Also if anybody is interested Josh Gonzalez did mention how it’s a strange feeling to see characters he’s written in a show and not get any credit (which he understands isn’t necessary)

I think this is why I have such a hate for it, because essentially this is just canon fan fiction. It has nothing to do with the original writers for the game’s lore it’s changing. Not even a nod or cameos or anything for the game writers who created and worked on the franchise. Just completely disregarding them and making their own shit up.

Which they’ve accepted, when you work for a company you don’t own anything and there’s nothing you can do really, and that’s that. But the lack of any acknowledgement feels…off

Like... If you have regret and sadness about doing something don't fucking do it, you bunch of turds

The problem is that they can't afford to. The Supreme Court ruling means that JK Rowling can single-handedly force these organisations into bankruptcy if they don't fold to her wishes, especially as she can afford really, really expensive lawyers and then, if she wins, get the organisations charged with paying her costs. Up until this year, this was a lower risk, because the gender criticals rarely won their cases and had to crowdfund their own legal fees. The Supreme Court has changed that.

Amazon, Warner Brothers and the Harry Potter fandom at large have successfully crowdfunded the campaign to exclude trans women from public life in the UK.

FUCK JKR

One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of 'appropriate for children' content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it's happened incredibly quickly.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children' reaction, consider: would what you're looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?

When I wrote this post, I focused on sex, rather than violence. But now I want to talk a bit about violence.

I had a very unusual encounter recently in which I was talking about a video game that I played as a child (Tales of Symphonia (2003) for the Gamecube, eternal classic) with my siblings. I was 10, they were younger. We didn't have very many games, so we played this one into the absolute ground. It's a great game! It's a rare example of a JRPG with 4-person co-op multiplayer, which means it basically works as a shonen anime you can play together. The skill floor is pretty low, but the ceiling's reasonably high, so it's great for a mixed-age group. To this day, if I really needed to keep 3 children entertained for two weeks, it's probably the first place my mind would go.

So anyway, I was talking about how great this game is for kids, and the reaction I got was... horror. I was told, repeatedly, that this game is not appropriate for children on account of its violence and heavy themes. Because this game's story is, in large part, about racism. Specifically it is about how racism is bad and stupid. And in the story of the game, the kinds of things that people do out of racism do occur. People are driven from their homes, used as expendable test subjects, and put in prison camps to work themselves to death, amongst other things. The game isn't afraid to really let those heavy themes sit, either. The characters discuss these things with each other often, and the way that their fucked up world affects their perspective on these events is a big part of each character's journey.

But, like, there's no blood in this game. At all. The graphics look like this:

These character models barely have fingers, let alone intestines.

And this isn't a situation where the cutesy character models are then used for shock horror. All depictions of violence are all either in-engine combat (with people shouting out their shonen battle special attack names left and right) or just, like, a janky animation of someone swinging a sword, a slash noise, and the recipient going 'Argh' and falling over. The engine just can't render it. Discussions of violence within the game are similarly non-explicit. People will talk about, say, the death of a loved one, but it's never and more detailed than 'and so-and-so killed them and I have all these feelings about it'. The focus is squarely on how the characters feel about the violence, not the violence itself.

So, any argument that this game is too violent for, say, an 8-year-old is really an argument that the discussion of violence is too much for an 8-year-old. And that represents a real and troubling change from how we talked about violence and media for children when I was a kid.

The concern with violence on screen when I was a kid was twofold: first, that violence is scary and could give kids nightmares; and second, that seeing too much violence - especially gun violence post-Columbine - would inspire a child to do violence. Both those concerns really only applied to the imagery of violence, though. Violence that happens off-screen isn't a concern. That's the whole point of the Disney Death - if a character falls off a cliff, we don't actually see them die, but we can still talk about their death in the rest of the story. An adult brain can wonder if Mufasa died from the impact of the fall before being brutally crushed by the stampede, but a kid isn't going to worry about that and it's not going to give them nightmares. And I've yet to hear anyone even claim that Mufasa's death would be likely to inspire kids to push their schoolmates off cliffs. People sometimes joke about being 'traumatized' by Mufasa's death, but nobody actually was. We know that, right?

