading that list gets higher the more people you’re blocking and the more people who are blocking you. If you’re blocking 1,000 blogs, we have to check that list a lot. If you’re being blocked by 1,000 blogs, that’s another big list to check against.

In technical terms, this is a “many-to-many” relationship, which is almost always incredibly difficult to manage while not degrading the experience of using a platform like Tumblr. The more people who are blocking, the harder it is to store those lists in a way that’s easy to check, but we’re working on making it smoother. The vast majority of people don’t block many others, if at all, so it’s never been a huge problem. But the outliers who block thousands of others (or are blocked by thousands of others) can degrade performance for everyone over enough time.

Adding muting would throw on top of that yet another list of blogs to check, increasing the complexity of something that’s already pretty complex. It helps that muting would be one-directional and not bi-directional (as in, it doesn’t matter who’s muting you), but, as that list of muted blogs grows, your experience may degrade further. So we’d need to solve for that, which is definitely doable. It would just take time—and lots of it.

And, as a product, Tumblr is already pretty confusing to people trying to figure out what “blocking” means already, as well as our other filtering options. Up until fairly recently, blocking was almost entirely one-directional, the opposite way you’d expect: blocking made it so the blocked person couldn’t see you, not that you couldn’t see them. We’ve been updating blocking to work both ways instead, which is more common on social media these days. Similarly, the options to filter tags versus content cause a lot of confusion because they don’t work the same way as each other.

So if we wanted to add another filtering option to that mix, “muting” blogs, we’d need to be conscious of how all of those options work together—and are confusing in context with each other. We should really clean up that experience to be more streamlined and simple, not more complex. And I didn’t even mention the oddity of how different settings apply to your primary blog versus your sideblogs if you have more than one blog!

Taken together, it is a great idea for us to clean all of this up, improve our existing options here, and add “muting” for even more control and granularity. Sadly, however, it just isn’t high enough on our list of priorities to tackle anytime soon. We don’t want to simply tack on muting for the sake of doing it—we want to do a better job than that. I hope that makes sense!

Thanks for your question. It was an important one to address. If anything should change here, you will get news through the usual channels: here at WIP, or at @changes. 

[mclalan]

Can you share what your art-making process is? What software and tools do you use?? I'm falling in love with your work!!

Thank you, I'm so happy you like my work and are interested in the process. The short answer is I mostly use Adobe Animate.

I hate how I'm using an Adobe product (although I still regard it as a MacroMedia Flash product), but there's just no other software that compares to its jankiness. Perhaps it's just my long familiarity with the program, but nothing I've experienced matches how it simultaneously feels like drawing in MS Paint and using Microsoft PowerPoint vector shapes. The result is something that feels in-between the two; handmade yet computer-generated.

Typically, I'll start with a hand-drawn sketch, often beginning as a thumbnail done with pencil and paper.

I'll then do a mix of hand drawing and vector shape tool rendering. I use the Paint Brush tool to hand draw strokes, and the line and shape tools mixed with transform to make more geometrically accurate shapes. The design is rendered into divided closed loop shapes, ready to be filled with a solid. The strokes are kept or removed depending on the design.

These fill shapes are then either coloured and rendered in Adobe Animate, using fills, gradients, or a more complex process of masks and effects.

Alternatively, I'll bring all these vector shapes into Photoshop and use them as clipping masks. The vector shapes act like masking taped areas or shields to maintain sharp edges, while the brush is like an atomized airbrush used to build soft volumed forms.

Please excuse all that horrible Adobe Cloud and AI bloatware...

And there we go!

Variations in the process include just using MS Paint, index color in Photoshop, or 3D programs.

Very old works of mine were almost abstract, just exploring digital mark-making, which was a trend I was following in the mid 2010s that I loved. This kind of stuff.

While my current work uses its digital material specificity as an intermediary to the subject in the illustration.

For example, #ersatz.world parodies clip-art and flash edutainment styles but imagines the characters living within that kind of world. The designs are meant to be cute, easy to read, light in computer processing, but also irreverent, janky, and generic too.

People typically regard this sort of clip art style as ephemeral trash, but I always found them charming. I use Ersatz World primarily as a satire vehicle, parodying educational formats to spoof corporate explainer content and digital media.

However, part of the problem with Ersatz is I've made it look too polished, complex, and I've grown too attached to the characters, which I imagine is a typical issue with overbuilding a world. So recently, I've made an even jankier Ersatz-like set of characters to play about with, using an even simpler style with less cohesion. I like to try and use slightly different styles and digital material styles to relate to the property at hand.

That’s why #autonymus has a bitmap digital material and a denser feel to it. Unlike Ersatz, Autonymus is not meant to be an overt semi-meta fiction. It’s not exactly pixel art, but the pixels are just about visible, as the intention is to create a digital expressionist depth to the setting. Although it’s still stylized and not realistic to our world, I definitely still want to evoke semblances of our world. That’s why there’s attention to landscape, plant life, and implied life beyond what you see in the frame with the characters, etc. But I'm still making a cartoon, and I still want it to feel at ease with itself being a digital material work. Characters are therefore flat, simple, stiff, and the speech style is like a bad Shakespeare parody. I like to balance between ugly and appealing, simple and complex, familiar and unfamiliar.

In regard to things like inspiration, references, and my relationship to aesthetic genres; these things certainly factor into my work, perhaps I'm even overtly dependent on them. My work can definitely be post-modernist in method; creating new, ironic, or fragmented interpretations through deconstructing a mix of various styles or methods. But at the same time, I'm still trying to make a digital gestural representation where the aesthetic is driven by my relationship to the software and techniques directly—not simply in an attempt to reference a style. For example, I like drawing lines in sweeping strokes, not to a point of geometric perfection, but just in a way where the curves are smooth and simple. But if I want perfectly curved or straight lines, I'll use the vector tools.

Working this way, you can sort of learn why certain styles and design choices in past vector aesthetics were made, as they would have also needed to make similar choices. That’s why I’m more mindful of using digital material specificity as a foundation to build narrative and subjects upon these days.

For example, genre references like cyberpunk clichés for #cyberhell or late medieval design for #autonymus or 2005 to 2015 era subculture fashion for #gradientgoblinz.

I think it’s important to take inspiration and reference from a wide variety of sources, but I think they’d mean nothing without having something to say or express. Autonymus, although it is a collection of tropes and clichés, isn’t just about that. It’s a story about the tensions of socially constructed systems and how that shapes faith, technology, and the natural world, or at least that's what I'm aiming for anyway.

But despite all that, I think there’s a danger of locking myself into the past by using these methods. For example, using nostalgia and references to past aesthetics can result in just recreating the past in a form of role-play. To avoid that, I try and evoke the past through a messy, inaccurate pastiche rather than caring to accurately re-enact anything. I’m probably not always successful at communicating the deliberateness of this, and it can certainly get very frustrating and pedantic. To be honest, I do kind of hate aesthetic labels (terms like Y2K, global coffee house, utopian scholastic designs from a pre-9/11 world).

I do not believe that a project aimed solely at mapping history through aesthetic styles is worthwhile. Sure, they can be handy for organizing style trends, but they can also be reductive and ahistoric. Who are these people to define the history of these design eras? The result is a kind of suffocating simulation of design history but removed from context, perfect for moodboardism. I wish it felt more tongue-in-cheek, less absolute of itself in its own practice. Instead, it acts to legitimize and engender those making these labels, almost giving them ownership of the design styles. It’s similar to the logic and process of generative AI and its databases in a way, just done manually.

I’m very inspired by artists like Oneohtrix Point Never in this regard, as I think he’s able to create an aesthetic portal to all kinds of memories, feelings, and worlds reminiscent of the past, while still being in the present. It’s more a reflection of how timelines are messy now, like a memory or dream, rather than an audacity to say the past was actually like that, or to try to actually map some kind of timeline.

I think the benefit of this process is how it avoids the other side of the spectrum—being locked into chasing the cutting edge of digital processes. I don't necessarily think using an old digital process means your work inherits the semiotics of old aesthetics. Non-digital mediums don’t have this issue to this degree, as you can still paint in oils and be considered contemporary, or at least it's not frowned upon to such a degree. And I also don't think anyone in the heyday of Flash ever made work the same as I do, especially as computers are more powerful now so can handle more. I probably shouldn't boast too much about that though, as artists at the time probably just had more sense than to use Flash like a painting program! So then, why is my use of Adobe Animate critiqued as obsolete and an aesthetic dead-end? Because to whose standards is this process obsolete? If you value digital aesthetics as an apparatus in industry practice, then sure, my work is redundant.

But as wonderful as the latest tech can be in creating new aesthetics, I do feel it can be overtly dependent on the trends and directions of tech corporations, and therefore act as an indirect propaganda tool to their hegemony over digital aesthetics, such as the ever-demanding processing power needed for simulated realism. If anything, work that does follow in the direction of the latest tech trends is ironically the quickest to date once the trends move on.

I've noticed I've not really described what my work is about, just the process, in this text. But I don't know, maybe I like Flash because it is regarded as redundant. No one really cares about it, so I feel free to make whatever I want, and can decide on form myself, to my own standards, the quality of my work. As fun as making images is, I find it difficult to put into words what it is exactly I'm expressing in my work, and perhaps that would spoil it anyway.

[radiance1]

Mechanical eastern dragon.

Danny, ever since he was a wee little lad, about 5 or so. Really liked eastern dragons since he found out about them, so much so that he even tried to make his own little eastern dragons!

When Jack saw that, it seemed to strike something in him and suddenly Danny found himself having a more experienced hand aiding him in his crafts.

Jack started directing him towards something simpler than a dragon when he was first starting out, then over time gradually let him make certain parts of a dragon instead of all at once, then when they were all complete, they stuck them together and Danny? Well, he found out why his dad liked to build so much.

So, he started to build more and more little things, small yet complex that'll eventually come together to form his eastern dragon.

As he got older, and his parents became more and more focused on their portal project, he eventually decided that, hey, why doesn't he just make a giant version of his little crafts?

An actual dragon.

Of course, such a thing was no easy feat, so he started it just like his dad taught him too, little pieces over time that'll eventually come together to make what will essentially be his masterpiece.

However, he lacks the parts to do so.

Well, not exactly considering there's a lot of household things he could take apart for scrap, but his parents are already doing that, plus he wants way better materials that'll really shape this up to be his mastepiece.

So he took to instead drawing out how it'll look, and creating various minor pieces that'll go into powering it and stuff. He took some of the ectoplasmic batteries his parents' didn't have a use for anymore, and kinda just, fused them together?

Either way, he made a core that'll be the basis of power for his dragon when he completes! Of course, it'll have to go over multiple modifications over the years while he refines the design for his dragon, to make it able to hold more energy, more durable and far more powerful.

He won't lie, he was both extremely suspicious and immensely grateful when Sam gave him a diamond of all things to make a battery out of, because she obviously wanted something outta it. What did she want? Dibs on being one of the first too see his creation when its finished.

Very simple, plus she said her parents could buy another one anyways. Ah, the joys of being rich.

Then he heard from his parents about how their portal works, though he wasn't too interested since he was too busy building the skeleton of his dragon from the parts Sam gave him.

Tucker, who was dabbling in coding, decided that he was going to attempt to create a high level AI for Danny's project, which Danny was all for! Great materials provided by his friend, and then his other one wanted to make an AI specifically for his masterpiece?

Why would he ever say no?

Jazz has been acting pretty weird thought lately, he noticed a bit after the day he was made aware of how his parents' portal managed to work, how he still isn't sure, nor did he actually believe there was a realm of the dead but eh. He would admit, he wasn't terribly close with his sister, ever since he started up his master work, and became a fink, but he could tell something was different.

Really only because she seemed to be finally getting off his case about how much work he's putting into his dragon and less into taking care of himself properly, which she usually does by bossing him around. But he thinks she's just busy, and is too busy to even care at this point so it didn't really matter.

He was a bit blindsided by ghosts actually being real but easily accepted it to be honest. Like, he's been using stuff powered by ectoplasm that ghosts are supposedly made of, so it wasn't that much of a stretch.

Of course, a ghost fighting against another ghost was new, different from what his parents had told him, but it was nice to have someone protecting the town other than his parents at the very least.

As he got closer and closer to finishing his masterpiece, and as Tucker himself almost finishing with the AI, his grades weren't receiving that much attention, he would admit. He would look back at them when he completed it, alright? But not now.

Then came a day where he was saved from a ghost attack by Amity Park's hero, and while he was extremely tired, he recognized that bossiness, snobbish attitude and smothering from anywhere. Did he expect his sister to be the ghostly town hero? No, no he did not.

Was he going to tell anyone? Not really, he cared, but he didn't care that much about to go around talking about it. Also, wasn't his place to spill his sister's secret really.

Also, she didn't know he knew, and he planned to keep it that way for the foreseeable future.

Just as he was nearing his completion, only having just a few finishing touches before it was ready for the AI to be uploaded to it, a test popped that he apparently had to study for, with his sister already passing with flying colors (which just proves how much smarter she is than him, because she fights ghosts regularly, he doesn't, doing something much safer and what does he have to show for it?) and urging him to study. Which, with her attitude that got even worse, after becoming half-ghost and a hero, he just, couldn't take.

He's thankful that ghost came when they did, because he just couldn't stand her any longer than that. So he just popped over to Nasty Burger instead, removing himself far as he could from that fight, and of course, of course said fight had to end up there.

The universe just hates him, it seemed. On the plus side, he managed to snag the answer sheet to that C.A.T. test his sister was nagging him about, why would he study if he has this now? Besides, he has something more important to do anyways.

Then a while he's confronted by his sister's apparent alternate evil future self after he dropped his knowledge of her secret in attempts to stave off the conversation of him cheating, which, now that he thought of it, was probably better than finding out and subsequently being knocked out by his sister's alternate self.

Thankfully, when he next awoke, he found his project was perfectly untouched, and then had to leave to take the test. He'll figure out a way to deal with his sister's future self later. While later, he finished the test, and was finally glad to be able to add the last touches to his project.

Oh, right, his sister's evil self. He almost forgot about her if he was being honest. So, he took the Fenton Peeler, and was going to go find his sister before he had to be called to Nasty Burger by his parents and, well, his 'sister' was there, and his cheating was already revealed and decided it's literally whatever and shot her.

Weird that he was separated from everyone else, but it's whatever. Sure, the sauce was going to explode and kill everyone, but he believed in his sister to come and save the day, as she always did and will continue doing and he told his sister's evil self that, and was incredibly smug when it happened.

He watched the fight, cheering a bit from the sidelines because, well, c'mon. It's not everyday he watches his sister beat her future self the up, and he might not get this chance ever again so might as well enjoy it while he can.

Unfortunately, he never accounted for his sister being too weak after said fight to help their parents', Mr. Lancer, and his friends, and then he saw them explode.

Then his sister disappeared.

He, very obviously, did not take this well at all. So, after he got back home, feeling both like shit and nothing at all, he stared at the almost finished eastern dragon sitting to the side of his bedroom/workshop, the only component missing being the AI bead, and promptly broke down crying.

He didn't cry earlier, but he just, couldn't contain himself. His parents were dead, his teacher was dead, and his two only best friends were dead too, and his sister disappeared in front of him and he had no idea where she could be.

He then cried himself to sleep.

Then he woke up, took up the AI bead, and inserted it into the dragon sluggishly.

It's completion was a solemn affair, rather than the bright and happy thing he expected and wanted. No one was around to marvel at his genius, too see the end result of what he tried for years to achieve, and no sister that he could rub it in her face about either.

He had nothing. Nothing but the product created from the combined efforts from him and his friends.

So, what was he to do?

Modify it, of course!

He threw all his attention into it, installing weapons, fiddling around with the core (That he had to take out and put back in) and giving it a lot of ghost shields, and other Fenton tech.

And for what? He doesn't know, but this, giant thing, somehow capable of growing and shrinking to his choosing (he still doesn't know how, even though he made the thing), installed to the brim with Fenton tech, is his.

And he'll use it to find his goddamn sister. Sure, they didn't have the greatest relationship, and sure, she wasn't the best to get along with, but she was the only thing he had left, and whoever took her could pry her from his and his dragon's goddamn hands.

Also, who would he rub his genius in the face of, if he didn't find her?

So, he took off to the zone, got lost, fought a few ghosts with his dragon and Fenton tech, and then ended up in another dimension full of heroes and villains. Did he care about that?

Fuck no.

But apparently, being a 14-year-old and fighting people off with his mechanical dragon was not a normal thing. Sure, he may have overreacted by having said dragon through his aggressors, who were normal humans by the way, through multiple walls, but in his defense.

It was their fault for trying him when he wasn't in the best of moods.

[chain-peoplebreaker]

Alhaitham in an Art Nouveau inspired style Here's a thread I wrote about this concept on Twitter, below the cut will be a copy of the text, sorry if it takes a weird format on tumblr since it was initially written as a twt thread

This might not make a lot of sense to some of you but before i talk about Alhaitham and Art Nouveau i'd like to talk about Kaveh and Romanticism The connection between Kaveh and Romanticism can be more easily done, specially with characters such as Faruzan calling him a romantic

The Romantic movement, as the name suggest, is very emotionally driven. Its a movement that values individualism ane subjectvism, it's objective is on evoking an emotional response, most comonly being feelings of sympathy, awe, fear, dread and wonder in relation to the world

Basically the artistic view of the Romantic is to represent the world while trying to say "we are hopeless in the grand scheme of things, little can we do to change the world yet the world is always changing us"

In Romantic pieces the man is always small compared to the setting they find themselves in, see the painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich as an example, the human figure is central but relativelly insignificant to the world

Another thing about Romanticism is the importance of beauty, it's through it that the Romantic seeks to get in touch with their emotions and ituition and its through these lenses that they see the world. The Kaveh comparison should be easy to make with these descriptions

Kaveh's idle chat "The ability to ability to appreciat beauty is an important virtue" just cements to me the idea that his romanticism is closely connected to the artistic movement. He does have an argument agaisnt this connection but I'll bring it up later on the thread

Now that I used the opportunity to talk about my favorite character in a thread that wasn't supposed to be about him let's go back to Alhaitham and how to connect him to the Art Nouveau movement

But seriously, I brought up Kaveh's more obvious connection to Romanticism because the Nouveau movement was created as a direct mirrored response to the Romantic movement, and we all know how we feel about mirrored themes between these two characters

Art Nouveau is about rationality and logic, the movement was used more comonly on mass produced interior design pieces or architectural buildings, it's a movement much more focused on functionality than on art appreciation

They also had a big focus on the natural world but in a very different way, while Romantics saw nature as a power they couldnt contend with, artists from the Nouveau used the natural as an universal symbolical theme for broad mass appeal

Flowers, leaves, branches, complexes and organic shapes are the basis of this style, the logical side of it coming from the mathematics needed to create these shapes and themes in ways that were appealing and also structurally sound

To appreciate the Art Nouveau style is to understand it is a calculated artistic movement (another reason to be salty about an AI generated image trying to emulate it) In short, this style is less about the art and more about the rationality in the mathematics to make it

Another note I'd like to point out is that I love how both Alhaitham and Kaveh have dendro visions while both movements are so nature centric in different ways, Romanticism seeing it as a subjective power and Art Nouveau seeing it as recognizeable symbols

I mentioned an argument against the Kaveh comparison before: the one thing that bothers me about Romanticism is how negative it is in relation to humanity's position in the world and how that related back to Kaveh

In the Parade of Providence it was explicitely showed how much Kaveh dislikes the idea of people seeing themselves as helpless in relation to the problems of the world

People may suffer but there is something he can do to help them and he will do it

It doesn't feel right for me to say that Kaveh fits the Romantic themes because of his suffering, in a similar sense it also doesn't feel right to me to say Alhaitham fits Art Nouveau because of his rational behaviour while he as a character is a lot more complex than that

This thread was done all in fun and love for an artistic discussion, it's not a perfect argument to connect these characters and movements

+ I haven't studied art history in a year, if anyone knows more about these movements please tell me I love learning new things

++ Really sorry if my english is bad or I sound repetitive, it's not my first language and im trying my best here

Thanks for reading

I love you, have a nice day/evening/night

[shuunnico]

You like rpgs. Do you recommend any games like baldurs gate 3?

