#rijomu

[utilitycaster]

Do you think that D20 could run a Daggerheart campaign? Would the system work for the D20 format? Would you like to see some other actual play show/podcast try Daggerheart?

I don't see why they couldn't - Daggerheart is designed to exist in a similar space as D&D 5e and Pathfinder as a heroic fantasy game with a combat focus, skill checks, and class-based abilities. I would wait until it's out of open beta and published before going for it, but it's very much doable as either an Intrepid Heroes or Sidequest season.

I hope people use Daggerheart - it seems very promising and I've enjoyed watching The Menagerie - but I don't have strong feelings about D20 using it. I need to make the post I had been thinking about this morning before I had to leave as it will shed some more light on these thoughts. To put it briefly, I think journalists and people who don't get that people want to play heroic fantasy need to stop treating Darrington Press as some kind of juggernaut on par with Wizards of the Coast nor as some mind control world domination attempt by Critical Role; but at the same time Darrington Press does have a built-in group of people who will play it in actual play because it is Critical Role's publishing wing. I'd rather see D20 cast guest on CR for Daggerheart games and D20 use their channel to play lesser-known games, and smaller podcasts try out Daggerheart and perhaps get some name recognition/CR crossover.

[onenicebugperday]

@rijomu submitted: This guy got into my apartment the other day. I’m proud of myself for escorting them out inside a glass without freaking out. I’m really creeped out by these guys even though I know they’re harmless. I’m fine with every other kind of insect but something about those legs just feels weird. Please exists outside, not in my home!! (Southern Finland but no ID necessary)

A fun fact about crane flies is that their long legs are used for giving hugs :)

[mollynoble]

Tagged by @where-desert-touches-the-stars  -- list a favorite character from 10 favorite fandoms

Generation Kill - Doc Tim Bryan

Marvel - Clint “Hawkeye” Barton

Star Trek - Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy

Dragon Age - The Iron Bull

Critical Role - Veth Brenatto

Dimension 20 - Riz Gukgak

Black Sails - Anne Bonny

Justified - Tim Gutterson

DC - Jason Todd

The Expanse - Chrisjen Avasarala

I’ll tag @asamandra, @magic-gps, @wombat-shaped, @loonyloopylisa, @rijomu and @indigorally feel free to ignore or if I didn’t tag you and you want to do it just say I did:)

[bitimdrake]

I hope you get around to writing an actual post on Alfred. I’ve been writing one in my head for a while now. Will I ever actually write it? Probably not. I’d start with how the concept of the character is dated at best. Then a whole rant about how messed up it is that he’s supposed to be family, a parent and also a servant who’s attached to his role as a butler. The emphasis on the parent thing is mostly in fics and I wish more writers would actually look at weirdness of the situation. I love the sassy butler trope, it just doesn’t stretch very far. Somebody needs to write a modern origin story for Bruce/Batman where people realize that leaving a kid to get raised by the help is not healthy. (Sorry for ranting in your inbox. I love Alfred, really.)

I finished the post, although it is specifically about recognizing Alfred as a flawed person instead of a perfect paragon, which is just one of many angles to discuss.

The butler/family thing is so weird, because it gradually developed over new additions to canon, without ever getting a super great explanation.

Although Alfred-as-Bruce's-parent does get a lot of focus in fandom and fic, it is still absolutely something that is present and referenced in canon. They are Stoic Men Who Don't Talk About Their Feelings, so it's exceptionally rare to say outright, but they have said it.

But see--we started with Alfred Beagle being introduced in the golden age, meeting Bruce for the first time after Dick is Robin. By the silver age, he was replaced with Alfred Pennyworth, who had a different personality, but arrived at the same time. He's the butler--a beloved butler, blending into friend and family in a natural way, but still someone Bruce met as an adult.

And then, Post Crisis, it is declared that Alfred has been working for the Waynes since Bruce was a child, and everything shifts. And their relationship is given more closeness, except now there's this parent/child aspect to it. At that is pretty odd, but still in a way that imo can work for the oddness that is Bruce Wayne. Alfred is Bruce's butler, but Alfred is also an adult Bruce has known since he was a kid and they are pseudo-familial.

Only then we get the addition that Alfred actually did raise Bruce after his parents died and the whole thing just...falls apart.

Like, listen, I think the Alfred-Bruce relationship is very sweet for the most part, but it is also weird for kid!Bruce's guardian to be his old butler. And it is even weirder for Alfred to be his butler again as an adult. And it is weirdest of all for Alfred to have apparently SIMULTANEOUSLY been a butler and a guardian when Bruce was growing up???? how??

(okay: the how is that apparently bruce faked custodial paperwork or something, but that is still exceptionally weird, and also giving child Bruce a LOT of skill, despite him having no reason for those skills at the time.)

