-Piiiiiiipe wrench fiiiiiiiight (pipe wrench fight!)...

it’s soooooo funny watch wotc shit the bed harder than anyone before them

if anyone here is scrambling to hop off the titanic that d&d is become before it hits the iceberg hmu and i’ll give you some game recs

so my personal breaking point was, after years of promises to Do Better™, Spelljammer releases w a new old revamped player race, the Hadozee! that’s right kids! now you too can play as a magically uplifted warrior slave monkey person!

here’s but a small taste of that Good Hadozee Lore

there’s a lot but i’m already physically tired just thinking abt it and many others have put it far better than me if you wanna see the full extent. it was so bad tho that wotc took them outta the pdf within a day of release, along w giving a statement abt how they promise to Do Better™

but between now and then there’s also been:

off and on rumblings abt the upcoming new edition, One D&D, and what that will do for ppl

the d&d player base is having a crisis as the game is now more popular than ever but no one wants to dm. this appears mostly to be bc of how dming already has a bit of a learning curve but wotc seem determined to make it as un-fun as possible w things like shitty adventure paths, and encouraging a player culture that puts it on the dm to know allllll the rules bc they’re the one’s running the game :] like a computer :] players don’t need to know the all the lil ins and outs of their own characters but by god should the dm own and have memorized every supplement you could want to use!

leaked meetings have revealed that shareholders disprove of d&d’s lack of “return spenders” or w/e. like. you know how to play physical games you need to, step: 1 buy the game, step 2: now you own the game and can play at will? well that’s not a subscription service! there’s no way in put a lootbox in that! ppl buy the game once and never have to buy something from us again?? bullshit the investors say! no one has any idea how wotc plans to meet these demands and ppl are starting to get worried abt the future of online play

apparently there were at least 5 video games in the works that we only learned abt via their cancellations? but maybe not bc the devs of one game say they haven’t heard anything abt being cancelled???

and the newest thing: the ogl is being replaced

the ogl stuff means basically nothing for regular ppl homebrewing and selling stuff, but seems specifically designed to target d&d’s third party “”competitors”“ (competitors in massive air quotes bc d&d makes up something like 97% of the market), so Paizo, Kobold Press, Green Ronin, and all the other big third party creators are now going to have to edit and resubmit 22 years worth of content and will be making less money off of it. it’s incredibly unclear how this will effect podcasts and youtube channels, as the new olg classifies those as “fanworks” which means there’s a cap on how much you can make off of them before wotc gets major royalties and also owns the ip. currently the Big Ones like Critical Role and Dimension 20 are the only one’s at risk, but there goes your plans for that new campaign thing, indie podcasters!

final thing w the new ogl is, for reasons no one can figure out, it gives incentive to third party publishers to use kickstarter over any other backing service, which is a bigger deal than you’d think bc ppl in the indie scene increasingly using alt methods due to kickstarter’s support of crypto/nfts

that’s all i can think off the top off my head. some of this is possibly incorrect in some way. idc tho bc things are moving fast, and like i said, i’ve been out of the d&d scene (as much as is possible) since the hadozee debacle

closing thoughts. fuck Hasbro. play Troika! or Animon Story. or Mothership. or Into the Odd. or Wanderhome. or Knave. or Cairn. or Lancer. or Mausritter. or Liminal Horror. or Blades in the Dark. or DURF. or Glitter Hearts. or NOVA. or–

This is all true and horrible, but "harder than anyone before them?" How quickly we forget TSR and their "five people are discussing D&D together, pay us" policy.

Oh yeah, that's also the same regime that brought us the Hadozee in the first place.

This is so disrespectful. It should be illegal.

THAT IS A LIE!!!!

WTF?!

I’m not even from the US and know like three things about US history but I studied genocide at Uni and congrats guys this is genocide denial at its finest

….I think this is a Canadian textbook? I’ve never heard any textbook in the US refer to Native Americans as “First Nations” people.

Ah, yes, Snopes has it. Textbook is from Canada.

Which is absolutely not intended to exonerate American textbooks, which have done similar things. However, let’s also not forget that Canada treats their indigenous people the worst of any “developed” country in the world–yes, including the US.

if a computergirl was transgender would she go on CRT

component replacement therapy (they are upgrading her GPU (girl processing unit))

You've been hit by

You've been struck by a

Took a bunch of candles from my church’s Christmas service because I am CRIMINAL

MERRY CHRISTMAS SUCKAS LIGHT IT UP

But my friend you left so early! Surely something slipped your mind… You forgot I gave these also! Would you leave the best behind?

Ive never laughed so hard at a post

This Friday's meme is: already there

“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).

“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.

Blood is what now?

It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing

#are you telling me#humans are just sentient aquariums? 

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.

Thank you that’s…very disturbing

It’s not my fault you’re human.

Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.

You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.

#/blood is imitation seawater/ is the part that’s confusing 

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

And that’s what a human is!

Well, there’s another few steps, of course.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.

It has been MONTHS, @elodieunderglass, and I am still mumbling “furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship” under my breath as a comfort phrase, and the FUCKING INDIGNITY that it came from this godforsaken post about THE HORRIBLE WETNESS OF MAMMALS!

“The horrible wetness of mammals” would make a great band name.

“hold hope, internally, at 37.5 degrees” and “Mammals internalize everything (eggs, grudges)” Now live permanently in my vocabulary

So, what is the OGL and why are DnD creators thoroughly screwed?