Absolutely. I'll assume you mean CRPGs and not RPGs in general.

Computer Roleplaying Games (CRPGs) refers to a style and genre of game that BG3 follows. Some have started calling CRPGs "Classic RPGs" instead. CRPGs are typically identified by an isometric, top down view style, a heavy focus on story and exploration.

I'm going to split my list it three main categories based on accessibility factors. These factors include the amount of reading involved, the depth of mechanics and the level of abstraction/math required.

Easy Entry Level

Baldur's Gate 3 - 2023 - Larian Studios. The current gold star for easy entry CRPGs. Exceptional graphics, every character voice acted, very little reading and fairly straightforward mechanics and concepts.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 DE- 2017 - Larian Studios. This is basically a less polished, more complex version of BG3 and made by the same studio.

Disco Elysium, Final Cut - 2019 - ZA/UM. Disco Elysium is a detective/social focus game that dives into heavy narrative concepts. Failing rolls is just as viable for the story as succeeding them, making the game's mechanics take a backseat to story. However, there is a lot of reading and that may be a barrier to entry.

Tyranny - 2016 - Obsidian Entertainment. A game about being evil, it's mechanically pretty simple, but there's a fair bit of jank due to it's low budget, and the game ends on a cliffhanger, but it's story is very solid.

Mid Entry Level

Wasteland 3 - 2020 - inExile Entertainment. The long awaited third installment of the Wasteland franchise and significantly less complex than its predecessors. Post apocalyptic, frozen Colorado, grim reality and goofy ideas. This is the franchise that originally inspired Fallout.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall DC/ Shadowrun: Hong Kong EE - 2014/2015 - Harebrained Schemes. Set in the Fantasy/Cyberpunk hybrid setting of Shadowrun. Fair bit of reading, but the game's mechanics are relatively easy to grasp and don't require a lot of math. Always play Dragonfall before Hong Kong.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire - 2018 - Obsidian Entertainment. A unique setting, exploring a fictional parallel to the age of piracy. Very wordy (but a lot is voice acted), with a lot of world building, but well worth engaging with. The first game, Pillars of Eternity, is less accessible, but still good.

Kingmaker/Wrath of the Righteous/Rogue Trader - 2020/2022/2023 - Owlcat Games. Owlcat adapts existing systems into CRPGs, like how BG3 is an adaption of DnD 5e. Do not be fooled, these games are where you start hitting a lot of complexity, a lot of math and a lot potential to damage your playthroughs by accident. This is where things start to get difficult.

Difficult Entry Level

Baldur's Gate 1/2 - Bioware - 1998/2000. The prequels to BG3, these games use an older, much more complex version of DnD's rules. Be prepared for a lot of reading and complex mechanics, but you'll be rewarded with some amazing storytelling.

Planescape Torment - Interplay - 1999. Another game using DnD's older mechanics, Planescape is a completely different beast from BG3. Many consider this series mechanically inferior to the Baldur's Gate franchise, but with better storytelling and world building to compensate.

Fallout 1/2 - 1997/1998 - Interplay/Black Isle. One of the most widely known game franchises started as an isometric CRPG. Universally considered more complex, rewarding and deeper than the Bethesda portion of the franchise, you'll need some experience to get into them, but you'll be happy you did.

Games I haven't played but I've heard good things of:

Wasteland 2, DC - 2015 - inExile

Torment: Tides Of Numenera - 2017 - inExile

Neverwinter Nights - 2002 - Bioware

Arcanum - 2001 - Troika Games

Ultima 7 Part 1/Part 2 - 1992/1993 - Origin Systems

Icewind Dale - 2000 - Black Isle Studio

[alexanderwales]

For Thresholder there are lots and lots of worlds, most of them just name-checked, sketched out in a handful of paragraphs as a place that people had visited before and now has little plot relevance. It's my favorite part of the series.

I'm not writing one of those chapters where I need one of those worlds, and I'm not sure I could give this one its due, but the idea I had last night was a world where people could increase and decrease the size of objects virtually at will. This doesn't work with conventional physics, but that's okay, some of the worlds can be more conceptual.

To start with, we have some ground rules: you have to be touching the thing, it can only operate on loosely defined "whole objects", and there's some kind of thing that happens with objects where they retain their physical structure to some degree, even if the square-cube law means that not everything stays functional. This is easy for things made of base elements (an iron nail becomes bigger and we can grok that it's still just made of regular iron) but it's less easy for complex organics. If you increase the size of an apple, are the individual cells increasing in size? Are new cells being generated? I think for this, I would have to say that the answer is that the world works on a level of pre-Enlightenment human understanding that the real world doesn't have, one where there aren't cells. (I am a bit sketchy on when cells were discovered, and more sketchy on what they thought was going on before that.)

As far as consequences, which is my favorite thing, I think there are a few big ones.

For one, any amount of food is enough to feed an infinite number of people. A single apple can feed a family, if they want to have nothing but apple for a meal. A single apple slice can feed a family. In fact, even the smallest crumb can undergo the process of magnification to become a full meal. But while you can make "more food" by making it bigger, the taste and texture don't necessarily stay the same. It seems to me that there's probably a sweet spot for most foods in terms of size, and eating a grain of rice the size of a loaf of bread is a very different experience than eating a bowl of rice. And if you've ever eaten one of those sourdough breads with way too large of bubbles, that's what pretty much all bread would look like if magnified, just holes with strands of gluten between them. So I think in terms of food, there would be a lot of class divide, along with a lot of processing of magnified foods to make them more palatable. Maybe a loaf-size grain of rice wouldn't appeal to many people, but you can break off bits of it and probably still make mochi with it.

Another big issue is manufacturing and the trades. In my mind, you have construction workers building the equivalent of dollhouses that then get sized up on a plot of land, but I think dollhouses are a little bit small, and most trades would work on a scale that was easiest for human manipulation. I don't think that's what we do for dolls, which tends to be nimble, finnicky work, and if you can freely scale up and scale down your tools and materials, I think you'd naturally want to work a bit bigger. Probably you would rescale on many different steps of whatever you're producing, and if this world was in the industrial age, then you would have people in factories rescaling as a human step in a factory somewhere. Another cool thing is that a chef could have a single pot and pan that they resize for their needs, and a single knife that fulfills roles we would use two or three different knifes for, though I think maybe handles would be a problem there.

Anyway, I'm not going to use this anywhere, though I do think it's cool, if maybe in a way that's not all that unique (What if Big Thing were Little Thing and What if Little Thing were Big Thing are both speculative fiction staples, see Indian in the Cupboard, The Borrowers, Ant-man, etc.). I have a bunch of outstanding questions re: conservation of momentum and some hacks that only work under certain implementations, but sometimes that's a bridge too far.

[rottenraccoons]

Hi!! First of all, I wanted to say how much I LOVE Obscura, I’ve played through chapter one enough to get nearly all the endings now!! You guys are doing amazing work, I’m so excited for chapter two!

My question is sort of a writing/planning one! You’ve created such an interesting and complex story that can branch out in so many ways; so what is it like to plan and write something this complex, and what was your process like while developing it? Any tips?

Thank you!! <3

Aw, thank you!

I think our story can look deceptively complex from the outside, but from the inside it's actually pretty manageable (and this would be true for any story you make, too!). I'll show a bit of my process and hopefully that'll help you.

So this is a peek at what my workspace looks like (cropped to avoid showing too much). On the right are all the variables I'm working with, on the left is the script, and that little red square poking in is the preseason testing for Formula 1, because I need background noise to work (and I like F1).

With the variable list visible like this, it's actually very easy to keep track of all the different possible choices the player has made, and so it's pretty easy to either accommodate them or write in ways that suit all possible versions. So that's cheat #1: just keep your variables on hand and you eventually get used to thinking about them as you go.

Another thing that helps is our plot structure. Sam Kabo Ashwell wrote a very helpful blog post that helps visualise the different way choice-games like interactive fiction, CYOA stories, and visual novels can structure their branches. Obscura might look like a "sorting hat" at first, but it's better to think of each route as its own "branch and bottleneck" narrative. No matter what happens in the branches, things always bottleneck to the same place. No matter how your party goes in Oleander's route, either you get a bad end or you end up dancing together. So cheat #2 is to just think about places where your narrative can converge and ensure that your branches will come together to that bottleneck again.

Which isn't to say that this doesn't take work! If you're used to writing totally linear stuff then it can take a little time to get used to thinking in terms of branches and variables. But the good news is that when you start at the beginning of the story, there's not too much to think about. As long as you don't dump a huge number of variables on yourself right away, you can build them up as you get more used to thinking about them as you write.

I hope that helps!

