#like I guess that's kind of a trigger for me

[shysuccubusstuff]

She needs me:

Content: Unstable! Caleb + SFW (meaning no smut) + Panic attack + Unstable mental health + Non proof-reading. I'm not romanticising any kind of mental health, seek professional help if you feel like your mind may be unstable, remember to take care of yourself.

Note: Yes, I love him even when I know he isn't in a good mental state, guess we have that in common, also shoutout to Amnesia (the otome game) for getting my type in games straight up :) (Toma you're crazy but I like it). Song that I heard while writting!

Unhinged! Caleb who sees overprotection as the purest representation of love. He knows it may be bad that he keeps using your affection for him to keep you with him, but could you blame him? He feels that this is the only way to keep you close to him for as long as possible, only a fool would let this opportunity escape. So he takes advantage of it, always using those puppy eyes he has to look at you a certain way, always reminding you of the sweet moments the two of you spent while you were younger, with him always making sure to get you everything you wanted even if i took him quite a few part-time jobs, refusing to let you feel less in front of the children who had an actual stable family.

Unhinged! Caleb who can't help but feel slightly happy each time you ask him for him to take care of you. He knows it, that he shouldn't feel as some kind of dog being petted, but just how could he not feel happy? You had been the one to reach out to him, the one who called him in the middle of the night asking him to get you some medicine for your sickness... Gosh, he could feel almost as happy as he had felt after finally seeing you once again. After all, what was his purpose in life if he can't protect and care for you?

Unhinged! Caleb who has to spend some alone time from time to time. He knows that he isn't on his best mental place, always feeling that constant bundle of nerves every time he has to let go of you. Still, he smiles at you, always trying to reassure you even as he can feel his hands starting to tremble under his soft white gloves. But as soon as he hears the door close behind you, he has to rush to your bedroom, burying his face on your pillow and slowly inhaling the sweet scent that was emanating from it, tears starting to form in the corners of his eyes as he hugged the pillow with extreme force. His breath starts to get heavier, more erratic despite how much he tries to keep himself calm, he knows that this could trigger that damn chip on his brain, so he forces himself to stabilise himself, biting on one of the other pillows as he keeps trying to stop the palpations he keeps feeling. He starts to remember you, remembering your sweet voice in his mind, your soft hands caressing his hair, his back, his chest... That's right, you will be fine. Nothing will happen, everything is alright, after all, he would be always there for you, to protect you from anything that could harm you. He repeats the words you said to him before leaving, his own hand on his chest as he felt his heartbeat decrease as the chip also helped him to remain calm.

You needed him, he repeated it to himself like a mantra, you needed him, not anyone else, just him.

[dmbakura]

Dante/White Rabbit thoughts, if any? I feel like they could've been more fucked up, with the whole, "White Rabbit is the one to sadisticly awaken Dante's Devil Trigger" thing.

oh ive been Thinking about this and wanted to stew on it for a while because like yeah. none of anything that happens in this sequence is normal. the yaoi goggles are on idgaf

his constant praise/encouragement of dante was 100% not necessary. i understand he Needs dante to trigger because his plan wont work otherwise but he was a little Too into it at the same time. like it had a personal stake to him

genuinely what are these expressions? he almost looks like he's blushing and his mask cant even blush. this is dangerously close to a rabbit ahegeo.

there's also the fact he just knows some personal details about dante, like dante watching vergil and eva die, which im guessing he may have gotten through vergil somehow? (furthering my verrabbit agenda hehe)

dante is wholeheartedly trying to kill him here by the way, and im not sure what white rabbit's plan was if dante had actually managed to get that shot off in his face (yes this IS as suggestive as it sounds)

and then the aftermath of dante's "premature" accident has him walking over and grabbing him by the hair, chastising him that he needs to push him "harder". like ok man. he also had NO way of knowing lady put that bomb in dante's neck. im not sure if he just assumed dante fucked up his trigger like that and that's why his face exploded?

anyways this whole scene left me feeling some kind of way. the psychosexual homoeroticism is off the charts.

