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jake that first night when they served a freezer tray tv dinner and not an overflowing plate of fish that's probably going for conservatively like $40-$80 bucks a kilo but the guys decided Eh we'll catch more let's just fry it up:

wizard council holiday season 2024 photo card

Class of 2025

It feels counter-intuitive when you don't actually understand what the problem with enemies in most combat-centric games in fantasy settings is, but the "fix" (improvement) is actually to make the enemies more like people and not less, and then to actually reckon on some level narratively with the fact that killing people is bad.

#not every story needs to be About how killing people is bad or about making the player feel guilty #im not saying that #but I am saying that even lazy stuff like "its self defense because the bandits attacked you first" #is leagues better than "you can kill those bandits because they aren't actually people and are by their nature born evil" #if that makes sense.

There really is no equivalent to the amount of social hierarchies in South Asia and how intricate they are which makes sense for a variety of reasons but do you know how sad it is to try and explain new types of oppression to people. To introduce people to social hierarchies they couldn’t have even dreamt up. The racism factory that produces new racisms

The notes on this 50 note post already shows how right I am. People don’t ask my caste because they can tell based off of the most basic level shit related to my life within the first few minutes of meeting me. the only people who ask my caste are white people who have no idea the gravity of what they’re saying

op feel free to tell me to shut up because I know I do not have a full grasp of this issue like I should BUT

I’m a child of indian immigrants in the west and I thought I understood casteism because we definitely brought that shit over with us to the new country, but I don’t think I really understood it until my dad was talking about his childhood.

we were talking about his childhood in the first place because he’s having some issues with his brothers right now (he’s the youngest kid and his brothers can’t accept that he’s a grown man that makes his own decisions (he’s 60)) and he was talking about how they used to be so close and their childhood was so good and blessed but then he was like ‘but maybe it was always rotten, maybe there was always this seed of judgement in us’

he was talking about how they, an upper mid caste family in a tiny farming village, would hire low caste workers to help out during the harvest. as part of their wages, they would get meals from the family. but because they were low caste, they weren’t allowed to use the same plates and cutlery as my family. it was thought that them using the dishes would permanently contaminate them. they weren’t even allowed to keep their own ‘contaminated’ plates in the house. instead, they would take their meals on banana leaf plates. and I was like ‘ok that’s fucked up but banana leaf plates are commonly used by all castes’

then my dad explained ‘if we were to give them sambar, they would dig a small hole in the ground and line it with leaves, and we would ladle the sambar into that. if they wanted water, we would ladle handfuls of it into their hands and they would drink it all and silently ask for the next ladle. this was part of my daily chores as a child, to feed grown men in such a degrading way. something about it felt wrong to me, but I was a child who couldn’t understand why.’

I was already shocked at that but then he continued ‘once, there were no banana leaves, so I went to give him the plate I was holding. the man wouldn’t even take it from me, knowing how the rest of my family would react. when he accidentally brushed against it, I was surprised and dropped the plate. he then picked up the plate and built a small fire from the branches nearby and threw the plate in. these were steel plates, so they could survive that. he then used a different leaf to pick up the plate once it had cooled enough to give it back to me. not once had I even spoken or asked him to do this, but he knew that the plate needed to be purified before it entered our house. I think I was eight years old.’

I think this was coming up for him because he was already realizing that his family weren’t always good people based on their interactions with him and this made him see their actions through a new light. my dad left the village and eventually the country fairly young so I think he hadn’t interrogated his fond childhood memories like that. honestly, it made me think less of my family.

I’ve heard some people compare castes to different sects of christianity and I don’t think that’s a good comparison. that’s bias based on thinking you’re the best. casteism is having a hierarchy and knowing exactly where you stand in that hierarchy and knowing that you can’t change that no matter what. that you are dirty and that you were born dirty and that you will never be clean.

being mid caste means we get shit from brahmins, so I thought I understood. I’d read about dalits, so I thought I understood. but that was the day I really started to understand.

after YEARS of seeing this quote online and finding it to be the most deeply and resoundingly profound writing i finally found the source article and absolutely nothing could prepare me for this opening paragraph

Okay but the whole article is really interesting and also contains this quote which I’ve never heard before but really like:

“Anyone worth knowing is inevitably also going to be exasperating”