Hey Ao3 Can You Like Give The Extra $38k You Made From This Month’s Funds Drive To Charity

The people who police your gender will police your gender even if you're cis.

Eat them.

The whole Weakness Of The Flesh Immortality Of The Machine conversation is fun... I really appreciate the point that in the modern real world technology is controlled by an ever-rotating pile of tech companies whose business model is predicated on obsoleting everything older than like 4 years. If you, the person reading this, managed to upload your consciousness to a file, it would struggle to interact and be read in, like, 10 years max. And if you rely on medical aids that are connected to computers and the internet, you are already facing that problem.

All that said, I cannot stress enough that obsolescence is not an issue for the in-universe source of the whole "from the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh" quote

Next VatiCon's gonna be lit.

so you're telling me that the Catholics have a new mascot that's a cute anime-style blue-eyed teal-haired anime (girl(???) or boy, possibly???) and her name is Luce? As in latin for light, so they're a bearer of light? like... Lucifer? Okay.

idk i dont mean this with as much derision as might bleed out but it is exceedingly clear that some of you were never considered retard-faggots as a child and therefore never subject to the subsequent torments Pure Children would subject Retard-Faggot Children to.

[* the use of these slurs is not reclamatory but is also not pejorative. the use of these slurs is academic, technical, and descriptive.]

One of the earliest lessons I had in 'adventure pacing' for running RPGs was a game where the players got arrested. When told "okay, you're all in individual cells [GM describes cells], what do you do? Look for vents, try to pick the lock?" "Sleep. We've been in continuous action for 36 hours, this is the safest we've been since we airdropped in!"

With Half-Life being talked about again, I do want to reiterate that Gordon Freeman went to work at one morning and; aside from being knocked unconscious and put into stasis a few times; went without sleep for the next six consectutive days

Once, there was a Japanese monk who had a little personal superstition.

Every time he travelled to a new location, he’d find some wood that grew there and make it into a staff to defend himself from any bandits or ne'er-do-wells who attacked him.

He was convinced that the staff, being more in tune with his surroundings, would serve him better in a fight. One day, he explained this to a scholarly friend, who decided to do some investigating.

The scholar started swapping the monk’s staves while he was asleep. Some days, the monk would be using a staff he thought was from where he was, but wasn’t; some days he’d believe it was from elsewhere, when in fact it was the correct staff for where he was; and some days belief and truth would match.

Interestingly, the scholar discovered that it was the monk's belief that mattered - whichever staff he was using, if he thought it matched his surroundings he’d do a little better, and if he thought it didn’t he’d do a little worse.

Of course, since then there have been many more rigorous studies, but that scholar’s treatise remains one of the most important works in shaping human understanding of the place-bo effect.

Empire powerscaling is hilarious because they canonically cannot survive 1 twink believing in the fundamental goodness of his cyberwizard father, of course any other galactic power in fiction is going to body them

...what is the "sex is just rock climbing" category

It was kind of a joke between me and a friend ("you wouldn't judge someone for having gone rock climbing with a bunch of different people") but honestly the more I thought about it the more I bought into it unironically because:

It is a physical activity done with one or more partners

You should only go rock climbing with people you trust to not let you fall

You should not go rock climbing with someone who is drunk or currently incapable of rational decision-making

Some people get super super super into rock climbing and do not shut up about all the places they have climbed and how many are left on their bucket list and these people are usually men between the ages of 20 and 35 and like it's fine dude I'm glad you're happy but I don't know what most of those mountains even are

While many consider it a fun activity, pressuring someone into climbing when they don't want to (or ignoring their feelings and just dangling them off a cliff,) could cause both psychological and physical trauma

There is no moral value to it whatsoever. Who you have gone rock climbing with (or whether you have rock climbed at all) has no bearing on who you are as a person. Imagine telling someone "it's not that heights make you nauseous, it's just that you haven't found the right person to belay you!" or "you need to save your first time rock climbing for someone special." That would be absurd.

For some people it is a deep and moving personal experience.

historically I have not asked myself "will this aggravate my hip flexor injury" before participating when perhaps I should have 😔

Was reminded (because I am kinda terrible at social media) that I ought to let people know I made an art history video about the cave art in Lascaux: How it was made; what pigments and what ingenious art tools were used (Paleolithic mouth-powered airbrushes!); and the historical development of ideas of the Paleolithic and how they were shaped by prejudices of the time.

And I bust some myths:

The cave paintings and engravings had nothing to do with hunting. The animals that people of the time hunted don't show up in the cave art.

It is very unlikely that men made that art. There has not yet been found any physical evidence of adult men in any of the decorated caves of France and Spain -- but there are numerous examples of footprints and finger-marks of smaller people, from woman-sized down to baby-sized, and groups of children alongide woman-sized footprints.

For some weird reason most of the scholarship on Lascaux identifies these smaller footprints as "adolescent boys" for no apparent reason apart from, well, sexism. The increasingly unlikely and awkward contortions made to rationalize how half-grown boy children made this magnificent art, rather than any acknowledgement that perhaps experienced adult women artists had a hand in it, feel kinda bizarre to me.

Anyway, here's my art history video. It's educational!

One of my favourite things about the setting is how Teenagers With Attitude are clearly considered a strategic resource that every nation should be developing, lest they develop an Angsty Teen gap with the Soviets.

The geopolitics of the Trails series are so funny. In Trails in the Sky SC, you have an entire chapter dedicated to figuring out who is trying to disrupt the signing of a major non-aggression pact, during which you learn a lot about the internal politics of all sides and what the treaty can and can't do. It's a really interesting chapter that teaches you a lot about Liberl's place in the world and it helps to ground the setting in a good way.

All that being said, it turns out the disruption was caused by a bored child supersoldier with a fucking gundam.