[boltdrake]

Ok about moral greyness in elden ring fandom

I feel like it’s mostly treated as either some kind of badass cosmetics for a GoodGuy (like “my blorbo is cool and good and kind but you know they kill people - bad people, so it’s not bad but it’s not also your Jesus guy which is normal bc who would give their second cheek”) or some kind of euphemism used by bad/problematic/pseudo intellectual people to erase morality

I’m bad problematic pseudo intellectual person so take my opinion with grain of salt, but I think it’s a great misunderstanding or what a morally grey character is in ER especially

It’s usually based on the that understanding of goodness that to be good you just need to do good things and don’t do bad things (which is of course extremely vague and not defined but anyways). It’s seems pretty straightforward and because of that brings a lot of confusion

It’s quite easy for a character to be GoodGood (even with murders but I digress), you can see it in many fix-it fanworks where often every trouble finds its own, well, fixing, and there’s always a way to set things right, maybe just with some sad deaths along the way, but characters often will find this correct way because in these universes there’s always at least one

(It’s not a rant on fanfiction I like it and I like fix-its very VERY much)

And when same logic is applied to the game itself, often arises treatment of characters as GoodGood, MisleadedGood and BadBad ones

But in the stories we see in Elden Ring context is usually such that when a character wants to get something, even something good, like for example make people live forever or cure their own sister, there’s sometimes no way of resolving their trouble without facing some kind of moral choice, even if you’re a literal half-god. You either get what you want with a price, or don’t get it… also with a price. Because fromsoftware stories are build on conflict, tragedy and irony

That’s what makes character grey, the fact there’s no third option or that you don’t have third option just because world is that way and you’re unlucky. And not choosing to get what you want can be as bad as choosing opposite. And that’s what usually makes situation complex and twisted and inherently grey

I don’t want to say that like every person in fandom should treat all the characters as mostly good ones without making some way less sympathetic than others. Making characters twisted and horrible is fun! I’m just tired of the way how people 1) don’t realise there’s often HUGE room for interpretation and make it problem of others 2) hate characters with such a passion as they were real humans who live in your neighbourhood on planet earth 2024 3) sanitise characters into strictly Good and Bad ones etc etc etc

My whole vent on Miquella’s hatebase is in fact divided into two parts, one being me thinking many people just lack understanding of the DLC/base game ideas and plot, but that’s ok we all have different opinions (I’m just the only one who is correct. LIVE WITH THAT.), and second being that vague ??rudeness?? and hatred which accompanies division on Morally Good and Morally Bad, because there’s this subtle idea like. Oh if you like Godrick/Rykard/Post-DLC Miquella / Seluvis then you’re moral pervert/ lover of Dark. Which is rarely true and really annoys me

I also have no trouble with GoodGood characters being GoodGood because, well. it’s comforting and cozy stuff. But often it turns into token of moral superiority, like look I love GoodGood guy because I’m good too and also not stupid. This is also annoying and I wish we had less of this in fandom.

It’s often also a lie to oneself, because even if we approach elden ring from I Can Simp Only Morally Pure ones (which is very boring and butchers the whole thing in my opinion) then we would probably be left with only Boc, Hewg and maybe Roderika. What do you mean you want to simp LITERAL murderers?? What do you mean you want to simp those assholes demigods who think that people are just dolls for their games, who turned the land into land of the dead because they just couldn’t stop war after war after war to decide who will make new order? What do you mean you want to simp the demigod who quit the war to do literally nothing to stop it???? CRINGE

Also GoodGood character headcanon making without self-awareness often results in very weird moral twists of its own, because in this logic character is allowed to make only GoodGood decisions, therefore all the stuff character made in canon MUST be good and morally justified. This leads to something like Marika fans writing essays on the topic You Can In Fact Deserve Genocide

Enough for today have a good day fellow dlc lovers 💪

Upd posted this on main by accident got jumpscared it’s so hard to copy past on mobile for some reason. No edgy on main I promised!!

[b7ngt4n]

The Last Remaining | Part 01

-> South Korea was left abandoned after a 'zombie' virus sweeps the nation. Left to save themselves, Y/N and a group of seven men, who she's found safety in, rely on each other to stay alive as they travel south of the country for a rumoured 'z-free' haven. But nothing is ever easy. Especially when they find it's not only just zombies they need to watch their backs for.

-> A female reader x BTS zombie apocalypse AU

-> Genre: Post-apocalyptic, action

-> Warnings for Part 1: Violence, gore, swearing

-> Word count: 2,071 words

-> Interactions are greatly appreciated xoxo 💖

Part 01: A Month Ago 🧟

A month ago, the nation of South Korea fell to its knees. A deadly virus swept through the country, killing every human it came in contact with and mutating them into flesh-fiending, viciously-violent creatures, fictionally known as zombies.

The outbreak spread fast through Seoul, turning half of the civilians here into zombies within 24 hours. Rumours were that outbreaks happened in Busan, Gwangju, and Daegu before the Seoul outbreak even started. Everything happened within a matter of hours. Nobody had any time to react, you had to fight for your life within the blink of an eye. Even the government was left dumbfounded.

They deployed military power to try and control the outbreaks. However, the number of zombies soon outnumbered the number of military personnel. Eventually, there was no stopping the virus as it just grew out of control.

It was too late for the government to issue martial law. They knew there was no use putting up a fight they knew they couldn't win. Instead they moved onto plan B: evacuation. Your TV was only able to play a singular automated voice message that repeated, 'All of South Korea is currently being affected by the 'Zombie' virus. The government advises you to stay indoors and wait for evacuation processes to be initiated.' And by evacuation, you heard they evacuated the entire Blue House, the closest schools, and the closest retirement villages. You watched choppers fly from Incheon, none of which you saw ever once stopped to evacuate other buildings. That's when you knew the government was absolute bullshit. They didn't bother to try save anyone else. They didn't want to risk it.

You heard the evacuation camp was set up somewhere in Incheon, which made sense because of the helicopters. But you later heard the camp was overridden by the virus only three days later. You never heard choppers flying around ever again. With no government left to guide you, all hope for survival was lost. A week later, the power in your complex stopped running. Matter of fact, you're sure the power for the entire city stopped. Phones stopped working a day after the outbreak so you couldn't call for help. And with food in your apartment running low, you knew your survival rate was plummeting lower by the day.

You were lucky that you only lived on the 5th floor. You had been watching the streets closely the past month. It used to be very busy with screams, growls, tyre screeches, and running footsteps. You even used to be able to hear zombie groans at night. But recently you noticed how quiet it has been. You see a zombie slowly roaming around every now and then but you haven't seen many alive humans. You wonder if everyone else had just left while they could. The more you think about leaving, the more you think 'fuck it, let's do it'. Could it be worse out there? Absolutely. But would you rather die from starvation or die trying to survive?

There was a convenience store just a street down. If you were lucky, you could make it there and hopefully there would be food waiting for you. You just had to be quick. You could do that. You used to be in the track team in high school and a regular gym goer. You can be quick.

"This should be a piece of cake," you encouraged yourself, but the entire time you were screaming at yourself 'what the fuck are you doing?' Only you were hunger-driven enough to go out into a bloody zombie apocalypse to get cup noodles.

You changed into a zip up hoodie and a pair of gym tights, tying your hair into a low ponytail and lacing up in running shoes. You put on your old elbow pads and knee pads from when you were in your rollerblading phase for protection. You also tucked away a pocket knife in your bra. As you were sliding your backpack on, you started having second thoughts. Was this really worth it? Would you really risk dying out there rather than safely at the comfort of your own home? Your life was in your hands but it seemed that any choice you would make could have you dead. You had to at least try. You believed in yourself, you believed you could get there if you tried hard enough. Gripping a baseball bat in one hand and the door knob in the other, you took a deep breath. Carefully unlocking the door, you opened it a small inch, enough for you to peek an eye out into the lobby. It was empty to your relief. You didn't hesitate to make a move, locking your apartment and bidding it a sad farewell.

You jumped to find a zombie lurking around the elevator lobby. It turned around the moment it heard your footsteps, snarling loudly at you. You recognised it to be Mrs Lim, a sweet elderly woman who lived next door to you. You would watch her cats for her whenever she went out of town to visit her daughter. Your heart broke to see her once-white skin drained of colour, her eyes not the usual dark brown but a mustard yellow, and her teeth was covered in dry blood. You didn't have any time to decide what to do about her as she came charging toward you.

"Why does the first zombie I come across have to be you Mrs Lim!" you protested as you held the baseball bat horizontally, keeping a distance between you and her. She was strong for an old lady, well half old lady half zombie, but strong enough to have you sliding back on the tiles. You noticed down the lobby on the other side of the complex were a couple other zombies. They had already noticed you and were rushing towards you.

"Shit!" you cursed, "sorry Mrs Lim," you quickly apologised before kicking her as hard as you could in the stomach. She groaned, stumbling backwards, tripping over her own feet, and falling to the ground. You didn't waste time, opening the door to the stairwell and making sure to lock it behind you.

There were no zombies in the staircase. Though the apartment did feel different without the lights on. You couldn't imagine how much of a struggle it'd be to do this at night without the power working. You had to make sure you were back home at least before the sun set.

A few zombies filled the entrance lobby. You instantly recognised one of them to be another resident who you saw around often and another one of them to be a security guard. You noticed a taser in his holster, something you deemed could be useful to you. They all turned around the moment you opened the door and came rushing towards you. You hit them in the heads with the bat as hard as you could, occasionally using your foot to kick them back whenever they got too close. They all fell to the floor after a good fight from you. You mutter a sorry to them and took the opportunity to steal the security guard's taser and tuck it safely away in your bag, whispering your extra apologies to him.

You hadn't been outside in a month. It felt weird to be back all of a sudden at a place you used to come through everyday. Blood that was smeared on the glass doors made you cringe. You checked the coast. All you could see was the apartment's front garden and the street through the gates. So far, everything was zombie-free. But you don't let your guard down just yet.

