Urpriest

So wait are livestock guardian dogs to their flocks like… Clark Kent among the residents of Smallville? He’s been here since he was a baby, we all know him, and he’s… generally one-of-us shaped, uh, approximately. And then when something goes wrong he suddenly leaps into action and does some terrifying impossible shit none of us could do. And then comes back home and settles in like nothing happened and he’s one of us again.

Hmm.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Actual answer: the sheep know the dogs are not sheep, and they also know the dog is protecting them and take their cues from the dog about whether they need to run for the barn or can just ignore anything scary that approaches.

However, a friend once had an extremely premature orphan lamb born in December who had to live in the house for a couple of months with leg braces and all that, who due to spending her lambhood with dogs instead of sheep came out of the whole experience convinced she was a livestock guardian dog! She would patrol the perimeter of the fields every evening with the actual dog, stand watch in the barn door at night like the dog, and was more than willing to throw down if she saw something scary coming towards the flock the way the guard dog did. Tragically orphaned lamb did a convincing job at being a guard dog without actually having any of the biological advantages a dog has over a sheep.

Which I suppose made her Sheep Batman.

I think part of the disconnect between people who like to read RPGs critically and those who don't is that the former approach RPGs primarily through the text and the latter through their experience. The former group isn't interested in critiquing your group's session of Swumbles Big Jumble: The Motion Picture: The Role-playing Game, but the rules and the text of the game. To them bringing up all the ways your group fixed the rules of the game on the fly and how you had a good time even though you ended up ignoring half the rules doesn't sound like a convincing argument for the game being good, because it is an experience with the game ultimately divorced from the text. It's not a showcase of the game, it's at best a showcase of your game.

And to the latter group pointing out that the rules of the game, when played straight, actually produce a different kind of experience sounds like an attack, because they are more concerned with their experience with the game, and pointing out that disconnect sounds like it delegitimizes their game.

Anyway I'm in the former category: I have no interest in judging your personal experience with the game because I wasn't there and also that sounds like. Trying to review a video game based on watching the Game Grumps play it. In which case my review of most of the games would be "Arin Hanson is bad at video games."

When I was a kid, my younger brother and I loved Yu-Gi-Oh!, so we bought a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and learned to play. And honestly, duel monsters kinda sucks as a card game. It was only ever meant to be a brief sequence in a horror manga, and then its popularity meant that a coherent game system had to be retconned onto it, and it shows.

So, finding that the game wasn't giving us what we wanted, we decided to play "show rules Yu-Gi-Oh!" Like in the show, the rules of a card were whatever was narratively compelling in the moment, often far more complex than any single card could reasonably be, and the cards could interact in any way that makes sense. Of course you can destroy the floatation ring of your opponent's Castle of Dark Illusions with your Catapult Turtle. That just makes sense.

And I absolutely loved that game. We were using the cards as they really had been originally designed: as a framework for whatever made for a compelling narrative, as aesthetic inspiration, as improv prompts.

But if I were to respond to criticisms of Yu-Gi-Oh! by talking about how great my experiences with "show rules Yu-Gi-Oh!" were, that would obviously be unreasonable. The game we made up wouldn't have been possible without the cards, true, but it was still a game we made up. The fun was coming from the fact that we were creative little improv-ers with a good sense of dramatic give-and-take and also, frankly, from the fact that I love my little brother and enjoy spending time with him.

You can have a lot of fun treating a TTRPG the way we treated Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Improvising and telling stories with people you like is a good time. It just doesn't mean anything about how good or bad that game is.

It's basically like saying any critique towards a show is invalid because you read a really good fanfic one time.

this goes some way to explaining why the ttrpg discourse on this site is so underdeveloped.

I think this also touches on why it's very difficult to write critically about games without talking about the play culture(s) of said game, and why it can feel practically impossible to write meaningfully about those play cultures because they're overwhelmingly unwritten, inferred, experiential and ever-changing.

I find my favourite writing (and in turn my own approach) infers what it can from experience and reading, confidently accepts its shortcomings, and just accepts that there will be people for whom the things you are writing seem wildly inaccurate because it's just not possible to speak to the width of any given text in this medium.

It's at once a frustration for critical analysis and the special sauce that inspires me to write about TTRPGs in the first place.

Adding that I really enjoyed reading this blog post yesterday that touches on much of the same stuff re: critical approaches to a game text with a largely unknown culture of play.

I really recommend it as a piece of TTRPG writing about rediscovering a game from the 70s, well outside of its context, and uncovering a latent style of play within it that it was likely never intended to accommodate and existed as a sort of negative space or shadow-game within the text:

Google search how to reset the body's score counter. Google average score kept by body. Body score counting rigged site:reddit.com

Think about your earliest memory for a second. Now think about the fact that the you in this memory had their own rich bank of memories which (by definition) has zero overlap with that of the you that's reading these words. The thought has a certain pleasing shape to it, no? Okay, now stop. You can go back to thinking about whatever you want again.

what if alexander skarsgard plays murderbot with his natural accent. what if murderbot is swedish and the company is secretly ikea. what then.

EXCELLENT NEWS FOR YOU FRIEND

yes (:

Murderbot as an IKEA SecUnit*:

*according to Google Translate

twitter is being overrun by ice war posting. Best this sites been in ages

I want to know what parties are engaging in brutal warfare upon the ice-covered surface of Europa.

Europe and A.

twitter is being overrun by ice war posting. Best this sites been in ages

I think I would rephrase that as "it would be better if the IDF only killed Hamas militants and not civilians, even though this would require them to take more casualties themselves, as this would reduce the deaths on net", and while I can't disagree with that -- fewer people dying is good! -- I can't help thinking that it doesn't serve long term Israeli strategic aims, that realistically are not limited to "eliminating Hamas", but rather "depopulating Palestine for new Israeli settlements".

at least in Iraq the US could just leave: there was no intention of claiming the banks of the Tigris for resettling families from Wisconsin or whatever.

yeah, i think there are more or less two ways of reading the Israeli strategy.

the more generous one is to say that they've concluded that they *cannot* defeat Hamas through conventional means and need to fully depopulate Gaza to achieve a lasting victory, which for the record is probably true (even if i am not particularly sympathetic to it)

but you can also look at historical Israeli attempts to funnel support to Hamas (over their more moderate rivals) as a long game designed to create a pretext for the current ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and now that Hamas provided it, that check is being cashed

it does feel like there have been decades of opportunities to integrate Palestine into the Israeli economy instead of slowly strangling it with walls and borders, if integration was ever desired.

This ignores a very basic thing:

Israel has offered, multiple times, as far back as 1946 when the first partition plans were being made.

Palestine has not only rejected the offers, they've done so with violence--so much so that when the Jews (not yet Israelis, just Jews) suggested having an area for themselves even smaller than Gaza, they were met with pogroms.

So what would you have Israel do? Take them by force? Because you seem to be very against that.

I think the only possible outcome besides genocide is one state.

Okay, but that's not an answer to the question.

The Palestinians have refused integration multiple times. All attempts at peacemaking have been met with violence. Both Hamas and the PA have made it clear that if they retake all of the land it will be a new caliphate, where Judaism will be illegal as it is through the rest of the Middle East. Seven million people will be either slaughtered or forced out of the land to which we are indigenous, where we have had a presence for 4000 years.

So what would you have Israel do?

So what would

all attempts at peacemaking have been met with violence, look at what happened to Yitzhak Rabin, but that cannot be justification to mete out yet more violence in response: there is no long term peace without integration, and Israel -- or a significantly powerful faction within Israel -- do not see or want a future as a truly democratic and open nation that does not privilege one particular ethnicity over another, and I don't think there can be an end to violence as long as that belief is held.

Err Israel is a truly democratic and open nation that does not privilege one particular ethnicity over another. The Arabs who live in Israel are full citizens with the same rights as Jewish (and others) who live there. Israel just doesn't have open borders, much like basically every other nation on Earth. Incidentally, it's illegal to be Jewish in Gaza and illegal to sell property to Jews in the PLO controlled parts of the West Bank. The last time some Jews took a wrong turn and accidentally ended up in Gaza they got immediately arrested and then lynched. So like, why is it only on Israel to repeatedly offer peace? Why doesn't Gaza lift the ban on being Jewish? Or stop chanting "from the river to the sea Palestine will be Arab?" Also like, doesn't "one state" = "Israel absorbs Gaza and the West Bank"? Somehow I don't think that would go over well with the citizens of either of those. Or is the solution "Israel has to let in anyone who wants to come in while Gaza and the West Bank and every other MENA country gets to keep Jews out"?

I think Israel already has defacto control over Gaza and the West Bank, and failing to acknowledge that just leaves the Palestinian people essentially stateless, with no democratic rights in the state that actually rules them.

Does it though? I'll admit to not being fully informed on the situation of the various zones in the West Bank, but Gaza? Israel fully pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and had 0 control there until Oct 7th. The reason they have no democratic rights is because Hamas refuses to hold elections (something the citizens are now protesting). So it seems you are advocating for Israel to take control of Gaza and/or make them all citizens of Israel whether they want it or not? Make them all subject to Israeli law, which includes freedom of religion, which may in Gaza do not want?

Like they absolutely should have a state and should have democratic rights, but Hamas is the main barrier to both, and they make a one state solution impossible. Like, look at what we've had here in the past 2000 years. And yes, I say 2000 because this didn't start wen Israel was established. Currently we have Gaza launching countless rockets at Israel (and yes this is still going on) and the West Bank has their program where they pay families of people who die or get captured killing Israelis. How does that make for a peaceful state? Right now, Israel has borders and people are already pissed about it. If it was one state? And Israel restricted movement within it? Well then claims of apartheid might actually be true. Prior to Israel being established we had Jews living there as second class citizens and experiencing frequent pogroms. That was in fact the impetus for declaring independence. Like, this was areas that were already majority Jewish who just got tired of being slaughtered every few years, so they setup borders to defend themselves.

But a show of peace has to come from both sides. Israel's population is 20% Arab Muslims ethnically identical to those living in Gaza and the West Bank. The only Jews in Gaza are the hostages and the IDF soldiers trying to free them. For a single state solution to work, Gaza would need to show that Jews have nothing to fear from them by letting Jews live there in peace. Israel allows Muslim immigrants, even many from Gaza. Why doesn't Gaza allow Jews?

One thing that I didn't know until recently is that there haven't been elections in the West Bank since Hamas took over either. Essentially, Hamas won an election, authorities in the West Bank decided not to let them take power, and Hamas has ostensibly been waiting until they can hold an election that covers all of Palestine to hold an election.

I don't 100% agree with argumate that the only solution is a one-state solution (at least in the medium-term...in the long term it's very tough to imagine that different geographic areas on Earth are going to be important political divisions). But I'm also not sure how much peace needs to depend on Palestine's goodwill. I keep thinking of Korea, where North Korea is absolutely still interested in eliminating its neighbor's governing philosophy and way of life but while it pulls all kinds of stupid destructive shenanigans there's essentially zero chance of something like October 7 happening. I can't help but wonder if the West Bank and Gaza had strict DMZes on the Israeli side and were roughly as open as China and North Korea are on their other borders if instead of a bunch of terrorists in an open-air prison you'd have something that's still not good but with a lot less loss of life.

>in an open-air prison

The border with Egypt.

Also, this phrase would imply that Hamas aren't an legitimate government, just a sort of prisoner's council.

The impression I had is that there are much stronger restrictions on trade and movement across the border with Egypt than there are across the North Korea/China border. There's a whole Israeli naval blockade, right? That would be totally superfluous if Hamas could trade freely with Egypt.

Okay, but is Israel responsible for Egypt's restrictions? Because "open-air prison" is usually used to imply Israel alone is responsible for Palestine's isolation.

Yeah, I'm not one of the people implying that. If Israel were the only country responsible then there would be no point in us on tumblr debating the issue, we're debating it because it's due to an international effort and thus could be changed by a change in the international consensus.

The shogun of sengoku-era america, Abraham Lincoln

Happy freedom weekend to all who celebrate!

link: https://bsky.app/profile/brainvsbook.bsky.social/post/3llc72lyhu22j

google translate defaulting to chinese at first

okay but for those of us with interests in both the murderbot and the daomu biji fandoms this is kinda hilarious

(english-side-only really, i get that the kanji and hanzi are completely different)

our good (air)ship murderbot! thanks google

I love reading about these kind of translation decisions.

I've only ever seen 弊 used to refer to one's company: 弊社, as the article says.

I've been told 弊 is used to refer to one's own something, and it has a very humble nuance.

So 弊機 translates to something like "I, your humble machine" or "I, who am but a mere machine".

Japanese is great that it can say so much with simple pronouns.

Romance language translator: well we don’t have a gender neutral pronoun so I guess we’ll flip a coin for male or female

Japanese language translator, an intellectual: none of Japanese’s 30-something plus personal pronoun options have the perfect vibes so I’ll create a new one to bring that special somethin’

What I found to be particularly clever about the coining of this very unique first person pronoun 弊機 (heiki) is that it’s a homophone of 兵器(heiki), meaning ‘weapon’

I think I would rephrase that as "it would be better if the IDF only killed Hamas militants and not civilians, even though this would require them to take more casualties themselves, as this would reduce the deaths on net", and while I can't disagree with that -- fewer people dying is good! -- I can't help thinking that it doesn't serve long term Israeli strategic aims, that realistically are not limited to "eliminating Hamas", but rather "depopulating Palestine for new Israeli settlements".

at least in Iraq the US could just leave: there was no intention of claiming the banks of the Tigris for resettling families from Wisconsin or whatever.

yeah, i think there are more or less two ways of reading the Israeli strategy.

the more generous one is to say that they've concluded that they *cannot* defeat Hamas through conventional means and need to fully depopulate Gaza to achieve a lasting victory, which for the record is probably true (even if i am not particularly sympathetic to it)

but you can also look at historical Israeli attempts to funnel support to Hamas (over their more moderate rivals) as a long game designed to create a pretext for the current ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and now that Hamas provided it, that check is being cashed

it does feel like there have been decades of opportunities to integrate Palestine into the Israeli economy instead of slowly strangling it with walls and borders, if integration was ever desired.

This ignores a very basic thing:

Israel has offered, multiple times, as far back as 1946 when the first partition plans were being made.

Palestine has not only rejected the offers, they've done so with violence--so much so that when the Jews (not yet Israelis, just Jews) suggested having an area for themselves even smaller than Gaza, they were met with pogroms.

So what would you have Israel do? Take them by force? Because you seem to be very against that.

I think the only possible outcome besides genocide is one state.

Okay, but that's not an answer to the question.

The Palestinians have refused integration multiple times. All attempts at peacemaking have been met with violence. Both Hamas and the PA have made it clear that if they retake all of the land it will be a new caliphate, where Judaism will be illegal as it is through the rest of the Middle East. Seven million people will be either slaughtered or forced out of the land to which we are indigenous, where we have had a presence for 4000 years.

So what would you have Israel do?

So what would

all attempts at peacemaking have been met with violence, look at what happened to Yitzhak Rabin, but that cannot be justification to mete out yet more violence in response: there is no long term peace without integration, and Israel -- or a significantly powerful faction within Israel -- do not see or want a future as a truly democratic and open nation that does not privilege one particular ethnicity over another, and I don't think there can be an end to violence as long as that belief is held.

Err Israel is a truly democratic and open nation that does not privilege one particular ethnicity over another. The Arabs who live in Israel are full citizens with the same rights as Jewish (and others) who live there. Israel just doesn't have open borders, much like basically every other nation on Earth. Incidentally, it's illegal to be Jewish in Gaza and illegal to sell property to Jews in the PLO controlled parts of the West Bank. The last time some Jews took a wrong turn and accidentally ended up in Gaza they got immediately arrested and then lynched. So like, why is it only on Israel to repeatedly offer peace? Why doesn't Gaza lift the ban on being Jewish? Or stop chanting "from the river to the sea Palestine will be Arab?" Also like, doesn't "one state" = "Israel absorbs Gaza and the West Bank"? Somehow I don't think that would go over well with the citizens of either of those. Or is the solution "Israel has to let in anyone who wants to come in while Gaza and the West Bank and every other MENA country gets to keep Jews out"?

I think Israel already has defacto control over Gaza and the West Bank, and failing to acknowledge that just leaves the Palestinian people essentially stateless, with no democratic rights in the state that actually rules them.

Does it though? I'll admit to not being fully informed on the situation of the various zones in the West Bank, but Gaza? Israel fully pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and had 0 control there until Oct 7th. The reason they have no democratic rights is because Hamas refuses to hold elections (something the citizens are now protesting). So it seems you are advocating for Israel to take control of Gaza and/or make them all citizens of Israel whether they want it or not? Make them all subject to Israeli law, which includes freedom of religion, which may in Gaza do not want?

Like they absolutely should have a state and should have democratic rights, but Hamas is the main barrier to both, and they make a one state solution impossible. Like, look at what we've had here in the past 2000 years. And yes, I say 2000 because this didn't start wen Israel was established. Currently we have Gaza launching countless rockets at Israel (and yes this is still going on) and the West Bank has their program where they pay families of people who die or get captured killing Israelis. How does that make for a peaceful state? Right now, Israel has borders and people are already pissed about it. If it was one state? And Israel restricted movement within it? Well then claims of apartheid might actually be true. Prior to Israel being established we had Jews living there as second class citizens and experiencing frequent pogroms. That was in fact the impetus for declaring independence. Like, this was areas that were already majority Jewish who just got tired of being slaughtered every few years, so they setup borders to defend themselves.

But a show of peace has to come from both sides. Israel's population is 20% Arab Muslims ethnically identical to those living in Gaza and the West Bank. The only Jews in Gaza are the hostages and the IDF soldiers trying to free them. For a single state solution to work, Gaza would need to show that Jews have nothing to fear from them by letting Jews live there in peace. Israel allows Muslim immigrants, even many from Gaza. Why doesn't Gaza allow Jews?

One thing that I didn't know until recently is that there haven't been elections in the West Bank since Hamas took over either. Essentially, Hamas won an election, authorities in the West Bank decided not to let them take power, and Hamas has ostensibly been waiting until they can hold an election that covers all of Palestine to hold an election.

I don't 100% agree with argumate that the only solution is a one-state solution (at least in the medium-term...in the long term it's very tough to imagine that different geographic areas on Earth are going to be important political divisions). But I'm also not sure how much peace needs to depend on Palestine's goodwill. I keep thinking of Korea, where North Korea is absolutely still interested in eliminating its neighbor's governing philosophy and way of life but while it pulls all kinds of stupid destructive shenanigans there's essentially zero chance of something like October 7 happening. I can't help but wonder if the West Bank and Gaza had strict DMZes on the Israeli side and were roughly as open as China and North Korea are on their other borders if instead of a bunch of terrorists in an open-air prison you'd have something that's still not good but with a lot less loss of life.

>in an open-air prison

The border with Egypt.

Also, this phrase would imply that Hamas aren't an legitimate government, just a sort of prisoner's council.

The impression I had is that there are much stronger restrictions on trade and movement across the border with Egypt than there are across the North Korea/China border. There's a whole Israeli naval blockade, right? That would be totally superfluous if Hamas could trade freely with Egypt.

when the snake women in xcom grab your lady soldiers and force them down on their knees while constricting them with their tails it's kinda

i knew this would be the right bait to use on tumblr. everyone play xcom 2

This gif is outrageous

 ■ The so-called “blood explosion” which punctuates the conclusion of Akira Kurosawa’s 1962 movie Sanjuro remains one of the most memorable and influential special effects in film history. Production designer Yoshiro Muraki would later recall this scene was filmed in a single take. No such effect had ever been attempted before, as movies of the time rarely showed violence with graphic detail. Filled with uncertainty, Muraki worried the blood spray he’d rigged up wouldn’t impress Kurosawa, so he added an extra 30 pounds of pressure to the fluid pump. At the moment the pump was activated, the additional pressure caused the compressor hose attached to actor Tatsuya Nakadai to blow a coupling which created a slight, unintentional delay before the fake blood began to spray, and caused a much larger gush of fluid than planned. It sprayed so powerfully Nakadai claimed it almost lifted him off the ground. His heart sinking, as he believed the delay and over-pressure had ruined the effect, Muraki nervously glanced at director Akira Kurosawa, but Kurosawa only nodded in approval.

“oh god i fucked this up”

“yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOO”

And to think this is so iconic that “two dudes clash, there’s a beat, then one dies incredibly violently” is just a must-have for action in anime

Its crazy to think that this iconic visual that has been so ubiquitous in pop culture for so long despite that the source material barely being known by people all came from actors staying in character thru an FX malfunction.

Sanjuro and its predecessor, Yojimbo, are both available FOR FREE on The Internet Archive! They’re KICK ASS movies and you should watch them!! You have no reason not to!!!

If you like anime, if you like Westerns, if you like samurai or cowboy tropes at all, you should really really watch some of Akira Kurosawa’s films! Rashomon is also very good and has had a really profound impact on modern film and storytelling!!

that's wild, love the discourse possibilities of fully automated robofarms actually granting farm animals more independence and autonomy and leaving them happier and more productive

Ten years ago (!) I visited a farm exposition where they were demoing a milking robot on a paddock of about 30 cows. Not only did the cows use it themselves and produce more milk, the cows had reduced rates of mastitis. I can't help but think that this is because they were going from two teat-washings per day (once per milking) to on-demand teat washings. Cows be covered in shit, and anything that reduces that would make them healthier.

domesticated cattle telling their wild cousins that the humans have robots that can milk you any time of day, man

Wild cattle wouldn’t need to be milked though? They have calves who suckle their teats and then just stop lactating when the calves are old enough.

Our cows need to be milked because we repeatedly impregnate them but then take away their babies and let the milk build up painfully in the udder

I guess the future robotic paradise for dairy cattle will feature robobulls and robocalves, I wonder if that's bucolic or creepy

Clean it up hiro….

Former infosec worker here, my 2 cents on this:

>4chan was running on an EXTREMELY OLD version of php so it was vulnerable as fuck

>hacker found vulnerability back on 2021 and played the long game so they could take down the entire site

>alongside admin info, entire source code leaked

>site used deprecated connections to MySQL server, insecure as shit

>site had a file with whitelisted countries that could post freely while others needed to wait for 900 SECONDS TO GET THE CAPTCHA.

>whole code base needs to be updated in order to get the server running up again, which could take a long long time, and could be deemed not worthy by Hiro, so this may actually be the end of 4chan

Remember kids, update and patch vulnerabilities if you don't want to get nuked out of the face of the earth by the hacker known as 4chan