Tumblr has not been doing a great job at talking about this, but:

With OneDnD, Wizards of the Coast has decided to update the Open Game License (OGL). Said license is what allowed people to create homebrew DnD content and sell it, and even larger companies to use certain sorts of content. Pathfinder, for example, is built on said OGL. This also allows streamers and artists to exist and benefit from said content.

With OneDnD (sometimes called “dnd 6e”), WOTC wants to create a much more restrictive OGL, which will, amongst other things:

It’s important to note that OGLs are supposedly irrevocable. They were planning to use it for OneDnD initially, but they want to apply it retroactively to 5e, somehow. Which is illegal, but lawyers have mentioned there’s a chance they may get away with it given the wording.

This means that anything you make based on DnD (A homebrew item? A character drawing? Even music, according to them?), can get taken and used as they deem appropiate.

These news come from a leak of the OGL, which have been confirmed by multiple reputable sources (including Kickstarter, which has confirmed that WOTC already talked with them about this), and was planned to be released next week.

Speak against it. Share the word. Reblog this post. Let people know. Tumblr hasn’t been talking much about this matter, but it’s VERY important to let people know about what is WOTC bringing. 

Boycott them. Do not buy their products. Do not buy games with their IP. Do not watch their movie. CANCEL your DnD Beyond subscription. (Btw, they ARE planning to release more subscription services too!). They do not care about the community, but they care about the money. Make sure to speak through it. 

And maybe consider other TTRPG systems for the time being, Pathfinder’s Paizo has been much nicer to the community, their workers are unionized and are far more healthy overall

History Posts You Should Always Fact-Check: a non-exhaustive list

- “here’s the Secret Real Meaning behind this piece of traditional media!”

- “here’s the Secret One Single Practical/Biological/Oppression-Related Reason a certain clothing style or garment got popular!”

- (see above, but also for “etiquette rule” or “pattern of behavior”)

- “here’s the Secret Lone Person Responsible For A Widespread Social Issue or Form of Systemic Oppression!”

- “here’s the Secret Worldwide Conscious Conspiracy Being Enacted By All Modern Historians To Keep You From Knowing About [insert historical topic here]!”

When something seems too good to be true… it likely is.

I've found there's a good practical corollary to that:

The more I want something to be true, the more skeptical I am of it.

I know I'll be predisposed to believe it, so I should be giving it extra scrutiny to account for that.

No, Comrade Lesbian. We haul

Wow, thank you JewWhoHasItAll for posting this helpful guide! Now I can support my Christian students much better :)

Facebook post

Twitter thread

This is both hysterically funny and the best demonstration of why this time of year is tough on us and our kids that I’ve ever seen.

there’s been a really bizarre trend in the past couple years of TERFS/radfems getting pissed off about biology posts. posts about the bilateral gyandromorph cardinal (one half male, one half female), posts about older hens beginning to crow and act like roosters, posts about animals being animals. and it’s hilarious because they interpret these posts as some kind of agenda. no! these are animals not choosing any gender identity or sexuality but being born into bodies they have no control over. weird how that happens in nature huh

never tell terfs about white-throated sparrow or they will lose their fucking minds

Do you want to hear about white-throated sparrows?!

Of course you do, they’re fantastic. They come in two models, one with tan head stripes and one with white head stripes. But the gene that controls stripe color also has a bunch of other effects! It’s a supergene!

To briefly sum up a grueling amount of fieldwork by people who were probably not getting paid nearly enough, basically the tan-stripes are nurturers and the white-stripes are fighters, across both males and females. White-stripes chase away intruders more, tan-stripes bring more food to the nest. Tan-stripe females bring more bugs to their chicks than white-stripes, white-stripe females are more aggressive and sing more.

There is a reason Jordan Peterson picked lobsters, not sparrows, to get all MRA about, because the sparrow ladies are ALL about the tan-striped males. Sexy nurturing tan-stripe males are immediately grabbed up by the more aggressive white-stripe females (who are also dead sexy if you’re a sparrow.) Then the remaining birds pair off, so you get tan and white couples reproducing in virtually all cases—nurturing male with aggressive female, hyper-aggressive male with hyper-nurturing female.*

And this is good!** Because it turns out that they can have a tough time if they don’t mate across stripes—white x white sparrows often come out undersized if they come out at all. There was some cool recent genetic sequencing and one particular chromosome is way funky, inverted, and scrambled in the white-stripes. So now every white-stripe has a funky chromosome and a normal one, and every tan-stripe has two normal ones.***

This is all really unique and means that white-throated sparrows effectively have four sexes, because they now only reproduce with a member of the opposite stripe and sex chromosome, and their offspring may be any one of the four sexes. The stripes have essentially become a second sex chromosome.

The geneticists involved think the funky chromosome probably showed up as a weird import from somebody gettin’ jiggy with another sparrow species. Presumably this created a hypersexy female whose white head stripes brought all the boys to the yard, and very unusually, that bred true.

Is that cool or what?!

*No word on whether there is a resulting sparrow tradwife media genre.

**Leaving aside the impact on the emotional health of the non-sexy sparrows.

**A population solely of tan-stripes can reproduce safely, they’re just not that into each other.

the implications for fanfic are staggering

Falling to my knees as I realize "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is an Abyssal name

When Anne has a will, Anne hathaway.

I think we need to add her to the immortal list.

Confirmed. Likely a very modern one, due to her lack of period affectations. She’s just kicking this journey off and has plans for centuries. 

Counterpoint, from @if-i-am-not-for-me, she was married to Shakespeare.  She’s just pretty good at keeping up with things.

Further counterpoint, 

She’s still married to Shakespeare

When Anne hath a Will, Anne Hathaway