#to be able to win which is actually a good thing !!! not to be a +/- watcher but him just being on the floor opens up so much space for

[negrowhat]

I need you to talk more abt phayurain's d/s dynamic pleaseeee🤚😭😭

Hi Anon!!!!!!!!!!!!! We can chat about PayuRain's dynamic!!!! But I do want to first say that I am no expert in D/s dynamics as like...a k!nk we're just talking about their relationship in general.

I think Payu finds Rain to be the perfect mix of bratty and submissive. I actually think he prefers Rain to be more bratty than submissive, but only slightly. Payu enjoys keeping Rain in check as much as he enjoys keeping Rain happy. He enjoys punishing Rain as much as he enjoys rewarding him and praising him. In the end everything balances out perfectly for him.

He seemed to only have a few behaviors that he just wouldn't accept from Rain in their day-to-day lives, which he made clear when they were courting. No impolite or disrespectful speech and no cursing at him. That's it! He made it clear that he liked bratty boys, not rude ones. I'm specifically talking about the stall scene in ep 2.

Everything else Rain did was very much, 'Try it and see what happens.'

And I love the way Payu could get Rain to speak to him politely. That stall scene was actually so insanely sexually charged. The way Payu used his dominant presence to get Rain to submit to him and say what he wanted him to say. He was either going to get Rain to ask (in the correct way) to be released or have that boy nut in his trousers right there. Either way was a win for Payu and he would leave such a lasting impression on Rain. In that stall Rain got a full crash course on the type of person Payu was and boy did he fucking like it.

Rain found himself submitting quite frequently because he peeped how Payu responded to his vulgar speech. He learned that with Payu there was a right way to approach him and a wrong way and honestly the challenge was to gauge just how wrong the wrong way was.

Either Payu was going to ignore him until he came correctly or Payu was going to push his many undiscovered buttons until he behaved. The latter is what Rain was aiming for every time he acted out. Rain enjoyed that taming as much as Payu liked to tame him. Rain enjoyed it so much that he found himself thinking about how Payu dealt with his disrespect nonstop. He liked being punished by Payu.

Once Rain learned Payu's dealbreakers he was able to take back some of his control in the way he responded to Payu. Rain learned quickly that when he went from good boy to bratty boy the situation could go one of two ways: either Payu was going to bend over backwards to make Rain happy or he was going to punish Rain back into his submissive boy. And that is what Rain found to be fun.

Rain did a lot of things to deliberately challenge Payu because he wanted to see how far he could take his naughty behavior before he could get Payu to put him back in his place. We see it a lot after they actually get together. Payu would give him warnings that he would ignore on purpose. He liked being handled by Payu. He liked being a brat to Payu knowing Payu would punish him to make him submit again.

Like when Payu took Rain on their movie date and he told Rain keep his hands in appropriate places or suffer the consequences. And the second they were off on Payu's bike what did Rain do?? Fondle that man's thighs the whole ride. Outright defiance with the expectations of being handled later. He also mentioned being a good boy to Payu all the time after Payu mentioned he wanted to be the one to straighten Rain out when he acted out.

Or like in ep 6 when he straight up told that man to "fuck him" in such a taunting and vulgar tone. Under normal circumstances the way in which he was speaking would be a no-go, but in the middle of sex??? Payu loved it, probably made him harder. But it could be something Payu would punish Rain for later.

Rain is very much aware that Payu likes to dominate him and he likes to give Payu a reason to want to dominate him.

Like in the special ep where Rain used his bratty behavior to get out of doing something he didn't want to do. That whole Daddy couch thing was something carefully crafted by Rain. He called Payu 'Daddy' knowing full well the type of reaction he would get from that man since he never called Payu that before. You can literally see Rain smiling the entire time he's insisting on calling Payu 'Daddy' because he knows Payu is about to wear him out and therefore he won't have to read. A win-win situation. Rain may have his blonde moments but he knows what he's doing when it comes to getting the right reaction from Payu. He knows Payu like the back of his hand.

In all honesty Rain holds so much power in their relationship because he knows that Payu is a dom and he loves that Payu is a dom but Rain knows he has the choice on whether he wants to submit or not. He knows that if he thinks Payu is being too much then all he has to do is say the word and Payu will turn into the man who would do anything to make him happy.

