passing the need for witness

samuel r delaney was so unbelievably correct when he wrote dhalgren in 1975. you WILL be a highly mentally ill bisexual who gets caught up in some fuckass city's politically charged society of other fucked up twenty and thirty something year olds. you WILL experience the art of poetry. you WILL meet scary transgenders named things like Nightmare and Dragon Lady

Taking the "like a vampire but toned down for game balance purposes" implementation of dhampir and doing it with succubi instead would be such an evil thing to put on a character like hey. you've got some weak Seduction Powers whether you're into that or not. do people actually like you or are you using the evil powers on them without knowing it? are your feelings genuine or do you want to feed on the people you think you care about? haha people think you're an evil sex demon and every interaction you have with others is going to have that lingering in the background

Not full shapeshifting but a body that subtly contorts itself according to local beauty standards. Noticing yourself looking up at a friend who's normally the same height as you like okay guess we're heading into "women need to be small and dainty" country. Sigh. It's never a place where the mainstream idea of an ideal woman is tall and muscular.

Having to get really good at bullshitting about makeup and perfume because you have No Fucking Idea, it's succubus bullshit altering your actual skin to make it look like you've absolutely mastered a skill you don't have, your scent is some subtle magic nonsense and actually differs from person to person, you don't know what smells they like, how the fuck are you supposed to know what it it's they're asking questions about? You roll out of bed like this in the morning and if you're too honest about that people get aggravatingly jealous about it.

All your adventurer friends have cool scars with stories behind them except you. Your body isn't allowed to have a history like that.

Also, this isn't really reader-facing, but as a designer I find that forcing myself to come up with dozens of use cases for a given rule or narrative conceit in order to fill out a big stupid table can be tremendously clarifying. Often I'll come up with a descriptive or mechanical twist that seems wonderfully useful in theory, but when I try to work out actual dice-on-the-table applications for it I'll get stuck after the first three or four, and I realise that I'm about to make some hypothetical GM do all the real work for me. Not cool!

The Catholic church is a thin veneer of aesthetics and religious dogma laid over the Western world's most ancient continuously operating bureaucracy. The issuing of an official Vatican-approved I'm Sorry form that SSPX members have to fill out and tick several checkboxes then get stamped for approval to have their excommunications reversed is more beautiful to me than any liturgy

this is the one meme that manages to age like a fine wine

"we're all faggots in the eyes of the state" okay but the state recognises different category of "faggot" where one is "idiot womanchildren with delusions of grandeur" and another is "subhuman predators that must be excised from society posthaste" like neither are a great way to treat another human being but can we pleeeeeeease acknowledge the difference here

"stop queer infighting we're all-" okay so is this actually queer infighting or did a trans woman describe her lived experience in a way you didn't like

I feel a perpetual deep-seated alienation from most people in academia because everyone behaves like cops and hall monitors, and then I log onto tumblr to see the exact people who do the alienating posting about how emotionally difficult it is for them to report students for (possibly) using AI to write an assignment  

The absolute contempt for these locks is palpable.

"Oh, so you like me when I'm a powerless victim, but you don't like me when I'm exterminating civilian populations with cluster bombs. Guess we're seeing your true colours now, bigot!"

why are your i's so long

because of the material conditions

America killed 3 million Vietnamese people, we put half of South Vietnam in Concentration Camps, we dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than were dropped by both sides in WW2, We permeantly poisoned the land with Agent Orange, the American war on Vietnam was the most inhuman and despicable action in this nations history, the Vietnamese had every right to do whatever they wanted to the occupation

When you learn what the US soldiers did to the Vietnamese, you'll never stop praying for the death of America.