So, I'd like you to imagine a world where watching cartoons had become suddenly super popular over the course of a few years. Huge burst in popularity. Suddenly everybody's talking about animation. Except: -Most of those new viewers only watch Family Guy, and a good chunk of older viewers stopped watching anything except Family Guy. -Most of these new viewers have got into the habit of just listening to the audio of Family Guy, 'cos the actual animation's kinda ugly, and normally just turn the screen off and listen to the cartoon like a podcast. -These new viewers, whenever they try watching any new animation - from Bob's Burgers to Cowboy Bebop - turn the screen off and just listen to the audio, and then don't understand why these shows are any different and go back to Family Guy because it's familiar. Imagine being an animator in this world. Imagine pouring your soul into the craft of making a drawing move and emote and live, the hours of painstaking effort taken over animating a single scene. Imagine talking to supposed fans of animation who don't even bother looking at the screen to see what you've produced. Imagine making a film like Redline, a celebration of visual art and an absolute technical slam-dunk, and it flops because it's a visual medium and nobody has their screen turned on, and people go back to talking to you about Family Guy with the screen turned off.

This is what it often feels like being a designer of tabletop games in 2024. Why yes, I *am* salty.

Sometimes you encounter someone who's like oh my God YES I love animation when you bring up you're a fan as well. In that moment you're thinking about the niche early 2000s masterpiece of storytelling, Scrapped Princess, because it's your favorite. Before you can explain what pieces of animation you like, they ask Who's your favorite Family Guy character? You pause, uncertain what to say, because you don't even really like that show, and they've never even heard of Scrapped Princess, but you don't want to squash their enthusiasm when they could learn to like another show.

Other times, it's like this. Animators often don't get any attention from fans when they work on a big project, because nobody watches the credit sequence, so you're used to no one really knowing what you've worked on, or what it is. Your cool uncle asks you what you're working on. You try to explain. He asks if it's like Family Guy.

Yeah. Sure. It's like Family Guy.

For some reason, the most influential thing in animation is a podcast where Matt Mercer and some of his voice actor friends watch family guy with the screen off, and do their own dubs of the characters. It's very popular; they are, after all, professional voice actors. As a halloween special, Matt & Pals watch Marjane Satrapi's award winning, deeply personal autobiographical film Persepolis, cracking jokes and improvising new lines like they always do. They are widely praised for their positive representation when they do this. Marjane Satrapi tweets that it's nice that a wider audience has been exposed to her work, but it would have been nice if they'd paid any attention to the plot or the visuals. Persopolis is the only French animation any of the fans of Matt & Pals have heard of, and none of them have actually watched it themselves.

Matt releases a series of animantics for his favourite family guy episodes. He's not a particularly good draftsman, but he's adopted some basic techniques like stretch-and-squash and is widely hailed for his inovation as a result. You have spent the last three years of your life doing character animation for the production of Violet Evergarden. Your wrist hurts from drawing all day. You mention your work to an aquaintance. They say you should check out Matt Mercer's Family Guy animatics; he even does close ups sometimes!

You don't even like Family Guy. It's a crude, crass cartoon with nothing really to say. You remember the first time you watched Redline, and the way JP's car disintegrating as it reached the finish line took your breath away, and in that rush of adrenaline you realised you wanted to be an animator. Watching Redline changed your life; it was a commercial flop. You got really into early silent-movie rubber-hose-era animation for the inventive visuals. With dawning horror, you realise most of the people taking inspiration from Max Fliescher are mostly in it because of the racist charicatures and objectified women. Somebody in the scene writes a very influential essay about how sound design is a betrayal of the medium and for weak-minded fools. His short film gets a bunch of critical acclaim and awards; his draftsmanship is about on par with Mat Mercer's, and this time there's a bunch of half-naked objectified women getting killed everywhere. You're at the movie rental place to see if they've got the new Makoto Shinkai film. Some guy in a Brian Griffin shirt says girls don't even like cartoons, and when you object he challenges you to guess which episodes his favourite quotes are from. You haven't watched Family Guy in half a decade. You tell him you worked on the new Violet Evergarden film. He's never heard of it, and complains about anime fans being pushy. The store doesn't have Suzume, but it sure has a lot of Family Guy funko pops. Your best friend from university calls you up, says he's found this amazing new show he's been watching, and he remembers you were into cartoons, so why don't you head over to his, and watch it with him? It sounds really cool, with a plot about a secret government agent dealing with aliens in disguise. You sit on the couch, crack open a few beers, and prepare for something exciting. He puts on an episode of American Dad.

As someone that only played a few sessions of 3.5 edition DnD like a decade and a half or longer ago (and tried to read some of the rulebooks), but was interested in DnD but is now interested in solo tabletop stuff, I feel like I am missing a lot of context.

Or. As someone that watched some Family Guy episodes in around the same time frame, wanted to watch more, but recently saw a little bit of what family guy has become, lost interest in that, and now has interest in some niche indie animation project I found in some random corner of YouTube while looking up stop motion stuff (idk I was looking up solo board games and stumbled on solo tabletop). Uh. What’s going on?

Disclaimers at the top that A. I'm not OP or the other poster, so there may be nuances to their analogies that I'm missing, especially since B. I don't work in the TTRPG space, I'm just someone who plays a lot of them and enjoys trying out new systems, so while I believe I understand most of what they're saying, there's every chance there's some inside baseball I'm missing, and because of that, C. my perspective is that of a consumer in the space, not a creator, so my experiences and perspective are inherently going to be different.

With that said, to try and give you the context you feel like you're missing, relevant section of the previous posts bolded in parenthesis:

There's a lot more to it obviously - I've only gone over one of the three posts - but this is already more words than I intended to type, and hopefully the next two posts are a big easier to understand with that added context.

pretty much spot on

Thoughts were a kind of derangement resulting from an accumulation of tension in the neck and shoulders.

Whilst initially assumed to be a consequence of innate biological weakness, later studies revealed that thought was itself a mere symptom of Language Acquisition Syndrome.

game of chess but with real people but all the pawns are trans women and if they get to the eighth rank they get a lifetime supply of estrogen

nope!

It is too. they just have to take some pieces to not get in each other's way.

Are there enough pieces to do that for every pawn though?

yes. easily.

Show me.

1. e4 e5 2. Ne2 d5 3. Nf4 exf4 4. e5 Kd7 5. e6+ Kc6 6. e7 Qd6 7. e8=Q+ Kb6 8. d4 Be7 9. Qf8 Bf6 10. c4 Be5 11. dxe5 c5 12. e6 d4 13. e7 d3 14. Be2 f5 15. Bf3 Nf6 16. O-O d2 17. Qc2 d1=Q 18. Be3 fxe3 19. e8=Q e2 20. Be4 fxe4 21. f4 e1=Q 22. f5 Qc3 23. b4 Nd5 24. f6 e3 25. f7 e2 26. Qfe7 e1=Q 27. f8=Q Qe4 28. cxd5 c4 29. Qe2 Qcd3 30. Nd2 c3 31. Nf3 c2 32. Nd4 Qde5 33. d6 c1=Q 34. d7 g5 35. d8=Q+ Ka6 36. g4 Bf5 37. gxf5 g4 38. f6 g3 39. f7 Qh4 40. Kg2 Qhf4 41. Kh3 Qff5+ 42. Kh4 g2 43. Qg7 g1=Q 44. f8=Q Nd7 45. Nc6 bxc6 46. Qb8 c5 47. b5+ Ka5 48. b6 c4 49. b7 c3 50. Qbc8 c2 51. b8=Q Qce3 52. Rb1 c1=Q 53. Rb6 axb6 54. a4 h5 55. Qef6 Qed2 56. Qfg8 Kb4 57. a5 b5 58. a6 Ra7 59. Qcd8 Rc7 60. a7 Kc5 61. a8=Q b4 62. Rf4 Qdd6 63. Rg4 hxg4+ 64. Qh5 g3 65. h3 g2 66. Q7h7 Qgh2 67. Qbb7 Qea1 68. Qfe7 b3 69. Q7e6 Qhh1 70. Qef6 Qfd5 71. Kg4 g1=Q+ 72. Kh4 b2 73. Qgg2 b1=Q 74. Kg4 Qge1 75. h4 Re8 76. Qhe5 Qda2 77. Qhe4 Q2b2 78. h5 Q2a2 79. h6 Q2b2 80. h7 Q2a2 81. h8=Q