Drops of old blood stained the pavement. What was once a nice garden now looks outgrown and somewhat sat on. You could smell the faint stench of dried blood and what you assumed was the smell of dead flesh. The entrance water fountain you thought was so pretty was no longer squirting out water and the water was coloured red. 'Gross' you thought to yourself.

The street was nothing different. Cars were littered all over the place, some had actually looked like they crashed into poles, some were also open. You wondered for a second if you could check the ones that were open out but you also did fear it was only a matter of time before a zombie found you. One car you passed had crashed into a light pole and inside laid a dead rotten woman in the drivers seat. You would have never seen stuff like this before the outbreak. You feel sad for that lady. Who knows how long she had been sitting there? And who knows how much longer she'll be left like that?

Loud snarls made you stop in your tracks. You pressed your back against the concrete wall and peeked slowly around the corner. A quick count of at least 7 zombies were within a 20 metre radius. They blocked the entrance to the convenience store. There were bound to be more too, ones that were hidden in your blind spots. There was no way you could take on all of them.

You noticed a half empty water bottle lying on the floor. Then you had an idea. You snatched it up, crawling behind cars to get closer to the herd without getting spotted. The sounds of their groans terrified you as it grew louder the closer you got. You chucked the water bottle the opposite way as far as you could. It landed on the bumper of a car, sounding its alarm. The loud horn attracted the zombies instantly. They turned around, racing to the source of the sound snarling loudly at it. It was loud enough to probably attract every zombie within a 100 metre radius which would definitely be more zombies than you can handle. But at least you got them distracted. As soon as the coast was clear, you dashed towards the convenience store. Luckily it was unlocked.

The store was a mess. Products littered the ground but the store would was at least half filled. You guess the store could've been looted a couple of times but it's likely this mess was caused the day of the outbreak. You noticed it was also quiet. No snarls, no groans. That was a good sign. You felt a little at ease.

Canned soup, instant noodles, granola bars, biscuits, water bottles. All the foods you have been craving were here in this very room. You have been longing for this moment. You shoved whatever wasn't expired and would likely last a long time into your bag. You noticed your favourite flavour of Doritos 'Sweet Thai Chilli' sitting on the shelf, untouched and not expired yet. You didn't wait to eat these back at home and decided to open one now, your stomach grumbling at the sight. You walked down the aisles like you used to late at night before. It felt wrong to be looting and in a way stealing. You were friends with the owners, a nice old couple ran the store with the occasional help from their daughter. It felt wrong to steal from them. But then again, it was the apocalypse.

Just as you turned down into the end aisle alongside all the freezers of frozen food and cold drinks, a zombie jumped out from the corner, taking you by surprise.

You yelped, flinging the Doritos out your hands by accident. Just in time, you managed to wedge the baseball bat between its teeth, keeping it from biting you. But it was way stronger than you, quickly trapping you between a freezer and itself. You tried to kick your feet at it but it was difficult in the position you were in. The more you tried, the more stronger it pushed against your bat, closing the threatening distance between you both.

You heard the stabbing sound before the zombie stopped moving. A knife had been plunged through the back of its head. The sharp tip stuck out through its forehead, nearly knocking you in the process. You heaved its heavy body off of you to reveal a muscular, middle-aged, man standing behind it. Behind him was a skinnier but taller and younger man. You assumed the two to be friends.

"Thank you" you breathed out, all your energy gone as you lean against the freezer to catch your breath.

The middle-aged man chuckled, an eerie smile that gave you chills appearing on his face, "Anytime sweetheart."

His smile was the last thing you saw before you felt a bash to the head and your world went dark.

(a/n: forgive me ik! "no bts in the first chapter?" "what a shit fucking story!" i know i know 😔�� i promise it’s development 🙏🙏 appearances begin in the nxt chapter)

[last-sprout]

Last Sprout Dev Diary - Dec 6, 2024

Hello again folks, I'm back for another dev diary, and it is Upgrade Month for Last Sprout!

If you haven't read one of these, I'm Val, @oneominousvalbatross, and I'm the tech half of the sprout team, and I'm doing these weekly to talk about the process of making a (very ambitious) game, including all the various missteps and learning that I'm doing along the way.

Here's last week's dev diary on Brains

Last Sprout is a roguelite, so that means we need ways to modify your build as a play session continues. So, this week I want to talk a little bit about what we need to prioritize when we're designing our progression.

Get that upgrade juice - you need it to UPGRADE

What an Upgrade Should be

This game is a roguelite, so that means we need ways to modify your build as a play session continues. So, this week I want to talk a little bit about what we need to prioritize when we're designing our progression.

By 'expressive', I mean that I want the choices I make to feel meaningful, and to feel like they are informed by what I want that build to look like by the end of a run. So, an upgrade like "Gain 10% bonus attack speed" is kind of the minimum level of expressiveness. Sure, if I like attacking I can prioritize that a bit more, but when it comes down to it I'd just compare this against other upgrade options and take it if it feels more abstractly valuable.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this, and in fact, I think some number of low-impact choices are helpful for a roguelite to keep a player from tiring out and just picking the easy-to-parse options by the end of a run. But that said, something like "Your melee attacks cause you to lunge towards the nearest enemy within 3m, but you can no longer block." makes your build look and play very differently from others. Plus, when you take big, build-defining upgrades like that, suddenly when you see a small attack speed buff, you think "oh, well since I can't block, attacking faster might be a way to mitigate that downside."

From a design perspective, I find it easier to design expressive upgrades by adding complexity, but that represents a pretty big development cost if you're writing all your upgrades by hand. That leads us to the tension I mentioned earlier - we also want there to be variety in our builds, we want you to have each run feel different enough from each other that you don't end up sticking within a single comfortable playstyle. But, if we want variety, we need quantity of upgrades, but making upgrades can quickly get very time consuming, especially for a team of this size.

To resolve this tension, we had two major ideas. One of them is still in early stages, enough that I think I'll save that for when it's more complete - unless you're in the patron discord, in which case you've already seen some mockups! I'm going to talk about the other option now:

Mods and ModActions

So first of all, I decided to make Upgrades a subclass of a Mod. A Mod is just anything that modifies an entity's capabilities, but it also includes Buffs, which are the temporary versions of upgrades. This is the data that a Mod stores:

BEHOLD

Ok so it's not that interesting. But that's kind of the point! A Mod, by itself, is just a container for a bunch of little pieces, that are all defined separately, the bones, if you will. The Mod itself is responsible for applying all of its actions to an entity, but it doesn't know what those actions are.

The meat of a mod. Or the brains? I'm losing track of this metaphor.

As a simple example, a mod action can define behavior for when the mod is added, removed, canceled, or activated. Added and removed are simple. Canceled is if the mod is removed in some way that isn't through natural gameplay, like if the entity needs to be refreshed to a base state. Activated is a sort of "whenever X thing happens." It's our container method for mods that will need to do something repeatedly, like when a player takes damage.

We aren't limited to just modifying the entity though! There's already a ModAction for playing an animation, which can be hooked up to any of the base three mod events.

BEHOLD AGAIN

The strength of these actions is that any Mod can contain any combination of these actions, attached to any stats! So the process of building new mods is, much like the rest of the design workflow, like snapping together legos. When we need something completely new, I can go in and write a new ModAction, and then that action becomes available for the rest of development, and in combination with all the other previous ModActions.

I've found that combinatorial approaches create a lot of variety for the amount of design work they require. If you create four mods that are all standalone, that's four different experiences. If you make those out of three individual actions each, suddenly you can mix and match these pieces, and the variety explodes out geometrically, not to mention how mods can interact with each other. Of course, then that can become a bit of a balancing nightmare, but that's a problem for Future Val!

Thanks for reading! If you have any favorite progression systems in roguelites (or roguelikes!) I'd love to hear about them, especially if they do something unusual. December is going to be pretty much entirely dedicated to progressing, both per-run and per-save, so next week I'll be back with something along those lines!

[weird-homosexual-in-your-area]

Around 7 years into the Fourth War, Stormcell and Forcemesh- the two corporations warring over control of the galaxy- realised that foot soldiers were no longer sufficient, no matter how powerful their weapons may be. After all, a weapon is only as strong as its weakest part, and the weakest part in the soldiers of the First Phase was the soldiers themselves- the weapons were capable of wiping buildings out in a single shot, but the flesh behind them could still be broken with a simple bullet or sword to the neck. Trillions of credits were poured into finding a better way to wage war, into a new status quo of suffering, and it was found in the analogue mech.

A marvel of technology, was the analogue mech. Years ahead of its time, its destructive capabilities were unparalleled by even the largest squadrons of infantry. Its weapons were beyond count, its speed could theoretically surpass even a jet plane, its armour was designed by a true genius- but one fatal flaw held it back. Its code was so complex that no computer could run it without delays. Even on an integrated system built into the mech itself, there could still be as much as a quarter of a second of delay between the pilot pushing the button to fire a weapon, and the rain of hell actually being unleashed on the enemy. Regardless of this flaw, it was still pushed to large-scale production, beginning the Second Phase- the dominance of the clunky, delayed analogue mech, and the anti-mech infantry units designed to counter them.

Time passed- new designs for the analogue mech came into the public eye faster than they could count them, with them being replaced with a better design even faster, and eventually, Doctor ___- a now-nameless doctor, graduating from Terra University with highest honours- had an idea. “It’s said that the brain is the most powerful computer ever devised,” they wrote in the paper they published on the possibility of a new type of technology they’d devised. “Its neurons transmit information with higher density, higher precision, than any circuit board born of silicon. It’s a wonder of nature that it was developed with as few faults as it has in modern life forms. So why, I ask, do we still bother with silicon?”

The paper went into detail about the possibility of using lab-grown brains as processors in machines. It was a fairly inconspicuous paper- revolutionary science, to be sure, but nothing immediately useful to Stormcell or Forcemesh. Until, of course, it mentioned the possibility of using animal brains in lieu of lab-grown ones. It was mentioned in passing, just as a future possibility should lab-grown brains prove unviable for whatever reason, but a mention of the possibility was all that was needed to spark research into how it would be done, and a method was discovered within weeks. A fairly gentle pattern of lights (relatively speaking) that when shown to a human would induce a dissociative state. Would make them docile, easy to control.

Easy to rewrite.

The Blank Pattern, as it came to be called, was useless for the purpose Stormcell and Forcemesh wanted it for on its own. It made the viewer more compliant, to be sure, but no matter how much you tell a human to have themself function as a computer, they won’t- it’s impossible. So what has to be done instead is that they’re stripped of their humanity, until their brain wouldn’t dare to not function as it was told.

A followup to the Blank Pattern was soon discovered, which remains nameless due to its existence being a highly classified secret. This pattern is extremely intense, containing light bursts at frequencies of up to 17.3kHz, and the brain can’t handle it, so it simply breaks. The majority of neural pathways crumble, like buildings in the path of a tsunami, leaving a nearly empty brain if allowed to run to its full course. The very basics of the brain are left intact- the weakest of neurotransmitter receptors, basic motor function, some semblance of sentience, but not of sapience. The viewer can’t be called human anymore- it's been reduced to so much more. It now only has the most basic of functions, just enough to survive, to fight for survival, to fight for dopamine.

What did Stormcell and Forcemesh do with this knowledge? What they assumed the other would be doing. The two companies immediately cut 99% of funding to the analogue mech program, redirecting it all to the new program by the name of “Neural”. Pilots, upon signing up, are shown the Blank Pattern, and urged to sign a wavier forfeiting their rights, their possessions, their humanity, and then put in a chamber where the followup is shown. They lose their uniqueness. All that remains of the person a subject once was is a few of the strongest memories, maybe lovers, parents, phobias, but faces are muddied. They may remember they had a dog, but draw a blank upon trying for its name, breed, age. Without purpose, without fine rewards, they crave the bigger rewards that they remain still sensitive to. This is why they make such good pilots- quite literally nothing feels as good to them as the sheer rush of dopamine a reward drive can give them.

After the unnamed pattern is shown, their rights are gone, so surgeons don’t need to keep up the illusion of informed consent when they install the various ports along their spines to link them to the mechs. After all, they aren’t human anymore- why would they need to be consulted? They undergo weeks of surgery until their backs are lined with ports, like craters in a war zone. All for one simple purpose- the connection between brain and machine that triggered the start of the Third Phase- the dominance of the neural.

And what a beautiful connection it was. When the code for the mechs was loaded into the brain, even physical buttons and levers weren’t needed- pilots could perform finer function than any analogue mech with just a thought. Sure, the link could fry some pilots’ minds, and sure, sometimes desynchronisation could corrupt what little remained of the pilot, turning them into a bloodthirsty monster, but just look at the results! Besides, they signed a wavier that warned them- they clearly wanted this.

With the need for pilots growing more and more as pilots died faster and faster, be it by natural causes, dying in the field, or desync corruption, propaganda from both sides grew even faster. Posters spreading sweet lies of what the front lines were lined every street, every wall, every billboard, not one of them telling the full truth. If the public knew what they were doing, they would begin to question them. The war became all society was- in an ironic turn, the fight to defend society devolved into overwriting society.

Well, the public don’t question them anymore, at least.

[thesophistiicate]

im not trying to act all high and mighty, im just genuinely confused by this... i truly dont understand girls who allow themselves to be put in degrading situations the same as the last anon? surely its glaringly obvious that man just wanted a body to use? i know i sound so mean but im genuinely actually confused whenever i hear or read girls talking about experiences like that i find it very hard to understand what would make them give the most undeserving men access to their bodies and souls like that... i can kind of understand if you sleep with a man for the first time and he treats you badly after but what i dont understand is going back again and again and expecting a different result. at that point maybe youre a little to blame as well? why would you even sleep with someone who youre not even in a relationship with? im just very lost i thought by now we all know better than to give just anyone our time. i see this even in my girl friends, theyre all so beautiful and intelligent yet they date terrible men that shouldnt even be allowed to breathe the same air as them and when they inevitably cheat or hurt them they genuinely get heartbroken and then they start to tell me about things the man has said to them and show me their text conversations and in my head im like "hes telling you right there in that message that he doesnt care about you..? what did you expect..?" sometimes it feels like girls get into situationships and relationships just to get themselves hurt on purpose because, and this is gonna sound so mean but i dont know how else to word this, but theres no way people can genuinely be this blind and stupid. i just find it so hard to feel sympathy for girls who numerously get shown and told theyre only being used for sex and still stick around for a different outcome. is that what love supposed to be? am i the one with the twisted understanding of love? am i missing something? i hope im not coming off as heartless or conceited, im genuinely confused i just dont know how to express or word it well

i'm happy to hold space for expressing thoughts imperfectly or even harshly, so long as we are willing to find understanding and not stay stuck in judgement 🤍 i would say the challenge for you here is learning to stay out of judgement (it is all right to acknowledge that's not how you would act, but attaching value statements and labels like 'stupid' don't help you be kind and don't help anyone else thrive either), and leaning into empathy (finding understanding when someone acts in a way you wouldn't, rather than judgement and frustration).

i say this as someone who used to be really judgemental, not to tell you off, but because it's so good for the soul to learn this growth. judgement and labels are easy, it's far more difficult to build the emotional intelligence to hold space for nuance and complexity, to extend compassion and nurture even when somebody is making imperfect decisions.

i think that you're someone with a really good level of self worth and self respect who cares about others too. that's so amazing! the best thing you can do is continue to hold your standards and lead by example. you aren't the one who has it wrong at all. healthy, respectful relationships aren't like this! keep your standards high, show your friends examples of high standards. as much as it will feel like they aren't listening, sometimes a simple, fairly neutrally toned: "wow, you deserve better" or "geez, i wouldn't put up with that" or "that's not normal" will linger and have more long-term impact than you realise.

i know it's easy to look in from the outside and say, can't you see it?! he just sucks!! or to look at the end of a crazy story and be like, girl, there was SO many red flags wtf!! (lol me at my past self!) but when you're in the middle of it, it's actually really hard. these people are master manipulators and they know how to keep their victims hooked. love bombing, mixed signals, disrespectful treatment to lower self worth... it's a wild ride inside the storm, you simply cannot see clearly because they are committed to obscuring the view.

at the core women get themselves into these situations because of low self worth. it's why i talk about it ALL THE TIME, it's SO CRUCIAL. when you don't value yourself, you put up with being disrespected. the more you are disrespected, the lower your self worth drops and the more bad treatment you accept. it's a toxic cycle. it's the exact same dynamics as in any abusive or domestic violence scenario (even if the relationships aren't abusive and he's just casually disrespectful - that is the beginning of abuse), and it's pretty well researched why women stay, how they get in those situations, why they find it difficult to leave, why the cycle keeps repeating with new partners. i'd highly recommend researching it if you want to understand it better. every woman should be educated on this topic.

you are right to some extent: if you want to get out of the cycle you do have to take responsibility for your own behaviour. you have to ask why you're accepting being treated that way. what led you there. why you are obsessing over their behaviours but not questioning your own.

but to confront all this is very difficult and painful and often related to trauma and neglect. yet another reason why so many can't escape the cycle, to face all of that can be more painful than putting up with a shitty guy who just wants sex without commitment... the crap treatment is easier to face, until it isn't.

it is a form of self-harm, a kind of self-destruction as a way a broken mind and spirit tries to cope with trauma. to end the relationship would be to limp out and finally confront how broken you are. when you stay in it you can stay delulu. it's a form of escape.

of course, to a healthy person it doesn't make sense. why would anyone ever willingly hurt themselves? and yet, it's a psychologically observable phenomenon and unfortunately the solution and path to healing is far more complex than just not doing that or getting into those situations. if only!!

but the way out DOES involve making a decision that you deserve better. which is why we need to keep talking about these things, bringing them to light, being compassionate, creating safe spaces for women in these relationships to talk about what they're experiencing without judgement, shame, being called stupid or asking for it etc 🤍

i could speak for a long time on this, but i'll leave it there for now... it's all right to not understand it. i actually think that's a good thing in a way, it means you're in a good place. but certainly if you really want to understand it, the research is there!

[katzkinder]

Okay so the dichotomy between your Sakuya Cherry Bomb idea and Yarra's Kuro vtuber is hilarious to me because like.

Sakuya: Fans only know him as Cherry Bomb and don't know anything about him outside of his music.

Vs

Kuro: Vtuber Lore is literally just his life but it should be fine because people dont know vampires are real.

I FUCKING FOUND IT. LINK TO THE CHERRY BOMB POST 🍒💣

Anyway one of the reasons for the difference is I headcanon Sakuya as being a 90s kid! as in, he died in the 90s--

This, naturally, makes him a lot more wary about the info he puts out there on the internet, but it also means his internet experience was molded by Ye Olden Days when creators were a lot less available to their fanbases and interacted with them very little, if at all.

He doesn't even have a fanart hub, and his icon is just a random street in tokyo he thought looked nice.

His classmates REALLY do not get why Sakuya is so paranoid, so Sakuya shows them how easy it would be for a super dedicated person to figure out exactly where Mahiru’s apartment is using his cooking tutorial videos (uploaded under the channel name "Sunny Mama" courtesy of Kuro) and basic realtor research

Things like Mahiru apologizing for any construction noise and using the time stamp to figure out which apartment complexes had construction in their vicinity during that time, floor plans, how even his living situation and the model of his appliances can all be used to narrow down the area he lives in.