Any concern about the appropriate levels of violence for children that implicates Tales of Symphonia (2003) can't be relying on either of those arguments. None of the imagery onscreen in that game could give anyone nightmares (unless they were unusually frightened of model clipping) and there's none of the glorification of violence that would lead one to have Columbine-y worries. Hell, there aren't even any guns except for one guy with a laser arm cannon.

No, the concern here is not about violent imagery. It's about discussions of violent subject matter. About a story that talks allegorically about racism, death, trauma, and how we come to terms with living in a world where these things exist. And not even in a particularly novel way! Honestly, I think it's a bit both-sides-y about the whole subject but that's a matter for a different day. The only way you can argue that this game's subject matter is inappropriate for 8-10-year-olds is if you argue that 8-10-year-olds shouldn't know that racism exists. That violence exists. That bad stuff happens sometimes.

And I promise you. A lot of children already know all that.

If anything, this is a more concerning cultural shift than the stuff about sex I mentioned earlier. Because the idea that talking about racism and violence at all would be inappropriate for children - that it would somehow compromise their innocence - is genuinely fascistic. There's only one kind of 8-year-old who doesn't know that racist violence exists. And it's one who should know, lest they grow up to participate in it.

art by @niochemblyat

A group of trans women protesting outside Scottish parliament to condemn the UK Supreme Court’s bioessentialist ruling on sex, and the response of the Scottish government. All are wearing black pants, black tape across their mouths or a black KN95, and their right arms are painted red as "a mark of solidarity with anti-fascist feminists across Europe." | May 17th, 2025

One of the demonstrators, Sugar, described the protests as "a public act of grief, resistance and solidarity to highlight the hypocrisy of the ruling. If the Supreme Court can see these woman legally as men, then they’ll have zero issue with them going tops off.”

“This ruling, and the subsequent EHRC guidance aims to segregate trans people from safe spaces that they have for used for decades without issue. We are demanding that the Scottish government stand up for its trans citizens by fighting this ruling and appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.”

edit/update: Rose has released uncensored versions of the protest photos on twitter alongside this press release

Homemaking, gardening, and self-sufficiency resources that won't radicalize you into a hate group

It seems like self-sufficiency and homemaking skills are blowing up right now. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, a lot of folks, especially young people, are looking to develop skills that will help them be a little bit less dependent on our consumerist economy. And I think that's generally a good thing. I think more of us should know how to cook a meal from scratch, grow our own vegetables, and mend our own clothes. Those are good skills to have.

Unfortunately, these "self-sufficiency" skills are often used as a recruiting tactic by white supremacists, TERFs, and other hate groups. They become a way to reconnect to or relive the "good old days," a romanticized (false) past before modern society and civil rights. And for a lot of people, these skills are inseparably connected to their politics and may even be used as a tool to indoctrinate new people.

In the spirit of building safe communities, here's a complete list of the safe resources I've found for learning homemaking, gardening, and related skills. Safe for me means queer- and trans-friendly, inclusive of different races and cultures, does not contain Christian preaching, and does not contain white supremacist or TERF dog whistles.

Homemaking/Housekeeping/Caring for your home:

Gardening

Country/Rural Living:

Sewing/Mending:

Sustainability/Land Stewardship

Avoiding the "Crunchy to Alt Right Pipeline"

These are just the resources I've personally found helpful, so if anyone else has any they want to add, please, please do!

Help Save the World of TTRPGs and Their Creators.

Okay I’m being a little dramatic, but at the same time I’m pretty serious. This is a call to action, and the livelihoods of myself and lots of other people, many of them (like myself) disabled, are depending on it. This is a post about why, what you can do about it, and (perhaps least often answered) how.

This post is actually an accompaniment to another discussion by someone else. If you don’t want to listen to a 90-minute in-depth discussion of much of what I’m about to tell you, you can just keep reading. Otherwise, click here or here and listen to this either before or after you read this post. (They’re the same thing, just different sources.)

If you have ever made or reblogged posts urging people to switch from Google Chrome to Firefox, you should be willing to at least give a try to other TTRPGs besides D&D5e for much the same principle reasons. I’m not telling you you have to hate D&D5e, and I’m not telling you you have to quit D&D5e, I’m just asking you to try some other games. If you don’t like them, and you really want to go back to D&D5e, then go back to D&D5e. But how can you really know you won’t like other games if you have literally never tried them? This post is a post about why and how to try them. If you’re thinking right now that you don’t want to try them, I urge you to look below to see if any of your reasons for not wanting to try them are covered there. Because the monopoly that WotC’s D&D5e has on TTRPGs as a whole is bad for me as a game designer, and it’s bad for you as a game player. It’s even bad for you if you like D&D5e. A fuller discussion of the why and how this is the case can be found in the links above, but it isn’t fully necessary for understanding this post, it’ll just give you a better perspective on it.

If you’re a D&D5e player, I’m sure at some point or another, you’ve been told “play a different game”, and it must get frustrating without the context of why and how. This post is here to give you the why and how.

[The following paragraph has been edited because the original wording made it sound like we think all weird TTRPGs suck.]

Before that though, one more thing to get out of the way. I'm going to level with you. There’s a lot of weird games out there.

You are gonna see a lot of weird TTRPGs when you take the plunge. Many of them try to completely reinvent what a TTRPG even is, and some fail spectacularly, others really do even up doing something very interesting even if they don't end up being what a core TTRPG player wants. But not every indie RPG is a Bladefish, lots and lots of them are more 'traditional' and will feel very familiar to you, I promise. (And you might even find that you like the weird experimental bladefish type ones, these are usually ideal for one-session plays when your usual group can't play your usual game for any reason.)

You're also going to probably see a lot of very bad games, and man have I got some stories of very bad games, but for now I'm just saying to make sure you read the reviews, or go through curators (several of which will be listed below), before you buy.

Now that that is out of the way, I’m going to go down a list of concerns you may have for why not, and then explain the how.

“I don’t want to learn a whole new set of rules after I already spent so much time learning D&D5e.”

Learning a new set of rules is not going to be as hard as you think. Most other TTRPGs aren’t like that. D&D5e is far on the high end of the scale for TTRPGs being hard and time-consuming to learn and play. If you’ve only played D&D5e, it might trick you into thinking that learning any TTRPG is an overwhelmingly time-consuming task, but this is really mostly a D&D5e problem, not a TTRPG problem as a whole.

“D&D5e has all of these extra online tools to help you play it.”

So what? People have been playing TTRPGs without the help of computers for 50 years. To play a well-designed TTRPG you won’t need a computer. Yes, even if you're bad at math. There are some TTRPGs out there that barely even use math.

“I’m too invested in the narrative and characters of my group’s current ongoing D&D5e campaign to switch to something else.”

There are other games, with better design made by better people for less money, that are the same kind of game as D&D5e, that your current characters, lore, and plot will fit right into and do it better. And no, it's not just Pathfinder, there's others.

“I can’t afford to play another TTRPG.”

You probably can. If you’ve only played D&D5e, you might have been made to think that TTRPGs are a very expensive hobby. They aren’t. D&D5e is actually uniquely expensive, costing more than 3x more than the next most expensive TTRPG I can think of right now. Even on the more expensive end, other TTRPG books will cost you no more than $60, most will cost you less than $20, and a whole lot of them are just free. If you somehow still can’t afford another TTRPG, come to the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book club mentioned below, nominate the game, and if it wins the vote we will straight up buy it for you.

(By the way, if you had any of the above concerns about trying other games besides D&D5e, that really makes it sound like you are in a textbook abusive relationship with D&D5e. This is how abusers control their partners, and how empires control their citizens, by teaching you to think that nothing could ever get any better, and even though they treat you bad, the Other will treat you even worse.)

“If I don’t play D&D5e, which TTRPG should I play?”

That’s a pretty limited question to be asking, because there will be no one TTRPG for everything. And no, D&D5e is not the one TTRPG for everything, Hasbro’s marketing team is just lying to you. (Pathfinder and PbtA are not the one system for everything either!) Do you only play one video game or only watch one movie or only read one book? When you finish watching an action movie like Mad Max, and then you want to watch a horror movie, do you just rewind Mad Max and watch it over again but this time you act scared the whole time? No, you watch a different movie. I’m asking you to give the artistic medium of TTRPGs the same respect you would give movies.

“I want to play something besides D&D5e, but my friends won’t play anything else!”

I have several answers to this.

“I only watch actual plays.”

Then watch actual plays of games that aren’t D&D5e. These podcasts struggle for the same reasons that indie RPGs struggle, because of the brand recognition and brand loyalty D&D5e has, despite their merit. I don’t watch actual plays, or else I would be able to list more of them. So, anyone who does watch actual plays, please help me out by commenting on this post with some non-D&D5e actual plays you like. And please do me a favor and don’t list actual plays that only play one non-D&D5e system, list ones that go through a variety of systems. The first one I can think of is Tiny Table.

“I can just homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e.”

Even though I want to, I’m not going to try and argue that you can’t actually homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e. Instead, I’m going to ask you why you’re buying two $50 rulebooks just to throw away half the pages. In most other good RPGs, you don’t need to change the rules to make them fun, they’re fun right out the box.

“But homebrewing D&D5e into any kind of game is fun! You can homebrew anything out of D&D5e!”

Firstly, I promise that this is not unique to D&D5e. Secondly, then you would probably have more fun homebrewing a system that gives you a better starting point for reaching your goal. Also, what if I told you that there are entire RPG systems out there that are made just for this? There are RPG systems that were designed for the purpose of being a toolbox and set of materials for you to work with to make exactly the game you want to make. Some examples are GURPS, Savage Worlds, Basic RolePlaying, Caltrop Core, and (as much as I loathe it) PbtA.

“I’m not supporting WotC’s monopoly because I pirate all the D&D5e books.”

Then you’re still not supporting the smaller developers that this monopoly is crushing, either.

Now, here’s the how. Because I promise you, there’s not just one, but probably a dozen other RPGs out there that will scratch your exact itch.

Here’s how to find them. This won’t be a comprehensive list because I’ve already been typing this for like 3 hours already. Those reading this, please go ahead and comment more to help fill out the list.

First, I’m gonna plug one of my own major projects, because it’s my post. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club. It’s a discord server that treats playing TTRPGs like a book club, with the goal of introducing members to a wide variety of games other than D&D5e. RPGs are nominated by members, then we hold a vote to decide what to read and play for a short campaign, then we repeat. There is no financial, time, or schedule investment required to join this book club, I promise it is very schedule-friendly, because we assign people to different groups based of schedule compatibility. You don’t have to play each campaign, or any campaign, you can just read along and participate in discussion that way. And if you can’t afford to buy the rulebook we’re going to be reading, we will make sure you get a PDF of it for free. That is how committed we are to getting non-D&D5e RPGs into people’s hands. Here is an invite link.

Next, there are quite a few tumblr blogs you can follow to get recommendations shown to you frequently.

@indierpgnewsletter

@indie-ttrpg-of-the-day

@theresattrpgforthat

@haveyouplayedthisttrpg

@indiepressrevolution

Plenty of podcasts, journalists, and youtubers out there do in-depth discussions of different systems regularly, a couple I can think of off the top of my head are:

Storyteller Conclave (I’m actually going to be interviewed live on this show on April 10th!)

Seth Skorkowsky

Questing Beast

The Gaming Table

Rascal News

Lastly, you can just go looking. Browse r/rpg, drivethrurpg.com, indie press revolution, and itch.io.

Now, if you really want to support me and my team specifically Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, our debut TTRPG, is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.

just in case it gets deleted

she got deleted so im reblogging this again. SPREAD THIS.

I'll go one better...

Matt evidence masterpost? Here's what I've got saved atm, gonna save these after reblogging.

Probably good to save this and keep it rolling.

The link to “Prediabetes: The epidemic that never was, and shouldn't be” goes to the wrong article, here’s the correct one:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-prediabetes-diabetes-pharma-epidemic-perspec-0801-jm-20160729-story.html

Oops! Thanks for this!

I’m back! And I’m no longer using an ancient version of Photoshop to colour so I hope to start posting comics regularly.

In response to an ask I just got...

If you want to know what's wrong with the creator of the orange and pink lesbian flag, read these posts:

(Click Me_1)

(Click Me_2)

I’m back! And I’m no longer using an ancient version of Photoshop to colour so I hope to start posting comics regularly.

My only concerns for Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds