Khrux

I don’t really think there’s ever a pass to staring at anyone’s chest except a partner or a very specific friendship energy.

I mean as a first language speaker, it is.

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As much as I don’t disagree, I think the “Apple is closest to Nazism” comment touches on something different. Other massive American companies have awful practices but they don’t care particularly how their way of making money looks. Apple wields a specific aesthetic power that generally dictates a hegemonic uniformity, that strays the line of being to their detriment at times. I don’t think any other big tech company would care in the same way if not for their desire to copy Apple.

I’d love to see US bases go, but I’m not convinced a lack of trust in America would be the tipping point when they haven’t behaved in a trustworthy way ever really. America would find some way to make any country that rejected a US military presence experience difficulty, be that via tariffs or vague threats about their military absence.

I don’t mind it being deep, just don’t fill it with your actions and deeds. A big part of fun for TTRPGs is ‘play away from the table’, which for the players is typically making art, backstory or builds for current or future characters. Most long backstories I read don’t invalidate a level 1 character but mostly explore values, just as my real life story could be as deep as I choose to write it and I’d not even have the skills to be level 1.

My suggestion is:

• Get people together for a session 0. Only pitch the campaign and tone then, if not construct it collaboratively too.

• Hand out pieces of paper or card face down, have each player take 1, and ensure there is one between each player. These cards say Love, ally, rival, or enemy.

• Explain that players should make an NPC for their backstory that matches this word, and should make a shared NPC with the person next to them based on the card between them.

• Now let them take another card of their choice. They can either make another NPC with this, or use it to make the relationship to one of their shared NPCs asymmetrical.

• They can design their NPCs and backstory now or before session 1, up to them.

Finally, explore what the players can choose to do to contribute between sessions to the game. If they don’t do anything, that’s fine, but they should have a way to meaningful contribute to something. Typically I encourage world building and cultural lore, such as unique foods and why that has a thematic resonance.

This is hard to structure, I had a player who was a former forever DM, who played a knowledgeable librarian in a former monster hunter guild. I asked her to make some monster statblocks, as she’d know them inside and out in character.

My advice to players:

Make your backstory show that your character has done no huge deeds yet, and most importantly, have everything that matters in it revolve around NPCs. Not just is this the best drama, but NPCs can move, join factions, be redeemed, betray you, die and everything else.

• That cost halfling village you design that perfectly exemplifies your character, but will never be seen in this urban campaign halfway across the continent? Make the most important part of it the mayor’s daughter who happens to be your childhood friend.

• The strange necklace that made you stronger but more angry when you wore it? The final time you saw it was when your brother stormed out of your co-owned business after a bitter argument.

• The lord who helped you smuggle your liquor into the city? That’s the same lord that wrongfully imprisoned the player character next to you.

One of my favourite scenes from a campaign came when a player, after spending a session getting the chance to meet with a resistance leader, turned to the others and said “this is my ex-wife”. That whole dynamic was interesting too, as both had come from a warrior culture and initially parted due to neither being the “strong warrior”, now both trying to fight against that same faction a decade later.

My all time favourite NPC was a talented tailor in an urban campaign, who owed one player character a favour and was generally fond of them all. Nothing like the party having a go to guy for fancy or silly outfit amendments.

That’s still incredibly low, I’d have assumed an enormous increase.

I can’t picture a service which beats Spotify in what they offer which isn’t just the same business model but more ethical.

Discovering music for free is an enormous benefit, and the fact that Spotify has practically all mainstream music is nice. People often cite that one quote by Gabe Newell that is “Piracy is not an economic problem. It is a service problem”, as a highlight for steam, but largely Spotify offers what consumers want in a way Netflix or Audible can’t. They have everything you want and guide your discovery in even more, and as long as their encroaching enshittification doesn’t undercut this service, they will continue to underpay artists and fund immoral activities.

The developer of Ultrakill, Hakita, said something which I’ve often thought about. “You should support indies if you can, but culture shouldn’t exist only for those who can afford it. ULTRAKILL wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t had easy access to movies, music and games growing up. If you don’t have money, you can support via word of mouth”. There are plenty of independent things I financially support, particularly things I attend in person in the city I live in. I may spend £100 per month paying for art and entertainment all said and done, and when that’s spent, I will pirate everything else.

I split a Spotify family plan between 6 friends, I think that’s about £3.50 per month, and I pay for no other media services. With video, I run a jellyfin server with a “parent friendly” interface, so they can have “netflix with everything”, which I have at my place too. I don’t read that much any more, if it’s physical I just go to the library and if it’s an audiobook I’ll just pirate it. The benefit here is that even if I’m on a reading binge, that’s not even a book a week. With Spotify, I often pick something and play it via song radio, which is probably 50/50 music I know and new music. Sometimes I just stick albums on, but it’s not like that’s harder. If I had a locally hosted music repository that I’d “paid for”, I could enjoy albums, but not as easily have a radio like discovery experience.

One day, a pirate tool may appear that rivals Spotify, but until that day, I can’t see myself moving away from it.

Go to your local live music, drag shows, theatres, independent cinemas and libraries. Don’t feel obligated to pay for any internet service.

Coronation chickpea is fine as it’s royally forbidden.

I forgot it was commemorative, let’s ban coronation chickpea and coronation chicken.

Yeah, he looked like he did on the left through the entire 2010s without changing appearance much, from Narnia 3 to Midsommar. This is absolutely styling above just growing up.

Funnily enough, when I do ask an LLM to rephrase anything I write, it changes any sentence with a semicolon to one with an em dash. I’ve probably always overused the semicolon because of its availability on a keyboard, but it appears a lot in my normal work.

Now I trust the semicolon, it’s an identifier of me.

I’ve never made the link between that and gender before (linguistically), it seems obvious in hindsight.

Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.

When a medium’s shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.

It’s not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don’t miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it’s particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it’s false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.

Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that’s admirable.

I agree. Provided you aren’t betraying your own values in the work you do, there’s no shame in not taking pride in how you sell your labour. Be are not defined by our jobs.

I’ve used ChatGPT a little, particularly a few years ago but still on rare occasion now. I won’t bother giving it this prompt and wasting the processing but it probably won’t be biased, I’ve been really really surprised with how critical it is of itself. I think by the nature of the dataset it’s trained on (i.e. basically everything), it’s not really showing any major bias at the moment. It matches my energy and decries capitalism, AI, OpenAI, Sam Altmann etc in a cartoonish, toadie way.

Sadly I don’t think being an AI engineer is quite as bullshit, the obvious allegory is someone who provides the syllabus and marks the exams, rather than just doing addition for rich people.

People disagree because it’s still an abstraction of camo. Wearing it in the first place came from people fawning over militarism.

I actually think it can work with a queer look in one of two ways, so you are likely fine: Either it’s effectively teasing the pro authoritarian militarism camo types, or it’s a radical anarchy armed rebel look, which without praxis is really just the former look again. Either way these are fine.

Another reason maybe you’ve been downvoted is that people loathe the deep abstraction of modern, or rather postmoderm society. Camo was made for soldiers > Camo was worn by patriotic civilians simulating the soldier aesthetic > particularly under the Bush administration, it became less a symbol of soldiers, and more a symbol of patriots. Patriotism is nationalism.

Today when most of us camo in the military cosplaying way, we think ‘nationalist’. When we see a person in a little bit of camo, perhaps just some came shorts and a regular t-shirt, we think either ‘nationalist’, ‘okay with nationalism’ or ‘ignorant of nationalism’.

So when most people see someone in a blended queer and camo look, they probably assume one of three things: ‘ignorant of nationalism’, ‘critical of nationalism in a rebellious manner’ or ‘pro nationalist queer’. Of course one of these is fine, but one is very bad.

Making it up as you go along isn’t inherently bad. Nine times in ten I prefer a story which is planned out but basically any medium that’s open to additional seasons, novels, sequels, etc is capable of falling into this category.

It’s only really a sin when the medium promises a long form mystery while doing this, hence the fact Lost is #1 here. Sherlock Holmes was written as episodic mystery and Arthur Conan Doyle clearly never planned future stories as he went and nobody minded. Togashi, the manga author for Hunter x Hunter stumbled into his most famous arc just because he’d made his metaphysic and societies up as he went and the stars aligned, leading to the Chimera Ant arc. The Simpsons rarely ever changes it’s status quo between episodes, and therefore can be made up as it goes along, because it’s going nowhere. Breaking Bad literally changed the ending of season one to not kill Jesse partly due to the writers strikes and subsequent shortening of the season, and Mike as a character exists because Bob Odenkirk was busy.

Any medium that decieves the audience, promising a well reasoned, long form mystery without any planning of what that mystery is, is bad. Perhaps you’ll strike gold and have an epiphany as to how to bring the plot together perfectly, but that’ll just be luck. Ultimately this is an expression of consumerism; baiting the expectations of art and narrative to deceive the audience for nothing more than engagement, and therefore money.

I find it interesting how people talk about Abrams’s Mystery Box as a choice for a writing technique, despite the fact it’s objectively shit. I can forgiving it in D&D sometimes, but in a professional story, it’s ridiculous.

I’m normally a big defender of erotic content in otherwise non erotic fiction. Enjoying this kind of content is incredibly human and if you were to definite which part is a social construct, it’s deliberate inclusion or deliberate omission, clearly the latter is routed in something more artificial, in my opinion.

That being said, this panel is a lame. The cropped framing is particularly objectifying, and it feels very unnecessary, like it’s just here to have an ass in shot. It’s literally a pulp thirsty trap so people who see this page are interested in the comic.