The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin. They both looked down at the crumpled shape of the Overlord, His Unholy Majesty, in his obsidian armor.

His final spasms had been mesmerizingly acrobatic. The fall down the steps leading up to his iron throne had pretzelled his body quite impressively, both arms folded behind his back and one leg bent at a jaunty angle.

The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin.

"Shit," said the goblin.

"Shit," said the orc.

"We're likely to get blamed for this," the goblin said. She walked over to the head of the glittering mangled heap and started pulling the helmet off.

"It's not our fault," the orc said. "It's hard to help someone choking when they wear two-hundred pounds of spiked armor at all times."

"Yeah, well," the goblin grunted. The helmet came free, and the bald head of the Overlord bounced on the stone with a hollow, coconut noise. "You know how it is in this bloody country - thieves get their heads cut off so they can't think about thieving, and all that." She fished in the Overlord's mouth with a finger and pulled out the obstructing olive on the end of her claw.

She popped it into her mouth and chewed. "What do you reckon they do for a regicide?" she said.

"We should run," the orc said. She had started bouncing her leg. "I hear that there's some places in the Alliance where they just kill you and let you stay dead. That's got to be nicer than what'll happen if we stay here."

The goblin started to nod - and then her gaze fell on the helmet.

It looked like a pineapple designed by a deranged blacksmith. It was all thorns and spikes and hard edges, as though the maker had been very determined to not let pigeons roost on it. The only bits that weren't solid iron were eyeholes. Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face.

She held up the helmet and squinted from it to the orc. One of the thorns had been bent badly in the fall.

Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face...

"Right," she muttered. "Right. Could work - or."

The orc had a sudden vision of the immediate future. "No," she said.

"I mean you're about his height-"

"No."

"It would just be for a-"

"Absolutely not."

"Just hear me out," the goblin said. "Outside of this room are two-thousand men and orcs and goblins who are absolutely gonzo about this man, and there's a whole country of them outside of the castle, and at any moment someone's going to walk in that door and see one dead tit in black armor and two unbelievably dead idiots next to him.

"Or." She tossed the helmet up like a basketball to the orc, who fumbled and tried to find somewhere to hold it that wasn't a knife's edge. "We chuck him out the window now, walk out the door in the armor, and ditch the armor as soon as nobody sees us."

The orc had started bouncing her leg again. "They'll know something's up the second I walk out of the room."

"No worries," said the goblin. "Leave that to me."

---

It had been a very strange year for the Empire.

Change had rolled across the land as slow and inevitable as a glacier. Roads and bridges carved the gray, blasted wildlands, and a number of social reforms had made the country a place where you could be miserable, yes, but miserable in comfort and safety, and that was an improvement.

Barely anyone got boiled alive in molten metal, and even if the disgusted sun never rose to light the Empire, at least you had a roof over your head to protect yourself from the acid rain.

when i say my gender changes to the tune of the bit i mean a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and if he can’t then god forbid women do anything

jokerkind specibus ass

But you still recognized that as a Homestuck reference.

What were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament?

i googled the words & got results from the homestuck wiki. that’s not attending the devil’s sacrament that’s investigating suspicious noises in the woods by lanternlight

Movies should be rated like gymnastics. First score is the difficulty (how complex is what you're trying to pull off?) second score is the execution. This would let us separate dumb movies that are competently made from interesting movies that don't quite stick the landing. Anyway. Another great idea from ME

please read this story of a man accidentally discovering his wife is the world's best Tetris player

[image description: an excerpt of text that says:

“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”

What Flewin said next I will never forget.

“Oh, my!”

/end id]

TL;DR on the article

The husband was writing an article on classic video game records, was surprised to find out that holding the Tetris record is a bit of a big deal, and mentions how good his wife is at it.

The guy he’s talking to mentions that the record is 327, way lower than his wifes usual scores of 500-600.

They travel to a tournament, and she goes to do her attempt. Just after she beats 327, and is climbing higher, a judge brings up to the husband that the specific version she’s playing actually has a different record of 545.

She overhears that she needs to beat 500-something, and keeps going, setting the record at 841.

which, they later find out, is her second-best record

There was a decent but ultimately forgettable fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had a single moment that stuck with me.

The protagonist has just won the world famous sword fighting competition in the big, rich capital and is talking to his mentor, and says something about being the best swordsman in the world. The mentor frowns and tells him that no, he isn't. He is the best swordsman out of the people that could afford to show up to this tournament. There could be a mercenary way out in the mountains, patrolling a snow encrusted fort's walls that could kick his ass and there was no way to know until he was already losing to the guy.

I think about that a lot, and how for every apparently dominant competitor, there might be a fucking ronin out there somewhere capable of destroying them.

Always reblog tetris ronin lady

listen. There's a whole mentality shift that needs to happen culture wide here, from the schools to the public infrastructure to pet ownership to the justice system

The proper response to your dog doing a natural behavior you dislike (digging/barking/protecting etc) it to give them an appropriate time and place to engage in that behavior

The proper response to skateboarders damaging infrastructure is to build more and better skate parks, or build skate elements into the public infrastructure on purpose.

The proper response to homeless people sleeping on park benches is to build them houses.

you see how there's like, a commonality at play here?

The proper response to a disruption is to address the root of the disruption directly, not somehow attack the disruption itself -

you don't invent a muffler by swinging a bat at the engine noise, you don't relieve your hunger by punching yourself in the stomach, you don't resolve public unrest by sending armed men to control them and you don't prevent homeless people using bus shelters as a roof by removing the bus shelters.

a whole ass shift in a basic mindset, i'm tellin' you. We need it.

only thing that comes to mind today.

the fad of putting these little blurbs in TTRPGs was probably the most embarrassing bit of useless wanking the little industry scene has ever done, besides the time Warmahordes put a "this aint your daddys tabletop game!" in their rulebook.

does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?

At the absolute minimum you could make a game which actually is a meaningful cultural expression of your ideals, or which is politically anti fascist in any way.

So this is actually I can reassure you, the exact opposite of self indulgent wanking with no impact. It’s aggressively impactful in a very specific way—by making the nazis in the room very loud about the fact that they’re nazis.

I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.

This is the updated version. It’s animated now.

But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.

And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.

For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.

And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.

And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.

While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.

So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.

Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?

This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”

It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.

So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.

Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.

It doesn’t fix the world— anyone who thinks the table top scene will magically save the day is a fool—but it does increase the odds that the hobby will be a safer place for more reasonable people, and not become a bastion of fascism like the wh40k fandom has.

It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.

Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.

Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.

See also the Godot discord, with an icon that scrolls through pride colours in a beautiful way.

It even works for games famously infested with fascists like 40k. Games Workshop coming out with a (really rather tepid) statement of support of BLM had Nazis losing their minds in the comments fucking immediately

I remember the meltdowns when the new Worls of Darkness books came out that this blurb is in. It's pretty easy to piss fascists off by just saying you don't want them there.

The Pathfinder Facebook group did something like this on purpose as a honeypot and immediately banned all the bigots coming out of the woodwork, and immediately eliminated more than HALF of all incidents requiring moderators. Not just about bigotry, everything.

And that is TACTICALLY USEFUL.

Because game companies spend so much money moderating chat spaces (both forums and in-game chats) and they lose so much business when dominant third party online spaces associated with their game turn toxic. Hell moderation is the big money sink for social media. Managing that cost is one of the most difficult aspects of the business.

Now imagine telling a game or social media executive that you can eliminate half of their harassment in a single honeypot operation. Imagine telling them that you have a technique which surgically targets a majority of their most toxic members and immediately gets rid of them. Because that's what this is.

You slap up a big pride or power banner and an announcement that this company stands with [insert group here], or stands against fascism, and you take names on everybody who has angry or quibbling shit to say about that. And then you ban them all. And just like that the moderation load you're dealing with gets so much lighter. Keep it up with a similar announcement whenever a topical opportunity presents itself and you clean out any new trash which walks in too.

