Fuzzytheduck

A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.

For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.

It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.

This part. This is the part I’m talking about

This is not a woman falling to pieces because her father won’t let her marry a man she just met.

This is a woman born to a life she has very little say in. She has never had a genuine friend (besides a tiger). She is facing a marriage to a man she doesn’t know and doesn’t like but duty (and the law) demands it. So she took a risk, ran away, ran to a world she doesn’t know or understand and when she landed in trouble (serious, serious trouble) a stranger came to her aid. She finally (finally!) made a real connection with someone but they didn’t get much time together before the guards showed up and she had to reveal who she was.

This moment when she’s crying her heart out? It comes after she’s been told that the first person she ever connected with, the first person to be genuinely interested in her for who she is and not what she is, the first real friend she has ever made, was executed… because of her.

What exactly are we to believe motivated this 'significant proportion' to plan to travel to the British museum (in central London, presumably at their expense), to disrupt an educational lecture?

It seems unlikely that any would-be protestors cared much about the content or veracity of the lecture. Likewise for the speaker: Dr Paul Collins is a well-regarded scholar and curator in ancient Near-Eastern studies, and to my knowledge all his previous talks, including on Iraqi, Syrian and Kuwaiti history and archaeological heritage, proceeded uneventfully.

So, what then about this particular event provoked a response?

The key is the symbolic aspect of the lecture - namely, the fact that the British museum chose Ancient Israel and Judah as a topic to mark Jewish Culture Month.

The prospective demonstrator finds the association of Jewish culture and history with Jewish sovereignty and self-governance entirely unpalatable.

The reason for this is self-evident; they are opposed to Israel in the present, and so they extrapolate an ahistorical and pathological opposition to 'Israel' in the past.

To be charitable, the intended message of the planned protest is that British institutions should limit themselves to certain acceptable topics when discussing Jews - coincidentally, the times and places when Jews were powerless and vulnerable. (Less charitably, the message is that institutions in Britain should refuse to acknowledge Jews at all).

But the unintended message is much more revealing. The ideology that instigates and drives actions like this one is hollow, reliant on ignorance, and unable to hold up when faced with the truth. If the arguments of antizionism are valid, they would be no less valid for encountering and incorporating history. Only by censoring and restricting what history is permissable to teach, can antizionism dogma preserve itself.

The choice now facing the British Museum, and wider British society is simple: to give in and allow the ideologues to have their way, leaving us all more ignorant and intellectually poorer for it, or to rise to meet the challenge by raising the priority of teaching about Jews and Jewish history to the public. It's clear enough now that Britain is in dire need of it.

i’m freaking out why did they add the fucked up version of the flushed emoji. I thought i was going crazy when i scrolled past this. How did a discord emoji end up in the real emojis list i thought. I took a screenshot incase everything is gone tomorrow and this is a fever dream

and he paused for a second and then said, “when you’ve been taught from a young age that crying is weak and you should train yourself never to cry for any reason, you assume that everyone else has trained themselves too, so anyone who cries has to be doing it on purpose. it took me a long time to realize that wasn’t true.”

you have to be kinder to people who are slow processors.

you have to be kinder to people who don't understand your jokes.

you have to be kinder to people who forget important dates.

you have to be kinder to people with cognitive decline.

you have to be kinder to people who were always this way, too.