“He lives with his uncle and the camera man, which means at least two rooms. We can see the stove top and the front of the oven, so I take a screenshot of that and… Ah, this is the brand. Now I research the model. Okay, I have two components. He mentions that he walks to school, so that’s a two bedroom apartment in Tokyo within walking distance of a high school with good quality appliances, which means I can rule out a lot of run down complexes. This grocery bag was in frame during this video, and a high school kid Mahiru’s age wouldn’t have a license, so now I add that name of the store to my list of things I know are around the complex because when you go grocery shopping, you don’t want to carry the bags a long distance home…”

The faces of his friends are full of horror.

"And that’s not even getting into the drinking with uncle segment that happens in their living room, with full view of the balcony because Mahiru hates the place getting musty so he leaves the curtains open a lot. Knowing what buildings are viewable from there can also tell someone where a place is, especially if you’re thorough enough to consider the angle you’re seeing everything at.” Sakuya glances up and closes his laptop. “So, yeah.”

Mahiru makes a Noise, fretting, "Wait, so what do I do now??"

Sakuya feels a little bad for scaring his friend, but it's for his own good! “Keep your curtains closed, make sure the screws in your door frame are the really long kind to prevent someone from just kicking the door off its hinges, don’t get electronic locks because it’s stupid easy to trick those into unlocking, and just… Be more careful? Wear a mask from now on and go back and edit footage to remove your face from the visible shot. Try and keep things focused on your hands instead, maybe…”

"Should I get rid of the drinking with uncle part? Since that always focuses on Uncle Tooru's reactions..."

"He’s a grown up and an old man. Nobody’s going to be interested in pulling him into a windowless white van unless it’s those creep show friends of his…”

"Wh--Why would anyone be interested in pulling me into a windowless white van?!"

"Sex trafficking."

"Eh?"

"Or stealing your organs."

"Eh?"

“Or even just some obsessive pervert who’s built up some kind of fantasy in their head that you’re fated for one another but you just don’t realize it yet.”

"What."

As you can tell. Yeah. Sakuya really internalized those 90s internet safety psas. He's also well acquainted with the idea of a very dedicated stalker for. Reasons.

Tsubaki voice: that boy just isn't right...

[racefortheironthrone]

Why People Are Wrong About the Puritans of the English Civil War and New England

Oh well, if you all insist, I suppose I can write something.

(oh good, my subtle scheme is working...)

Introduction:

So the Puritans of the English Civil War is something I studied in graduate school and found endlessly fascinating in its rich cultural complexity, but it's also a subject that is popularly wildly misunderstood because it's caught in the jaws of a pair of distorted propagandistic images.

On the one hand, because the Puritans settled colonial New England, since the late 19th century they've been wrapped up with this nationalist narrative of American exceptionalism (that provides a handy excuse for schoolteachers to avoid talking about colonial Virginia and the centrality of slavery to the origins of the United States). If you went to public school in the United States, you're familiar with the old story: the United States was founded by a people fleeing religious persecution and seeking their freedom, who founded a society based on social contracts and the idea that in the New World they were building a city on a hill blah blah America is an exceptional and perfect country that's meant to be an example to the world, and in more conservative areas the whole idea that America was founded as an explicitly Christian country and society. Then on the other hand, you have (and this is the kind of thing that you see a lot of on Tumblr) what I call the Matt Damon-in-Good-Will-Hunting, "I just read Zinn's People's History of the United States in U.S History 101 and I'm home for my first Thanksgiving since I left for colleg and I'm going to share My Opinions with Uncle Burt" approach. In this version, everything in the above nationalist narrative is revealed as a hideous lie: the Puritans are the source of everything wrong with American society, a bunch of evangelical fanatics who came to New England because they wanted to build a theocracy where they could oppress all other religions and they're the reason that abortion-banning, homophobic and transphobic evangelical Christians are running the country, they were all dour killjoys who were all hopelessly sexually repressed freaks who hated women, and the Salem Witch Trials were a thing, right?

And if anyone spares a thought to examine the role that Puritans played in the English Civil War, it basically short-hands to Oliver Cromwell is history's greatest monster, and didn't they ban Christmas?

Here's the thing, though: as I hope I've gotten across in my posts about Jan Hus, John Knox, and John Calvin, the era of the Reformation and the Wars of Religion that convulsed the Early Modern period were a time of very big personalities who were complicated and not very easy for modern audiences to understand, because of the somewhat oblique way that Early Modern people interpreted and really believed in the cultural politics of religious symbolism. So what I want to do with this post is to bust a few myths and tease out some of the complications behind the actual history of the Puritans.

Did the Puritans Experience Religious Persecution?

Yes, but that wasn't the reason they came to New England, or at the very least the two periods were divided by some decades. To start at the beginning, Puritans were pretty much just straightforward Calvinists who wanted the Church of England to be a Calvinist Church. This was a fairly mainstream position within the Anglican Church, but the "hotter sort of Protestant" who started to organize into active groups during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I were particularly sensitive to religious symbolism they (like the Hussites) felt smacked of Catholicism and especially the idea of a hierarchy where clergy were a better class of person than the laity.

So for example, Puritans really first start to emerge during the Vestments Controversy in the reign of Edward VI where Bishop Hooper got very mad that Anglican priests were wearing the cope and surplice, which he thought were Catholic ritual garments that sought to enhance priestly status and that went against the simplicity of the early Christian Church. Likewise, during the run-up to the English Civil War, the Puritans were extremely sensitive to the installation of altar rails which separated the congregation from the altar - they considered this to be once again a veneration of the clergy, but also a symbolic affirmation of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.

At the same time, they were not the only religious faction within the Anglican Church - and this is where the religious persecution thing kicks in, although it should be noted that this was a fairly brief but very emotionally intense period. Archbishop William Laud was a leading High Church Episcopalian who led a faction in the Church that would become known as Laudians, and he was just as intense about his religious views as the Puritans were about his. A favorite of Charles I and a first advocate of absolutist monarchy, Laud was appointed Archbishop of Canturbury in 1630 and acted quickly to impose religious uniformity of Laudian beliefs and practices - ultimately culminating in the disastrous decision to try imposing Episcopalianism on Scotland that set off the Bishop's Wars. The Puritans were a special target of Laud's wrath: in addition to ordering the clergy to do various things offensive to Puritans that he used as a shibboleth to root out clergy with Puritan sympathies and fire them from their positions in the Church, he established official religious censors who went after Puritan writers like William Prynne for seditious libel and tortured them for their criticisms of his actions, cropping their ears and branding them with the letters SL on their faces. Bringing together the powers of Church and State, Laud used the Court of Star Chamber (a royal criminal court with no system of due process) to go after anyone who he viewed as having Puritan sympathies, imposing sentences of judicial torture along the way.

It was here that the Puritans began to make their first connections to the growing democratic movement in England that was forming in opposition to Charles I, when John Liliburne the founder of the Levellers was targeted by Laud for importing religious texts that criticized Laudianism - Laud had him repeatedly flogged for challenging the constitutionality of the Star Chamber court, and "freeborn John" became a martyr-hero to the Puritans.

When the Long Parliament met in 1640, Puritans were elected in huge numbers, motivated as they were by a combination of resistance to the absolutist monarchism of Charles I and the religious policies of Archbishop Laud - who Parliament was able to impeach and imprison in the Tower of the London in 1641. This relatively brief period of official persecution that powerfully shaped the Puritan mindset was nevertheless disconnected from the phenomena of migration to New England - which had started a decade before Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury and continued decades after his impeachment.

The Puritans Just Wanted to Oppress Everyone Else's Religion:

This is the very short-hand Howard Zinn-esque critique we often see of the Puritan project in the discourse, and while there is a grain of truth to it - in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Congregational Church was the official state religion, no other church could be established without permission from the Congregational Church, all residents were required to pay taxes to support the Congregational Church, and only Puritans could vote. Moreover, there were several infamous incidents where the Puritan establishment put Anne Hutchinson on trial and banished her, expelled Roger Williams, and hanged Quakers.

Here's the thing, though: during the Early Modern period, every single side of every single religious conflict wanted to establish religious uniformity and oppress the heretics: the Catholics did it to the Protestants where they could mobilize the power of the Holy Roman Emperor against the Protestant Princes, the Protestants did it right back to the Catholics when Gustavus Adolphus' armies rolled through town, the Lutherans and the Catholics did it to the Calvinists, and everybody did it to the Anabaptists.

That New England was founded as a Calvinist colony is pretty unremarkable, in the final analysis. (By the by, both Hutchinson and Williams were devout if schismatic Puritans who were firmly of the belief that the Anglican Church was a false church.) What's more interesting is how quickly the whole religious project broke down and evolved into something completely different.

Essentially, New England became a bunch of little religious communes that were all tax-funded, which is even more the case because the Congregationalist Church was a "gathered church" where the full members of the Church (who were the only people allowed to vote on matters involving the church, and were the only ones who were allowed to be given baptism and Communion, which had all kinds of knock-on effects on important social practices like marriages and burials) and were made up of people who had experienced a conversion where they can gained an assurance of salvation that they were definitely of the Elect. You became a full member by publicly sharing your story of conversion (which had a certain cultural schema of steps that were supposed to be followed) and having the other full members accept it as genuine.

This is a system that works really well to bind together a bunch of people living in a commune in the wilderness into a tight-knit community, but it broke down almost immediately in the next generation, leading to a crisis called the Half-Way Covenant.

The problem was that the second generation of Puritans - all men and women who had been baptized and raised in the Congrgeationalist Church - weren't becoming converted. Either they never had the religious awakening that their parents had had, or their narratives weren't accepted as genuine by the first generation of commune members. This meant that they couldn't hold church office or vote, and more crucially it meant that they couldn't receive the sacrament or have their own children baptized.