[fhylie]

the shift towards 5.5 or whatever it will be called has been interesting from the outside. I think I decided early on that I had not much interest in supporting a change; either make a new edition or don't, you cowards.

since all these updates have bracketed that whole OGL business, and since I have friends who are pretty into M:TG, it's extremely easy to see that Hasbro is only interested in extracting rent from its properties, but also, the fact that this is their focus automatically makes it so all of their products contain this kind of fatal flaw that hangs over game design.

you can kind of see it in progress where, first of all, isn't it funny that for the longest time you couldn't buy dice or other accessories from them? I understand that dice are super easy to make so they couldn't possibly corner the market, but they could have at least tried to have official products.

second, you get products like Critical Role, which arguably led to a revival of popularity of their product because of the way it was presented and the passion of mercer's little group of actor friends. which, to be clear, is great for them. I have my minor issues with CR, but it's never been that they're fake fans or only in it for the money or whatever.

third, you get assist aids and character sheet trackers like dndbeyond, which interestingly was advertised by CR pretty heavily, leading to its success. it was a pretty good product, when it was separate from Hasbro, behaving more like a passion project made by people who seem like they missed the very functional 4E character builder. constantly updated with new material, back end programming making it so new mechanics released in modules were supported by the website's functionality, etc. their drive before selling their product was to make it functional and useful, and maybe this was only in service of creating a product that was designed to be sold eventually. however, notably, they did not collect rent. then it's sold to Hasbro, and they go for subscriptions. you can microtransaction yourself into having one feat or race at a time out of a new book if you want (at a cost that would make buying each individual item probably 10x the cost of the book). they stop updating functionality from any new products. in other words, they sit on what once was a useful tool and it stagnates.

alongside this, you have the types of products released by Hasbro during this time. one adventure per year, which is.... fine. it's fine, I guess. thank you for making them, adventure writers in question. tasha's cauldron being an official release of a lot of previously published UA material, most of which was not updated at all. mordenkainen's tome of foes and monsters of the multiverse having huge chunks that are nearly identical. it's easy to see in comparison that they're not interested in creating; after all, it's a lot easier to purchase the products of fans who understand the product and the community and public desires than to employ someone whose job it is to track this kinda shit.

I guess my whole feeling on these events is essentially disappointment. I feel like if Hasbro wants to be regarded as the big boy in the room where it comes to games companies, they could act like it instead of flailing around trying to own everything by proxy via OGL shenanigans or feeling as though they're required to monopolize and purchasing other people's work and then sidelining them. I also think this feeling is echoed by bigger actual play products like d20 and CR where they continually are trying out systems that are not 5e, and while they may not say it's out of protest for observed behaviour, they kind of don't have to say it out loud, do they?

by Mike Shea on 5 August 2024:

Hasbro may be hurling D&D towards a digital future but we already have everything we need to enjoy this game for the rest of our lives. Hasbro is super-excited for a digital D&D future. They're tired of selling us, as Penny Arcade perfectly describes, a single hamburger we can share with our friends every week for thirty years. Hasbro wants subscription revenue from every player every month – not just the single purchase of a book you can keep, share, and use for the rest of your life. Hasbro doesn't want to sell you D&D. They want you to pay rent. Chris Cocks, Hasbro's president and former president of Wizards of the Coast, is pushing hard for a digital future. He already said they're running experiments with artificial intelligence saying "D&D has 50 years of content that we can mine". The new head of Wizards of the Coast, the subsidiary of Hasbro in charge of D&D, is a former Blizzard executive who replaced a former Amazon and Microsoft executive. They posted a new D&D product architect job with a clear focus on digital gaming and a new "monetization designer" which is as close to "professional enshittifier" as I've heard of in a job description. So yeah, Hasbro is really excited to charge monthly fees and microtransactions for D&D and ensure you never stop paying for it. But I have good news for you. It doesn't matter. Here are four reasons why: 1. The three D&D core books are the only D&D books that really matter and they're going to be physical books. 2. With rulesets released into the Creative Commons, anyone can build digital tools, adventures, supplements, and even entire RPGs – all fully compatible with D&D. 3. We have 50 years of previous versions of D&D we can play, multiple competing and compatible 5e variants from other publishers, and hundreds of other RPGs we can enjoy. 4. We have several independent digital platforms we can use to run our games online.

[keep reading]

So Mike Shea's argument here is that no matter what Hasbro does, D&D is enshittification-proof. Personally, I agree that tabletop games (all of them, not just D&D) are to a large extent resistant to that, due to the nature of the game, but digital platforms are another matter. Then again, I have zero interest in digital platforms, so I don't know how they work. Can you incorporate non-SRD material in an independent VTT, for example? Does it matter? No idea!

For traditional D&D, I think it's always had (in its entire history, all editions!) two distinct modes of attracting people:

here is an Official Book of Rules! I should buy it (or borrow it, or pirate it) and use it, because it's an official and authoritative publication

here is a Good Rule! I should incorporate it in my D&D game because I like it, and I don't care where it came from and in what format, official book, third party, homebrew, DMs Guild, hardcover book, piece of paper, pdf, a reddit post, my own noggin.

But last year, they tried an new thing and released a set of 25 monsters for $6 only on D&D Beyond. No physical print, and no pdf. (Previously there had been digital-only releases, mostly short adventures, but in pdf form.) And although I have no way of knowing how sales went, I strongly suspect this will NEVER work. It's just a bunch of "assets", it doesn't register as an Official Publication, there's no incentive to get it as such. So we're left with "is it a good rule?", and there it competes with a million other rules published for fun and/or profit by other people. Why "buy" that one? (You're not quite buying it: if D&D Beyond goes down, poof go the monsters!)

So yeah, I think they'll try to enshittify tabletop D&D, but they'll go about it half-heartedly (to go full in, they'd have to drop the printed books, and there's NO WAY they'll do that), and simply no one will care, D&D doesn't work like that.

[miyuskye]

I found this scene in particular so odd and out of place in the new episode. Apart from the fact that Stolas has no right to be angry at Blitz for "not saving him" when Striker kidnapped him nor to be upset that he didn't tell him about Striker's attempt at shooting him. In Loo Loo Land he's perfectly capable of defending himself (even when he hired Blitz for protection!), why is he complaining that an imp, the lowest class on the hierarchy isn't protecting one of the highest?

In that scene Stolas accuses Blitz of not understanding "how much he cared about him", but has he forgotten that he was the one who couldn't stand up not to Asmodeous nor to the accusations of him "sleeping with an imp"?

This reaction shows the actual opposite of what he's telling Blitz he did.

I read that Stolas is supposedly also not aware of ~things~ but why is the narrative conveniently forgetting about his faults as well?

Onto the "apology tour" subject: I fail to understand why Blitz owes Stolas an apology. The only time he was shitty to him was actually in Ozzie's when he asked him on a (fake) date without telling him all the story. But they didn't talk about that not during that episode neither during Apology Tour. Is it because doing this would have forced the narrative to acknowledge that also Stolas was at fault during that episode?

All the other times they interacted (on and off screen, their chats don't really mean anything since it seems that's the way Blitz writes in general), Blitz was being good to him (not that he had any other choice, due to their society ranks and their deal).

To me, this looks like bad writing. But if someone has a different take, I'm happy to hear their interpretation.

[herba-mysticas]

The zero lab battle theme won't leave me alone so I decided to draw my feelings

[illithiddies]

This interaction from before everyone finds out Astarion is a vampire is actually so insane to me. What do you mean the monster hunter from Baldur's Gate doesn't know about Cazador, but the archmage in Waterdeep who reads a lot of historical texts does?

Is it just an open secret everywhere except in Baldur's Gate, where people just don't really notice or pay attention to it? Like this shit is in books, apparently, if it made it's way to Gale. It's a published thing. It's known.

Astarion didn't even mention his last name.

[sangcreole]

damn. this is genuinely the only space on the internet where I feel completely at peace.

[vampirefangs]

i know "i saw the tv glow" is very metaphorical but also if you are/have been mentally ill/delusional enough in just the right ways it can be relatable in a literal sense too

[alchemiclee]

I think doing shipping through and aroace lens makes things complicated but also interesting. I think one reason I don't enjoy straight ships as much is because it's very rare for people write/talk about them with a queerplatonic dynamic. straight romance is so "normalized" in society, it's hard to get any other dynamic out of those ships from other people in conversation or writing. it's mostly always romantic. (especially when "guys and girls can't be *just* friends" is extremely common and has ruined mamy of my own friendships) but I enjoy a handful of a straight ship with that dynamic. it's just way more rare to see talked about than gay ones from my observation. anyway point is, more queerplatonic type ships and stuff please! those aren't explored enough!

[effervescent-fool]

theres a will wood fan on youtube who puts a Trigger Warning on their videos any time will wood happens to be shirtless in them. which is extremely funny but also im not laughing

[sodrippy]

accidentally thought about trying to cook in my mother's kitchen and now im so stressed out i cant sleep 👍

[jimintomystery]

This algorithm is picking a fight with me that it can't win.

[puppylustt]

On the Keeping of Spermatophagos Species in Captivity was HORRIFYINGGGGG and i liked it a lot. i read it right after Ovivermicula Vulgaris bc the author linked it at the end and i liked that one more. the description of the worm INSIDE SOLLUXES FUCKING BULGE?? HORRIFYING. AWFUL. DISGUSTING. TERRIFYING. AND I WANT TO READ MORE OF IT.

[unbearable-lightness-of-ink]

so anyway I really did start compiling a kinyarwanda/english dictionary/grammar guide out of all the random resources i've been hoarding on my phone (it doesn't have to be great, it just has to be better than searching multiple different files every time I'm looking for some obscure vocab or grammar detail) and one of these resources is some PDF uploaded to the internet archive and it's... not great. from the writing and contents it's clearly

old (my guess is mid-1900s. I don't remember colonial and post-colonial Rwandan history specifically enough to guess well here, but based on some of the typos, it was done on a typewriter and then scanned with OCR)

intended for missionaries (some examples of actual sentences in the "translate this" exercises include "I praise God because He saved me and He gave me peace and joy" and, I shit u not, "The blind man cannot see the Word of God, but he can hear and he can know the love of Jesus." it's. well for one thing this is basically useless vocabulary for me, and also it's cringe af)

written by someone who was not a linguist (at one point instead of just saying "if T is preceded by an unvoiced consonant, it turns into D" they give you a list of every unvoiced consonant and then recommend that you invent a mnemonic phrase to memorise the list?! why?)

written by someone who was shit with pronunciation (legit so many places where they're like "there's no way to describe how this sounds, you just have to ask someone to make the sound for you" my good bitch the phoneme might not be in english but I could describe it just fine. skill issue.)

but the thing that's really killing me about all this is that every time they try to explain tonal vowels or phonemes that aren't in english, they tell you to "ask an African to say it for you."

an. an what now? an African? babe there are approximately 1.5 billion people in Africa. Africa accounts for about 20% of the land on earth, it's the second-biggest continent, and it has an estimated two thousand living languages spoken throughout the continent.

and kinyarwanda? it has maybe 15-25 million native speakers, depending on which source I trust. it's spoken (almost*) exclusively in rwanda, which is the 9th smallest country in Africa--and that roundup includes islands off the coast of the continent. It has the second densest population in Africa but it still only has like 13 million people in it. and it's a very unique language. its closest relatives do not have the same phonemes that kinyarwanda has, and its closest relatives are also spoken by relatively few people. I don't know enough about kirundi to say much but I do know that it doesn't have the same vowel tones in all instances and it doesn't have some of the same consonant clusters. and the more widely spoken related languages that you're more likely to stumble on someone who knows how to speak? they're even worse for a reference; ask someone who speaks kiswahili to pronounce kinyarwanda for you and they will not pronounce the difference between, say, umuceri (rice) and umucyeri (berry), or the tonal difference between words like umusambi (floor mat) and umusambi (crested crane).

so, like. it's just absolutely sending me, this random white lady who was obviously a colonialist missionary, bothering to make a whole language guide to teach me how to proselytise in kinyarwanda, but along the way she's like "just ask an african--any african--how to say this" lady less than 1% of them are going to know this language but go off i guess

*almost because there's the diaspora of rwandan expats and immigrants in other countries plus the banyamulenge which is a whole aspect of it that has so much fraught history on all sides that I won't even try to say something intelligent about it, it's totally not my place/something i'm educated enough about, but to my knowledge most of them speak dialects that are more or less dissimilar to kinyarwanda; kinyamulenge and kinyabwisha are not the same as kinyarwanda. take it from my munyamulenge coworker who could never pronounce the difference between c and cy

[strawberryfaced]

haven’t had such a night in quite a while :’) almost forgot how to handle