Wow. Good work.

i was asked to post this, speedrun is heating up

Interesting that both go beyond the original parameter of "promote all pawns" and also avoided capturing any of the promoted queens or the original queen, thus also making the maximum number of possible Queens on the board (18 Queens!). I suspect it would be possible to shorten the number of moves a little if you allowed Queens (whether original or promoted) to be captured. It's also funny in that White and Black kept alternating between having forced mate sequences

Got it in 50:

1. e4 d5 2. c4 b5 3. a4 f5 4. g4 h5 5. g5 b4 6. Ra3 Rh6 7. gxh6 bxa3 8. Nc3 Nf6 9. e5 d4 10. exf6 dxc3 11. c5 f4 12. c6 f3 13. Bg2 Bb7 14. cxb7 fxg2 15. Qg4 c5 16. a5 hxg4 17. h7 Qb6 18. axb6 gxh1=Q 19. b4 g5 20. f7+ Kd7 21. h8=Q c2 22. Qb2 axb2 23. bxa8=Q b1=Q 24. Qxh1 a5 25. b5 Na6 26. bxa6 a4 27. b7 g3 28. b8=Q g2 29. Qxb1 cxb1=Q 30. a7 gxh1=Q 31. a8=Q a3 32. Qxh1 g4 33. h4 g3 34. f4 g2 35. d4 gxh1=Q 36. h5 c4 37. h6 Bg7 38. hxg7 e5 39. d5 e4 40. d6 Kc6 41. f8=Q e3 42. g8=Q e2 43. Kf2 c3 44. f5 c2 45. f6 a2 46. d7 a1=Q 47. d8=Q Qxc1 48. f7 Qca3 49. Qxa3 c1=Q 50. f8=Q e1=Q# 0-1

Sometimes victory belongs to mercy and looks like failure

had to share this brilliant discussion - source: X

At the most important moment in modern fantasy, the hero fails. Not quietly. Not ambiguously. He stands at the edge of the world, feels the full weight of evil loosen its grip, and chooses it anyway.

At the edge of Mount Doom, with the fate of the world balanced on a single will, Frodo Baggins does not throw the Ring into the fire. He claims it. The moment every heroic narrative has trained us to expect as triumph becomes instead a confession of failure. Tolkien does not flinch. He lets the hero break.

And yet the world is saved.

This is not a plot twist. It is a moral thesis. The destruction of the Ring happens not because Frodo earns victory, but because mercy extended long before the ending finally comes due. The quest resolves because of a chain reaction of restraint. The decisive force is not discipline, not optimization, not grit. It is pity.

This is where Tolkien quietly dismantles the moral machinery of hustle culture decades before we had language for it. We live inside a story that teaches us effort converts cleanly into outcome. That endurance guarantees reward. That suffering is a down payment on success. Tolkien offers a colder and far more honest truth. Sometimes you do everything right and still cannot finish the job.

Scholars have long noted that Frodo’s failure is not a betrayal of his character but the completion of it. The Ring is not a fair test of willpower. As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote plainly in his letters, the will is not infinite. Power erodes agency. The closer one comes to absolute domination, the less freedom remains. Frodo is not weak at the Crack of Doom. He is human at the end of an inhuman burden.

By the time he reaches the Fire, Frodo has endured starvation, sleep deprivation, repeated physical injury, and sustained psychological terror. Modern neuroscience would describe this as cumulative trauma. Tolkien simply wrote it as reality. Expecting one last burst of perfect moral clarity from a nervous system already wrecked by suffering is not heroism. It is wishful thinking disguised as virtue.

The quest only succeeds because of Gollum. And even that rescue is not redemption in the sentimental sense. Gollum does not transform into goodness. He falls into the fire because of what he already is. The deeper truth is that Gollum is alive at all only because he was spared when mercy looked foolish. First by Bilbo. Then by Gandalf. Then most dangerously by Frodo himself.

The Ring is destroyed not because Frodo conquers it, but because Frodo once chose not to destroy someone else.

This is a devastating inversion of the moral economy most of us were raised to believe in. We are taught to look for visible proof that goodness works. Tolkien gives us an older logic. Moral victories are often retroactive. The most transformative decisions rarely announce themselves as such. They look inefficient. They look naive. They often look like failure.

In the medieval moral tradition that shaped Tolkien, mercy was not sentimental. It was strategic in a way power could never be. Mercy refused to close the future. It kept outcomes unresolved. It preserved the possibility that evil might one day undo itself. Tolkien does not sanctify Gollum. He allows evil to collapse under its own gravity because mercy refuses to force a premature ending.

This alone would be enough to unsettle the reader. But Tolkien goes further. He denies us the fantasy that salvation heals everything.

After the Ring is destroyed, Tolkien insists on the Scouring of the Shire. Home is violated. The saved world is not the same world. The victory does not restore innocence. Frodo returns permanently wounded. He cannot sleep without pain. He cannot fully enter the peace he helped secure.

The modern myth is that collapse will be redeemed by recognition. Tolkien refuses that lie.

We want the hero to stand at the end and receive the moral reward. Tolkien lets his hero sit down and admit he is finished. Frodo does not recover because recovery would falsify the cost.

This is why The Lord of the Rings remains psychologically modern beneath its ancient scaffolding. The story already understands what burnout culture would take another century to articulate. Some burdens cannot be survived without damage. Some systems demand more than one conscience can sustain. Sometimes the bravest outcome is not conquest but survival long enough to make mercy matter.

We live in an age that worships visible dominance. We measure virtue through performance. We reward leaders who claim they can bend chaos through sheer will. Tolkien issues a quiet warning instead. When power becomes the proof of goodness, goodness collapses.

Frodo fails because no one was ever meant to pass that final test.

The world is not saved by the flawless execution of the righteous. It is saved by the accumulated weight of restraint. By choices made without assurance of payoff. By mercy that looked wasted at the time. By patience that looked irrational. By hands that refused the easy kill and kept the future open instead.

The modern fantasy is not Middle-earth. The modern fantasy is that effort always guarantees justice.

Tolkien tells a harder truth. Sometimes the most important moral decisions you will ever make will feel powerless when you make them. Sometimes the victory will not belong to your endurance at all. It will belong to mercy that looked like weakness years earlier.

Frodo does not win.

Mercy does.

And it does not feel triumphant.

Magic is such a cool game you can have white allies

You can have white token allies like in real life

You, yes you specifically reading this, are a pedophile.

This news probably came as a surprise to you. After all, you haven’t done anything pedophilic that you know of. Yet here you are, accused of being a pedophile.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been diagnosed with POCD or not, whether you’ve sought out material or not, even if you’ve been vocally opposed to pedophilia in the past. What matters right now is that YOU are a pedophile. Someone said it was true, and that’s what matters to most people.

Don’t worry, it happens to a lot of us, especially if you’re queer and ESPECIALLY if you’re transfemme. Hell, it’s happened to me before:

For some people, they become more vocally opposed to pedophiles to prove they aren’t a pedophile. Others develop radical compassion.

This is gonna sound like an unhinged comparison at first, but hear me out.

This whole “discourse” around ISFF has had me thinking over and over again about how Paul Robeson was blacklisted from being a prominent face of the civil rights campaign despite being possibly the most globally well known Black person from the US, bc he was a communist in a time it wasn’t just unacceptable socially but legally dangerous and would’ve brought even heavier crackdowns on the civil rights movement.

The result was an incomplete liberation because it was only uplifting the “acceptable ones” within a capitalist framework rather than uplifting the baseline total rights regardless of belief/existence.

The point there being is that so long as there are categories of human we view as unacceptable we cannot achieve total liberation. All trannies and faggots are pedophiles, addicts, bums, rapists, whores, etc. to those who see it convenient to get rid of us, and refusing to address this issue will only result in an incomplete liberation because we cannot leave behind those who are seen the worst by society when we ARE them too by default.

“But communist and pedophile is an unhinged comparison” they’ve been calling communists that, perverts, sexual deviants, etc. since McCarthyism anyway so.

We cannot be truly liberated until even those viewed as “the worst of society” have the same basic rights and ability to survive in society as everyone else. As humans, they deserve that much. If you cannot accept that, consider that all any of the rest of us need to become one of them is to be accused of it. Proof doesn’t matter. Reality doesn’t matter. You are a pedophile. You will become a pedophile as soon as it is useful for someone to make you into one.

