anthropomorphic blob

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

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.

At least hit the shiny repost button if you're going to do nothing else. This should not stand.

First, govtrack has this at a 21% chance of being passed. That's low, but not impossible. It's in the range where loud phone calls will have an impact. Make Your Calls. Standard advice: sound invested in it, but don't start screaming obscenities. Cosplay as a moderate swing voter. Have notes written down for specific objections.

Here's the Full Text, it's short and simple, you should be able to understand it pretty easily.

To make this more palatable, they talk about protecting children, and they put in language that says this doesn't apply to science stuff, classic literature, classic art, or world religion texts. (That last is on there bc the Church of Satan loves to use the Bible as a book that must be banned for its sexual and violent content.) (also bc this thing is very very evangelical and wants you to read a bunch of christian text but they cant say only christian stuff is okay)

It does NOT have a carve out protecting history classes. you could use this to strip funding because a history teacher talking about the 60s showed video of free love movements. Or if they accurately cover the context of women wearing pants. Or the androgyny of the 1920s. The life of Alan Turing. Accusations against Catherine the Great. Rasputin, full stop. Colonialism. Women's Lib. The Kinsey Study. I have to stop, there are so many coming to mind.

Not the most important piece, but it drops in that you cannot expose children to "lewd or lascivious dancing." So. Okay. How do they feel about Elvis? Or swing? Or Flappers? Or a fucking waltz?

Now then. The stuff it focuses on is art and literature.

The classic art caveats reference the AP Art courses for what's allowed to show despite having naked people. Fair. There is a lot of naked and sexual implication in classic art, and I doubt the bill's authors can comprehend it. Also also, a bunch of religious art gets naked on the regular. I wouldn't focus on this part in a phone call. (It's hard to defend sexually explicit performance art to the kind of prudes who lost their shit bc my neighboring highschool implied a gay kiss after the blackout.)

The literature stuff is easier to object to because its very concrete and flawed. I'd stick to that.

Under definitions, it says that literary "Classics" are things that Compass Classroom has listed in their articles for middle and high schoolers. Compass Classrooms is explicitly a Christian Homeschooling organization. It's on their main page that they can "Teach your kids to think Biblically about the world". mfkn yikes.

Here's the Middle School List. At a quick glance, it isn't too far off from what you'd expect, with additions like Pilgrim's Progress that stand out as hella Christian.

Here's the High School List. Again, similar to what you'd expect with some bonus propaganda.

Here's the US code the bill cites to define what counts as sexual content

The point of using lists that seem reasonable at first glance that she didn't generate, is that it looks above board, making it harder to dismiss the whole thing as zealotry. There is no reference in the bill's text to the fact that these are from a distinctly Christian source. I also didn't see anything in the article (which is good! read it!) about Compass Classroom. But they suck. They suck so much. It's so Christian. It is pushing a Christian view so hard it's a violation of Freedom of Religion under the Constitution. ACLU will be all over it. Fuck Compass Classroom. It's a really great foot in the door for objections to this bill.

So the thing I will use when I call my (very liberal, they're not voting for this but I'll still call) representatives.

The bill says that no funding can go to teaching things that are sexually explicit/trans under this definition unless they are on those exact lists. They're using the lampshade of things like Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Brave New World, Epic of Gilgamesh, which all include sex themes, to make it seem academic and independent. I assume Canterbury and the sonnets get a pass bc most people won't catch how filthy they can be. Also gay. So very gay.

I object to an explicitly christian group deciding what does and does not count as valid sexual content in literature. Especially since the gaps are so obvious. I don't believe that we should censor books at all, but in a phone call, I'll talk about how biased and sucky Compass Classroom is as a way to define what's allowed. Those lists are literally titled 'should read' That is not a comprehensive list of what has academic value, but the text of the bill means that anything not included can be banned. I would then provide examples that would be banned.

And because that's the thing that got me angry and made me type this up.... Here's some works off the top of my head that are undeniably classics, that are not included, which can be banned by this bill:

Midsummer Night's Dream

Romeo and Juliet

Twelfth Night

tbh everything shakespeare can be claimed as classic and the majority are

The Crucible

Prayer for Owen Meany

Metamorphosis

Things Fall Apart

everything Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

Anna Karenina

A bunch of mythology (gods love bestiality)