Hopefull rolling

A clarification: Not all of the people I've listed here specifically identify as trans women, but I'm fairly confident that the folks I've listed can resonate with transfeminine experience. Gender's a fun playspace that doesn't have solid barriers, and in my list of trailblazers there are people who align more closely with a non-binary gender or no gender at all. Regardless, I think it's beautiful that so many trans creators have had the ability to flourish in the design space, and leave a lasting mark, and first and foremost, the goal of this list is to honor and celebrate that.

snow

snow has quite a significant games catalogue, her two most notable games being .dungeon and Songbirds 3e.

The original game of .dungeon is about characters (and the people that play them) living in an MMORPG. It's described by Spencer Campbell as a classic dungeon crawler that's incredibly meta, a game that well, talks about games and what they mean to the people that play them. As a result, loss isn't just represented in hit points - it's represented in your ability to continue playing the game with your friends. Both the original and the remastered version put a lot of emphasis on making the game easy to learn, especially with the tutorial adventure that is the first thing you read in the remastered version.

Songbirds 3e is an OSR-inspired game that synthesises ideas from places such as Breath of the Wild, Dune, Dragon Ball, Disco Elysium, Fallout New Vegas, Into the Odd, and much much more. This game is consistently praised for its content more than anything else; the weird and fantastical, the depth of the lore, and the themes of movement between death and life. The setting is full of dungeons, but it's not necessarily fantasy; there's modern technology, shopping malls, basements, paintings, and strange growths in the wilderness that can all be dungeons. (Snow's kind of known for showing how anything can become a dungeon.)

I personally appreciate the game theory playlist that snow put together on Youtube. Most of the videos on this list are not about ttrpgs. But the thoughts put forward in these essays are really interesting, highlighting themes and mechanics in other media, including video games and music, that prompt you to re-contextualize and draw from the subjects of the videos in your game design.

Snow's work asks you to push fantasy far past the limits of typical sword and sorcery games, and challenges you to think about how to blend and mix genres into new and flavorful combinations.

Jenna Katerin Moran. @jennamoran

Jenna Katerin Moran is a prolific author, who has written for Steve Jackson Games and White Wolf, but some of her prominent works include Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Nobilis, and The Far Roofs.

Nobilis is a diceless game about people who are personifications of concepts; it's abstract, and pulls from modern mythology in a way that feels historied and yet new. Many of the reviews about this game praise its text and writing, while also admitting that it can be a terribly difficult game to pull off, because, for a 'narrative-style game', it's incredibly dense. In 2003, the 2nd edition of this game won the Diana Jones' Award for Excellence in Gaming.

Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, like Nobilis, is diceless, and like Nobilis, is set in the same game universe. Where Nobilis is grand and sweeping, Chuubo's small-town and slice-of-life, using character quests and goals to drive players to figure out what they do next. Like Nobilis, Chuubo's has beautiful writing, that draws the reader into the world and gently asks them what they want. The genres and arcs of the game help players highlight the story pieces that mean the most to them, and serve as guideposts, making very clear to everyone around the table what kind of themes and narrative threads you want to play with.

The Far Roofs is Moran's newest game, a game about talking rats and the people who perhaps might have once been rats but are now heroes. It's an urban fantasy game that pits tiny creatures against moon-stealing monsters and dead gods.

Moran's work is beautiful and poetic, exploring fantastic and emotional worlds while proving that just because a game feels narrative doesn't mean it can't be just as complex as a tactical game. Her games ask you to think about the world your characters live in, not just the characters themselves, and in many ways I think it can be difficult to pin her work into one specific genre. Reading her work is rewarding even if playing the game is difficult; Moran's work touches your heart and asks you to walk away from your experience with a new perspective.