Somewhere in their home there's a room filled with costumes for Payu to wear solely for Rain's enjoyment and I'm telling you some of them are racy.

Rain knows that if he wanted to he could truly get that man to do any and everything for him. He could turn Payu into a total simp. But he respects and admires and loves Payu and therefore he is a good boy 85% of the time. They are so sweet together because they get exactly what they want to each other and have truly achieved a harmonious partnership.

Rain submits to Payu's dominating aura because he doesn't mind being dominated and he actually likes being under such a man that he finds to be absolutely perfect and worthy of a good boy such as himself.

So sure Payu is Rain's dom but let's be clear about who holds the power.

[tafaha-means-apple]

Good stuff. I think most of the disagreements come from whether or not to give riot the benefit of the doubt on interpretations and how much certain things are intentional attempts to undermine tropes vs just playing tropes completely straight. I'm definitely much more in the latter camp in that I don't think Riot is doing much more than using Ionia as a asian-trope factory to make popular champs at this point.

"Stripping Ionia of competency” man what does that mean? Ionia defeated Noxus in the war – by the way the Noxus fanboys hype it, it should not be.

There's a couple of ways that I meant that. You touched upon one right here in that Riot actively undermines Ionia's "win" over Noxus in several ways. They've actively established that Noxus wasn't even trying to win the 1st war in the first place. The Black Rose just used the war as cover to eliminate political rivals and search for/steal magical artifacts. Even "wins" like Irelia's stand at the Placidium have been undermined as Riot has also specified that The Black Rose specifically sabotaged Swain at that battle in order to cause him to lose. This stuff with Swain goes even further in that riot has even said that the Ionians didn't even end the war. The war only ended because Swain went back to Noxus, did a coup, and then chose to unilaterally *pause* (not end) the war. I don't think Riot actually wants the impression of the 1st war to be one of Ionian triumph, rather for it to exist as a contrast to Swain's new invasion where he and Noxus will actually try to win this time having cleaned house of the Rose.

Ionia didn't so much "win" in Riot's eyes as much as not-lose and this was even explicitly stated by one of the writers way back in 2018 (and who still works at riot as one of their head editors) when he basically said that the way he views the Ionia-Noxus conflict is in terms of "You can't ever beat Noxus all you can do is stop them again and again, and I find that inspiring". While arguably not entirely unrealistic it's also just really annoying how they only do this with Ionia.

Vietnam successfully fought off multiple colonial invasions, a Chinese invasion, ended the Cambodian genocide, and established themselves as important independent power on the world stage. Riot can't even muster up enough competency in Ionia to depict them as being much more than just farmers with pitchforks (see Awaken and many LOR cards) because the people at riot legitimately don't see Ionians as anything but an orientalist version of "noble savage" tropes.

Hell, the writer/creator of Jhin had to go to bat and fight with Riot to make him an Ionian at all because the people at riot didn't think that Ionia should be allowed to have guns or technology because they were the Asian region and Asian people don't have technology. Asian people are only allowed to use swords, magic, and martial arts. Odin here talking about wanting Jhin's weapons to be hextech in inspiration, but of a markedly non-piltovan design (that piltover wouldn't even be able to make themselves) to reflect the ingenuity and uniqueness of Ionians and that Asian cultures aren't just defined by western martial arts tropes and vague mysticisms.

Riot isn't making some statement trying to "question" the assumptions that technology is a biased metric for judging civilizational development. They just straight up don't think Asian people can have technology because of orientalist prejudices. We got the Jhin LOR cards which depicted some of the Kashuri technology but it's really clearly framed as an aberrant and evil thing (which is fine given that it's jhin, but less fine given that it makes Jhin's technology the exception that proves the rule that Ionians can't have any).