Inserting Leslie Thompson as Bruce's guardian can kind of repair some of that, but I don't think canon has ever made her more than a co-guardian to Alfred. And, more important tbh, she's not a character that gets enough focus to be seamlessly inserted as Bruce's major caretaker from ages 8-18.

I don't know. I guess if I were to try to explain it--in Bruce's youth, Alfred knew he wouldn't accept a new parent-figure and that his whole world was already thrown upside-down, so Alfred tried to preserve some small piece of the status quo in maintaining a butler act even when he was Bruce's guardian. And when Bruce returns from his years of traveling and training, Alfred is afraid he will refuse the implied emotional support of a parent (or maybe Bruce outright does), and so he falls back to the familiar pattern of "ah but I am just your butler" to trick Bruce into accepting his help and caretaking anyway.

...but it is still weird (and more weird that the people around them have little to no commentary on the dynamics of that relationship). And even with the best intentions, it still leads me to think Alfred probably could and should have done more to be open with Bruce instead of maintaining patterns. I would LOVE to see a writer try to tackle it from a modern perspective.

[cranesofibycus]

Would losing followers for a controversial (or ”controversial”) opinions be a good thing? Because it means that people are curating their fandom experience.

(Feel free to ignore me. I have no fandom presence or followers to lose. But it’s 1 am and I don’t feel like sleeping.)

absolutely! I don’t have a problem with people unfollowing me. It’s healthy and good and a lot better than sending rude anon asks. I unfollow people all the time when I see stuff on my dash that I don’t jive with. I just hadn’t realized that my takes were that spicy today ^^° but yes, I curate my fandom experience on here very carefully and I encourage everyone to do the same.

[kimabutch]

Unsolicited book recommendations ahead. Feel free to stop reading and delete. Neither of these authors is new so it’s possible or propable that you already know them. But the reclist of scifi you just reblogged didn’t have either of them on it so... Two queer (lesbian?) women authors who write sci-fi. Tanya Huff (Canadian, I’ve only read her fantasy but there’s also an sf series) and Melissa Scott.

Ooooo thank you!! Do you have any particular recommendations for either of them? I do really like scifi but I’m generally more pulled towards fantasy, to be honest.

(And I’m always happy to get queer book recs, regardless of the genre!)

[copperbadge]

ameliahcrowley replied to your photo “Last Monday was a little rough.  [Description: Three text messages...”

Eugh Huge sympathy. That happened to my thesis once. I hope you managed to get them all back.

Oh yeah, just a quick ctrl-z and they were fine, but it cracked me up like, “Oh, look, a portent.”

rijomu replied to your photo “A friend of mine 3-D printed me a hand in return for some COVID masks,...”

Have you sewed (sowed? sown? F the English language) buttons for the loops into your winter hats yet?

I hadn’t really thought about winter, but I figure I’ll just put the mask on first and pull the hat down over the loops. I wonder if they’ll start making hats with masks built in, although I suppose then you’d have to wash the hat after each wearing and IDK about anyone else but I wash my hats way less often than that...

suddenlywaffle replied to your photo “sufficientlytalentedfool: copperbadge: A friend of mine 3-D...”

As a fellow glasses wearer I recommend getting masks with ties, or getting ear savers so that there’s no loops around your ears. I find that the edjustable ties help the mask sit more flush to my face with no gaps to fog up my glasses, plus there’s less discomfort on my ears and my glasses stay where they’re supposed to.

It’s an option, but honestly I haven’t found head ties that work terribly well, and it’s kind of a solution to a problem I don’t have -- the glasses-swap works perfectly fine, and in some ways it’s kind of a good reminder not to go out without a mask. I’ve got the little headphones-mask-glasses ritual going at this point :D

[cdelphiki]

Have you read Justice League vs. Power Rangers? If not, you should. It’s by Tom Taylor and more fun than it has any right to be.

You lost me at power rangers but then won me again with Tom Taylor. 😂   I’ll have to check it out, thanks! 

[luckthebard]

Speaking of magical healing. Do we know where Fjord’s scar comes from? In the opening he has when he wakes up on the beach with the sword. I can’t remember if he mentioned something about Uk’otoa healing any injuries? I might be forgetting something.

Listen, it is one of the FIRST THINGS Travis described about Fjord when introducing him back in episode one (“I’m a half-orc. Got a big scar across my face”) and I’ve been waiting for 73 episodes for someone to ask him about it.

It’s entirely possible that he got in the explosion and shipwreck, but he’s never said. And it’s clearly something Travis thought about and purposefully added to the character, because it’s so visible in the art and he mentioned it so specifically!

Join me in waiting for an answer to this mystery.

[winterhawkkisses]

Prompt: Kittens

819.

Bucky disappeared. 

