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Hey there! This unit, Deric "083" Bindel (zey/zem/zeyr), is a tabletop game designer and artist, and an avid enjoyer of smaller indie tablet
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The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.
I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widderās work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals canāt perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And thatās how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!
bojack horseman really treated hollyhock loosing a large amount weight from being secretly drugged as something bad and unhealthy and not as something with a silver lining bc she was now thin and then had her gain the weight back with no one making comments about how that was āunhealthyā and appropriately showed the fact that she was traumatized by the event and not secretly grateful other shows CAN NOT RELATEĀ
And this is the same show that showed another character hesitate to take medication to treat her severe depression because of the risk of weight gain and then showed her, after agreeing to take it, fat and happy and mentally healthy and loved by her partner for the rest of the show. It wasnāt a temporary change to make a point then back to status quo, she got fat and stayed fat and the narrative told us it was better for her to be fat and healthy than thin and depressed or dead. And her weight wasnāt a punchline! It just was how she was now.
These two are a married couple. They never wanted kids. Diane gets pregnant. They still donāt want to have kids. Diane gets an abortion. At no point is the abortion blamed for any issues in their relationship. They agreed to it together, and that balloon made me laugh so hard I nearly had an asthma attack.
Tired of trying to be genuinely creative and intellectual. I'm going to invent a vague aesthetic that I can slap a -punk suffix on, market myself as the founder, and put out a series of BookTok friendly speculative fiction novels that do gangbusters because they include a color-coded set of categories to sort one's intrinsic characteristics into. Surely this is the path to the future.
#solarpunk has achieved nothing it's time for geopunk#we've got BASELOAD RENEWABLE POWER and SPARKLY GEM BASED CASTE SYSTEMS#and hot spring episodes
Reviews will include "sort of like the Broken Earth but worse and dumber" and "this amount of geology puns about hardness, cleavage, and subduction should be illegal"
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Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms ā a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer āmay be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.
Taylor makes bagged greens, salad kits, chopped salads, the works. Keep avoiding supermarket greens, but keep an especially close eye out for this brand/supplier. The above list of grocers and fast food chains is NOT exhaustive, so please continue getting lettuce and other raw produce taken off your burgers, sandwiches, etc.
just realized my phone doesn't display some braille characters correctly. the dot pattern [ā ø] is supposed to be the right three dots, but on my phone it looks the same as [ā ] with the left three dots. that's a really weird problem and I don't know how they messed that up
how am I supposed to tell the difference between ā ā „ā ā (nuke) and ā ā „ā Øā (nuance) if [ā ] and [ā Ø] display the same way? pretty big oversight there
after looking into it, the reason this bug exists on android is that, one, when braille was added into Noto Sans they just did it wrong at first, and two, even though this issue was fixed in Noto Sans back in 2017, the android system font Droid Serif, bafflingly, hasn't been properly updated in ages despite the decade of work the Noto team have been doing improving these fonts. like different departments at google just aren't telling each other what they're up to. so that's why braille text is broken on android
I feel like simply calling JK Rowling a transphobe isn't strong enough anymore. Like. This is not your grandpa calling you by your deadname at a restaurant kind of transphobic. This is her wanting to eradicate all trans people (with an extra special hatred towards trans women specifically). This is her trying just that by personally funding transphobic hate groups with millions to push around laws in the UK. It is not hyperbolic to call her a dangerous, genocidal maniac.
It's not about cancelling a problematic writer. It's about literally trying to save lives by denying her as much money and power as possible.
my most lukewarm take is that I don't think there should be any exemptions for vaccines, etc., beyond documented legit adverse medical shit that makes it physically impossible. like they should be free and required and nobody should be allowed to just choose to leave their child and any immunocompromised person they interact with vulnerable to potentially deadly but entirely preventable diseases and other medical conditions.
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Accepting identities I don't understand is actually extremely easy because I just go "this isn't about me" and move on with my life unbothered by someone else's identity, it's truly that simple.
i heard someone say once, āyou donāt need to speak French to acknowledge that itās a language that existsā. and i feel like more ppl need to keep that in mind when they come across something they donāt understand.
Last month I announced an upcoming collection of monster-focused story games entitled Kayla Diceās Absolute Monsters and outlined the project. Amid other busyness I have made progress on a few of the titles. I finished the first draft of Our Destroyer completely and am ready to approach an editor for the title and I figured out the fourth title in the collection: Darkness and Distance; or, The Triumph of a New Prometheus.
Darkness and Distance; or, The Triumph of a New Prometheus is a retelling of Frankenstein in the form of a roleplaying game. It is also an oral storytelling game, an asynchronous card game, a character creation game and an embedded branching interactive narrative. In playing the game youāll tell the story of a scientist, his creation, the pain they caused each other, and the explorer who bears witness to the end.
Play requires a deck of Tarot cards and the gamebook itself. Chapters cover events in the story and feature card challenges that must be completed and key choices that must be made. The decisions and consequences will influence the narrative and point to the next Chapter. Between chapters the narrative is relayed through a Storytelling Scene, with a player performing as different key characters depending on where in the gamebook they are.
The idea of the game is it could be played completely solo, but its best version is playing it with someone else as a hybrid solo play-by-post game with storytelling handovers. I finished a draft of some rules text and the first three chapters of the gameĀ¹. I then conducted a short self playtest mainly focused on the card mechanics, as I needed to be sure they worked before I committed to writing more of the game. Here was the initial draft of the card challenge mechanic:
Before playing a challenge separate the Major and Minor Arcana into two decks. Remove The Fool from the Major Arcana, add it to the deck of Minor cards and shuffle them together. This will be the deck you draw from during a challenge.
At the start of a challenge a player deals themselves a number of cards dictated by your hand size for this Chapter. Individual Chapters will have specific rules for discarding and drawing cards.
A challenge is represented by a Major Arcana card, to triumph over the obstacle you must play a combination of up to four cards, either of the same suit or rank. If the combinationās total value is higher than the Major Arcanaās number the challenge is overcome.
The numeric value of Aces is 1 and Page, Knight, Queen, and King are all worth 10.
The Fool is a trump card. It can be played alongside any four cards and it will count as a valid combination, regardless of suits or ranks. Integrate how a characterās folly aided their triumph into the story.
After a challenge a player discards their hand. The discard pile isnāt shuffled back into the deck until the end of a Chapter.
Just as a brief overview for the early chapters the Scientists redraws were linked to sacrificing resources, which broadly could represent attributes like Emotional Regulation, material resources like a Large Inheritance and connections like an Amoral Hired Assistant. Whereas the Creatureās redraws in their opening chapter would involve gaining scars and eventually killing people (with it left to player interpretation whether thatās accidental, self defence or pre-meditated murder) and building a death toll. How many re-draws something takes gives shape to the fictionĀ². An immediately apparent problem with the mechanic in the playtest was that it was simply too easy to beat a challenge, there was no real difficulty or chance of failureĀ³. I tried a couple of tweaks, first restricting you to only playing a pair of cards, then further the pair specifically having to be a match. This finally resulted in playthroughs that had a variety of results, sometimes I needed to discard and redraw a lot and some challenges I beat without losing anything. It was swingy but that wasnāt a problemā“, but a problem still existed.
Even when Iād made changes to the mechanic it didnāt feel right, there was a lack of satisfaction. Drawing a hand and realising you can instantly win didnāt feel lucky, it left like being denied the chance to playāµ. Even though the fictional outcome could be interesting, the experience of play inspired no feeling. I went back to the drawing board, the Major Arcana as obstacles worked fine but I looked to move away from beating the Major Arcana through card values. Instead of playing a hand I decided to use a predicting based mechanicā¶. Hereās the new draft for card challenge rules:
Before playing a challenge separate the Major and Minor Arcana into two decks. Remove The Fool from the Major Arcana, add it to the deck of Minor cards and shuffle them together. This will be the deck you draw from during a challenge. The rest of the Major Arcana will act as the obstacles you encounter over the game, with higher cards representing more dangerous challenges.
You complete a card challenge by building a pile of cards the size of which matches the Major Arcana number of a given challenge. You add cards to your pile by guessing if the top card of the deck will be higher or lower and then drawing, if you guessed correctly then the card is added to your pile, if your guess was incorrect it goes to the waste pile. For the first card you draw, you are guessing higher or lower relative to the value of the Major Arcana, for all the following cards you are guessing relative to the current top card of your pile.
Pages are valued at 11, Knight at 12, Queen at 13, and King at 14. When you first draw an Ace you declare if it is valued at 1 or 15, this value applies to all other Aces drawn in this challenge.
If the card you draw is a perfect match it is not immediately added to your pile or the waste pile, instead it is set aside and your next guess determines where it goes. If at any point you draw The Fool you succeed against this obstacle immediately, regardless of the size of your pile. The Fool is then set aside for the rest of the Chapter.
When a challenge is over, the number of cards in the waste pile determines the consequences you suffered during this challenge. Each specific challenge will present its own costs.
In some Chapters the cards challenges will have a fail state, where if a certain number of cards go in the waste pile the challenge cannot be completed. An obstacle revealed itself as truly insurmountable to your character and the story will take another direction. Some challenges cannot be failed, regardless of how much is lost, you will triumph no matter what it costs. Once a challenge is completed shuffle your pile and the discard pile back into the main deck.
From my own tests this feels better to play and let me explain why I think that is. One reason is that this inherently involves more effort. Even if you get lucky and call correctly for every draw you do still have to draw those cardsā·. Thereās more moments of tension; if the top card is a Queen and a player predicts lower and drawing a Jack would feel like a near miss while a King would have an unfair feeling sting and drawing a 6 would feel exciting then intimidating as you realise you have to predict again. These feelings can influence the emotion of the fiction, you have a sense of struggling against a challenge before getting a lucky break and that bleeds into the telling of the fictional obstacle, whether thatās pilfering corpses, trekking through the arctic or conquering Death.
Other changes flowered downstream from moving to the prediction game. Using the waste pile as a results table unique to every challenge may mean moving away from representing things as resources, essentially speaking in plain terms about fictional consequences and how they cause divergences in the narrative and which chapter is proceeded to.
The next step will be moving to a more detailed re-write of the initial chapters to align with this change. From there Iāll see whatever changes I need to make to the rules text and likely run another self play testāø.
Because of the nature of this book I imagine it will have a high page count. I predict it will be the largest title of the collectionā¹ by far, which probably means Iāll cap the collection at four games before the physical book becomes unwieldy. This could change when I continue writing, if my length expectations are wrong, or the book could grow to a size the format of the collection has to change around it.
Kayla Diceās Absolute Monsters is coming to Kickstarter in the future. Please do follow the pre-launch page, it will be a big help when the time comes. Iāll likely write more about the individual games and the collection as a whole as it developsĀ¹ā°. I also have other stuff to work on, some much closer to sharing than others, so the next time I contact you there may be some announcements.
A hardback collection of monster-focused story games from a one of a kind creator.
1. A preview of the game was posted on my Patreon for free members but Iāll replicate important things in this post. Iāve decided to make some changes Patreon going forward where itāll essentially be a place mainly for cross posting the newsletter/blog. I explain more in a post over there.
2. The connection between a sacrificed resource and discarded cards felt somewhat abstract, which isnāt bad per se but asks the player to make that connection themselves.
3. Admittedly itās not actually possible to meaningfully fail in the first two chapters. There are certain things that have to happen in the story, the Scientist always makes a Creature and leaves, the Creature always tracks them down with a demand. In those chapters the only scale is how much of a struggle is. Iāll likely write something about trying to strike an inevitably tragic note with those chapters, in every possible version of events certain fates canāt be avoided.
4. Something I have learned and try to catch now is that the most statistically unlikely outcome will happen to someone, so you should try and make sure that is still an engaging situation. As an example the initial timeskip mechanic in The Gallant and the Virtuous had the number of years just be the number you rolled, until I realised a game where people only ever got to skip ahead by one year wouldnāt actually be that fun. So I changed it so the results correspond to different lengths of time and youāll always skip ahead a minimum of three years. For Darkness and Distance I need to make sure a playthrough where everything is accomplished without any major cost is as interesting as a playthrough full of struggle and suffering.
5. A bad run of luck felt more substantial but that ties in to the issue of having to account for all outcomes, someone could get implausibly lucky.
6. Fun Fact: I have an unfinished draft of a mythological underworld football game that used Tarot Cards. Very different mechanically from Darkness and Distance but penalties in that game uses a prediction mechanic, not identical but similar in ways. Maybe Iāll get back to the underworld some day.
7. Yes, drawing The Fool is an exemption to this but thatās why you have to set it aside for the rest of a chapter. Every chapter tends to have around three challenges so its impact is limited. The Fool is only ever confined to a single challenge where you donāt have to try and that has its own narrative resonance, your character is succeeding through something without needing to put in effort but in all likelihood thatās something driving them to ruin. All the same Iāll keep an eye on The Fool as I keep writing.
8. Iāve been trying to rest mostly this week, well rest and watch football. I also have some layout work and other writing to do thatāll keep me busy for the rest of this month. Of course I often say this and then end up doing more work anyway because I get excited about whatever I want to write. Keep your eyes peeled I guess.
9. Iām not bothered by the disparity in length really. I have something I want to write about sequencing collections and how I think of priorities like an album sequence. Darkness and Distance was probably always going to be the last game in print order, it being much larger just gives it an effect like an LP where Side B is just one long ass experimental song.
9. This was a design diary, other stuff may be more using the games as a jumping off point. Iāve been threatening to write a piece complaining about the term cinematic in ttrpg descriptions (and how I think itās often insulting to cinema) for a while now and many of my Absolute Monsters are inspired by cinema so itād be apt.
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Something about the bastardization of the story time and time again proves that nobody in power really cares about the people who would resonate with Kingās Carrie White. A girl so ugly and repulsive sheās been removed from her own story. The societal need for women and girls to be constantly perceived as attractive is what fuels a fair amount of her torment in the book, but that person isnāt even allowed to exist on the screen. We cannot empathize with her; it isnāt allowed. Itās fascinating to me.
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