Jay Dragon, @jdragsky

I was gobsmacked to find out that Jay Dragon started publishing games one year after I discovered ttrpgs, because Wanderhome exploded onto the scene in a way that took the indie world by storm. Wanderhome looks like a cozy game on the cover, but buried inside its pages are themes of grief, trauma, and loss, in a world where the good guys didn't win. Wanderhome is a game about community, the journey between disconnected places, and a world where hospitality and the kindness of strangers can make a big difference in anyone's life.

Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, another game spearheaded by Dragon, takes away the option of creating your own character, and instead introduces the players to a vibrant cast of characters, asking you to place them into pre-written chapters of a piece of lost children's media, unlocking new content the longer you play the game. Similar to Wanderhome, Yazeba's is a game that can be played with a different play group every time; both of these games refrain from punishing players who can't make it to every session, while keeping the anticipation of wondering where each character is going to go next.

What I appreciate about Jay's work most of all is the consideration both of these games have for folks who have different gaming needs. Wanderhome and Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast reduce the barriers to play, from giving players the ability to step away from sessions without falling behind, to giving play options that allow players to participate in the practise of roleplaying without feeling the pressure to contribute to the story in the same way as everyone else.

Jay's most recent game, Seven Part Pact feels like a considerable step away from her previous work, I've already heard stories from play-testers about the ways the game affects them after they play it, particularly the strange trend of "wizard dreams." I'm curious to see where this game brings us once it's been published.

Avery Alder / Buried Without Ceremony

Avery Alder is the mind behind Monsterhearts, Dream Askew, and The Quiet Year, three games about community, queerness, and existence on the margins.

Apocalypse World is a game that introduced a whole new style of design to the indie scene, but Monsterhearts was the first game built on the Apocalypse Engine that proved that you didn't have to make the game about combat. Monsterhearts emphasized the personal conflict between characters that can be fruitful story seeds for roleplayers who truly feel fulfilled when their characters are emotionally backstabbing each-other. At the same time, the game was honoring media that was often derided due to the fact that it was loved by teenage girls - movies like Twilight, and monster romance fiction. Monsterhearts also took away a player's choice about who they were attracted to; being a game about teenage sexuality, it left attraction up to whatever happend when the dice hit the table, which, considering the way games can often be a way to explore identity, blew a lot of players' minds wide open.

The Quiet Year, and its partner, Deep Forest are GM-less map-making games that have provided the bones for various other map-making games. The games separate players from individual characters, instead asking you to introduce new people and make a few statements about them before handing them over to the table, their stories free for anyone to pick up and examine. Both of these games are about communities that are attempting to rebuild, and the obstacles & opportunities that stand in their way. One of the most poignant pieces of these games is the way that characters express dissent: if a character feels left out of a decision or harbors dissent, the player representing that character takes a Contempt token. These tokens give those characters justification for actions taken that harm the community as a whole, but they also sit as silent reminders to the entire table that the community is out of step with one-another; the lack of trust that can sit and simmer until it's too late.

Dream Askew is a product of the Powered by the Apocalypse design ethos, but re-contextualizes many of the processes into a new line of games, styled as Belonging Outside Belonging, or No Dice, No Masters. These games are known to typically be diceless and GM-less, with players taking ownership both of a major character as well as an element of the world they live in. This form of design democratizes decision-making at the table, both removing an element of power imbalance that exists at a GM-led table, as well as encouraging all of the players to contribute in similar ways. It gives players ownership over the setting, and invests the table heavily into the game.

Overall, Alder's design seems to prompt new ways of playing at the table, and her work is a priceless contribution to both storytelling-type games and GM-less tables. I'm personally touched by the ways her games aim to confront a sense of community and care even in moments where conflict isn't easy to navigate.

Jennell Jaquays

Jennell Jaquays is one of the early pioneers of games, known for both he work in ttrpgs and video games. Her work is a fundamental pillar of dungeon design, particularly her adventures titled The Caverns of Thracia Dark Tower, (adventure modules for D&D) and Griffin Mountain (for Chaosium's RuneQuest). Her dungeons exhibited a previously-unseen flexibility, and even gave birth to the term "Jaquaysing the dungeon", which referred to creating a dungeon that had multiple paths for players to follow, allowing a nonlinear progression. A dungeon with multiple pathways and entrances can be traversed multiple times over, with new layers and added complexity as the players grow in skill and knowledge.