You mentioned that Ionia is more than just the invasion and has a rich and storied history, but they really don't. We know a grand total of 5 historical events prior to the war: The Vastaya'Shei'Rei fighting some group of "sky titans" 10,000+ years ago, Ivern cutting down the God Willow 9,000 years ago, Varus getting put in a well in Ionia 1,500 years ago, Syndra getting put into a coma some centuries ago, and Zed and Shen capturing Jhin. That's it, and I wouldn't call any of these events particularly relevant nor illuminating for Ionian history or society. They are a random hodgepodge of unconnected events with no consistent through line. The war is what defines the vast bulk of Ionian lore and champions and I find that quite infantilizing. It's an entire lore dedicated to making Mathew Perry the most important person in Japan's entire history. Riot certainly sympathizes with Ionians, but they don't really see them as an independent or particularly deep people with a history and culture all their own.

Riot in 10 years hasn't put any real legwork into making Ionia a place with depth and importance. More often than not Ionian lore is used to provide Noxian characters/Noxus region as a whole with plot and emotional development (See Swain's lore, Riven's lore, and, without going into too many spoilers, a few things that happen in the Ambessa novel). At this point it's hard to for me not to see it as much more than just their Noxus-fetishisms and latent orientalist prejudices. Noxians are the main characters and the Ionians are the Native Americans in Dances With Wolves who exist to push them onto their character arcs.

I disagree with the sentiment that having a different culture that doesn’t rely on industrialization is a “sheltered, naïve” culture when the lore even is explicit as to why the culture exists the way it does. It’s a land that is based on balance and any extreme measure is met in kind. There’s also the rather dicey implication in general that a culture in which there isn’t technology or certain advancements is seen as in the Western world these cultures are “primitive.” Like we’d have to go into the concept of “civilization” and “modernity” and the Western centric, white supremacist implications of the definition of what is “modern” or “civilization” vs “wild” and “nature” that “has to be controlled” and how “modern civilization is control over nature.”

I agree but I'm just telling you what riot already does in the lore. Repeatedly Noxus is portrayed as bringing "modernity" to the world and that the world is unironically better off for it. Both in terms of governance, trade, and industry, but also socially in the form of tearing down "backwards" cultural institutions and replacing them with more "pragmatic" and "enlightened" ones. There's a multitude of Noxus stories and lore pieces that do this (The Principles of Strength, the Garen Novella, the Noxus Tales of Runeterra short, etc.) and every time Riot plays it 100% straight. Noxus *is* bringing modernity according to Riot and they do not see that as something to question or even take a cynical view of because it is a form of modernity that the writers consider good.

Ionia's lore doesn't just depict it as naive and sheltered because of its lack of industrialization (which I agree *shouldn't* be a factor, but Riot doesn't actually ever go deep at all into how Ionians don't need industrialization because of magic and whatnot so what we get left with is depictions of Ionia that don't showcase it as a unique civilization, but as a hodgepodge of rural village and poor farmers which will carry esp to a modern audience notions of simplicity and under-development). It goes even further than that by depicting them as isolationist pacifists who didn't "understand how the world works" who must be taught by Noxus or die. This theme is shown in Yi's lore in "Poetry With a Blade", it's in Kennen's lore where it remarks that "There have been many threats to the Kinkou over the centuries, but none as grave as the Noxian invasion and its aftermath" (Shen's lore before riot retconned it several times had him fighting off entire armies of Demons btw, but nah, Noxus is apparently the worst thing Ionia has ever faced ever in 10,000 years of history), Sett's lore where Ionians gained "a new bloodlust they never knew they had before", etc.

This doesn't even get into the physical level of the binary they created wherein Ionia's culture was apparently so fragile that after 10,000 years of flourishing it was nearly wiped out in barely 5 years.

All of this draws heavily from Orientalist norms about East Asia. The superstitious, mist filled lands, isolated from the world and filled with a barbaric and inscrutable people whose fate is to die to modernity for which they are unprepared for. It's like straight out of a diary entry from Richard Wellesley.

I do not get the impression this is Ionia’s first contact with Noxus or the outer world either either – Mel’s flashback speaks to as such, the Kirammans seem to come from there and maintain some contact – and they are not traditionally Ionian as such.

I can tell you every international interaction we have in the lore between Ionia and anywhere that isn't Noxus:

About 9,000 years before the "present" a guy named Ivern sailed from the Freljord and cut down the God Willow (Yggdrasill, basically) in Ionia

A Demacian noble family fostered some Ionian orphans who were escaping the Noxian war.

