Van Helsing coming in with the most unnecessary name drop like

Rise and Fall is great but he does make a rather wacky claim at one point that T. rex had chimp level intelligence. Otherwise a good book.

I start with P and end with ORN what am I?

PRONGHORN

A nonhuman character in heavy makeup: *is very long*

Me: is that you, Doug

The credits: Freaky Creature played by Doug Jones

Me: YEAHHHH

When it’s Doug

my favorite character trope is when someone in a full fledged fantasy setting has a gun. they're surrounded by magic and old weaponry and they pull out a fucking pistol to a dragons face

I once played a Pathfinder character who was just a WWI English captain who'd gotten transported into this fantasy world of knights and demons by a random flash of wild magic and he was just so tired and also had a ludicrously overpowered Webley revolver that frequently one-shot literal demons.

It was so much fun.

GIRLS NIGHT1!!! Angua and Cherri, oh gods i love this duo theyre adorable,,,

i also tried doing a disco elysium and discworld fake screenshot,,, (( i suck at thinking of cool names for things so i took the skills names from @higgsbison post where they did an interactive disco elysium and a discworld crossover !! )) aand some more character interactions, sam and sybil this time

^ ( inspo'd by this post i saw ))

just to be completely clear, the amount of military power and political influence Israel has has NOTHING to do with its settlers being Jewish. Israel is a force for American & European interests in the region and they're just doing what America does and allows/encourages its close allies to do.

war crimes aren't considered war crimes when someone America finds useful is doing them. european and american pushback against anyone criticizing Israeli apartheid & genocide is 100% because these crimes are useful to American & European hegemony.

Governments that are deeply antisemitic, like France, aren't suddenly caring about Jewish people. Jewish people, persecuted the world over, don't hold some kind of hegemonic power outside of Israel.

The state of Israel and its attendant brutal treatment of the locals are both incredibly useful to the US, and American hegemony means we're expected to celebrate both.

not bc they're Jewish. this isn't a break in the pattern of western antisemitism and it's not evidence that antisemitism doesn't exist.

it's just like how you could get fired for saying shit against the US war in Afghanistan when i was growing up. it is 100% about US military and political interests (ok slightly western europe too but lbr)

This is exactly it. Israel doesn't control the US, the US uses Israel as a military outpost in the Middle East and doesn't care who it has to hurt to keep it that way.

Round One - Match Sixteen

Hydrogen Bomb vs Coughing Baby (somebody please help the hydrogen bomb)

i actually do think individual human lives are unfathomably valuable

my liege lord made his heraldic banner a fucking picrew dude i cant do this shit anymore im gonna become a highwayman or some shit

OP got an ask from a Neanderthal

Is it the one with the orange crocodiles? 🥺

Actually your society is the freaks for shooting everything that moves and burning half your "nature reserves" every year so that upperclass dandies can eat leaded pheasant. North Americans are the well adjusted ones here, your country has become a desolate suburban lawn in island form

my opinion as an american is that we spend way too much time trying to save african megafauna and nowhere near enough time making fun of the english for turning an entire island--which was once a hazelnut food forest--into a goddamn lawn.

bill bryson once actually wrote down in a whole book and got published that the english were superb gardeners and i about threw the book out the window i was that outraged. the english!!! the fucking ENGLISH. them? that's who you want to laud? the english

the

THERE ARE A GRAND FUCKING TOTAL OF ZERO STAPLE CROPS ORIGINALLY OR EVEN PRIMARILY CULTIVATED BY THE ENGLISH. NONE OF THEM. NOT POTATOES NOT WHEAT NOT TURNIPS NOT RYE. THEY GNAWED THEIR ISLAND DOWN TO A NUB FOR NOTHING. THE WOLVES AND BEARS ALL GONE FOR NOTHING. THE WILDCATS AND BIRDS AND MUSTELIDS AND INSECTS, GONE IN THEIR THOUSANDS, FOR NOTHING. FOR SOME SHEEP. FOR

THEIR MAIN AGRICULTURAL EXPORT IS FAMINE

anyway the english approach to agriculture, biodiversity, and environmentalism is roughly on par with a dog's approach to someone else's homework and everywhere in the world that has inherited their cack-fisted disdain for nature has suffered immensely. i can't overstate enough how bad things have been and still are.

please make fun of them. it's the least they fucking deserve.

the English led the world in abandoning the art of forestry, because for a while there they had intensively managed forests just trying to keep up with fuel demands, because as an island nation they've always been more likely to increase in density and try to bring marginal land under cultivation when the population grows, rather than spilling extra farmers over the nearest border.

and then they got onto coal and were like 'oh guess we don't need these trees and things anymore' and started eating their way through them and never really stopped.

(also according to the 13th century Charter of the Forest, certain common foraging rights in woodlands were legally sacrosanct regardless of land ownership, so the destruction of british forest is heavily bound up in enclosure and the destruction of the commons. and the highland clearances, which is intra-british colonialism at the expense of the scots. not that the scots haven't been involved in this process of Civilization but they did also have it done to them.)

and so if you, like, google earth around Britain you will find that random small clumps of trees are named 'Something Wood' because there used to be a wood there.

shook me mightily to do this as a teen and realize that the backdrop of all that Cute Small Animals Driven From Their Homes By Human Development children's fiction britain has long produced was actually to-scale, and the english countryside is genuinely like that.

Faces carved into the walls of the Paris Catacombs

Frenchmen be like “this pitch black cave full of skeletons is not scary enough, I must make it worse”

@dying-suffering-french-stalkers

i saw an incel complaining about shin hati being a 'tomboyish defeminized force goblin' which is. probably one of the funniest takes a weirdo star wars hater has ever had.

"Tomboyish Defeminized Force Goblin" AND YOU SAY THIS LIKE A BAD THING?

This sentence has made me more interested in the Ahsoka show than any marketing ever did.

i think I finally have a term for the genre of takes that I find insufferable and it's "leftist insight porn"

part of my writing style that i think is valuable is that I try to hedge (note "that I think is valuable" not "is valuable") in an effort to make myself seem less like a big smart expert who knows what it's talking about (which I'm not) and more like just some rando online doing amateur armchair sociology (which I am)

like okay, there was a blog post going around elsewhere that said that the reason modern web design is bad is because misogyny; design is seen as women's work, leading to a merge between design and developer as job descriptions, leading to developers doing the design, leading to bad design

and like... maybe! it's possible this has something to do with it. but it was written/talked about in this very "wow, this is definitely true, i always knew that techbros are ontologically evil and say 'horrible morning!' to each other" way and that annoys me. whereas if it was like "here is one mechanism that I think might contribute to design getting worse" it'd be different. you need a lot of epistemic humility if you're going to attribute big cultural things to one specific cause

Sometimes Twitter is good

I thought originally the customer was just offended someone sent them a cake celebrating the Philadelphia PD.