#very long posts

[eleemosynecdoche]

ngl you're vastly overexaggerating the racist aspects of prax if you think they're as bad as korerala. even the faux native thing isn't as shitty as...literally nearly everything about the later.

I didn't say that the reason Prax sucks was solely because it was racist. (Although Prax is pretty racist when you step back and evaluate that it's a part of Glorantha where the primary population is faux-Amerindian *and* Mad Max postapocalyptic raiders, where the basic modalities are of the American Old West, where the imagery and worldview of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories also come into play, and then there's, as a tiny part of that, Argrath and the whole White Bull thing.) I mean, I played a game with lengthy sections in Caladraland, the presence of overt racism in the source content isn't the root problem I mean when I say a place "doesn't exist" as a joke.

Prax and Kralorela, to me, suck because they don't have playable content that I'm interested in. Prax has playable content that is entirely focused on Pavis and the places downriver of Pavis, and none of that really interests me. (In fact, Sun County/Mo Baustra as presented textually could be just about anywhere, because there's not that much about how its people interact with the Animal Nomads. This, too, is unfortunately downstream of the racism in the content there.) But stepping outside of that zone and wading directly into the Animal Nomads, the conflicts are over... what? Which of the big five is on top for the next little while? There's microscale content for, idk, fantasy life-sim stuff, but unfortunately the whole "strong and hard barbarian savages" element becomes really damaging there, because you're playing people who exist in an environment where cooperation across ethnic boundaries is downplayed and submerged.

I'm also, steelmanning the position of the hypothetical Prax defenders out there, straightforwardly ignoring the nu-Chaosium intent, which is that the Lunars conducted a genocide against the Bison and Impala People after First Moonbroth and then Argrath conducted a more thorough genocide against the Sables after Second Moonbroth, killing 40% of the adult population. I am ignoring this because it is content that goes so far out of tone for Prax that it's functionally gibberish. Metaplot metastasizing. But I'm also not that interested in playing with that kind of content either.

So that's Prax- I think Prax sucks because playing there with the content provided doesn't do anything which interests me, and it's also reveling in brutality in a way I find distasteful.

Turning to Kralorela, yeah, it's cartoonishly racist. I don't know if there's a clear way to quantify these things even in theory, but Kralorela is down there with Fonrit and Teleos and the Vadeli and Teshnos and, frankly, Pent as far as wanton racism baked into the content goes.

And Kralorela also does have a kind of proto-playable content thing going on, which is utterly fucking rancid because it's centered around a drug called "black lotus" and a guy named "Can Shu" who's positioned about where Manchuria would be and who's scheming to invade and overthrow Kralorela and ha ha ha, if you count the Kralori emperors they roughly match up with Chinese dynasties/Chinese states- and that's when I start screaming internally.

And yeah. Both of us could go on at length at how much racism is embedded in the content, and one area Kralorerla exceeds anywhere else in is that you really have to take a fire axe to almost all the names because of how they're pseudo-Mandarin (written in Wade-Giles or sub-Wade-Giles) rather than vague fantasy bullshit or recognizable words.

Setting that parade of misery aside, Kralorela is also fundamentally disconnected from the entire rest of the setting because it's built on the trope of Chinese isolationism, and that extends to the "East Isles"/Vithela which are ostensibly part of the same "zone", but which have significantly more interesting content on their surface. The Guide included a stream of racist vomit that attempted to lay out the desired metaplot for the whole area east of the Zola Fel, but it's metaplot and doesn't have more than the faintest hit of actual tensions or conflict you could play.

Also, Godunya is one of Greg Stafford's many self-inserts.

With that being said, I am now going to, out of sheer perversity, talk about the content in Kralorela that I think you could get to without too many swings of the fireaxe and which I think is interesting.

Kralorela has a pretty decent amount of pure fantasy content- chocobos! Bridges big enough to be entire cities stretched out across their length! Magical injection-molded fortifications!- that you could pick up and play with. Kralorela also has the advantage that there's a lot of external media you can use as a source for content once you've chopped away the vast majority of it. Cultivator novels aren't high art, but they're perfect to inject into Glorantha.

There's also- There's a way in which Kralorela having thus far avoided the nu-Chaosium reduction of Glorantha to working in a single way and via a single metaphysics opens up Kralorela as a place that is potentially valuable for wide-scope play with the Lunars, or the Holy Country. Again, a hard job with the fire axe, but once you're done, there's something interesting about the Kralori as "Lunars who sold out" and accepted their cosmic revision would only go so far and no further, and as a "Holy Country that escaped Belintar" and went on to develop a system that continued on without the deaths and annihilations of ruling demigods actually destroying it. That's, uh, really wide-scope play, the point at which the Altinelans and Luatha become polities interacting with other polities, and it's fairly limited in examples... but there's something there.