The Navori Brotherhood sends Jhin to intimidate some Piltovan clans who were selling arms to Ionia.

...that's it. Ionia really doesn't have much lore that isn't Noxus focused.

and how they behaved different in contrast to Noxus, and died for it. Irelia and her faction meeting Noxus in the middle to fight them can be also said, ironically, as symbolically balance itself

This gets to one of the core issues. Why is Noxus considered some indominable thing that Ionia must culturally balance itself with? Riot is like a bad Star Wars nerd with this where they really really really want the Sith to be "right" and for them to be affirmed of their values within the narrative. Other regions don't have to "balance" their cultures with Noxus. Why is it the Asian region that has to?

“emotional trauma response” – because they experienced a massive war where the land and people are destroyed, cities are leveled (genocides are even done with Wuju for example), people are left without much of anything, culture is lost – that they are not scarred by it? Scarred by the effects of the land? Do you expect them to get up by their bootstraps or something? Somehow not struggle with how they were before vs the things they are forced to be now, or even the factionalism as people come from a war differently – a war that was continent wide.

A lot of places in the lore experience war, struggle, and strife, but Ionia is the only one that is consistently depicted as having been emotionally broken by violence. Innocence Lost is a great theme for a story focusing on individuals but it's really infantilizing to extend that theme onto an entire continent of people (and particularly suspect given how it is the Asian coded region that is the one they chose for this depiction). It'd be better if there were at least some variety but there really isn't much of that in Ionia. The way Riot handles it borders more on trauma-fetishism than a genuine attempt to depict a place that has experienced warfare.

Thinking about Irelia and violence and how she both resents it and uses it as a balm for her pain. "Killing you won't bring them back, but it still felt good." She hates what she has been forced to become - something that goes against her family beliefs, but still cannot separate herself from it. There is a little part of her that enjoys it - the thousand pebbles to sink a warship line, the way she goads ppl into "dancing" with her - ie fighting. and so forth. She loathes it, but she can't help but enjoy it still.

And it's all a product of her being a soldier since she was 12. Something about the worse of one's tendencies being brought out in excruciating circumstances. And I say tendencies cause I still think of the line in Frostblade Irelia where she goes "Oh I just love the way blood pools on ice" which is just flat out unhinged, let alone violent. Not to mention her canonical anger issues, and there's always a link between anger and violence.

[elftwink]

to preface this post i am anti-advertising i think we should explode the entire industry but it's sooo funny when you people make posts like "and they don't even work!!" like. sorry to be the bearer of bad news but yes they do. that's why we have to put up with so many despite everyone hating them and thinking its annoying. because they actually work really well and make a shit load of money

[batsplat]

Sepang 2006: After an exhausting race, Valentino Rossi brings a chair to the podium and sits down. Loris Capirossi joins him to sit on his lap.

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent misc pictures

[dragonwysper]

Guys I win. I am packed and ready and all my assignments and finals are done and I have talked to my advisor and the only stuff left is things I have to do with my parents anyway. I get to relax and drink the hot chocolate I bought a few days ago and play Control and all is right with the world.

[slamrink]

klay 0 points but he looked sexygorgeous doing it + lockdown defense + mavs WIN and dubs clinch so im leaving here with something 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

[caterjunes]

we're gonna put our rats up for adoption at the animal rescue. things are. bad. we can't keep their cage clean. grayson gets exhausted taking them out to play and i rarely join bc i just feel empty or disgusted or i start sobbing or wind up in pain or exhausted myself. so they don't get the amount of human interaction they deserve/need.

i feel awful about it. i feel sick. i don't know the last time i've felt like such an abject failure. not just as a person responsible for small lives but as a partner. grayson gets such joy from these boys, and they are so sweet to us too. i just. i can't even take care of myself. it isn't fair. it's not fair.

[fingertipsmp3]

Why must dieting be absolutely fucking miserable

[pochapal]

had a migraine all day then sat in the shower for almost an hour rotating life is strange thoughts in my mind and now the headache's gone and i'm also mad

[knifegremliin]

spicy baby update

i managed to pet romy today, and she hunched down at first, but then she got back up and actually bumped her head into my hand! progress!

