#some history lesson

[reality-detective]

1963 Refrigerator 🤔

[constantly-deactivated]

Epic answer by Morgan Freeman 🤔

[egophiliac]

I hope someone hasn’t asked but what did you use to rig the deformed Maleanor? It looks so cool!!

thank you! :D :D :D I drew her in Photoshop (there's an overly-long speedrun video here) and rigged her in Spine Professional! her rig is...very messy...but it works for a silly little fanproject where nobody needs to know how many bones I kept shoving in to try and force her cape to stop breaking. :')

it was easier to just export images directly from Spine, so all the backgrounds and credit text are in there too as separate skeletons! who needs compositing when you can just throw everything into one project and let it simmer. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

(I figured I should probably have a tag for this stuff by this point, so I've added #spineposting to posts of/about my Twst chibis and Spine!) (once again I am reminded that I really need to go back and fix poor Che'nya for a third time...)

[naturesass]

I can't stop thinking about the 0% ship log vision

[vlarelythere]

went a little insane over the Ancient Rome part of Infinite Realms and spent two days researching Rome oops

The Vlad and Danny piece is based off of Anton Mengs's painting called Jupiter Kissing Ganymede

[al-luviec]

juvie buddies

[shtoproishoditemae]

Polska💋

[breelandwalker]

Idiot In My Comments: It's not gonna be that bad! You're being dramatic! Nothing's gonna happen to you omg shut uuuuuup!

Me: .....You must be new here. And there's the door.

[puhpandas]

I think about the tapes so often the badass dialogue they use to build tension in 46 the storytelling of both Vanessa's past with abuse and showing it still affecting her and her STILL being abused by glitchtrap/mimic and actually truly for real showing that on screen canonically in a game. steel wool having the chance to put in love and effort into the writing of the human characters. the vanessa tapes being about her but also being about showing GGYs progress keeping everything under wraps and how powerless vanessa is to stop him or vanny or glitchtrap. the 46 tapes giving us cute little information about Rabs character and being so sinister with great voice acting and great writing in the dialogue to tell all this information like GOD. I miss the tapes sooo much I want them to come back so bad they were some of the only surviving actual writing from SB and I know steel wool is still capable of cooking like this. they just havent gotten the chance!!!!!

[jone-slugger]

When I first started watching Voyager and read the word Maquis I almost spat out my drink because, being from Spain, that's the name of the anti-fascist forces that fought against the dictatorship during the civil war. I understand it was also used in France to name the resistance against the nazi but in my mind I always imagine Chakotay and B'Elanna fighting the fascists in the mountains of Spain.

Like, I know the Star Trek writers were probably thinking of France, as their ship is a Les Miz reference, but for a second I allow myself to think that they might also be referencing Spain. After all, many Americans (notably Hemingway) fought in the Spanish Civil War, which was seen in a way as a rehearsal of what was to come just when it ended in 1939.

In any case, I love they used that name for the resistance against the Cardassians.

[reality-detective]

Old Lighters 🤔

[constantly-deactivated]

When the facts came out about the Swine Flu injection propaganda. 🤔

[skitskatdacat63]

As per usual you’re taste in classical is 🔥. Not good at putting it to words but the symphony felt vibrant and I enjoyed listening to it all come together. Favourite piece had to be ‘Adagio – Largo – Moderato risoluto – Largo – Adagio’ made me jealous that I couldn’t witness it live ����.

— Penalanon (also seeing the side by side with the conductor on yt , I can see the resemblance lol)

Hehe you don't know much it means to me everytime you tell me you've listened to my reccs!!! <3 Also omg, I would literally die if I ever got to see this one live. I's my absolute favorite right now!! I think though, thankfully, I'll get to hear one of his other symphonies, the 5th, which is also pretty great! He really does look so much like Shostakovich, doesn't he??? So funny.

