Not posting this as a reblog because I don't want to screw with somebody else's notes, but the whole "theological implications of Tolkien's orcs" business has some interesting history behind it.

In brief, a big part of why the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe™ is so cagey about what orcs are and where they come from is that later in his life, Tolkien came to believe that orcs as he'd depicted them were problematic – albeit not because of, you know, all the grotesque racial caricature.

Rather, he'd come to the conclusion that the idea of an inherently evil sapient species – a species that's incapable of seeking salvation – was incompatible with Christian ethics. Basically, it's one of those "used the wrong formula and got the right answer" situations.

In his notes and letters, Tolkien played around with several potential solutions to this problem. (Though contrary to the assertions of certain self-proclaimed Tolkien scholars, there's no evidence that he ever seriously planned to re-write his previous works to incorporate these ideas.) In one proposal, orcs are incarnated demons, and "killing" them simply returns them to their naturally immaterial state; in another, orcs are a sort of fleshy automaton remotely operated by the will of Sauron, essentially anticipating the idea of drone warfare.

Of course, this is all just historical trivia; any criticism of The Lord of the Rings must be directed at the books that were actually published, not the books we imagine might have been published if Tolkien had spent a few more years thinking through the implications of what he was writing. However, the direction of his thoughts on the matter is striking for two reasons:

Level 1: character gets a redemption arc for something that's not really that bad because the writers are cowards and don't want to risk making them truly unsympathetic.

Level 2: character gets a redemption arc and the text just straight up refuses to specify what they actually did, but trust us, it was really bad. (AKA Schrödinger's war crime)

Level 3: character gets a redemption arc for something the writers clearly think is really bad, but it's... kind of not? (Bonus points if it's a weird gender role thing.)

Level 4: character gets a redemption arc for something that genuinely warrants it, but the writers seem to have very strange ideas about why it was bad.

as fun as petra parker is it really cannot be stated enough how in addition to MCU oversaturation being its own beast, Spider-Man comics themselves have been absolute dogshit for ten years at this point. like making parker a trans woman is a great idea but i also think its popularity speaks to a larger desire for literally any good editorial to happen at marvel, literally any at all, please, for the love of god. like marvel is addicted to somehow simultaneously Shaking Things Up while Never Meaningfully Changing Anything and the people yearn for something fucking good to happen

look me in the eyes: did you know that peter parker was trapped in outer space and so norman osborn was spider-man for a while. yeah norman fucking osborn. he's a good guy now because he got shot with a magic sin-eating gun that separated the goblin persona out of him. this really happened and it was recent. and if you don't know who "Paul" is then just be fucking thankful

The thing about professional wrestling that I find really and truly fascinating is that it takes place in a setting where

Most settings where magic is real are about magic. The wizards are the main characters or the antagonists. The presence of ghosts or mutants comes up within the first three sentences of any reasonable summary, or is a major plot twist that changes the entire story.

Meanwhile pro wrestling is a combat sport with scripted outcomes and surrounding storylines. "And also sometimes they do necromancy" is such an extraneous detail not worth mentioning. But also I cannot stress enough that sometimes they do necromancy.

You can go an entire show with zero wizard nonsense, but at any given point on any show in any promotion it wouldn't be shocking for a wizard (or demon or alien or vampire etc) to appear.

The wizards don't even win particularly often. Having actual magic powers that you use to cheat is actually somewhat less effective than "hitting someone with a blunt object while the referee is distracted" or "being large".

Funniest possible approach to magic.

hope it was worth the college money

update: the reason it hasn’t gotten any sort of relief is cuz iran fuckin smoked a logistical center that was supposed to resupply them and the military covered it up lmaoooo

It's actually kind of ridiculous how trans women have been pushed out of transmisogyny, like the mythical flawlessly passing perfectly feminine femboy who has to tell the audience stand in flirting with him "Actually I'm a guy" is just the same transmisogynistic joke since the fucking nineties of someone flirting with a woman and then suddenly noticing they're trans except now in a progressive turn of events, there are no more trans women! To prevent transphobia we have erased trans women while keeping the exact same jokes used against them for decades! We hope to make a much more sensitive and respectful place without trans women for everyone!

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

i use Firefox which has the fun little feature of customizable search shortcuts; i set it up so that if i type "define" and then a word in my address bar it goes straight to Wiktionary, which has been very helpful in learning new words (even in foreign languages)

I say this with genuine love: I love this rash of small time internet creators starting the most unlistenable tabletop roleplaying podcasts you've ever heard. It feels like a companion to how every group of 20somethings in the 1990s used to have a shitty garage band. We need more of that shit.

One can only spend so long watching the big name actual-plays studiously pretend that they're not workshopping the hell out of their character concepts and major plot points and that the professional voice actor GM's clever monologues aren't 100% rehearsed before it starts to feel strangely refreshing to listen to a group try to wring a coherent narrative out of a group of player characters who barely occupy the same genre and a pre-written scenario that the GM is clearly reading for the first time as they're running it.

Let’s see what the old Steam recommendation queue thinks it’s going to sell me today.

Insightful as always.

Lily is Girls with the Ability

They Fight Again

This is a game about girls with the ability. You will take on the role of a girl with the ability, and explore the fundamental tension of being a girl with the ability.

Character Creation

You are a girl with the ability.

Choose a Number. Your Number must be in the range from 2 to 5, inclusive.

A low Number means that you’re better at solving problems with girl. A high Number means that you’re better at solving problems with the ability.

Decide what kind of girl you are, and give her a name.

After all players have created their girls, collectively decide on the nature of the ability.

Playing the Game

When you encounter adversity, decide which of the following approaches you intend to use to overcome it:

Pick up one six-sided die (d6), plus an extra die for each of the following conditions:

Roll your dice, and compare them to your Number:

0 successes: It all goes wrong somehow, and things get worse. 1 success: You get what you want, at a cost. 2 successes: You pull it off without a hitch. 3+ successes: You do it and get an extra benefit!

If any of your dice roll your Number exactly, you momentarily achieve a perfect synthesis of girl and the ability. Describe one thing that changes about the current situation as a result of your new insight; whatever you describe is true, regardless of whether your roll succeeded or failed. Afterwards, you may adjust your Number by one point in either direction, if you wish; the same minimum and maximum values that applied during character creation apply here.

Helping

If you want to help someone, describe how you’re helping and roll for it. If the person you’re helping is a player character, and you scored at least one success, they count has having help on their next roll.

License

Lily is Girls with the Ability is based on Lasers & Feelings by John Harper, and is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The rules never described when they fight again

Why You Fight Again

Roll 1d6 on each of the following tables in order to determine why you fight again:

A(n)…

… seeks to…

…

what was the original game of that description because i think the original creators would enjoy you doing this to their grammatical malformation

oh this is a real game huh

I don’t know why so many people are surprised by this. Like, did y'all think I invented a fake badly translated JRPG purely for the purpose of writing a janky Lasers & Feelings hack based on its made-up tagline?

… Yes.

Everyone who was even slightly surprised that prokpetz found something like this on Steam, I need you to do something for us.

I need you to go to your Steam Discovery Queue, and go through it.

If you’ve never done this before, it’s going to be chock full of the usual expected mainstream fare–your Assassin’s Creeds, your Calls of Duty, maybe a Guilty Gear or the like. Kind of a boring experience, truth be told. This is just the surface cruft that you need to burn off. Keep going through queues, disregarding stuff like that. Keep queueing. Keep digging.

Eventually. EVENTUALLY. Eventually, Steam is going to run out of games that people have heard of, games for normal people. And it’s going to look around shiftily as if making sure you’re not a cop, lower its voice, and be like “oh, you’re here for the weird stuff, huh?” It’s going to open a secret hatch like a speakeasy and take you to the back room, to a place that we in our friend group have taken to calling Deep Steam.

You will know you’re in Deep Steam when instead of FIFA or whatever, you see the thumbnail for the next game in your queue and all the sudden it’s something like

Deep Steam is a dark chest of wonders. Seeing Deep Steam changes you, like seeing behind the veil in a Lovecraft story. We saw that post and were like “yeah, that sounds like your average Deep Steam offering.” Everyone who was reacting like “wtf? That’s a real game??” is just, like… you’ve never seen Deep Steam before, is all.

Memes about collectible card games tend to treat Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gu-Oh! as basically interchangeable, but the truth is that each of them is fucked up in completely different ways. In brief:

Magic: The Gathering –

Yi-Gi-Oh! TCG –

See the difference?

Describing my own writing that I accidentally misplaced before posting it anywhere as "lost media" because, you know, technically

This is the digital equivalent of the underside of a refrigerator.

Lotta folks in the notes trying to offer helpful suggestions who are clearly still in the stage of their life where they know where all of their archival storage media is physically located.

I give you this classic from bash.org’s Top IRC Quotes list:

There was a place I was doing on-site network support for about fifteen years back that had a server that was acting up, but nobody knew where it was physically located, and a cable trace failed because the cat 5 disappeared under a baseboard and just plain never came out the other side. It was eventually determined that they'd somehow pulled a Cask of Amontillado: the door to the server closet had mistakenly been drywalled over during some past renovation, and nobody noticed because the affected server had never gone off the rails badly enough to require physical servicing until just then.

