Recovering Fool

first it was the klingons—they’re originally supposed to be this cruel, bloodthirsty, war-obsessed people—and then tng comes along and it’s like wait no maybe war and violence is a part of their culture and actually ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies so we have to be woke about it.

hey these are the ferengi and they’re supposed to represent everything we hate about capitalist society; they’re greedy, scheming, profit-obsessed, and they look like ugly little trolls to emphasize how much we fucking HATE capitalism. oh wait fuck here comes deep space nine and we have to recognize that they’re PEOPLE. okok what if the pursuit of profit is actually part of their culture and ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies. so we have to be woke about it.

this is the borg, they’re a hivemind race of cyborgs who have no sense of individuality and their only motivation is assimilating people into their society. they want to assimilate humanity and we are completely defenseless against them because their technology is eons ahead of our own and they’re incapable of being reasoned with. oh sweet we have a borg prisoner this is the perfect opportunity to commit genocide against them. fuck actually we can’t commit genocide we’re woke and communists and in space.

hey these are the cardassians, they’re part of a cruel and vicious empire which is supposed to be a representation of fascism and authoritarian regimes, they’re a cold, bloodthirsty people with no sense of empathy or compassion, their society literally references 1984 on multiple occasions, and they’re known for the insanely cruel and inhumane methods of torture they use against their prisoners of war. we hate the cardassians…….. except, here’s a cardassian kid who grew up on bajor, and……. fuck. he’s a person. now we actually have to consider his humanity. and being racist is actually……. bad.

this is the jem’hadar, they’re genetically engineered soldiers who have no sense of individuality and only live to defend the state. they’re all born addicted to a synthetic drug that’s manufactured by the state and administered by their masters—this is how they’re kept subservient. they’re ruthless and powerful and they’re incapable of being reasoned with because their only motivation is violence and killing. so we should kill them all, right? FUCK….. what if they’re actually people. goddamnit. now we have to consider their humanity.

Pedestrian traffic lights

Starting off with the difference between formerly Eastern German traffic lights (upper images) and formerly Western German traffic lights (lower images):

The city of Erfurt had some additions, like an umbrella or a heart:

Same sex love in Marburg (upper image) and Frankfurt (lower image):

Traffic light lady in Bremen:

Karl Marx light in Trier:

Face of Friedrich Engels in Wuppertal:

Elvis in Friedberg (Hessen):

A sparrow (for the Golden Sparrow film awards) in Gera:

Winemaker in Bad Dürkenheim:

Mainzelmännchen (mascot of the public broadcasting service ZDF) in Mainz:

Otto Waalkes (German Comedian) in Emden:

Town musicians of Bremen in Bremen:

A miner in Pirmasens, Rheinland-Pfalz:

Bishop in Fulda:

Source: Saarbrücker Zeitung

NAIROBI, KENYA

I couldn't figure out why I couldn't find a still image of the green light. Wanna know why? (It's adorable.) THE GREEN LIGHT ACTUALLY WALKS. It has a full walk cycle. I found a video of it on YouTube.

LAGOS, NIGERIA

Doesn't seem to have them. Instead they have raised pedestrian bridges to go over traffic.

LUBUMBASHI, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

Lubumbashi has us all beat, everybody. We can go home. First of all, it's another animated signal. Second of all, it's a giant robot:

STOP:

WAIT:

And then the whole top turns at the waist and you can GO:

The melodramatic OT3 of Cyrano de Bergerac × Red Wine Supernova ❤️‍🔥

for @ninadove, my old bear 🧸💜 happy ami-versary!

Beloved!!! This is art!!! What do you mean this is your first edit everything is so perfectly timed. I was grinning like an idiot the whole time. UNTIL I GOT TO THE VERY END. THAT LAST SHOT WAS EVIL. EVIIIIILLL 😭

I loved every second of it, the charm of Roxane’s part and the hilariousness of Christian’s (directors are not normal about this side of the triangle and I thank them for that), especially the bit in the Kline version where he uses Cyrano as a ladder and how you paired it with the lyrics… AND AND AND The Trio of course. They are incomplete without each other. Thank you Solès for the orbiting scene indeed!!!

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Aratea (Harley MS 647, ff 2v-17v)

22 constellation figures containing extracts from Hyginus, Astronomica.

England (c. 820-11th century)

Unironically made me reconsider how i was writing the gm side of things for my ttrpg

You literally have to collect rare stones from remote locations, put them into specific formations to work. All of this gets written down in symbols which don't make sense to the uninformed. It gets powered by energy which can not be seen in most cases.

goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you

some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!

if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too

You realize that Lovecraft borrowed a lot from the pre-fantasy authors that came before him, like the little fanboy that he was.

You then realize that a lot of what the "Lovecraft mythos" is in popular culture actually comes from works derived from Lovecraft's writings rather than his true writing (The Call of Cthulhu RPG is literaly the source of fifty percent of the stuff you find today on the Internet, it is to the mythos what D&D was to fantasy).

And finally you realize that Lovecraft's world was literaly a collaborative project of which two thirds did not come from him but from his pen-pals.

The post-Lovecraft version just made him Loki, essentially. Trickster, always wanting to cause trouble, having dubious sexual consent with humans, etc. OG Nyar would NEVER do such things. The worst he ever got was when that mortal guy kept causing trouble in the Dreamlands or whatever and Nyarlathotep was getting super annoyed (it was his domain, after all), so he fucked with him and eventually tried to kill him.

I was talking about the Nyarlathotep poem with a friend not so long ago and it is funny how people, by analyzing the description of the dream that inspired it, proved that it was yet again another case of Lovecraft coming up with a cool fictional invention out of being terrified of something... in this case Nikola Tesla X)

"What?"

"Space is haunted."

"No, I heard what you said, but..."

"Most times you want to get the ones in LEO. They can still see their home, and want to go back. If you're lucky, you can tell them you'll find them on your way down and they'll let you go. The most fortunate find the dog. A friendly little guy who's just solid enough to feel your hands petting him. None of the others mess with the dog.

"Those around the Moon, or Mars? They're a bit nastier. Lonely, I think. Some just want to talk, messing up the instruments in the hopes you hear them. Others mess your instruments so you'll join them out there. A new face in their lonely voyages.

"But it's the ones in deep space you have to worry about. Lot of those don't even remember they were human. Just an incorporeal mass of want. What do they want? They don't remember anymore. You can always tell if you caught one of those by the screaming, the way they smash you against the walls like they forgot what a door is. But they're not the worst."

"They're not the worst? Then what is?"

These posts reminded me of several other things, included below.

To begin with: Some of this counts as "star lore," a real thing!

Wikipedia:

Star lore or starlore is the creating and cherishing of mythical stories about the stars and star patterns (constellations and asterisms); that is, folklore based upon the stars and star patterns. Using the stars to explain religious doctrines or actual events in history is also defined as star lore. Star lore has a very long history; it has been practiced by nearly every culture recorded in history, dating as far back as 5,500 years ago. It was practiced by prehistoric cultures of the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods as well.

@attractthecrows' Space Mythology

This is the OG post, the OMG post, the one that made me fall in love with the whole concept of space myth and space fairy tales.

(It inspired a whole writing WIP of mine, that's basically Jim Henson's The Storyteller in space. Working title: The Starryteller! )