facultative activity

every child should have a specific stuffed animal/toy that they develop an antagonistic relationship with

some of my most significant core memories involved getting into heated arguments with the furby who lived in my closet. essential component of my pre-teen character development. necessary anguish

When I was little, my uncle and his gf, later wife, still lived with my grandma, and the girlfriend used to have this big plush elephant that I just loved to wrestle whenever I wisited them. No reason for it at all, I just loved to bully the elephant.

Yeah I think this is basically my take on it: in the workplace, workers are respected more the more they work, and being viewed as lazy or uncommitted is risky in ways unrelated to any of these tradeoffs, to the point where people will often choose to work unpaid overtime just for reputational reasons. The stigma isn't even strictly related to productivity: people love a worker who gets a week's work done in 80% of the expected time and then spends the leftover 20% on other work, but someone who does their work in 80% the time and then takes the other 20% off is less respected than someone who just takes the normal amount of time to do it, even if the former charges 20% less. There's just a lot more reputational risk associated with working less, to the point where "how to work at an artificially slow pace" and "how to slack off when your work is done without being obvious about it" are, like, timeless core vocational skills

IT’S FINALLY PRIDE MONTH, TIME TO REBLOG THIS AGAIN.

Putting the term "male gaze" on top of the fridge until everyone remembers that it refers to a cinematographic trend and not the act of looking at things while being a man

reaching up to get it off of the fridge and the big tshirt im wearing as pyjamas rides up and the reader sees my panties

In 2026, the chicest thing a gay actor can do is never explicitly come out as gay but also make it abundantly clear that he is. Coming out is too modern. Staying closeted is too old fashioned. But this method merges contemporary freedom with Old Hollywood glamour and allure, and it weeds out the dumbest people who truly don’t get it. I call it the Pascal Method.

Taylor Swift does this

no she doesn’t

You clearly don't go here or to queer history and signaling, or both, enough to have this conversation and I'm not going to explain it to you. You could have asked questions, you could have done even a modicum of research. You didn't and you made yourself look ignorant. Goodbye.

the other day in the groupchat we were talking about how historical fiction will often try to code aristocrat characters as more sympathetic by only having them have a single servant instead of a whole household of staff but instead this just makes them look like an exploitative employer who’s so cheap he would rather pile impossible amounts of labor upon a single guy than hire enough help to actually run his house

atp my stance on gendered socialization is "there's only one gendered socialization and we all get it, you fools"

The much-discussed decline of letter delivery and consequent crisis of postal services around the world, also known as the mail loneliness epidemic,

You matter

what happened to "cool as fuck grandma" as a character trope. i miss "cool as fuck grandma"

If you'd asked me a decade ago which contemporary tabletop RPG was most likely to do the AD&D-versus-BD&D "two versions of the same game being published simultaneously, one of which is ostensibly a stripped down version of the other, but in practice they're really two separate forks of the same core system that fundamentally disagree with each other about what kind of game that system should be" thing, I definitely wouldn't have guessed "Exalted", but in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.

Ok, I have not been paying attention to new Exalted after 2.5 stopped - what in the world is happening over there?

In brief, there are currently two separate versions of Exalted in active publication: Exalted 3rd Edition, and Exalted: Essence. The latter's marketing kind of positions it as a lightweight or introductory version of the former, but in practice the two are just totally incompatible visions of what the game is supposed to be, and familiarity with one isn't necessarily transferable to the other. They even disagree with one another on the level of basic setting worldbuilding that has no implications for the game mechanics, which is actually kind of remarkable.

In theory, Exalted: Essence sort of positions itself as "Exalted, but friendlier." So, lighter rules, all the Exalt types are (in theory) mechanically balanced instead of Solars having a huge power advantage over everyone else (this is supposed to be a non-diegetic concession to play experience), but also the Essence setting has kind of... had a bunch of its edges sanded off. You are far less likely to encounter something that makes it clear that plagues happen in an Essence book, or that gender-based bigotry is normative in Creation even though it takes different form than it does on Earth. And this is confusing because it is ostensibly the same setting to the point where most of the setting books are written for Exalted 3rd Edition and Essence points you at the 3rd Edition books for more setting info.

I wouldn't even necessarily agree that Essence has lighter rules. Some of its individual subsystems are lighter than their 3E counterparts, yes, but other subsystems are substantially elaborated upon where Essence's authors seem to have felt 3E's are lacking – and some of those subsystems which have received greater elaboration are sitting right in the middle of core components, like action declaration timing.

have you seen the lord of the rings movies? the practical effects look great, but there's also an amazing digital serkis

Dont be very woried about me since i deserve all of this

OP seems banned again