talenlee reblogged
can i perhaps interest you guys in some griddlehark??
talenlee reblogged
project-butch
No. No delay
Damn! free thinker alert ‼️
project-butch
Ok some delay
Decemberween '23 — This Year's ASMRtists
If you’re not familiar with it, ASMR is an abbreviation meaning ‘autonomous sensory meridian response,’ a science sounding name for a reaction that some people get to a range of stimuli. This effect can be caused by a whole host of triggers but at least in the community on Youtube there’s a body of people who engage with it because of its ability to affect relaxation and restful mindsets. If you’re not familiar with what this looks like, it looks like a bunch of people making long videos with a strangely hushed affect.
And I watch and listen to them, to help me relax!
If you are familiar with it, hey, here’s some of the artists I’ve been watching this year, as the ASMR effect shifts around in my head and how I respond to it. One thing that people who don’t experience ASMR might not realise is that you can rely only on the effect being modestly unpredictable. Some stuff may cause it reliably for months and then suddenly, nothing. It pushes me to partake of new things regularly, and to that end, every year, I try to look at what artists are ‘new’ to me that I haven’t mentioned before.
Here then are four artists that I started paying attention to this year:
ASMR "Criminal" Lawyer Gets You Out of Trouble | BETTER CALL SAUL Parody
I feel like I’ve watched more Amy Kay, like maybe I watched her years ago and I never got around to mentioning her. That’s probably likely, because she has an entire queer-read story about you being some variety of monarch, who started out being referred to as a dude, and then as the story evolved, the woman you’re talking to starts referring to you differently. Then eventually the series splits into two threads, with one half referring to ‘my lord’ and the other ‘my lady.’
Oh and then a cult got involved, it was an interesting story.
Anyway, Amy Kay does a lot of different types of video. Some of it is very mundane, some of it is very fantastic, and you’ll know if it’s the kind you respond to. Also, and this shouldn’t be a thing, but in the ASMR space, there’s a common responsiveness to media trends. When a Harry Potter movie comes out, a lot of people will make Harry Potter themed videos. It’s just a heavy trend, and I try not to hold it too much against the artists who are algorithm-responsive, but I am grateful when I see people fade out on it.
Amy Kay does have some videos about Harry Potter content, but it seems to be a thing of the past for now.
ASMR My Friend Brushes and Plays With My Hair
Cosmo is an ASMR puppet. Cosmo is not unique as an ASMR puppet, but Cosmo is a puppet that does ASMR. And it’s a big friendly kind of puppet. You’re not going to see stuff that you won’t see from other ASMRtists by the way. Cosmo does roleplays about Recent Events (hi, Barbie Movie Tie In moment) and Cosmo does hand-focused gameplay videos (like Solitaire and Rush Hour), and Cosmo even does draw-along and ramble videos. In every way, Cosmo creates the most typical and normal content any middle of the road ASMRtist can produce, except for the alienation that comes from Cosmo being a puppet.
Alienation is important to me in ASMR. Roleplays don’t want to be realistic because they can’t be. Sometimes there are people who aim for normal, everyday kind of vibes, or expected behaviours, but because ASMR content is fundamentally weird (why are we all whispering?), the closer it gets to normalcy, the less likely it is to land for me. Give me something weird, give me something that recognisably can’t be real, and let me patch the gap in reality myself.
Cosmo’s great, and Cosmo isn’t real, but Cosmo exists and is my friend.
ASMR | making comfort food for a cold day
I’m really selfconscious about my ASMR habits, especially since a lot of the ASMRtists I follow are very attractive women, some of whom are markedly younger than myself, and that makes me feel… oogy. It does mean that when I find myself responding to an ASMRtist who isn’t a pretty white girl, I try to make sure I mention it, and share their work. In this case, ASMRdido got on my radar through long, patient, whispered explanations of mathematical game concepts – particularly, the Monty Hall problem.
The other thing he does that I find useful for study is long (long) videos of playing a softly sounded, wood-and-velvet game called Close the Box. Close the Box is a great solo game because it underscores how little pieces you need to make a game out of something and still make it engaging.
ASMR-The Vintage Ice Cream Parlor Role Play🍨(Spooky Creations)
And finally, Lloyd’s ASMR is a channel that’s… I think deliberately weird. Lloyd really turns up the ambient sound so if you don’t like the SHHHHH of an empty room, you might not like these. They’re slow, deliberate videos, and usually you can see the structure being something Lloyd has props for, reiterated in a new form. Door to door salesman, visiting a store, visiting an old style store. It’s a bit like a comprehensive library in that if you like one thing you can probably find ten or twenty versions of the same thing, even if they don’t make sense. Like you don’t get door to door bakery salespeople.
Lloyd is someone I like because of his gentle demeanour and I like the way that I, forgive me, don’t have to pay much attention. There’s not going to be a really funny joke or something I need to respond to, the way that (say) survey question videos invite me to. I know what I’m getting and I know there’s a reasonably large quantity of it, but also that it’s not about to impress me. It’s just sweet background noise and I’m not going to need to be afraid of something shocking or funny happening.
There! Here’s some stuff I’ve been listening to this year and I think makes my ability to focus and study better.
Source: press.invincible.ink
There should be some of that good old American Cornfield Horror shit, you know with strange radio transmissions and fucked up deer and stuff, but in Australia. Guy whose car breaks down on a stretch of road with nothing but sheep and cattle farms for 100km in any direction. No phone service to call RAA. Both of these things are completely normal but is that... the lights of a town in the distance? Can't be. There's no town here on the map. The am radio station he's been listening to for the past three hours is fucked up now, somehow. He sees a truck approaching in the distance and gets out to wave it down, but it somehow... doesn't arrive? Turns back to his car. There it is -- the most fucked up kangaroo he's ever seen in his life.
isn't that just tuesday for you guys
uh it's called NRMA and if you call through after hours from one of the roadside phones, you will get to hear the fantastically threatening pre-recorded message 'stay where you are, near the light.'
talenlee reblogged
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
THE NEW SELESNYA EVANGEL ART IS FAT
talenlee reblogged
Why does magic still use “he or she”? Even if you look past the fact that it isn’t inclusive, it’s just clunky and annoying to read over and over when the word “they” would suffice.
We don’t. We switched from “he or she” to “they” a while back.
Five years ago, in fact.
Sagas and They/Themming cards are the same age
talenlee reblogged
"I'm going to play Dark Urge, I'm going to play a Drow, I'm going to play a Half Elf Cleric of Selune-" No. I grow tired of filling Faerun with hotties and encouraging my party's fatherless behavior.
To remedy this I have made Your Dad, the ultimate 1:1 replica of the average New Jersey father to save the realm and put a stop to my party's sad, horny business.
And before you can even ask "oh what is the Guardian Your Mom or something" of fucking course she is you fool
talenlee reblogged
staying with my father and my teenage brother occasionally has been very enlightening actually i need to think about it positively
hmmm ok. fascinating. okay. amazing. and i have to live like this? okay
talenlee reblogged
all goofing aside I genuinely don't understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene(TM) is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria Monét and Miya Folick if you're willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.
Isn’t Lady Gaga bisexual?
yes that is indeed why she's on the list of famous women who like women
why have multiple people reblogged this with some horse-assed "um actually most of these people are bi or pan" did I fucking stutter I said they like girls. what is your point. I'm going to kill you.
the icon is because of this post
POV: you make a good post and then encounter tumblr reading comprehension
btw to just clarify for anyone who sees this reblog of this post
op is basically saying something along the lines of "yea ik taylor swift is bi but like. why is she y'all's only lgbtq+ pop icon when there are all these other lgbtq+ people in the pop scene???"
i might have worded this badly but hopefully i got the main point across
hi op here I certainly did not fucking say Taylor Swift is bi
update
more updates
So I hear that you have some things to say about the whole “it was all a dream” trope. I’ve received some additional context on it from other people but I would also like to hear your opinion.
On their own they're not inherently bad things. But the problem they represent tends to be one about them being unsatisfying explanations for the story up to that point.
See, we know dreams are nonsense and we know stories are fictional, but stories are much harder to make than dreams, because dreams don't have to make sense. A dream can make a lot of sense of a story (check out Jacob's Ladder for a generally-praised version of the trope), but a story in most cases works on establishing premises then demonstrating them later; that's how characters can surprise you, because they establish the way they are at one point, and then do something you weren't expecting based on that establishment, but because they are meant to represent people with whole inner lives, the difference in behaviour makes you ask 'hey, why did they do things differently?'
If it's a dream, the answer to everything is just ''cos it's a dream.'
Dreams are also used as a common 'get out' clause for horror or disaster scenarios, where a story presents a terrible situation and the narrative then abruptly ends with 'don't worry about all of that, though' which can make it feel like the author didn't know how or didn't care about how they could resolve that story or what it says. It was a super common thing in fanfiction the early 00s, by my memory, where authors would make these long serialised stories, get criticised for how bad they were or what wasn't making sense, and then in the last 'chapter' reveal it was All Just A Dream, so don't you look silly for thinking it was bad, audience?
It's not like you can't use dreams well! It's just there are lots and lots of ways they can be used badly, and 'all just a dream' stories often don't use the dreamness to express anything as much as they build up to 'nuh uh'.
talenlee reblogged
just blocking everyone in that 'this stranger changed names in a book to make it more readable for themselves' thread until I stop feeling the urge to shout at all of them
'he colonised this book' IT'S A BOOK IT'S A FUCKING BOOK IT'S A FUCKING KINDLE FILE THEY FIND REPLACED NAMES THEY WERE STRUGGLING WITH TO MAKE IT MORE READABLE FOR THEM THE ORIGINAL FILE IS STILL THERE IT HASN'T BEEN FUCKING COLONISED THEY'RE NOT SAYING THE BOOK SHOULD BE THIS WAY WILL YOU PLEASE KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF
I'm fine, I'm normal
talenlee reblogged
Yuri between a mets fan and a yankees fan
Let's Go Mets: Baby, I Love The Mets Just As Much As You! Vol. 1
just blocking everyone in that 'this stranger changed names in a book to make it more readable for themselves' thread until I stop feeling the urge to shout at all of them
Game Pile: Just One
New Post has been published on PRESS.exe: Game Pile: Just One
Chances are if you’re like me, you’re going to be dealing with some family gatherings, and those gatherings are almost certainly going to feature downtime where people are looking for something to do. And again, if you’re like me you might be thinking well this is the time to bust out a board game or a card game and you have to resist that urge. You have to resist the urge because this is not the time to teach someone how to play Resistance with its tension and its lying and its complicated steps. Right now, you need a party game, and you need a party game so good that it’ll work for almost any grouping that are capable of engaging with the idea of playing a game together. I don’t have a lot of party games in my collection, and I know what my collection would look like if I was limiting myself to …
This party game is one of the easiest games to get playing out of any I’ve ever played. It’s a game that lives alongside other party beasts like Codenames, Werewolf and even the basically-free A Fake Artist Goes To New York.
The game Just One is played with a very small amount of stuff. Each player has a marker and a little dry-erase writeable easel, and there’s a deck of cards. For any given game, you only need a small number of cards. First player grabs a card, puts it facing the rest of the players, and picks a number from 1-5. That tells them the word they want that player to guess. Then, those players write a one-word clue on their easels, and then before showing it to the player who’s guessing, they show one another.
If any two players’ clue matches, those two players don’t show their clues, and the guesser gets to see the remaining clues. They get to guess once, what word the remaining clues are trying to show them.
That’s it.
That’s a round.
And you may think ‘hey, that doesn’t sound like much,’ and it’s not much. It really isn’t! It’s simple and you can breeze through a round so fast that a failure or a mistake doesn’t sting or last because you got a new word to go for now. You can go from having never played this game to playing your second round in about five minutes. There’s no elaborate setup, no fictional buy-in, there’s almost nothing in the way of ‘hey, let’s play a game’ to the lets-playing-a-game.
Just One has no fiction; it has no soul, no heart, no myth to it, there’s no lore, no backstory or association. When we’re talking about games there’s a common refrain of how mechanics create a narrative and how that narrative creates a fiction and all that good stuff that gives you room to tell stories and make movies and engage the mind and soul and imagination in a way that lasts beyond the game and the playing. A game like Just One is almost the opposite of that; playing Just One is often more an exercise in finding unrelated threads of things that you and the guesser can connect to and trying to pull those threads in against one another, as you navigate the space of other clue-givers, where nobody wants to take the most obvious option but nobody wants to leave the most obvious clues to lay by the wayside.
There’s a willingness to refer to these systemic games as being ‘pure,’ and you know, I’ve done it, I’m not proud. Or tired. For me what’s important about Just One isn’t just its systemic purity (and trust me, a lot of other games like it exist and have been iterated on, often by the same developers in the same general play factor, almost like when you have the infrastructure for dry-erase markers and hard plastic you wind up doing a lot with it).
The way I want to recommend Just One though isn’t its purity or some dazzling systemic mastery, but instead, I want you to think of this as one of the most convenient games of its type that you can play. You don’t even need to be able to shuffle cards to play this. Grab a hunk of thirteen out of the heart of the deck and it is close enough to shuffled as makes no difference. Setup is handing people a marker and a placard and telling them what to do the first time, and then, they get it.
This game thrives on exploiting your competitive spirit (‘I bet I can do a better clue than that’) and your cooperative nature (‘oh I hope this works for them’). It makes your in-group messages into game-winning hail maries, and it punishes two people for sharing a braincell in a way that is frictionless and over in moments.
This game is amazing.
I don’t own it.
(Yet)
I don’t own it because I am writing this on Christmas Day 2022. I played this game again today, with my family, and had this moment of asking: WHY THE HELL DON’T I OWN A COPY OF THIS GAME? It’s cheap (as a widespread award winner), it’s available (on physical and digital stores), it’s even something you could print-and-play at a pub or family gathering with a phone and a note app (I mean how hard is it to find a random word generator website online). I want to show this game to students and I want to share this game with my dad.
The way I feel when I play this game and I see my weirdo clues click with the guesser is amazing. When I am presented with five words and I can stare at them until the pieces slot together in my head and suddenly I blurt out a word like ‘gothic’? That’s amazing.
But.
But but but but.
But.
Wanna know the best feeling?
The best feeling is when you get presented with missing clues. Five clues in front of me, three face-down because they match. So two clues, but suddenly you’re presented with the question: Hey, what’s something so obvious that three people tried for it? Is that a clue? What kind of clue would these three people have in common? What would they pick when trying to talk to me…?
“Chewbacca.”
Success.
Cheers.
Shock.
And the elation.
If you want a small, convenient board game collection of the best and brightest in each category, sort of paragons of excellence so you don’t feel overwhelmed with choices, Just One is a game that can stand, on its own, as your only party game and totally justify that space.
Source: press.invincible.ink
I need to live another twenty years purely to see what kind of bullshit the Tolkien estate gets up to with respect to The Silmarillion in 2044.
Context for non-dweebs: Unlike Tolkien's other well known works, The Silmarillion was published posthumously; Tolkien died in 1973, and The Silmarillion first saw print in 1977.
Though Tolkien had shown drafts of The Silmarillion to publishers during his lifetime, there are substantial differences between those drafts and the book that was actually published. It's been a matter of great interest – read: nerd drama – in the Tolkien fandom exactly how much of the published Silmarillion is really the work of J R R Tolkien, and how much of it is original authorship by his son Christopher.
The Tolkien estate has historically maintained that The Silmarllion is all J R R Tolkien, and that Christopher merely acted as an editor, because "by J R R Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)" is going to sell better than "by Christopher Tolkien (based on the work of J R R Tolkien)".
If The Silmarillion really is 100% J R R Tolkien's work, and Christopher Tolkien was merely an editor, then – since J R R Tolkien died in 1973 – the whole thing will enter the public domain on January 1st, 2044 in all life-plus-70 jurisdictions (i.e., most of the big ones, including the US).
If, however, any major part of the published Silmarillion constitutes original authorship by Christoper Tolkien, then the term of copyright would instead be calculated based on his date of death in 2020, pushing its earliest possible entry into the public domain in life-plus-70 jurisdictions back to January 1st, 2091.
Thus, there exists the possibility that the Tolkien estate might be able to preserve their ownership of The Silmarillion by arguing that they've been lying the whole time about Christopher Tolkien not contributing any original authorship to the published work.
Would it work? Probably not – but it'd be fun to see them try!
(The preceding summary is, of course, focused on copyright duration. If you're not concerned about the copyright angle and just want to start shit on purpose, what you do is bring up the theory that the Tolkien estate's claim that Christopher Tolkien merely edited the work is true only because the original portions of the published Silmarillion were actually ghost-written by Guy Gavriel Kay.)
talenlee reblogged
Listen, I’m a control freak. I can only handle chaos if it’s contained within tightly confined boundaries. That’s why freehand selection is more than just a tool, it’s a lifestyle 😤