Adventure modules in the OSR do this pretty much all the time now, but Jaquays is considered the godmother of the idea. The decision to give players options about what to tackle and what to avoid increases player agency and makes the game feel less scripted. While Jaquays passed away in 2024, her work leaves a legacy that has likely left an impact on any dungeon you pick up to play.

Adira Slattery

Adira's work is quintessentially indie, in that I feel that her games are made for her 30 sickos, and then outside of that, anyone who's willing to dip their toes in. I can't pick just two or three games to highlight when it comes to her work, because her ideas are unique and punchy and vibrant.

Deadly Weapons is a game about girls with guns who hunt demons, and hacks the BXLLET system in a way that removes dice nad randomizers, instaed asking players to take on risks in order to achieve their goals, all while being haunted by the guns that force them to kill demons.

Bad Moon is a cathartic game about yelling at the Moon, because you love her and she has wronged you.

No Love's Land is a duet game about lesbian robots working for opposing forcees in a war, assigned to assassinate each-other.

Feedback is a solo drawing game about answering surveys and drawing chairs.

Slattery's games are weird, they're messy, and they ask you to be vulnerable and engage with ritual. She uses unique mechanics and approaches to game design to give you new play-tools and challenge you to re-define what a game actually is. Her work is intimate and violent and I love the contrast that exists between the two.

Nem, the founder of Sandy Pug Games

Sandy Pug Games is a game-production co-op with a huge library, the most notable game being Monster Care Squad, a game about healers in a fantasy world working to take care of sick creatures in a humane way, and the most recent game being Hellpiercers, a game about breaking into hell after all the gods have died to free those unjustly imprisoned.

Nem is certainly not the only person who helps manage a co-op, (and certainly not the only trans fem person doing it either), but Sandy Pug is emblematic of what collectivist labour looks like; it's a studio that lifts up the work of all its contributors in a way that is heartening to see in an industry that commonly has various solo hobbyists trying to figure out how to make their passion a reality, figuring out the steps on their own. The community aspect makes their work special, and as the group's founder, Nem deserves some credit for spearheading the charge.

Emily Allen @cavegirlpoems

Emily Allen is the author of Dungeon Bitches as well as the adventures The Stygian Library and The Gardens of Ynn (to name a few).

The Stygian Library and The Gardens of Ynn are both system-agnostic adventures that work exceptionally well in various OSR-style games. Allen's adventures invented the idea of the depth-crawl, a method for procedurally generating a location as you play. Disparate locations and encounters are written up in the adventure, but the order in which they appear isn't set in stone; they show up according to player choice and GM dice rolls. The rolls generate different locations depending on how deep the players go, allowing for compact dungeon design that feels different every time you run it.

On the flip side, Dungeon Bitches is a PbtA game about queer women trying to survive in a cold and unforgiving world, with space for romance, sexuality, and the catharsis of grappling with abuse. There is no respite for your Bitches; polite society has no place for them, and the dungeon doesn't care about who they are or how they feel, it wants them dead all the same. The game embraces the ability of PbtA playbooks to make bold statements about the kinds of characters that live in this world and the specific struggles each archetype is going to face.

Between these works, Allen also has war-games, lyric games, osr games and experimental metafiction, wrestling with surrealism, whimsy, pain and queerness. She has range and depth in astounding abundance, and it makes her accolades well-deserved.

And now, a lighting round…

April Kit Walsh, designer of Thirsty Sword Lesbians, which as a naming convention, is probably the most transparent label you can give a game.

Evey Lockhart, who writes wild and weird content for Troika, the science-fantasy multiversal ttrpg.

curatrix-ribston, @ribstongrowback, a horror connoisseur and author of doll.bod, a cyberpunk game that lives rent-free in my head ever since I found out about it.

