#though never say never imo!

[moonlightsapphic]

I saw you like sapphic fiction and Taylor Swift and I've just gotta ask you: have you heard of Burn the House Down by Kenna Jenkins? It's an alternate history novel abt the 1st woman president and her secret sapphic relationship/bearded marriage with her mlm best friend and has massive Taylor Swift vibes (especially anti hero, last great American dynasty, gold rush, illicit affairs, I Did Something Bad, and champagne problems). It also has a subplot about arson at the White House and ft. An entirely queer main cast and really fleshed out characters!

Ooooh I’ve never heard of this but I’m definitely putting it on my list! I’ve also just started Stars Collide by Rachel Lacey, which also has Taylor Swift vibes! Thanks so much for the thoughtful rec :D

[wonder-worker]

Wild how we know that Elizabeth Woodville was officially appointed to royal councils in her own right during her husband’s reign and fortified the Tower of London in preparation of a siege while 8-months pregnant and had forces gathering at Westminster “in the queen’s name” in 1483 – only for NONE of these things to be even included, let alone explored, in the vast majority of scholarship and historical novels involving her.

[pinkfey]

remember how in dao there were always like multiple flirty options u could just spring on ur love interest and it wasn't something that was brushed past it would stop a conversation dead in its tracks to have a cute secondary flirty offshoot with small variations dependent on the flirty option u initially chose with a unique course correction to get back on topic after...... yeah.

[fussystreetlight]

I know antis like throwing the term logical fallacy around, but as someone who had to take a philosophy class, antis would have an aneurysm in that class.

One time we had a discussion about incest. The professor asked us why it was wrong. When we responded it was because of inbreeding and that a child would be hurt, he asked us "what if the couple couldn't have kids?". That was how the class went. We'd come up with a reason and he'd ask us to think about if that context was removed and whether or not we'd still react the same without that context.

He wanted to teach us to think about why things are right or and wrong and what effect context would have on our morals and perceptions. Because things aren't wrong because they're wrong, and we're not born knowing right from wrong even if we do have enough empathy to not want to hurt someone.

I think classes like this are useful for teaching critical thinking skills, but from what I've seen of antis, they'd probably freak out over someone talking about bad things in even the slightest positive light...

[steelthroat]

I'd always thought I preferred the messiest, most chaotic and fucked up people but with a grain of wil and spark that makes them do something over passive people that do nothing wrong, that don't care about anything but themselves and that never help...

AND I WAS RIGHT

People who are willing to try, that give a shit, that MEAN IT when they try to do something, smuah smuah come here here’s your smooches smuah.

[harmonysanreads]

Completely random anon here.

As someone who hasn't gotten to Amphoreus yet, it's fun to see people's reactions to Phainon out of context. Of course, this means I'm getting a very distorted view of his character. Just based off reactions, I'm kinda seeing an overlap in personality between Phainon and Childe. How much of that is true, I'll see when I actually get to Amphoreus.

I'm interested to see how that distortion lines up with him once I officially meet him.

Childe? I won't lie, I had to pause and think when I saw this lol. I think I see why you got that perception, yes. There are some surface level traits that appear similar and their entrances also fall into a genre. Phainon lacks that particular battle-hunger of Childe though and is more stable than him... for now.

Lol is this why you ended up liking Phainon too? @teabutmakeitazure

[leroibobo]

the paradesi synagogue in kochi, kerala, india. the first synagogue on the site, built by the city's longstanding malabari jewish community, was destroyed by portugese who'd colonized the area in their persecution of locals. it was rebuilt in 1568 by spanish and portugese jews who fled persecution and later expulsion, hence the name "paradesi" ("foreign" in malayalam).

these sephardic jews and a community of jews of mixed african and european descent who were formerly enslaved ("meshuchrarim", "freedmen" in hebrew) joined the malabari jewish community of kochi and somewhat integrated. they were later joined by some iraqi, persian, yemenite, afghan, and dutch sephardic jews. the middle eastern and european jews were considered "white jews" and permitted malabari jews and meshuchrarim to worship in the synagogue. however, in what seems like a combination of local caste dynamics and racism, malabari jews were not allowed full membership. meshuchrarim weren't allowed in at all, but were instead made to sit outside during services and not allowed their own place of worship or other communal rights.

as the "white jews" tended to be rather wealthy from trade, this synagogue contains multiple antiquities. they include belgian glass chandeliers on its walls, hand-painted porcelain tiles from china on its floors, and an oriental rug that was gifted by ethiopian emperor haile selassie.

[rexcaliburechoes]

does anyone else find it fucked up that moon's friends protect themselves from her with the skyfire at the end of moon rising?

[lesvianism]

i feel like people wouldn’t have been so shitty in regards to violet if the game was more transparent about the issues within violet and minerva’s relationship before she was taken.

like i’m pretty sure the game developers did mention how vi wasn’t really getting the treatment she should’ve been (??) in the relationship, and you do see it in certain scenes, but those scenes are mostly in the romance violet route, so people who already decided to hate her and only play the louis route didn’t get to see them.

[selfinflictedgunshotwound]

i'm kind of amazed how most of the stardew marriage candidates just want you to be their manic pixie dream whatever by agreeing with everything they like and plying them with compliments or praise or whatever (which is fine but a bit. Much) but for shane his romance is just you being there for him while he figures his own shit out... dunno why i never wanted to romance him before he's so good

[frogspawned]

pet peeve is when a story tells us something is aberrant, but it seems to matter more about who does the behavior than the behavior itself. rorschach in snyder's watchmen isn't going too far; we watch nite owl and silk spectre ii snap necks and arms with gleeful, loving abandon, in slow motion no less, while they lecture the audience about rorschach's violence. heroes frequently torture the plot contrivance out of a villain and then moralize to the camera when the villains do the same. indominus rex's killing spree doesn't shock or appall me; all the jurassic world dinosaurs act like mindless killing machines, and the camera lingers, rapturous, on their cruelty. it's not an outlier. there's nothing interesting about it beyond as a set piece.

in a better script, the indominus rex would have had pathos; a chimera made for entertainment, for profit, stitched together with no regard for itself and placed in a lonely box. a freak among freaks. of course it would be mad. but the film wasn't interested in it as an animal, or a character, only as a moving piece of scenery for people to scream at or breathe tensely while it can clearly smell and reach them but doesn't, because it isn't a character and doesn't have motivations.

it's just sort of boring, i suppose. it tries like all other empty drab things do to cover it with bombast and roaring and soaring brassy scores but it's just sort of dull. a sprawl of nothing.

conversely peele's nope is a transcendent monster movie, imo, because it thinks about the the whys and hows, how jean jacket perceives the world, how the world perceives her, and lets that shape the narrative as much as jupe or emerald or gordy. they consulted biologists and behaviorists, digging into the meat of it. the creature as a camera as an animal as a device. nope has layers. it takes its own insane premise seriously, and has something to say, and is a goddamn good movie. i forgot where i was going with this.

[elftwink]

been learning to play ironsworn (gritty fantasy ttrpg which you can play with a gm but is mostly suited for solo or small group co-op gmless play) after having the rulebook pdf for several years (stars finally aligned to remove invisible thing blocking me from reading it idk) because i'm on another solo ttrpg kick & i don't know what took me so long to get around to this game because it genuinely is exactly what i was looking for. years ago when i was playing through solo 5e modules i should have just been playing ironsworn (believe it or not, 5e isn't very suited to solo play and is extremely clunky when you try lol).

also though i have dabbled in some other solo ttrpgs, a considerable amount of them are journaling games which is fun but imo considerably more work (usually by the time i'm a quarter of the way through the journal entry, i know how to entire scene played out and i want to move on to the next gameplay thing, so i get frustrated and bored quickly. it feels like when you solve a level in a video game but don't have the coordination to pull off the necessary move so you have to spend 20 extra minutes doing something you already figured out), so i really appreciate like not needing to write something for the game to progress (ive been taking notes for my own record since im playing solo and thus am not really out loud roleplaying the way you do in a group, but i definitely could do that instead and not take notes and the game would still function perfectly)