[fragmentedblade]

I've been reading about xiangqi a bit and now I'm even more obsessed with that one video of Jing Yuan

[justahumblememefarmer]

Putting some positivity out there about the election

Harris has raised a record amount of money from small donors after Biden dropped out, in addition to being able to access all the funds from their campaign they already had

Trump is deeply unpopular and people have already seen the chaos that 4 years of his presidency would bring. A lot of people have been energized to vote against him, even if they're not fond of Dems

Polling showed a red wave for Republicans in the 2022 midterms, and yet they only barely had control of the House, and couldn't even agree on a Speaker for a historic amount of time. Dems also increased their lead in the Senate. Historically, midterms favor the opposition party and have lower turnout, so this is a good sign for the House in 2024

Dems are fighting back in swing states. PA and GA both put in Democratic senators in the midterms

In my home state of PA, I am from Bucks County, which is a swing county for the state. Moms for Libery took over the school board and used it to attack queer students, enact book bans, and funnel money to themselves and the superintendent. At the most recent election, Dems turned out and took back every single open seat, ousting the board and superintendent. Worry about similar takeovers in surrounding school boards also increased turnout

Abortion rights are on the ballot in many states, which has been a winning issue for Dems and increased turnout

Republicans were prepared to attack a feeble old Biden who isn't the strongest speaker. I don't think they expected him to actually drop out, and they now have to put an 78 year old convicted felon up against a prosecutor

Awareness of Project 2025 and it's contents has entered the public sphere and is being much more openly discussed on the news. While Trump has insisted he has nothing to do with it, most of the authors worked in his administration and Trump has worked closely with the Heritage foundation

Feel free to add more things on this thread, but the most important thing is to get out there and VOTE

Vote for President

Vote for Senators

Vote for Congresspeople

Vote in your local elections

Vote Blue down ballot

[the-physicality]

i don't even know what to say

i had a bad feeling about this game ever since i went to watch and it was on *m*z*n pr*me

what happened to the offense

what happened to the defense [what happened to the defense is that atlanta has one 3 point threat and apparently washington has 8?

monique i thought had a very good game

celeste did well

natasha mack again had good impact

honestly i thought we took better care of the ball tonight than we have in a while but the shots were just not falling

i'm still annoyed at nate's rotations and honestly i think they are fucking up the first quarters

like i get that he's working on rotations or what ever but if people are getting points [the first points, the only points so far] maybe keep those people in instead of pulling them halfway through the quarter

i want to say this politely: it seems like he has pre planned rotations that he's going to implement regardless of the context of the game -_-

like we lost the 1st by 9, we lost the 2nd by 9, we lost the 3rd by 4 and we won the 4th by 9. thus the game by 13

if we lose the 1st by 5 instead that means that we've either played better defense or scored more points which keeps us hotter going into the 2nd, making it easier to play well, etc.

[byoldervine]

Types Of Writer’s Block (And How To Fix Them)

1. High inspiration, low motivation. You have so many ideas to write, but you just don’t have the motivation to actually get them down, and even if you can make yourself start writing it you’ll often find yourself getting distracted or disengaged in favour of imagining everything playing out

Try just bullet pointing the ideas you have instead of writing them properly, especially if you won’t remember it afterwards if you don’t. At least you’ll have the ideas ready to use when you have the motivation later on

2. Low inspiration, high motivation. You’re all prepared, you’re so pumped to write, you open your document aaaaand… three hours later, that cursor is still blinking at the top of a blank page

RIP pantsers but this is where plotting wins out; refer back to your plans and figure out where to go from here. You can also use your bullet points from the last point if this is applicable

3. No inspiration, no motivation. You don’t have any ideas, you don’t feel like writing, all in all everything is just sucky when you think about it

Make a deal with yourself; usually when I’m feeling this way I can tell myself “Okay, just write anyway for ten minutes and after that, if you really want to stop, you can stop” and then once my ten minutes is up I’ve often found my flow. Just remember that, if you still don’t want to keep writing after your ten minutes is up, don’t keep writing anyway and break your deal - it’ll be harder to make deals with yourself in future if your brain knows you don’t honour them

4. Can’t bridge the gap. When you’re stuck on this one sentence/paragraph that you just don’t know how to progress through. Until you figure it out, productivity has slowed to a halt

Mark it up, bullet point what you want to happen here, then move on. A lot of people don’t know how to keep writing after skipping a part because they don’t know exactly what happened to lead up to this moment - but you have a general idea just like you do for everything else you’re writing, and that’s enough. Just keep it generic and know you can go back to edit later, at the same time as when you’re filling in the blank. It’ll give editing you a clear purpose, if nothing else

5. Perfectionism and self-doubt. You don’t think your writing is perfect first time, so you struggle to accept that it’s anything better than a total failure. Whether or not you’re aware of the fact that this is an unrealistic standard makes no difference

Perfection is stagnant. If you write the perfect story, which would require you to turn a good story into something objective rather than subjective, then after that you’d never write again, because nothing will ever meet that standard again. That or you would only ever write the same kind of stories over and over, never growing or developing as a writer. If you’re looking back on your writing and saying “This is so bad, I hate it”, that’s generally a good thing; it means you’ve grown and improved. Maybe your current writing isn’t bad, if just matched your skill level at the time, and since then you’re able to maintain a higher standard since you’ve learned more about your craft as time went on

[prokopetz]

"But doesn't having a notion of 'balanced' combat inherently imply that all combat encounters are expected to be fair and winnable" well, no – it implies only that the GM has the ability to know whether a given combat encounter is fair and winnable.

There's a story that's been going around for decades about a Dungeons & Dragons party who encountered a large room full of treasure while exploring a dungeon. Immediately suspicious, they asked their GM a series of detailed questions about the room, but no obvious dangers were identified. Satisfied, they moved into the room – and were immediately set upon and eaten by the dragon that had been sitting atop the pile of treasure the whole time, which the GM hadn't mentioned because the players never specifically asked about the presence of living creatures within the room.

While this is obviously an extreme and ridiculous case, it illustrates an important point: as GM, you're the group's eyes and ears. If you don't describe something, the player characters literally can't see it – that dragon was effectively invisible from their perspective. The trick is that active malice isn't the only way to invisible-dragon your players; a group can also find themselves invisible-dragoned because the GM simply failed to provide sufficient information for the risk in question to be identified. This can happen through neglect, but it can also happen because the GM themself was unaware that the risk was present.

Now, hold on, you might be saying: the GM "plays" the entire world. How is it possible for the GM not to know that a risk is present? Well, that brings us back around to the subject of combat balance.

A game in which "balanced" combat is a meaningful thing to discuss is typically going to be one in which both the players and the GM are actually making strategic, tactical, and/or logistical decisions, rather than merely producing a description of their characters making such decisions. Without a good handle on the interplay of these decisions, it's completely possible for the GM to be wrong about the level of risk the scenario they've constructed entails.

That's actually pretty critical, because even if you don't care about the game being fair and winnable (and that's a perfectly valid stance), your players are still depending on you to be their eyes and ears, and to give them enough information to make good decisions about whether the fight in front of them is one they can win. A game where not every fight is expected to be winnable needs to be a game where the players have the opportunity to walk away.

No matter how objective you try to be, your own sense of the answer to that question is inevitably going to colour how you communicate about it. You being wrong about the level of risk at hand inherently increases the chance that your players will make bad choices. The party eating a TPK because they made a stupid decision is one thing; the party eating a TPK because they made a decision that looked reasonable from their perspective based on your unwitting miscommunication of the level of risk involved is quite another!

Sure, once the dice hit the table I'm probably going to realise that I fucked up, and I can adjust things on the fly to bring the level of risk that's actually present in line with the level of risk I communicated – but that's extra work I don't need with everything else that's on my plate. And that's a best-case scenario; if I'm running the game for a hardcore let-the-dice-fall-where-they-may group (and such groups tend to have a pretty significant overlap with groups that are cool with not every fight being winnable), I may not be able to adjust the fight's parameters on the fly without violating the social contract of the table.

Basically, whenever I see an OSR game with tactically crunchy combat brag about how its author never even thinks about "balance", what that's telling me is that running this game is going to create a whole lot of extra work for me as a GM. This is not a selling point.