The Spooky Fox

- A rogue made out of Goo who is based on the crash test dummy from mythbusters (the being that managed to pickpocket Strahd)

- A Dhampir whose job is vampire tax collector (died recently, couldn’t tell that Strahd was a vampire)

- Swarmkeeper ranger whose swarm is RATS, player is slowly building the pied piper who’s obsessed with woodchucks

- Cleric, only person with a braincell but the player named the character Eva Nescence so I can’t take anything seriously, currently stealing most items that look cursed

You see this a lot in standalone horror novels that don't get caught up in their own "lore." My absolute favorite example of this is "The Library Policeman" by Stephen King. The creature in that book and how it "works" is wholly defined by the scope of the protagonist's personal trauma. It does not "exist" nor has "logic" independent of the protagonist's emotional journey. Sure, it all makes "sense" in that story but trying to tease out the creature as an independent entity with a consequential "existence" simply falls apart.

I would also point to something like Frank Miller's Sin City stories. The characters are BOLD archetypes with no substance behind their evocative presence. Senator Rourk is a complete tautology. He is a Senator because he's rich and powerful and is rich and powerful because he is a Senator. Things happen because Rourk wants them to happen. By what means? What's the power structure propping him up? Who are his allies? Who are enemies? What is the network composing his wealth? These things are not only unanswered, I would suggest they are UNASKED. It simply doesn't matter. Rourk might as well be Zeus.

It is that element of UNASKING, I am focusing on.

No, this was never a legend meant to operate on a 21st century biology, the blood is blood but it's also life, and so on.

Lady this is a skinny influencer in a frilly white dress that's never had dirt on it, with her hair in professionally-done beachy waves, doing a photoshoot in a field using a basket of strawberries bought at walmart as a prop.

southern states are gerrymandered to hell--specifically to prevent the majority from overthrowing the conservative political chokehold. this is by design and a direct inheritance of the civil war (to keep former slaves and their descendants as politically disenfranchised as possible). Southern politics do not reflect southern reality. And neither do media portrayals. there is a reason the media wants you to think of the south as white, conservative, poor, and uneducated: to keep southern progressives isolated. to alienate northern liberals from disenfranchised southerners (especially southerners of color).

it's just another divide-and-conquer strategy. because that's what conservatives are good at--controlling the narrative in order to rewrite history and sow discord between groups that should be helping each other. Because unity is powerful, and it makes us dangerous.

The original post annoyed me not because I think it’s a mainstream opinion that needs to be taken seriously, but because it’s part of a larger trend of hypocrisy I’ve noticed among leftists. Construction is an important trade that takes a lot of skill and knowledge, but things like inspections and engineering can be done by anyone with a passing interest in architecture. Worker’s rights and safe working conditions are of the utmost importance, but actual safety regulations and building codes are just bureaucracy meant to keep us dependent on the government. You should unionize and demand the full value of your labor, but tradespeople who charge a fair price are scum and union members who retire millionaires after a lifetime of manual labor are class traitors who get the wall. We need to respect blue collar workers and how difficult their work is, but also we should abolish the division of labor because those jobs are so simple that people can just take a class in high school to learn how to do them. A lot of leftists claim to respect labor but constantly show that they still buy into the “blue collar labor is unskilled work for people too stupid for academia” stereotypes.

also, safety codes are anti-capitalist. The only person who benefits from cutting corners and ignoring safety violations is the CEO.

lol, again?! I remember this also happening when America invaded iraq back in like 2003. I think the name "camel spider" was even first coined then; in books the only common names I knew them under before then was "sun spider" and "wind scorpion," both of which are much cooler as well as more appropriate for something that runs as fast as the wind in bright, sunny places. But they do "chase" people in order to try and cool off in our shadows, leading to the belief that they're aggressive, and basically all the terror of them started because soldiers made up stories about them just to scare younger newer recruits as a prank, insisting that they're venomous or parasitic or that they'll chew your nose off while you sleep.

I think their tiny close-set black eyes and giant fat mouthparts give them an adorable sweet dopey face, though from the side it becomes sick and rad:

They can bite very hard and easily draw blood if you upset them, but they want to be left alone. Their jaws are only so big and strong because they're the arachnid version of a shrew: a fast-moving high energy predator adapted to quickly take down and devour everything else it comes across up to a couple times larger than itself, like lizards and centipedes!

They call this kind a teddy bear solifugid: