Aw YIEH I got my blog back. Imma let the queue run dry here so if anyone new is around come find me back at @hajikelist
evil park with a sign that says “please feed the bears we are trying to make them as fucked up as possible”
Bro
Please click on the link, it’s such a good read.
This tortoise loves shower time!
The Radiated Tortoise is known for this “dancing” behavior during periods of heavy rain in its native range (dry areas of southern Madagascar).
ghostofwhat
ok but the concept of a rivalry is just so funny. it’s like “i’m literally obsessed with you. you’re the only motherfucker on the planet worth my undivided time and attention. i spend hours planning in detail exactly what i’m going to say and do the next time that we meet. but, like, i fucking hate you.”
so dance, hamster, dance, he never had a chance
my favorite scene in LotR as a kid was when Sam started miserably freestyling in the tower of Cirith Ungol and the only reason he ever found Frodo was because he deliriously tried to join in
lady-lizbian
…i did read some of the novels, but i couldn’t get through them entirely…
…and so i genuinely have no idea whether or not this is serious. coz i mean, obviously, it could be a joke. but it could also have legitimately happened. people who have only seen the films underestimate the amount of random things that happen in the books that could come off as utterly silly and ridiculous if removed from their context.
Haha, well, it is pretty much what happens. Sam is looking for Frodo in the tower of Cirith Ungol and is despairing that he will ever find him. He sits down and does what any self-respecting Tolkien character does during their moments of hopelessness and bursts into song.
It’s a really good song (ten year old Ship had it memorized) and as he begins the refrain a second time, he hears Frodo’s voice answering weakly from above. Frodo is poisoned and despairing and beaten but he is still a Hobbit and cannot resist a singalong even while on the brink of death.
ghostingrose
So I had this half lucid dream where I was swimming in a lake with my crush and his friends and we climbed up onto this very low dock that dipped just a little below the water. I thought “Oh I want to hold a water animal!” and what I WANTED was a dolphin, but my brain couldn’t quite conjure the image of a dolphin, nor could I recall the word “dolphin”.
So after much thought as to what a dolphin looked like, a giant banana with floppy banana peel dog ears, banana peel fins, and two beady black eyes hauled itself into my lap from the waters of the lake.
And I remember thinking “... Now wait... something is not quite right with this...”
I sat looking it over for a moment until I realised, “Oh I forgot a tail!” so when I looked down, the creature had a fish tail, and I was Quite Proud of how well I had recalled what a dolphin looked like from memory, and it deserved to be drawn:
My mom got tired of me making fun of her “Live Laugh Love” sign and modified it.
Some process shots of the Big Gs! I rarely save in-progress images like this (too in the zone!) so this is a rare stroke of luck for those of you who were wondering what my sketches look like. Wonder no more! It’s messy.
ALSO: Ask and ye shall receive! Now available by popular request: PRINTS AT SOCIETY6!
I know tabletop RPG players being stumped by first-grade logic puzzles is a funny meme and all, but as a GM the thing you’ve gotta realise is that nine times out of ten, your players are getting roadblocked by bone-simple puzzles for one of three reasons:
a. they don’t realise that there is a puzzle;
b. you didn’t clearly or completely communicate the information required to solve the puzzle; or
c. they came up with a perfectly valid solution and you rejected it because it wasn’t the specific solution given by the source you stole the puzzle from.
These aren’t unsolvable problems, but their solutions require you to really think about what you’re doing.
First, you have to make it obvious that a puzzle is present. Engaging with the game’s fictional world as a puzzle-box to be solved is not many players’ default mode of engagement; they may be more inclined to approach it as a simulated reality, or an improvisational theatre exercise, or as an opportunity to Talk About Their Feelings.
You need to explicitly signpost that it’s time to go into puzzle mode. Sometimes this means breaking the fourth wall and just telling your group “okay, it’s puzzle time now”; if that’s what it takes, do it.
Second, you need to be absolutely rigorous in identifying the minimal set of information that’s needed to arrive at a solution.
Don’t assume that what’s obvious to you will be obvious to everybody, especially if it’s unstated. In particular, be wary of clues that rely on catching pop culture references, as your players definitely don’t have the exact same set of referents that you do.
Don’t assume that your players are going to perfectly recall information that came up hours ago (or, heaven forfend, in previous sessions!) – they don’t have your notes to refer to.
Write shit down, make a checklist, and actually, physically check each clue off as you provide it to make sure you haven’t missed one. You’d be amazed how many puzzle-based adventures come to a crashing halt because the GM misremembered which clues they’d already provided and ended up entirely omitting one or more critical pieces of information.
Take a hard look at your phrasing, and ask yourself whether the way you’ve phrased any of your clues admits multiple equally plausible interpretations, particularly ones you didn’t intend.
(Incidentally, that last point is why it isn’t safe to assume that players can rely on their own notes to keep the clues in order. Even if you phrased the clue perfectly to avoid ambiguity or multiple interpretations, the player responsible for note-taking may have written it down wrong! If a puzzle’s solution must rely on note-taking, write the notes yourself and make them into player handouts.)
Thirdly, recognise that a tabletop RPG isn’t a puzzle book or a video game. Puzzles whose intended solutions arbitrarily rule out certain approaches aren’t going to fly. In video games these arbitrary limits often take the form of the proverbial waist-high fence, but at the tabletop, waist-high fences can be less obvious.
For example, you might present a puzzle that can trivially be bypassed by using an ability that you just plain forgot the party has. When that happens, don’t resort to evil genie logic to explain why it doesn’t work – accept your failure and move on.
On no account should you reject a perfectly reasonable proposed solution just because you didn’t think of it first; as the saying goes, that’s pride fucking with you.
Finally, accept that you can do everything right on paper and still end up with a puzzle that won’t work for your particular group because they just don’t have the skills or the temperament for it.
Sometimes it’ll be obvious, like “don’t give a party with a dyslexic leader a word problem”.
Other times it’ll be more subtle. For example, some players are so constitutionally risk-averse that, when presented with a course of action whose potential outcomes are unknown, they’ll prefer to do nothing at all, even when inaction will definitely get them killed – and when it does, they’ll blame you for putting them in that position in the first place. If you’ve got a group like that, you should probably avoid puzzles whose solutions depend on trial and error.
If it sounds like I’m making GMing puzzles out to be this big, scary monster, well, I kind of am. As a GM, puzzles are hard; there are a lot of ways to run them wrong and only a few to run them right. You’ve gotta know what you’re getting into!
On the topic of information, I relate the one and only time I allowed the party to undo 30 minutes of play.
The game was Exalted, and there was a tower that was on fire. I gave some information about how big the building was, potential people stuck inside, and the like. I expected them to do external firefighting things. The party, being the heroic Solars they were, dove in to get directly to rescuing. They realized rapidly that the damage they were taking was MUCH higher than expected and they would not be able to complete their planned mission, nor even a quarter of it.
They asked what was going on, and I said that they were the ones who dove directly into an inferno of blue flame. The party informed me that I never said it was blue flame. Oops.
I’m reminded of the possibly-apocryphal story of the party who openly walked into a dragon’s lair and promptly ate a TPK because their GM had gotten so caught up describing the various wonders of the dragon’s hoard, they’d entirely neglected to mention the dragon.
since microplastics have now been found in plACENTAS allow me to reiterate:
faux fur is plastic
pleather literally has plastic in the name
synthetic wool is plastic
stop implying that plastic is good for anything.
“Vegan” fabrics? Yeah that shit is just plastic rebranded
not supporting the fur industry - but remember, vintage furs from thrift stores do not contribute to killing animals and are actually better for the environment than faux fur.
villainous-queer
You can also buy fur new if you want. That is not a crime unless you are buying endangered animal furs. It’s also not really worse for the environment or the animals than buying regular meat or eggs from the grocery store, because all those animals are factory farmed, whether for fur, meat, or eggs. Factory farming isn’t solely a problem with fur, and anyway if you want to stop it then you’re better off calling or writing your politicians and getting involved with the larger movement that is trying to end big agra monopolies than only shopping at ‘pure’ retailers. You can’t change the world with your pocketbook, that’s a lie capitalism fed us.
The best furs to buy for warmth are coyote and raccoon, anyway, not mink and such. Sheepskin is also good. Stuff like mink, ermine, and sable aren’t actually very useful in terms of keeping you warm. Vintage bear and beaver are also pretty warm. Rabbit is useless, it sheds and goes bare quickly and isn’t very warm at all. Soft though.
Wool is the only fibre in the world that keeps you warm even when the wool is wet, and silk is among the best baselayers for warmth. Linen is the coolest fibre in the world, better than cotton, has been used for centuries and is a lot less costly in effort and water to produce–cotton is only cheaper artificially.
Down is the warmest and most breathable stuffing for blankets and pillows and it lasts a really long time. Cotton or wool stuffing is available also, but it doesn’t get the loft that down does, nor is it as warm (cotton isn’t warm at all). Remember that stuffing is also made of plastic!
Leather is great stuff, if you take care of it properly. It needs regular care and maintaining, but it will last a really long time if you do, and just get softer and softer over the years. And yes, you can clean it! You use something called saddle soap to clean it with. Patent leather has a plastic coating and may not even be leather these days, unfortunately. Deerskin is very nice, very soft but not very warm.
There’s a movement I first heard about in the historical costuming community, from Pinsent Tailoring: Slow Fashion. It’s a response to fast fashion, and the goals are to have a wardrobe that is more about longevity and quality of the clothing, and also about the clothing being made so that in a hundred years, all that would be left are the metal/horn/bone/shell/wood buttons. It’s very hard to do that with modern shoe soles, but if the heel or insole of your shoe is the only plastic you leave, you’re still doing better than an outfit from Target or something. Making your own clothes is actually not extremely difficult, you can start with extremely simple things, including the Bisexual Shirt (poet shirt), a pair of comfy pajama-style pants, and so on.
Make friends with your local vultures, costume historians, and leatherworkers (which are all, sometimes, also cosplayers)! They’re going to have oodles of resources for where to find natural materials.
Also, support Indigenous businesses!
Akon Changkou by Dario Catellani for Vogue US November 2020
IM SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS
If a nudibranch sea slug scored a header in a soccer game in 2014, that would be a rhinophore score and seven years ago
the inFINitesimally small audience for this post has shown its appreseaocean and that’s all that motters