I love the whole piece dearly, but my favorite is definitely the first movement, because the way it ramps up is so adrenaline filled and makes me feel so much palpable emotion. Also the context behind it, which was what the book I was reading was about(Symphony of the City of the Dead by M.T. Anderson, which I highly recommend!!) It's just crazy to think he was writing the first two movements while the Siege of Leningrad was actively getting worse and worse(thus why it's referred to as "Leningrad.") I think he even marked the original score every time he had to go into the bomb shelter, which is so insane. Knowing that context, the whole first movement makes my heart drop and I can just FEEL the tension he probably did writing this. That repeated melody, which is basically Shostakovich's version of Ravel's Bolero, in the beginning is referred to as the "Invasion Theme," so it's really so easy to picture the approaching of the army, getting more and more tense until it comes to a fever pitch(though you can also interpret this piece as being about fascism/authoritatianism in general, i.e. Stalin and The Great Purge OR Hitler and Operation Barbossa.)

AGHHHH god, and thinking about how when he finally finished it, the city of Leningrad itself(which he thankfully managed to evacuate from before it got too bad) was desperate to play it, even though everyone was dying from starvation. They were collecting literally anyone who could play an instrument to be able to play it, even though it required a huge orchestra and was long as hell. I want to cry just thinking about that premiere, how everyone was so grateful to finally feel human and creative again in some tangible way through music(lol so you can see why I'm so enthralled with this piece.) And the fact they even played it over loudspeakers as a sign of resistance to the Germans !!!! It's a very emotional piece to think about, and I start tearing up every time I listen to it, thinking about all of this. Every bit is packed with emotion so it's hard to even express what parts I like specifically, cause I love all of it! Though here's a fun fact, they almost lost this piece!! Shostakovich and his family were evacuated further East from Moscow, and in the confusion, they lost the score he had composed so far(I think the first two movements), but managed to find it on the train, miraculously unscathed. It stresses me out to even think about.

Also since I've got you here, here are some more reccs >:)

Jazz Suite No. 1 & No. 2 - Shostakovich

These are so whimsical and fun! But they also kinda make me sad when I remember this is the kind of fun music he liked to compose before the government practically beat all the fun and whimsy out of him. But, still, the duality of man, I guess?

Piano Concerto No. 2 - Shostakovich

Spotify link this time, sorry lmao. I wanted to share this recording specifically because there's a lot of signifigance in it. The fact that it's his compositon, which his son is conducting and who it was written for in the first place, and his grandson is the one playing the piano!!! The second movement is especially so good omg

Scherezade - Rimsky-Korsakov

Soooooo incredibly cinematic for its time!!

Symphony No. 3 "Organ Symphony" - Saint-Saëns

I saw this one in concert the other day, so I should link it lol. I'm so happy when the organ gets used, there's nothing like it, it's so loud!!

La valse - Ravel

Ma mère l’Oye - Ravel

I've been listening to Ravel the past few days, and wow, his music is so magical so I thought I should link some!!

Dies Irae - Verdi

Piece I am going to tomorrow !! Requiems are so cool, you should also listen to Mozart's, but I'm sure you're familar with some of it. This kind of chorael singing rips at something deep in me

Japanese Suite - Holst

*adding this late so I hope you see it! Literally randomly heard this rn and I had no idea it existed. It's crazy how good Holst is at giving the vibe of something. This was composed while he was working on the Planets, so it still has a space vibe but also reminds me SOOOOOOO MUCH of Inazuma's soundtrack, it's insane. I know it's probably because they're both based on traditional Japanese music, but still, wow. Holst truly is the creator of the modern soundtrack imo.

[c-is-for-circinate]

Background AD&D info for Stranger Things Fans

I'm doing it, I'm writing an overly-long post A WHOLE SERIES of overly-long posts about how the Stranger Things kids play D&D, and what exactly first edition and AD&D were for.

Source: I've been playing since 3rd ed/3.5 era, NOT AD&D, but I've had a lot of friends who've been in the game for much longer and I'm kind of a nerd for rulesets so I watch D&D bros go off on youtube sometimes for fun. Also, I've actually read the AD&D player's handbook, which is an experience let me tell you. If anyone who's played older editions wants to chip in, go for it!

I think I'm going to have to write a separate post (or posts...god hopefully not posts) about the kids' individual classes. So stay tuned for that. I'll link it from this one when it's done.

First, some history: The earliest editions of D&D are a little confused, numbering-wise, because they didn't know there were going to be numbered editions yet. Dungeons and Dragons debuted in 1974 as an offshoot of mini-based tabletop wargames that already existed at the time. These were mostly big games, where players controlled whole armies rather than creating individual characters, and set their forces against one another. (Not unlike very complicated games of chess, if you really think about it.) D&D was not, to my knowledge, the first individual-character-based ttrpg, but it became the biggest pretty readily.

Advanced Dungeons and dragons, or AD&D, came out in '77 or '78 (Wiki says '77, the publication date on the copy I've been using says '78), although they were still publishing Basic D&D as an alternate option, more or less until the mid-nineties. AD&D was a lot more rules-heavy and had a lot more intricacy going on (relatively speaking), and it's the game the ST kids play.

Compared to modern D&D, AD&D's basic rules feel both more and less. The mechanics themselves are often way more complex, and navigating your way through all of those percentage tables as a DM implies a pretty high level of math skill, worth noting for both an 11-year-old or a guy who failed senior year twice. The character options, on the other hand, feel slim. On first glance.

AD&D only has five classes -- ten if you count subclasses, which you probably should for AD&D. There's fighters, with special fighter subclasses ranger (Lucas's class) or paladin (Mike's class); clerics (Will's class, supposedly), with special cleric subclass druid; magic-users (or mages, theoretically El's class), with special mage subclass illusionist; thieves (NOT rogues! but this is definitely Lady Applejack's actual class, with some caveats), with special thief subclass assassin; and monks. You will note I did not mention bards. We will get to bards. (Probably in the character post, when I talk about Dustin. Bards are...special.)

AD&D had no barbarians, no warlocks, no sorcerers. No special, prescribed forked paths for a character to venture down. Subclasses functioned mostly like classes do nowadays -- you'd roll up a character and be a paladin from day one, simply lumped under fighter because many of the core mechanics were the same. And a significant percentage of text given to describing these classes seems full of really restrictive orders and conditions. Clerics are never allowed to use a bladed weapon? Druids refuse to touch metal? Assassins must engage the local guildmaster in a duel to the death in order to progress to level 14? Where's the creativity, asks the modern 5e D&D player? Where's the freedom?

And this highlights a really core, central thing about how AD&D works and what it was for, that I think modern audiences can very easily miss:

1st edition AD&D is a game about archetypes.

Modern D&D is a game played in a sandbox that's been dug up and worked over for the past fifty years, in a cultural landscape that values individuality and originality and sometimes pretends that daring to share a trope with anything that came before is somewhere between boring and a straight-up crime. Original D&D came with very different baggage, and while it was still very much a game about storytelling, the KINDS of stories being told were a little different.

Characters weren't intended to be highly specialized, granular creations with intricate backstories and complex individualized skill sets. This wasn't even because those kinds of character-driven games or narratives were seen as bad, necessarily -- it's simply not what the game was written for!

First edition D&D was designed for big, epic adventures, where players could embody their own personal instance of a specific stock character trope. It was written for "I want to be a knight!" and "I want to be the magician!". It was about getting to be YOUR VERSION of a very particular, already-existing idea that would have been familiar from fantasy fiction at the time.

So, when the AD&D rules say that druids hold oak and ash trees sacred, that they will never destroy woodland or crops under any circumstances, that they cannot and will not use metal weapons or armor, that there only exist nine Level 12 druids in the world and they form a council with students below them -- this isn't an attempt to micromanage players, to be arbitrarily pedantic or controlling. This is Gary Gygax attempting to present the archetype that 'druid' is meant to encompass. This is what a druid is, according to this ruleset: a priest of nature, part of an order with rules and loyalties, with these priorities and these ideals. Mechanics and personality are not divorced in AD&D as they are in 5e; they are written together, to outline a specific character concept, and that is what's presented for the players to get to play.

If this sounds like it leads to boring, formulaic stories -- well, it could. But archetype-based stories, particularly adventure stories, are by no means necessarily bad. A story about a mysterious and knowledgeable old wizard; a naive-but-determined farmboy full of destiny and potential; a reckless rogue, slick but sometimes bumbling, selfish but secretly loyal; a beautiful princess, charming and clever and sharp-tongued when she wishes to be -- it's a pulp novel full of stock characters and tropes. It's Star Wars. What makes Star Wars special is NOT that its characters are specific, convoluted, or entirely original. What makes it special is that the specific instantiation of these characters, the little things that make Luke Skywalker be Luke Skywalker and not any other callow farmboy. Star Wars uses these archetypes well, and that makes them deeply satisfying. THAT'S the kind of story ethic behind AD&D.

First edition D&D has a reputation of being all about combat, and not about story at all. And on the surface, it's somewhat true: AD&D's rules are also highly combat-based. This isn't because players were expected to only do combat and dungeon crawls, and never roleplay -- but it WAS expected that, by signing on to play D&D, players were most interested in a campaign of exploration and fighting towards some fanciful goal. There was an element of buy-in from the start. The game was (and still very much is), at its core, about going on a quest.

The thing to remember, though, is that a quest IS a story. It's not the psychological trauma-unburdening character-driven narrative that pop culture might tell you to expect in modern D&D, but AD&D was every inch as story-based as the game's ever been. The stories being told were a little different, but with a very similar root.

The 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide is actually full of information about how to set up a world and stock it with people, political factions, and socioeconomic logistics. There are extensive rules about how high-level adventurers become part of the political fabric of the realm, building forts and amassing followers and making names for themselves. (Here, again, we see echoes of AD&D's forebearers in war games, and certain elements of the game that are all but gone from modern D&D.)

What there AREN'T a lot of rules about, on the other hand, are things like skill checks. There's no "persuasion" or "investigation" in AD&D, no list of specific things players can do and how good they are at them. Aside from combat and a small handful of specific non-combat activities, discretion over the success or failure of just about anything was left up to the DM. A DM was always free to call for a dice roll, and could set an arbitrary target number for success at any activity, but the rules also don't say they have to. To see if the characters persuade the barmaid to give them a hand, the players would have to be persuasive. To find the hidden clue in the cluttered chamber, the players might have to describe themselves looking in the right place.

In other words, there are relatively few rules for activities outside of combat, not because those activities were expected to be absent, but because they were expected to be unpredictable. How much exploration, and what players had to explore; what NPCs to interact with, and how they might react to being spoken to; what factions might exist, what moral quandaries could unfold, even the goal and big bad guy of the whole campaign -- the original sourcebooks for AD&D offer at best some very general advice, and NO hard and fast rules. That was for players and DMs to decide.

Many players and DMs, I know, fell on the side of engaging in relatively little worldbuilding complexity outside of the very mechanically-crunchy dungeon crawl. What little we see from the campaigns in ST is certainly mostly combat-oriented. And yet there are also hints of storylines happening off camera. Season 1's one-day eight-hour adventure was probably mostly dungeon crawl. Season 4's campaign takes most of a school year, until the players recognize the members of the cult they've been chasing for months, and know Vecna lore that would only have been published in one or two places anywhere by then, which means they probably learned it in-game. We don't see a lot of evidence of specific character plotlines -- in fact, repeatedly we're shown that the Party's characters share names with their players, making the whole thing even more clearly a big kids' game of let's-pretend. But that doesn't mean there's not a story.

So in short, the original game of D&D is built for epic quests, founded in very specific archetypes, but with the space for just about infinite in variation within that framework. That's what the Stranger Things kids are playing.

(And with this posted, I can start writing about the individual classes these kids are playing and what that says about each of them.)

[op3ra]

two EARLY early rusty pfps of mine.........these are so old it feels like they're from another dimension at this point. both are from september 2022 or so

[apostacism]

i can’t find it on the wiki but i swear i read that if you bring oghren he’s like hmmm yup this has been sitting on top of a raw lyrium vein this whole time. so probably the most plausible explanation it is an object that was very loved and revered which probs attracted the relevant fade spirits for healing energies, and then fermenting in wizard juice for decades turbo powered it up

yess okay great perfect. someone else corroborated this in the notes of the post and also i have a vague memory now that someone said something of this happening to me. love this for all of us. i am now going to believe that the creators of the gauntlet were exactly as much cultists worshiping a symbol disconnected from any physical andraste as their later descendants were.