And it just so happens that the way to do this is to clear out the bigots and make a safe space for oppressed groups.

There are so many of these companies which are worried that by taking a stand like this they will hurt their user base. There are so many forums online with volunteer moderators who reflexively don't want to wait into politics because they think that will increase their workload. Give them good solid practical examples of this reducing their workload instead, and you will get some of them onboard.

Because this has a real measurable impact with the right follow through, and the impact is a general reduction in all harassment of everyone. And that is worth capital M Money and capital T Time to some people.

1,106 days left

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How do they keep making later and later stages of late-capitalism

through innovative, synergistic solutions that align strategic stakeholders along key performance indicators

fun fact: there are quite a few academics and scholars nowadays who argue that we are no longer in the late stages of capitalism, but in fact the early stages of something completely different. david graeber puts it thus:

varoufakis calls this new era "technofeudalism", and in his book of the same name he describes it this way:

so, to put it another way: perhaps we are no longer in the later stages of capitalism, a system whose defining feature is that power belongs to those who own the means of production and can therefore profit off the labor of people they hire to work their machines and factories - but rather in the early stages of an entirely new hegemony, characterized by the fact that power is largely held by feudal overlords who have claimed dominion over specific segments of daily life through technology.

for example, under varoufakis' view, platforms like Amazon or Etsy aren't really markets in the traditional capitalist sense; they're more akin to fiefdoms, where everyone who wants to participate must do so subject to the whims and desires of the overlord, who takes a cut of everything and carefully controls what people are allowed to buy, sell, or even be shown. these corporations don't just make money by taking a cut of a worker's paid labor; they make money by charging rent for any activity that takes place within their domain. sure, your employer siphons off some of the profits you generate when you work your job - but both you and your employer are also constantly paying rent, paying tribute, to Amazon Web Services to be able to host a website, to Google for advertising, to PayPal every time you make a transfer with a surcharge... thus these companies are primarily characterized by their ownership of specific domains of everyday life, rather than by their ability to profit from what their workers sell and produce.

this is obviously not the only way to understand our current economic and political climate, just one particular lens through which to view it, but. food for thought!

Saved by the actual killer; let's not forget that Luigi Mangione was almost certainly framed and is most likely not The Claims Adjuster. (I love that name. Robin Hoodie was good too, but The Claims Adjuster is perfect.)

I mean. Days after the killing, he is still carrying around the weapon and a handwritten manifesto in his backpack? A 3d printed weapon, which he could have melted down and destroyed, or thrown into the Hudson River, because the thing about 3d printed guns is that unlike standard manufactured guns, it's really hard to identify who printed them? When his bag was searched out of anyone's sight, hours after his arrest? By a notoriously corrupt police district under pressure to make an arrest?

We need to stop accepting reflexively the narrative the NYPD and the media have tried to sell us; it's got way too many holes in it and it runs the risk that an innocent man will spend his life in jail or be executed for a crime he didn't commit. The fact that we would all support him if he did commit it is irrelevant; the state will grind him through the gears of injustice if it can.

This 100%. Several students in my ethics class a few weeks ago wanted to discuss "Luigi Mangione killing a healthcare CEO" and were very confused when I said that no, we do not know that he did it. One person even told me they thought he confessed. This narrative that we know he did it, and we now must only consider our thoughts on his actions has become insanely prevalent. Even the professor went along with it without question.

Little Bird

Walks for your mental health!

Source post here

ahaha!! That's me!

the thing is that everyone does actually want the skill set that comes with a humanities degree but a) they refuse to acknowledge that actual WORK goes into acquiring those skills and b) they want to do it all without actually reading a book

🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

🕯️ you will see trump dead or behind bars 🕯️

🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️in your lifetime 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

"the average income in <X> is <Y> of <currency>" cool, what's the median

Average isn't useful here. however, after a little bit of research, apparently the median income in the US is $24,327, which means the reality is actually much worse than this meme makes it seem. yay!

According to time magazine, median annual rent is $13,896, which means rent alone is 57% Of the median annual income, awesome!