And you could very easily use Godunya the self-insert and Genertela being a horizontally flipped United States and just make Kralorela California or the whole American West Coast. Chen Durel is Idaho, Fethlon... okay, bad idea.

None of this makes Kralorela "good" or playable, just something that has more nascent content that interests me than Fonrit.

[marvelsmostwanted]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[whiteshipnightjar]

Zoozve, my beloved

[velvetcloak]

The Olympics but high fashion by Wisdom Kaye

[stealingpotatoes]

the illness post is still getting notes (???!! <3) and that means people are still telling me to get better soon, which is really nice but im gonna be too powerful if i get any better

[bumbleboa]

oh what a joy it is to get to grow old

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[staff]

Tumblr Tuesday: TURN BACK NOW

Hello, Tumblr. This is your warning. Do not interact with this post. Do not reblog this post. Do not, under any circumstances, like this post. You know what will happen if you do. You have been warned. —Stanford Pines

@astllee:

@clumxy:

@clacy2812:

@ponpasta:

@d1rtb:

@s0up1ta:

@nyenyel:

@umboloae:

@yujateaandpi:

@scandalous-dirtcup:

@emilylovescookies:

@n0cturnalcm:

@drowninnoodles:

@meriahlatyar:

@donniipao:

@tiilore:

@eerieseelie:

@paddysol:

@cactikoi:

@kddqr:

@solarwreathe:

@laz-262:

[eggwishing]

I ONCE TRIED TO WASH THAT SCUFFED OLD THING WHILE HE WAS TAKING ONE OF HIS NAPS, BUT WHEN I TOOK IT OFF HE WAS WEARING ANOTHER IDENTICAL ONE UNDERNEATH! AND ANOTHER! I GOT THROUGH TEN MORE LAYERS OF THE SAME THING BEFORE HE WOKE UP. I WAS SO FRUSTRATED! WHERE DID HE EVEN GET THOSE FROM? THEY ALL EVEN HAD THE SAME STAINS!!

[beaulesbian]

Emmrich & Lucanis banter about/with Spite because it's a very fun angle of conversation between them

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[hotdogmchiggin]

Company Mandated Fancy Fits on the Tulpar 😏

Also had to include the REAL star of the show (and a bonus)

Based off of this and this. Thank you very much joetastic for being inspirational 👍

The REAL reason this is late

[emberglowfox]

Keeper -- a short comic about an angel meeting a robotic lighthouse keeper that doesn't know the world has already ended. Made in about 18 hours for a 24-hour 24-page* black and white comic challenge (that I arrived late to, ha.)

*the actual submission does not include the cover, which was created after the fact for this post.

This was a really great learning experience as someone who's... never really made a completed comic. I ended up really attached to the story by the end of the project (possibly due to all-nighter deliriousness lol) and ultimately am very proud of what I made.There are some things I'd still like to change, particularly text placement, but in keeping with the spirit of the challenge I've elected to leave it as is.

[gongyussy]

the h in nhl stands for homoerotic

bonus intricate rituals:

[lylahammar]

Randomly thinkin about Chilchuck today, and how he tries sooooo hard to self sabotage

like for example, other half foots on the island think that he's a greedy asshole who only cares about money, and he does nothing to try to disprove that

but then there's this omake at the end of book 9 that shows that people treat half foots fucking TERRIBLY and chilchuck started a union to protect them

and then in the bicorn chapter, he doesn't want Marcille to keep digging into his personal business so he tells her he CHEATED ON HIS WIFE

but he just COMPLETELY fuckin lied about that and made himself sound so much worse than he is bc he's afraid of being vulnerable with people and would rather everyone believes he's a shitty person so he can keep them at a distance

and the thing that's memed so often is that he refuses to help with fighting most of the time because it's not part of his contract

but if you take this lore into account (not gonna add those particular images to this post simply bc I've used them in so many posts already LMAO) along with this tidbit from the world guide:

then it's like. yeah he has to keep his weight low so if he gets killed or severely injured and has to be healed, that could be really dangerous for him. and even if he was healed at that point he'd end up being a burden to the party after that point, he would be too dangerously thin/sickly to be able to help.

Like, Chilchuck has so many things about him that APPEAR to be character flaws, but every single one of them has a very reasonable explanation. He just leans into the mischaracterization bc he's emotionally withholding and can handle people thinking he's an asshole more than he can handle opening up to anyone. he's such a well thought out and interesting character

[chloesimaginationthings]

Happy one year anniversary to this FNAF post,,

[shadowtraveled]

"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.

but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)

mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…

the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.

every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.

first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic

which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.

which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.

the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.

walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?

well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.

you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?

it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.

when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.

and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.

kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.

yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.