This seemed to suggest that, within a generation, the Congregationalist Church would essentially define itself into non-existence and between the 1640s and 1650s leading ministers recommended that each congregation (which was supposed to decide on policy questions on a local basis, remember) adopt a policy whereby the children of baptized but unconverted members could be baptized as long as they did a ceremony where they affirmed the church covenant. This proved hugely controversial and ministers and laypeople alike started publishing pamphlets, and voting in opposing directions, and un-electing ministers who decided in the wrong direction, and ultimately it kind of broke the authority of the Congregationalist Church and led to its eventual dis-establishment.

The Puritans are the Reason America is So Evangelical:

This is another area where there's a grain of truth, but ultimately the real history is way more complicated.

Almost immediately from the founding of the colony, the Puritans begin to undergo mutation from their European counterparts - to begin with, while English Puritans were Calvinists and thus believed in a Presbyterian form of church government (indeed, a faction of Puritans during the English Civil War would attempt to impose a Presbyterian Church on England.), New England Puritans almost immediately adopted a congregationalist system where each town's faithful would sign a local religious constitution, elect their own ministers, and decide on local governance issues at town meetings.

Essentially, New England became a bunch of little religious communes that were all tax-funded, which is even more the case because the Congregationalist Church was a "gathered church" where the full members of the Church (who were the only people allowed to vote on matters involving the church, and were the only ones who were allowed to be given baptism and Communion, which had all kinds of knock-on effects on important social practices like marriages and burials) and were made up of people who had experienced a conversion where they can gained an assurance of salvation that they were definitely of the Elect. You became a full member by publicly sharing your story of conversion (which had a certain cultural schema of steps that were supposed to be followed) and having the other full members accept it as genuine.

This is a system that works really well to bind together a bunch of people living in a commune in the wilderness into a tight-knit community, but it broke down almost immediately in the next generation, leading to a crisis called the Half-Way Covenant.

The problem was that the second generation of Puritans - all men and women who had been baptized and raised in the Congrgeationalist Church - weren't becoming converted. Either they never had the religious awakening that their parents had had, or their narratives weren't accepted as genuine by the first generation of commune members. This meant that they couldn't hold church office or vote, and more crucially it meant that they couldn't receive the sacrament or have their own children baptized.

This seemed to suggest that, within a generation, the Congregationalist Church would essentially define itself into non-existence and between the 1640s and 1650s leading ministers recommended that each congregation (which was supposed to decide on policy questions on a local basis, remember) adopt a policy whereby the children of baptized but unconverted members could be baptized as long as they did a ceremony where they affirmed the church covenant. This proved hugely controversial and ministers and laypeople alike started publishing pamphlets, and voting in opposing directions, and un-electing ministers who decided in the wrong direction, and accusing one another of being witches. (More on that in a bit.)

And then the Great Awakening - which to be fair, was a major evangelical effort by the Puritan Congregationalist Church, so it's not like there's no link between evangelical - which was supposed to promote Congregational piety ended up dividing the Church and pretty soon the Congregationalist Church is dis-established and it's safe to be a Quaker or even a Catholic on the streets of Boston.

But here's the thing - if we look at which denominations in the United States can draw a direct line from themselves to the Congregationalist Church of the Puritans, it's the modern Congregationalists who are entirely mainstream Protestants whose churches are pretty solidly liberal in their politics, the United Church of Christ which is extremely cultural liberal, and it's the Unitarian Universalists who are practically issued DSA memberships. (I say this with love as a fellow comrade.)

By contrast, modern evangelical Christianity (although there's a complicated distinction between evangelical and fundamentalist that I don't have time to get into) in the United States is made up of an entirely different set of denominations - here, we're talking Baptists, Pentacostalists, Methodists, non-denominational churches, and sometimes Presbyterians.

The Puritans Were Dour Killjoys Who Hated Sex:

This one owes a lot to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.

The reality is actually the opposite - for their time, the Puritans were a bunch of weird hippies. At a time when most major religious institutions tended to emphasize the sinful nature of sex and Catholicism in particular tended to emphasize the moral superiority of virginity, the Puritans stressed that sexual pleasure was a gift from God, that married couples had an obligation to not just have children but to get each other off, and both men and women could be taken to court and fined for failing to fulfill their maritial obligations.

The Puritans also didn't have much of a problem with pre-marital sex. As long as there was an absolute agreement that you were going to get married if and when someone ended up pregnant, Puritan elders were perfectly happy to let young people be young people. Indeed, despite the objection of Jonathan Edwards and others there was an (oddly similar to modern Scandinavian customs) old New England custom of "bundling," whereby a young couple would be put into bed together by their parents with a sack or bundle tied between them as a putative modesty shield, but where everyone involved knew that the young couple would remove the bundle as soon as the lights were turned out.

One of my favorite little social circumlocutions is that there was a custom of pretending that a child clearly born out of wedlock was actually just born prematurely to a bride who was clearly nine months along, leading to a rash of surprisingly large and healthy premature births being recorded in the diary of Puritan midwife Martha Ballard. Historians have even applied statistical modeling to show that about 30-40% of births in colonial America were pre-mature.

But what about non-sexual dourness? Well, here we have to understand that, while they were concerned about public morality, the Puritans were simultaneously very strict when it came to matters of religion and otherwise normal people who liked having fun. So if you go down the long list of things that Puritans banned that has landed them with a reputation as a bunch of killjoys, they usually hide some sort of religious motivation.

So for example, let's take the Puritan iconoclastic tendency to smash stained glass windows, whitewash church walls, and smash church organs during the English Civil War - all of these things have to do with a rejection of Catholicism, and in the case of church organs a belief that the only kind of music that should be allowed in church is the congregation singing psalms as an expression of social equality. At the same time, Puritans enjoyed art in a secular context and often had portraits of themselves made and paintings hung on their walls, and they owned musical instruments in their homes.

What about the wearing nothing but black clothing? See, in our time wearing nothing but black is considered rather staid (or Goth), but in the Early Modern period the dyes that were needed to produce pure black cloth were incredibly expensive - so wearing all black was a sign of status and wealth, hence why the Hapsburgs started emphasizing wearing all-black in the same period. However, your ordinary Puritan couldn't afford an all-black attire and would have worn quite colorful (but much cheaper) browns and blues and greens.

What about booze and gambling and sports and the theater and other sinful pursuits? Well, the Puritans were mostly ok with booze - every New England village had its tavern - but they did regulate how much they could serve, again because they were worried that drunkenness would lead to blasphemy. Likewise, the Puritans were mostly ok with gambling, and they didn't mind people playing sports - except that they went absolutely beserk about drinking, gambling, and sports if they happened on the Sabbath because the Puritans really cared about the Sabbath and Charles I had a habit of poking them about that issue. They were against the theater because of its association with prostitution and cross-dressing, though, I can't deny that. On the other hand, the Puritans were also morally opposed to bloodsports like bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and bare-knuckle boxing because of the violence it did to God's creatures, which I guess makes them some of the first animal rights activsts?

They Banned Christmas:

Again, this comes down to a religious thing, not a hatred of presents and trees - keep in mind that the whole presents-and-trees paradigm of Christmas didn't really exist until the 19th century and Dickens' Christmas Carol, so what we're really talking about here is a conflict over religious holidays - so what people were complaining about was not going to church an extra day in the year. I don't get it, personally.

See, the thing is that Puritans were known for being extremely close Bible readers, and one of the things that you discover almost immediately if you even cursorily read the New Testament is that Christ was clearly not born on December 25th. Which meant that the whole December 25th thing was a false religious holiday, which is why they banned it.

The Puritans Were Democrats:

One thing that I don't think Puritans get enough credit for is that, at a time when pretty much the whole of European society was some form of monarchist, the Puritans were some of the few people out there who really committed themselves to democratic principles.

As I've already said, this process starts when John Liliburne, an activist and pamphleteer who promoted the concept of universal human rights (what he called "freeborn rights"), took up the anti-Laudian cause and it continued through the mobilization of large numbers of Puritans to campaign for election to the Long Parliament.

There, not only did the Puritans vote to revenge themselves on their old enemy William Laud, but they also took part in a gradual process of Parliamentary radicalization, starting with the impeachment of Strafford as the architect of arbitrary rule, the passage of the Triennal Acts, the re-statement that non-Parliamentary taxation was illegal, the Grand Remonstrance, and the Militia Ordinance.

Then over the course of the war, Puritans served with distinction in the Parliamentary army, especially and disproportionately in the New Model Army where they beat the living hell out of the aristocratic armies of Charles I, while defying both the expectations and active interference of the House of Lords.

At this point, I should mention that during this period the Puritans divided into two main factions - Presbyterians, who developed a close political and religious alliance with the Scottish Covenanters who had secured the Presbyterian Church in Scotland during the Bishops' Wars and who were quite interested in extending an established Presbyterian Church; and Independents, who advocated local congregationalism (sound familiar) and opposed the concept of established churches.

Finally, we have the coming together of the Independents of the New Model Army and the Leveller movement - during the war, John Liliburne had served with bravery and distinction at Edgehill and Marston Moore, and personally capturing Tickhill Castle without firing a shot. His fellow Leveller Thomas Rainsborough proved a decisive cavalry commander at Naseby, Leicester, the Western Campaign, and Langport, a gifted siege commander at Bridgwater, Bristol, Berkeley Castle, Oxford, and Worcester. Thus, when it came time to hold the Putney Debates, the Independent/Leveller bloc had both credibility within the New Model Army and the only political program out there. Their proposal:

redistricting of Parliament on the basis of equal population; i.e one man, one vote.

the election of a Parliament every two years.

freedom of conscience.

equality under the law.

In the context of the 17th century, this was dangerously radical stuff and it prompted Cromwell and Fairfax into paroxyms of fear that the propertied were in danger of being swamped by democratic enthusiasm - leading to the imprisonment of Lilburne and the other Leveller leaders and ultimately the violent suppression of the Leveller rank-and-file.

As for Cromwell, well - even the Quakers produced Richard Nixon.