& ive been playing by myself but also in the past ive played a lot of ttrpgs in very small groups which has been other games but is mostly dnd and like. we also should have been playing ironsworn so that having a gm was not necessary. have definitely played games where we had to adapt the rules soooo much to do something that is just base game included in ironsworn. plus it's rules-light enough to do pretty complex moves that pose difficulties in bulkier games (ever introduced someone to dnd and they tell you they want to do a sick backflip and catch something and then attack and you have to tell them that will require several different consecutive rolls and some creative liberties with how the rules are 'supposed' to let you move? you can just Do That in ironsworn. use the strike move and describe it. done!)

the one thing is that although it's rules-light enough to theoretically play any setting or genre (some with more difficulty than others), ive found so far that like... the grittiness and sense of threat is very built into the mechanics so that would be sort of difficult to work around or change (but i think it's great from a game design perspective). what i mean is like, okay: you start with 5 max hp. there isn't really a way to raise this max hp, you just slowly gain abilities (assets) that make you less likely to have to lose the hp in the first place, or that make it easier to recover. when you encounter foes, you rank them on a scale of 1 -5, and enemies on the lowest side of this scale do one harm to you, while enemies on the highest side do five harm to you. so even though encountering an epic enemy won't always be deadly due to the assets you have, they are ALWAYS capable of taking you down to 0 hp with one good hit. so the feeling of threat is much more present compared to games where your character starts to be able to just tank and push through a failure or huge threat.

admittedly also i'm playing solo, im still learning how to balance combat, and also i built a character who has NO combat talents and iron (the close quarters fighting stat) is one of my lowest stats so i personally am under much more threat than if you built a character who knew how to fight or who could do deadly harm. but also the other thing about combat is it's extremely difficult to maintain control of the fight; you have to score a strong hit to do it on basically all moves, and there's a really limited pool of moves available when you don't have the initiative, and obviously none of them really favour you. i don't know that this makes combat genuinely more difficult, but it does make you feel like the fight is always about to spiral out of your control. every second you let it drag without decisive action feels like it brings you closer to dying. like i said, this is a feature of the game design and not a problem in any way. just thinking about it because when i was initially learning i was going to try to supplant it into a homebrew fantasy world of my own but the tone just wouldn't be right. and that it is somewhat difficult to replicate the kind of worlds that i typically play or run for dnd, which tend to lean somewhat sillier and definitely much higher fantasy

but i like to try new things and tbh especially in dnd i find that i very rarely feel that sense of threat and when i do feel it, it has nothing at all to do with the actual mechanics and reality of the combat and everything to do with how well the dm sells it to me and makes it sound and feel scary and dangerous. which is a testament to what a good gm can do for you but i do appreciate the threat feeling more built-in and also being actually real.

[muckmagister]

what's your problem. you hate furries?

yeah i saved a draft of this ask and then forgot about it. and also this other one

whoops!

anyway. still not a furry but i recently had the epiphany that my fursona would probably have to be a horse. or perhaps a deer

you see, it was pointed out to me recently after i told a story about how i once tried skipping in the pacer test to see if it was more efficient and got laughed at.., they called me a horse😔 but basically: also likes oats + spooks and runs away so fast. so yeah, i'm doomed

[britneyshakespeare]

i am at the looking-at-dolls-as-self-soothing part of the night. i definitely wanna beef up my bratz collection since unboxing my alwayz bratz yasmin was just like... oh... oh man... and... and i didn't think it'd be like that for me man i didn't think i had as much nostalgia for bratz as i actually do not just buy owning some but by touching them and playing w their clothes and their hair.

and one of my issues of course is that i'm a redhead and as a redhead my Default Lookalike Doll is meygan (not that having a doll that looks like you is the most important part of bratz, but it is so much of the fun right? the fact that there's a character out there for just about everyone?). and i like meygan as a character well enough, that's not the issue. but of the meygan dolls that have been reproduced, there's none of them that are like, hardcore needs for me except for sweetheart meygan. and i did not buy sweetheart meygan in time. i was not really collecting at that point. that was like 2022. i had a few... na na na surprise dolls at that time. which is funny bc i have four of those that i got all either on clearance or w giftcards and i do really like them even though a lot of doll collectors thought they were kinda dumb, and they were. i just liked the gimmick of the fabric bodies and there were just enough dolls i thought were really cute that i kinda caved at one point. i also knew it was a brand i wouldn't go overboard with. anyway. we were talking about meygan...

sorry meygan back to you girl. i know original 2000s bratz that have not yet been reproduced at crazy expensive on the secondhand market and it's genuinely out of control. but sweet heart meygan, both the repro and the original, are selling for triple digits on mercari, ebay, what have you. that's just ridiculous. frankly. i'm not buying her at that. i don't even like her enough to hunt for her regularly, if that's how it's gonna be. there are plenty of more readily-available bratz dolls that are either regular retail price or clearancing online andin stores. did you guys know alwayz bratz jade is going for 15 bucks on amazon right now? that's crazy. the other always bratz dolls aren't going for that low if they're even marked down yet. that release wasn't even that long ago. anyway i'm thinking of getting jade from that line bc i know some ppl thought that alwayz jade was a let-down, but i thought she was cute. yasmin was my favorite from that line and that's why i got her but jade was my second fave there easily.

i also wanna get the kumi they reproduced sometime and maybe girls nite out cloe since i see she's still available. it's funny there aren't that many core girls i've wanted from the repros but if i go for any of the cloes, new or old, it's gotta be girls nite out. cloe isn't even usually my favorite character no offense blondes she's just kinda. she's just kinda cloe to me. idk i love her but i'm not gagged over her most of the time. these are still bratz standardz we're talking about here so obviously i love her.

there's nothing going on in the world right now other than my bratz dolls. and if someone we won't mention wins the election, i'm definitely going doll crazy. i'm gonna be buying dolls after this anyway, but i'm gonna justify spending an unusual, nearly-irresponsible amount of money. you know. bc i'm an adult and i can.

hey also and of all the lines they could've reproduced why is their most recent slumber party? why? why? when the poll posted by mga had tokyo a go go WINNING? bc tokyo a go go is the correct option? i mean the slumber party line is cute and i like the base dolls and the accessories especially the stuffed animals are cute. but. everyone knows the bratz audience these days is adult collectors. which adult collectors are losing their minds over dolls in pajamas and bathrobes? again they're CUTE. but why. also why did they reproduce bratz babyz when those things were nightmare fuel

[spikes-got-anger-issues]

I have to say that some of my favorite text posts I've ever made are in my next collection and I'm excited to share them

[duskargentum]

One thing that really had to grow on me about KCD from the first time I played it up through all the times I had to play it was the fixed protagonist. Many RPGs these days allow you to create your own character, their appearance, their personality, their skillset, etc., but there's always a slight disconnect, which I think people realize but tend to look past. The disconnect, of course, is that, when you play these custom characters, you are inhabiting a husk and forcing your decisions onto it. This means that the design of the game, from the dialogue options to the character builds to the level of connection to the other characters in the story, they're all at odds with the vision the player has in their head of how the game is being played. In other words, in being able to inhabit a character in a story, your making those decisions WITH them, and not OVER them. KCD railroads your character customization to the point of not being able to choose your own name, appearance, personality, character build (to an extent), and forces you to *become* Henry of Skalitz. Dialogue always seems like something Henry would say, the different skills all seem like things Henry would spend his time doing and improving, characters always seem like the type of people would have connections to. Henry is not inserted into this game world in the same way a custom character would have been. He lived in it, he forged connections, he built character motivations, he experienced events and formed opinions on them. The canon of the story is not always at odds with the perception of events that each player has. Granted, this means that Henry's life and feelings and experiences will almost always be the same, but it does mean that you get to live it all alongside him, instead of instead of him.

This maybe isn't so much a strength of KCD in particular and may be more of a commentary on fixed protagonists in RPGs in general, but I will give the credit to KCD that it does it well enough that it inspired me to form a more cohesive opinion on the difference between a fixed and custom protagonist in an RPG.