(For those who've followed my workplace horror stories in the past, this is the same location where I once got yelled at for walking past a manager's office door on my way to a service call because apparently there was an unwritten policy in place that middle management and above should never address, interact with, or even see a contractor or hourly employee during regular office hours. This may provide needed context for the level of institutional competence in play.)

#What like a victorian maid???? (via @sloth-fossil)

If somebody in upper management ever needed tech support, they'd have their salaried administrative assistant phone it in, routing all communication through the assistant and having the assistant carry out all instructions – absolutely no direct contact. If the problem turned out to be something that needed to be dealt with by an on-site technician, they'd make the network operations manager come over and handle it personally.

-imagine hating the working class SO MUCH

I once saw a coworker at that office get taken aside and given a quiet talking-to because his tie was visibly more expensive than his manager's tie, which was deemed to be inappropriate. Dude literally got reprimanded for dressing above his station.

sounds like my first experience understanding that I was dash-trash (v-dash or vendor) at Microsoft. it was my first week on the job as a security consultant and a ms ft employee asked a question that i knew the answer to, so i answered it. when they left the meeting room, my manager rounded on me and told me to never speak directly to ft employees without direct permission from her.

i would add that we were required to dress in business clothes oxfords and slacks etc - our ft counterparts frequently worked on campus in their pajamas. i learned a lot about class consciousness there.

You’re not depressed. You just need $250,000 in your bank account.

Reblog to materialize $250,000 in prev's bank account

(in a room full of friends who love me) this place is a den of vipers... i can trust no one.

(in a room full of snakegirl friends who love me) this place is a den of vipers.... yay! yippee!

Okay, so today's quest is (rolls a big handful of dice) an evil wizard disguises himself as a pretty princess and gives a rock-man a magic luchador mask which compels him to become a drug dealer.

Had a dream that there was a furry subculture revolving entirely around popular cryptids where nobody knew exactly what anybody else's fursona actually looked like because they exclusively drew themselves blurry and out of focus and/or really far away.

Here we go! Fursona reveal!

Of course Peter Gallagher knows that "dank" is a weed thing. He also knows that "in heat" is a sex thing and that when aliens "probe" someone it's in the anus.

These are words, not things. Heathcliff is a comic about symbols.

You're never going to get a comic where an alien actually probes someone any more than you're going to get a comic where the Man-Eating Giant eats a man. You're just going to get a dozen comics where aliens like the word "probe".

Heathcliff wears the ham helmet because it's the helmet you wear when you eat a ham. You can tell it's that helmet because it says "ham" on it. The helmet's function is determined not by its form but by its label.

summer = beach = sand = desert = mummy and thus there is the Summer Mummy. Because of symbolic associations that do not otherwise cohere.

Robots don't wear clothes but the mere act of labeling them "nude" makes them nude. And once a painting is a nude painting there has to be a fig leaf because a "nude" without a "figleaf" is "indecent".

A "ham" is a ham even when it's a car. A yam can be a ham can be a car because "yam" sounds like "ham". Symbols have overtaken things.

This is certainly true, but it's important to note that the fundamental act of a Heathcliff comic strip is for a character to remark on the fact that the symbol has overtaken the reality. The meat store invites the existence of a meat container, which invites the meat tank (tank both the vehicle and the bowl) which invites the enthusiasm of children for powerful mechanical objects. However, the gesture of the strip is not complete until the human identifies the irregularity which has occurred and states it aloud for us. The human does not question it, but they do name it. "Children love the meat tank"

It's important that Heathcliff is not the one speaking. Heathcliff is the character who dives the furthest into symbols, but he does not have a voice to speak of them. He is the avatar of the symbols and he is only spoken about. We must imagine the speaking characters in Heathcliff strips as the rebellious voices of the material crying out against the tyranny of the symbolic. At every moment once we've stepped into the treacherous world of Heathcliff, we are at risk of being pulled away by the tides of free association and similarity. However, the voice calls us back. It shows us when we have slipped too far, names the distance between us and the particular and specific which we have nearly lost. Symbols in Heathcliff are powerful; they can take you almost anywhere they want to go, but that power can be revoked simply by identifying what has happened. By explaining it. Heathcliff reassures us that the physical can win out, if only we are wise enough to perceive and to speak it, against the encroachment of the symbolic. Once we stand together and name the world truly, Heathcliff is merely a cat.