The only one concerned at first was Steve; even Tasha agreed that the guy was probably just ducking out ahead of the clean-up that Steve always insisted on. When he didn’t show up at the quinjet there was a little more concern; Clint figured that the guy was an adult and that they should give him more than a couple hours before they went chasing after him. It wasn’t even as though they’d had any hints of Hydra recently. 

Steve had the look of a guy who’d be pacing all night; he also kinda looked like a guy who’d keep others up around him, so Clint made a snap decision to head back to his place in Bed-Stuy, even though tonight was one of Kate’s nights to have Lucky. 

The door opened easy enough, but something felt off as he stepped inside. Still in his Avengers gear, Clint quietly drew an arrow out of his quiver and strung it, bow held down at his side. He almost jumped out of his skin when there was a tiny peeping, high-pitched and unquestionably demanding. 

“What the hell,” he said, and Bucky stepped out of the shadows under the stairs, cradling a cardboard box - the threatening aura was disrupted entirely by the determined pair of kittens, a wisp of grey and a cloud of ginger and white, who kept trying to climb out of the box. 

Clint made a noise that he’d never admit to, not in a million years. 

“I didn’t.” Bucky gritted his teeth, then visibly forced himself to keep talking. “I didn’t want to leave them. But I wasn’t sure they’d let ‘em on the ‘jet.” 

“Natasha likes cats,” Clint said, and Bucky’s mouth quirked up at the corner, something that almost resembled a smile. 

“Yeah, well Hydra woulda -” he shuddered, almost too quick a movement to see, but there was a chorus of protest from the box. “I didn’t trust it.” 

“So you came here,” Clint said, almost afraid to extrapolate from that. 

[velkynkarma]

rijomu replied to your post: Happy April Fools Day! The fool is me for not...

Oof. This is great! Thank you!

:) You are most welcome. Glad you enjoyed!

[utilitycaster]

🔥 races (as in human, elf, eisfuura) in DnD worldbuilding

everyone needs to fucking explore how elven lifespans change their attitudes and like, not in a boring way. Brennan was right. What if gnomes work differently than anyone has ever thought before.

Also though if you can't tell a compelling fantasy story in which everyone is a boring-ass human you just can't tell a compelling fantasy story. I mean, sometimes the story you want to tell is about cultural exchanges between races that truly cannot share the same experiences, and also it's fine to just be like "I would like to be a bird person, bc birds", or whatever, but in general in D&D if you can't make a human fighter a good character, you can't make a good tabaxi sorcerer either.

[onenicebugperday]

@rijomu submitted: This green fly friend visited me on a hot afternoon. He got a taste, I got a photo. Rothenburg, Germany if you want to ID further than ”fly” but feel free to just admire.

I am admiring! But also it looks like a common European greenbottle fly. Hope they enjoyed the taste of your skin :)

[maychorian]

Would you happen to know and/or could you rec any Batman/Batfamily fics where the Joker is killed off? It doesn’t have to be the main point of the story, it can even happen off screen, I’m more interested in the cause and effect than on the Joker as a character. (I’ve read the excellent Retrogade Motion by Lysical, and I remember another de-aging fic where this happened but can’t find it again.)

I’m sorry I held on to this so long. I was honestly trying to think of fics like this, because I know they’re out there. If you’re going to write an AU, you may as well kill the Joker. But the only one I’ve been able to come up with the Cor Et Cerebrum series by audreycritter, and it’s a fairly small part of the series and happens pretty late in the game. I know there are more, though. Anyone else?

[nilim]

I just finished listening to the Ancient Rome sidequest. AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!! (Sorry about that. But not really since I got into this because of you and I’m LOVING it.) I knew there was going to be death but not that it’d be Grizzop. He was the best. I might just scream some more.

Aaaah! I’m sorry! God, I did not know there was going to be death so Ancient Rome absolutely wrecked me. T_T

Season 4 has some good stuff though, good, soft Azu & Hamid moments

[butteredonions]

Prompt: de-aged Keith. No idea if this reaches you in time. I don't do time-zones on Sundays

It did reach me in time! :) here’s a smol fill for a smol prompt. 

“You’re fine,” Hunk repeats, voice calm and soothing as he rocks Keith’s new and very small form in his arms. Keith shakes his head into Hunk’s shirt, still sniffling, still confused and so upset. Of all the times for the pod to malfunction this badly, it had to be while everyone else was occupied - Coran and Allura down planetside, Lance and Pidge both getting some rest after Hunk insisted he’d wait for Shiro and Keith two vargas ago. Shiro’s still in a healing pod, quiet and still right next to the one Keith just tumbled out of. Hunk’s praying to every deity he’s ever heard of that Shiro’s pod isn’t about to malfunction, too. “You’re fine, buddy. Everything’s just a bit big, yeah? You’re okay. Shhh, you’re okay. I’ve got you.”