@thydungeongal is the world's foremost Rolemaster fan and her thoughts on what games do and what game design does have resonated in the the works of designers and games academics.

Austin Ramsey / @austinramsaygames is the designer of Beam Saber, as well as radiant and enthusiastic contributor to the Forged in the Dark design space: her game of mech pilots and an unwinnable war has inspired the PARTIZAN season as found on Friends At The Table, as well as CalazCon, a mega-campaign actual play featuring 30 players.

Kayla Dice of Rat Wave Game House @ratwavekayla is a Diana Jones Emerging Designer Award Winner who is behind The Fight Card System, a dueling game system that uses trick-taking games as a resolution mechanic. Kayla is also the host of the podcast This Is Your Lifepath, which interviews various designers.

Tanya Floaker is the designer of games such as Lo! Thy Dread Empire, Mum Chums, and Be Seeing You, games about capitalism, community, and surveillance, and her work examines the way things are while asking if the structures we live in have to stay that way.

wendi yu, @wendiyu, is a brazilian game designer known best for her game here,there, be monsters!, an unapologetically monstrous game about being queer, being monstrous, and resisting the boxes that capitalism and fascism try to shove us into. The game flips monster media on its head and asks you to embrace your weirdness and cherish the outsider.

Lex Kim Bobrow, aka @titanomachyrpg, is a non-binary game designer and the creator of Caltrop Core, the first of many SRDs that made it easier for newcomers to try out game design for the first time. Lex's work is also aggressively human-made, a testament to the beauty and uniqueness of personal creativity.

(as someone who isn't trans, I welcome criticism from trans creators who find any remarks in this essay that turn out to be insensitive, inaccurate or thoughtless)

Shout-out your own fave trans creators! I'd love to add to the list.

And Fellowship.

And Olivia Hill who does iHunt.

Well. They did, at the time. 

We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.

And the thing is:

They weren't wrong.

The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.

There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.

Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)

The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.

So.

Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?

Well, two things are different.

1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis. 

This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time. 

2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.

Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.

Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.

Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.

---

I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."

This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.

Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.

So I'll just close with this warning, instead: 

You know, you'd think that someone who wrote an essay about queer people selling each other out for cishet approval would agree with this, and to a certain extent, I do, at least in the outcomes and effects, but this excerpt contains a number of deeply wrong and deeply fucked up things to say.

The big pushes for marriage equality and military service were responses to things done to us. They weren't the malicious behavior of a bunch of second-rate, shitty gays (holy fuck, what the fuck, measuring people's artistic prowess and social importance by how much they got laid? James, what the fuck). The push for marriage equality got bigger and louder because of the AIDS epidemic. Because we were denied entry into the hospital rooms and funerals of our loved ones. Because sometimes all families left behind when they cleared out everything in a shared apartment was a fucking box fan. Because people lost their homes when their partners died. Because people were buried under the wrong names, or unclaimed by family and unable to be claimed by the people who loved them.

The push for military service equality? That happened as a pushback against active campaigns to out queer people and drive them out of military service. Like it or not, military service has become (by intent on the part of the Department of Defense) a way out of poverty for a lot of people, and queer people? Well, we tend to be poorer than others. Protecting people's ability to serve in the military meant protecting that path out of poverty for a lot of queer people, meant protecting health care, meant protecting housing, meant protecting lots and lots of things.

A friend of mine was expelled from the military under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He'd been in almost long enough to have a pension, and he pissed someone off who knew he was gay. When I talked to him about it when DADT was repealed, he was still bitter about it -- he and his now-husband couldn't at the time get VA loans or any benefits for his years and years of service. There are at least a hundred thousand people who were expelled from military service for being gay from WWII until its repeal in 2011. Most of those people still have their records showing an other than honorable discharge, and so they and their families are not receiving benefits to which they are otherwise entitled.

Again, this push was a pushback against an active Republican campaign to drive queer people out of public life, one which was used by Republicans in order to stir up their base into a froth over the concept of gays tainting the pure American way of life. There were accusations of gays attempting to undermine the military in the 90s, lots of talk about how the very presence of queers in that space would sully it immeasurably, ruin the American way of life. (Lots of talk about 'combat readiness' and I heard people talking about not wanting 'faggots in foxholes.')

Sound familiar?

Is there a problem with respectability politics in the queer community? Yes. Does that problem with respectability politics undermine our ability to make meaningful change? Yes, absolutely. But we need to refrain from this absolutely fucking asinine and totally untrue reframing of the narrative to blame respectability politics for decisions made out of desperation by people under attack, and we one fucking hundred percent do not need this gross "the survivors were the losers who didn't fuck" narrative, as if one's sexual prowess has anything to do with one's worth as an artist or a human being.

That's fucking disgusting, and James Somerton should be ashamed for even thinking that, much less putting those words in that order and putting them out into the world. My worth as an artist -- and yes, a queer artist -- has nothing to do with who I fuck or how much I fuck or how many partners I fuck. It says a lot about the art world and who gets to rise to the top in it -- the pretty, the popular, the fuckable -- that people think so, though.

Yes, the community has a problem with respectability politics -- I have been loudly saying so for years -- but the response to that can't be grading people by their transgressiveness and fuckability. It just creates a new metric by which you can be found a Worthy Queer.

"General employment discrimination wasn't all that important to them."

YOU FUCKING LIAR.

Executive Order 12968 was signed by U.S. President Bill Clinton on August 2, 1995. ... Executive Order 12968's anti-discrimination statement, "The United States Government does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation in granting access to classified information." responded to longstanding complaints by advocates for gay and lesbian rights by including "sexual orientation" for the first time in an Executive Order. It also said that "no inference" about suitability for access to classified information "may be raised solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the employee."

You can find this shit is fucking wrong on fucking Wikipedia, you goddamned rotten cabbage.

For clarity and conciseness, I've included only those advances made during the worst parts of the AIDS Crisis: 1982: Wisconsin: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1983: New York: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Ohio: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1985: New Mexico: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Rhode Island: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Washington: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1987: Oregon: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1988: Oregon: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment 1989: Massachusetts: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1990: Colorado: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1991: Connecticut: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Hawaii: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Minnesota: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           New Jersey: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1992: California: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Louisiana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           New Jersey: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Vermont: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Oregon: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1993: Minnesota: Sexual orientation and gender identity protected in all employment 1995: Maryland: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Rhode Island: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1996: Illinois: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Louisiana: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment 1998: New Hampshire: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1999: Iowa: Sexual orientation and gender identity protected in state employment           Nevada: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Ohio: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment           Delaware: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Iowa: Sexual orientation and gender identity no longer protected in state employment           Montana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 2001: Indiana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Maine: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Maryland: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Rhode Island: Gender identity protected in all employment

Do you think all of those things were just magically fucking granted by the benevolent cishets? No. Each one of those advances came with long, tedious, brutal fucking fights, with people risking their careers, their livelihoods, and sometimes the possibility of criminal charges by coming out and fighting.

The idea that "general employment discrimination was not on the agenda" is such a bald-faced fucking lie that I can't even see past the goddamned red mist in my vision. I highly, highly recommend reading that page if you don't understand what an ongoing fight antidiscrimination laws have been. Several states have gone back and forth several times on whether or not employment and housing discrimination is banned, making it especially fucking risky to get involved in those fights, but the boring gays did it anyway.

Fuck, I am angry. That is just a bunch of self-congratulatory bullshit, and it doesn't do fucking anything to talk meaningfully about what AIDS took from us.

like

my good bitch

And also, like, we're taking the words of Fran Lebowitz as meaningful?

This Fran Lebowitz, talking in 2010?

