tumblin' mouse

The White House bragging about how many different countries have reached out to negotiate in response to the tariffs reminds me of that part of Disco Elysium where you have the option to put a loaded gun in your mouth and threaten to pull the trigger as a negotiating tactic. It is certainly one way to start a conversation!

The crux of the anti trans movement is a war on bodily autonomy. They don't want you to have any agency over what you look like, how you dress, who you date, whether to have kids, etc.

They want total control over you. Not just trans people. Not just queer people. You. Everyone.

Trans people are just a scapegoat. They want total control over everyone's self expression. They want the right to mold you into their perfect little cog in their dehumanizing machine.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility. Our rights are your rights. Our destruction is your destruction.

STOP no more live-action remakes. We're going the other way now. Animated Casablanca. Animated The Godfather. Animated Oppenheimer. Animated Fight Club.

ok guys am i stupid for feeling like folding chairs were a modern thing? i saw this folding chair from the 16th century in the ming dynasty and it's blowing my mind

not that they'd be difficult to manufacture im sure they could've made one a thousand years ago, thinking about it now. it's just like, in my dumb lizard brain you'd never invent the folding chair without first inventing the enormous auditorium conference hall for mediocre businessmen yk

this meeting could've been a bamboo scroll

Not just in China, either! Here are two x-frame, or scissor chairs, from Europe. Both are from the mid sixteenth century, and made in Italy:

(Both of these are from the V&A’s collection.)

The V&A says this about x-frame chairs:

Which makes sense; anywhere you have armies going on campaign, you're likely to see some form of portable chair.

The thing that really messed me up about furniture being older than you expect is trestle tables. All those big banquets in castles in the Medieval period? On trestle tables.

I nicked this photo from the St Thomas Guild blog, and they say this is 15th century. If you go over to the blog you can see lots more images, including the hand holds for moving the top.

Also with the Medieval guild system, they also had meetings of mediocre businessmen then too. They were just more likely happening in guilds than in massive corporate headquarters. 🤷‍♂️

(This meeting could have been a messenger. Or a piece of parchment.)

As long as I'm doing this:

I would not say no to some more friends on Dreamwidth!

So there's some stuff to do at Dreamwidth that I personally am in charge of. There's lots of stuff I'm not in charge of as well, but you'll have to do your own looking to find it! I recommend dw_community_promo, followfriday, and fandomcalendar as a start. addme_fandom is also probably a good idea. Oh, and here's my tutorial for finding cool stuff and people on Dreamwidth as well.

Edit: Updated tutorial for finding things to do and meeting people on Dreamwidth!

Some stuff I'm in charge of:

A community with weekly posts to encourage you to do stuff! It's low-key, and the stuff you create can be anything from clean laundry to websites.

Talk about Ursula Vernon/ @tkingfisher 's work and share stuff.

I keep meaning to archive the cyoa she did here like I did the twitter one...

Active comms I regularly see on my f-list:

Talk about comics.

Nature pictures. Often small around the neighborhood things.

Multi-fandom weekly prompt community.

Talking about advice given in advice columns.

Tell us one good thing that happened to you each day.

Multi-fandom all kinds of works rec comm.

Batch two because tumblr is fighting me.

Do you collect dolls? Talk about it here.

Music sharing comm.

Need help with research for a story? Ask here.

Multi-fandom art recs.

General fandom community. Explicitly made to help folks figure out how to use comms.

Place to rec queer and queer adjacent stuff.

Batch three.

Talking about user generated internet stuff and showing off projects.

US politics.

The fandom secret posting and discussion comm.

Oh hey, that's Queerly Beloved! I run that comm 😃 And technically it's for all sorts of general queer stuff, the weekly recs posts are just the most common these days 😅

Here's the suggested post content I wrote in the profile. It's not an exhaustive list, it's just what I came up with at the time and thought might be cool to see there:

* Art (drawings, paintings, edits, crafts, etc) * Writing (prose, poetry, nonfiction, the works) * Other various creative things (videos, fanmixes, recipes???, etc) * Media recommendations featuring characters like us (books, movies, podcasts, fanfics, etc) * Media reviews of canons that feature or supposedly feature characters like us, with warnings as appropriate * Character headcanons * All sorts of creative fandom stuff, in fact * Introductions (Example with template) * Friending/following memes for various identities * Resources for various queer identities * Resources for various intersectional identities (queer and: disabled, POC, poor, fat, homeless, religious, etc) * Theme weeks/months for various identities * Creative challenges and/or prompt sets * Memes * Icons * Product recommendations, promotions, and/or shoutouts ("So-and-so's store offers a whole lot of aromantic pride stuff!") * General fun, supportive, and pride related stuff * Discussions of news, links, and roundups/links to discussions happening elsewhere

We've had people talking about the books they've written, a fic-in-the-comments meme, and I did a couple of giveaways in the early days.

That said, I've got a couple of other communities I run, so the Thursday Recs posts are about all I can keep up with, but I'd love to have more and varied content over there. But in the mean time, I know that the weekly recs posts mean a lot to some people, so I'm happy to keep them going!

(If anyone else is interested in being a mod and running some of these things, I would happily take applications!)

Out of Touch

Yes

here have this grond meme that my partner made

D&D 5e supposedly has a GM shortage and idk maybe if the player culture of the game didn't treat GMing as a thankless job and the rules of the game as an issue to be fixed by the GM maybe things would be better. Ah well, who knows. Maybe a couple hundred more "we ruined the GM's campaign on purpose" memes will make people enjoy running the game better.

From my Bsky rant earlier, a non-exhaustive list of things I've heard people say a "Good DM" should be able to do:

A Good DM would hold their players' hand through parts of the game they don't understand - without expecting them to read the player handbook.

A Good DM would be able to resolve the completely off-the-wall, mechanically unsupported action the player wants to take in this situation.

A Good DM should be able to meticulously craft a heroic fantasy narrative for their players, and happily throw it all out at a moment's notice.

A Good DM would accommodate their players not wanting to use core gameplay mechanics - like resource management - and then easily be able to resolve all the issues that arise from that - like players being able to easily one-shot bosses - without it interfering with the narrative progression.

A Good DM has time to read your 10-paragraph backstories and incorporate all of that, but also pull just as much character-specific story content out of your 1-word backstories.

A Good DM can play therapist for you as you project your real-world issues onto your character.

A Good DM can act as a referee with perfect conflict resolution skills that satisfy all parties, even when one player's only goal in the conflict is to be an asshole and piss someone off.

A Good DM can respond with grace when a player, or the party as a whole, absolutely refuses to engage with the premise of the story.

A Good DM is happy to keep being DM for the same people forever across multiple games, never getting to be a player again.

Man, some people will really just find a replacement for their parents for ten or more years rather than learn some fucking respect, huh?

If any item on that list is an expectation your players have for you, do everyone a favor and leave to get some milk from the store the next session. Then don't go back. Just ghost, in the only way these players will accept.

The last time I DMed for a group of people, I had just a bit of experience from many years prior, and most of them had no experience at all. But I'd built a whole world and loose story and was excited to share it with people, so I got this group together to give it a shot.

I made the mistake of having them start out as strangers, with a grand plan to bring them together as a group. You see, I was under the misapprehension that, having agreed to play this game, they were interested in the world and story I'd set up, and would therefore take the hooks I laid for them and find reasons to work together. Because I was a fool.

When they made their characters, I asked them to fill in some basic info for me, including someone important from their life (who was still living), their greatest goal in life, and what their character's main motivation would be to go on an adventure.

Half the players tried to treat the game like a single-player sandbox video game and got frustrated and accused me of railroading them when I asked them to please not run alone into the woods in the very first scene when the characters have all just met and been given a reason to work together. At the first sign of any kind of danger, one player would simply say "my character is a coward so he would run away" and refuse to take part in anything.

One player specified in my questionnaire that his character thought himself very wise (a devoutly religious monk, in fact), but was actually very foolish, and was the type to get drawn in by get-rich-quick schemes. So I prepared a hook to draw him into the plot involving an NPC trying to sell him on a get-rich-quick scheme... which he promptly refused to engage with because he'd decided that actually his character was too zen to be tempted with worldly possessions.

When I began to get exasperated, several of the players pointed out that a good DM like Brennan Lee Mulligan never seemed to have any trouble adapting to what players wanted to do. They were unreceptive to my counter points that 1) that is his entire job, which he is paid for, and 2) his players are skilled improvisers and all actively working together to tell the best story possible.

I feel I should note that at this time, all of us in this group were in our 30s. And not, say, 14-year-olds who you might expect this entitled attitude from.

After a few sessions of desperately trying to keep the characters in the game at all without totally railroading them, I asked everyone to please watch a couple specific episodes of Adventuring Academy with Brennan Lee Mulligan which were about how to be a good player so that everyone has the best possible experience. I had already told them that I was spending literally 8 hours per week planning these sessions and trying to find ways to keep things going and keep together a group of people who desperately wanted to be brooding loners, and I promised them bonus XP at the start of the next session if they would just watch one or two of these videos.

At the start of the next session, one player proudly announced that he hadn't watched the videos, and that he wouldn't, no matter how I tried to bribe him, because he didn't think that being a player in a tabletop roleplaying game should come with homework.

When reminded (again) that I was spending 8 fucking hours a week planning these sessions, for which I was not being compensated in any way, and which he was making harder, he shrugged and said that it was my idea to start this campaign, so it was up to me to keep it going, and keep the players interested enough to keep showing up.

I don't DM anymore.

Making friends at the yarn show 🐑🐈

I’ve now had multiple people tell me they ship these characters…fibre crafts yuri 🌈🧶

i just invented a cathedral rose window granny square pattern and i feel insane now

Tesla is tanking so hard it is dragging the entire EV segment's sales down into the negative. When you omit Tesla from the equation, EV sales are up 13% across the board.

Don't let anyone tell you EV sales are in a slump.

Interview with the Vampire Official Season 2 Blooper Reel

🗡That will depend on the manner of your return 🏹

asbestos-free cornflakes

I actually know this one!

There's a traditional coconut farming technique in Thailand where they send monkeys into the trees to pick the coconuts. This is like a traditional centuries old thing that doesn't hurt the monkeys at all. Since Thailand is in asia, animal rights groups have been focusing on it the last few years as some kind of issue even though if a monkey doesn't want to do something there's nothing you can really do to make it do that because it's a monkey.

Nonetheless racist "animal rights" groups go around discussing it as though it's slavery or a labour rights issue. Personally I think they're being paid by people who get coconuts some other way but I can't prove anything.

Anyway, it's basically MSG again in that it catches on because of anti-asian stereotyping and none of the allegations are true or really even make sense when you look at them. Animal labour in agriculture is really well-established. That's where we get the term "horsepower". Because horses were doing the. The power. But there are no monkeys in Europe so Europeans didn't do that so it's an evil rights issue.

We domesticate animals and use them for labour. Big if true.

We domesticate

animals and use them for

labour. Big if true.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Like. As far as I can tell the monkeys in question are macaques, which... Yeah you're not getting a macaque, the monkey known primarily for attacking humans, to do anything it doesn't want to do, especially through violence. They use violence to establish dominance and that's a battle the macaque will always win. This npr article says every couple of trees the monkeys get inspected for ants and a little massage, and every other link in the search I did was from PETA, so. Yeah pretty sure the monkeys are fine.

For those interested in a bit more nuance, recent primatology welfare review *not* done by PETA (all animale welfare scientists hate PETA booo), but also not an uwu utopia and surveys actual subsistence farmers working with macaques:

tl;dr

-macaques were physically healthy, and were not sick or injured

-mental wellbeing was less good, and appropriate housing and training methods have been highlighted as an area of improvement

-the most common problem was aggression towards humans, both to owners and people around

-aside from the whole 'what are the ethics of a traditional farming method that uses a now endangered species caught in the wild?', the really pressing problem is more how to improve welfare knowledge so 1, people just trying to earn a living don't get murked by a macaque and 2, macaques don't end up fully neurotic

(for those without access, sci-hub wink wink)

i was at a little park fest thing today and someone was there with their cats who were trained to hang out in a stroller?? like they were SO chill it was amazing. the cats were obviously enjoying themselves and were very well trained to stay right in or under their catmobile.

until, that is, i rolled up in my wheelchair and one of them turned and saw my vaguely stroller-like contraption and *immediately* jumped out of his cat-approved-stroller to climb around on my chair like OH WOW WHEN DID WE GET ANOTHER WHEELEY THING YAY! :D

i was like sir you are not supposed to be here and he just looked up at me like oh yes i am ! i must stay in wheeled contraption !!! and he was wearing a lil bowtie so i could not argue with him

[id: the Is This a Bird meme edited so that a stock photo of a gray tabby cat with a bowtie is the one gesturing at the It's Free Real Estate meme that has a disability symbol of a person in a wheelchair edited on to it. end id]

[id: #it's free...wheel estate /end id] (via @youdontoutgrowpunk-sir )

stop being funnier than me on my own post!!