There is no option but acknowledging they are still human and cannot be simply removed from society, because as long as there are stigmatized demographics, we will be able to remove the basic rights of anyone.

I don’t have a “solution” and I will not answer requests for one, because I’m not here to offer one, I’m saying that humans remain human and we cannot achieve true liberation as long as we are willing to allow demographics of “acceptable ones to harm”. We have to start here. Everything has to start from here.

If you weren't into games at the time M:tG came out, you may not realize the impact it had on the gaming landscape. It was the nuclear bomb of games. I remember talking to a game store owner at the time and she said that it had vastly simplified her ordering because she just had to restock Magic booster packs; nobody was buying enough of anything else to matter.

Wizards opened at least three huge game stores in the Seattle area -- where commercial real estate is NOT cheap, and most game stores up until then were hole-in-the-wall operations -- which they did eventually close a few years later, but it's indicative of the kind of money they were suddenly rolling in.

The other indication, of course, was when Wizards bought TSR. That was seismic. TSR had been the big dog of the TTRPG industry as long as it had existed, and for some upstart card-game company to just come along and buy it was astonishing.

(Of course, we all got a lesson on the difference between Big Money in the game hobby world and Big Money in the actual corporate world when Hasbro rolled up and bought Wizards in turn like they were a county fair corn dog.)

Anyway, the point is, yes, when Magic came out everyone else was like, "Hey, there's infinite money in collectible card games! We gotta get in on this!" Somewhere in the other room I have a set of the CCG version of Steve Jackson's Illuminati game, which says straight out in the game rules that they're cashing in on the trend.

I think that's what I respect so much about Steve Jackson - even when he's making a game that shamelessly cashes in on a trend, he still has the honor and artistic passion to make sure it also predicts 9/11

[wistfully reminiscing about the stack of Pathfinder 1e sourcebooks on a shelf at my parents' home] So much paper dedicated to character options that were complete ass... so many ways to make your character genuinely useless... in a way, it was beautiful, but like in a satirical way

GMing this game with beginners straight up meant having to sit players down like "look. I know this looks fun. I know. But it's ass. If you take these options, you will have a bad time. I am advising you not to do it, not because I hate fun, but because I'm your friend. Do not play a core rulebook rogue."

Shadowrun 5e is very similar in that way. Learning how to make a functional character is something that takes Immense effort.

But because the rules are borderline non functional in parts every table plays with radically different Interpretations of them. What might be a functional Character at one table will seize to function at another.

Some character designs with some…atypical color choices? I guess. I don’t know what’s going on in that area.

This is Nimona and her supervillain friend (He doesn’t have a name yet, I’m working on that). Nimona is his sidekick/squire, they’re like the Batman and Robin of slightly Medieval villains, but she’s actually way more evil than him. He does what he does to make a point, and he doesn’t really want anyone get hurt - Nimona just gets a kick out of destroying stuff.

I’m going to attempt to make a two page comic with them? We’ll see how this goes.

This was tagged #homework and posted in December 2011.

tumblr post to Oscar nomination

Put your percentages in the tags

NEVER KILL YOURSELF . SOMETHING LESBIAN MIGHT HAPPEN TO YOU SOON .

My wifey has officially started playing Baldur's Gate 3. She only has vague impressions of the game from being in the room while the rest of us play, so she's basically going in clueless as to the story details.

She has made it off the Nautiloid (or "the airplane," as she calls it) and begun recruiting the party. Her thoughts on them thus far:

- Lae'zel: An angry frog

- Shadowheart: An at-risk youth whose parents are absent

- Astarion: A dracula who speaks in an English accent despite clearly being French

that young lady should be in school

Literally all correct assessments

Now I have met a big red lady who says fuckwords

Btw I offer bad advice, dubious assertions, and strange views. Free of charge.

Prophecies as well but not even I remember which ones are bullshit

Charlie Kirk's neck got ripped open like a Gogurt. Sad!

It's just a wee bit sad we don't get footage.

I ain't posting it but it's everywhere, it's NASTY, and it is good

Issuing a broad apology to etsy witches, now that magic is real apparently.

two-day delivery like they had Prime shipping.