"Candy [Darling, a trans woman] was a man who wanted to be a female movie star," says Fran in the opening of the under-three-minute teaser. "And you know, fell into the clutches of Andy [Warhol] who told her she was."

"A 25-year-old man who becomes a 25-year-old woman is not a woman at all, because a woman first has to be a little girl. Candy was never a girl."

Or maybe this from 2021's Pretend It's A City?

"I said to this little girl, 'you are not a woman.' Now you can't say that to anyone. [derisively] If someone says, 'I'm a woman,' you're a woman, okay? You can be a three-year-old girl, a 70-year-old man, you could be a giraffe. You're a woman? You're a woman."

Or how she repeatedly compared being trans to having a headache?

Who you choose to cite and who you choose to view as an authority tells people a lot about how and where you've formed your opinions. James leaning into this garbage tells me a lot about him, unfortunately.

A lot of people in the notes of this post keep saying that those of us pissed off by this garbage "don't get it" or that those of us pissed off by the post don't understand bla bla bla creating systems of support of our own outside the system bla bla bla now people are just trying to fit in to the system bla bla.

And first of all, it's fucking exhausting to see comments like that from people half my fucking age who didn't live through this and don't know fuck all about fuck all. But second of all--

-- how do you create meaningful and durable systems of support in a capitalist society if you have no form of steady income or cannot be certain that if something happens to you that the resources you've built up will be passed to the people that you want it to go to rather than being stolen by people who hate you? How do you create stability for the next generation, how do you raise kids or provide shelter and stability for young people fleeing homophobic and transphobic bio-families, if you don't have a stable home yourself or if taking in someone you're not genetically related to can cause you to lose your home?

It pisses me off to have to grab people by the neck and say "fucking stop it, we were forced into this fight to protect ourselves," because there is a lot that we lost when we had our backs put to the wall by the AIDS crisis and by the endlessly aggressive Republican attacks of the 80s and 90s, and there are a lot of things we had to give up on as priorities because we were trying to protect our right to employment and a steady place to live, and still are! It fucking sucks that we have to do this. It fucking sucks that as a community we are going to look back in 20 years and see what we could have done if we hadn't had to spend so much time and energy protecting the basic right to bodily autonomy and continually re-fighting the same fucking fights. I know that it will because I feel that way about how shit was when I was 20, and I see history not repeating but rhyming the way that it does.

But this bullshit "we lost the artists because they were the Bad Boys who fucked and that's why it's sad" shit that also contains a lot of absolute fucking lies about what "the community" did 30, 40 years ago is just not the fucking way.

The human cost of the AIDS crisis is incalculable, but not because we lost the "radical artists" and everyone else who remained was the losers who suck (a pretty ironic thing to say when you're one of the ones who lived, Franny). It is horrible because people fucking died due to active attempts to use this disease to exterminate us, because of the malignant neglect of the people in power, because people fucking died.

Not artists, not radicals, not ... whatever. We didn't lose martyrs. We lost people.

And like... this bullshit about how addressing general employment discrimination wasn't on the table? Shut uuuuuuuup. I mean, look at that list. Look at Oregon alone. In 87, sexual orientation protected in state employment (you'll see this as a first step in many states as it is easier to argue and sets the stage for general discrimination to be outlawed). In 88, that goes away bc of opposition. It doesn't return until 1992, 5 years later. Go back further, and you see that Oregon went back and forth five fucking times on the question of whether it was legal to castrate or sterilize queers during the first half of the 20th century, during which time almost three thousand Oregonians, many of them women, were either castrated or had oophorectomies performed against their will for being "moral degenerates or sexual perverts."

Tell me exactly how one establishes alternate systems of care in a society that will forcibly remove parts of your body for being queer. Tell me exactly how one establishes alternate systems of care when you can have anything you establish ripped away from your hands because your job is gone, because you're a pervert who doesn't deserve a job or the ability to rent or buy a home with both names on the deed or the ability to get a mortgage (because they COULD discriminate against your ability to sign a mortgage together, and if you don't have both incomes, you might not qualify and even if you do, if lightning strikes the property owner, well, now it belongs to their shitty homophobic family).

All of these advances in our basic rights that James fucking lies about so blatantly are the necessary ingredients for existing in this society as it is established. You cannot create these alternate family forms or alternate systems of care in a way that is stable, livable, and able to be protected without those basic rights, and the fact that so many young people take that shit so much for granted is both wonderful - because all of them have never really experienced the world that I and other older queers grew up in - and so so frustrating, because they really don't understand that all of those basic rights are written in blood.

I am deeply frustrated by the way in which a lot of the big rights organizations can be really really short-sighted and focused on the rights of cis queers, and I'm extremely frustrated by respectability politics. The solution, however, is not shifting the goalposts so that the "acceptable" queers are the ones who are sufficiently radical in visible, tangible ways. Like, what the fuck. The solution has to be actual solidarity between the radical gays and the "boring" ones, and you don't get there by lying about hard-fought history or quoting TERFy McTERFerson Fran Fucking Lebowitz.

D&D writing, by and large, encourages a lack of questions. The surface runs deep. "Go into a cave and chop up goblins." Why are we doing this? "Goblins are bad." All goblins? "Yes."

I think the question of "why are there players comfortable siding with fascist factions and wondering why they're called 'lawful evil'" is pretty easily answered with... because D&D itself is inherently kind of fascist. And it's the most insidious kind of fascist, too- its villains are fascists, so how could you point fingers at the book?

Fire Giants are dwarf slavers. Drow are a megalomaniacal theocracy who hate men. Orcs are violent tribes of marauding killers. Illithids want to destroy all life and keep an entire civilization to scrub their floors. But these narratives still push the idea that "evil" is a racial trait. The players are not only justified in their campaign to destroy these cultures, they're encouraged to do it.

I had an intro to my campaign that involved a mad scientist kidnapping someone and turning them into a wererat. I didn't think much of it and I spent way more time fleshing out the other NPCs, I just wanted to use that wererat as a boss fight.

Once the party encountered him though they immediately saw what I totally missed: the guy who became the wererat was absolutely the victim of this story. I did my best at thinking on my feet and made the wererat this defeated guy who only followed the mad scientist because he felt like his life was ruined. So they, through good rolls, convinced him to help them fight the mad scientist and it made for such a better story.

anyone interested in the subject should definitely also check out the whole Three Black Halflings podcast, which talks about being black in nerdy spaces. a lot of times they’ll have on guests talking about their intersections and experiences in nerdy spaces. they have an episode with the author of the articles above.

they’ve also played a ttrpg based on african mythologies rather than mostly european ones like most mainstream fantasy.

A Tumblr comment from "smudge-goblin" that reads: "Why not a political theory class. I wanna war crime accurately".

Oh jesus christ"

So this is from 30,000 Miles From Chang’an, which is a 2 hours 47 minutes(!!?) long Chinese animated film that is basically an actually legitimate historical epic and historical biopic (think Gladiator & Amadeus) made into animation, and also passionate tribute to classical art and culture, similar to something like Miss Hokusai or Millennium Actress.

I heard it was decent before, but was not expecting it to be This Ambitious. The Criminally Underrated Champ of 2023 Animation

They didn't just cut out the parts with the oat milk, they skillfully edited over all the god-damn branding and replaced the audio.

But what I still find most hilarious about this whole commercial is the fact that everything they show in this solar punk world seems to be made with sustainable, zero waste and reusable materials.

Everything EXCEPT THE FUCKING CHOBANI BRANDED STUFF! The only plastic you see in this whole commercial is all the straight to the landfill packaging made by the very corporation that tries to sell how sustainable and "green" they are. Unintentional self satire at its finest.

They couldn't even show their yogurt and milk in (basically infinitely reusable) glass containers because they pretty much only sell their shit in plastic