oozeposting

A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.

Hasbro is fucking lying.

Their game does one very specific thing in an extremely specific way, and are exploiting unpaid game designers to sell the illusion otherwise.

Like people regularly pilgrimage out to try and get it to calculate something for them despite the fact that it's widely known that this machine is dumb as bricks. People just refuse to believe that something this big and impression and that takes so much energy to run can actually just be stupid. There are whole entire cults on other worlds that are dedicated to puzzling out the secret actually "smart" interpretations of it's conclusions, widespread disagreements about what the culture of its creators was (if they existed) and how they might impact things like the translation of data submitted or received, there have been historical teams who have worked night and day to understand the planet brain's language and workings and solve this riddle of how it's secretly smart, but prevailing wisdom remains that it just actually, factually gets everything wrong like 99% of the time.

Some people are convinced there's some fundamental flaw to how the planet brain works, and that if this flaw could be fixed then it would become an invaluable resource. So yet more resources and genius have been poured into figuring out what it could be and trying to secure the necessary grants and access privileges to attempt repairs. The few times anyone has actually gotten in to try and change the brain, though, the effect on its output has been negligible, and the brain has gradually reversed those changes and reset itself over time.

It's estimated that multiple billions of resources have been poured into figuring out the planet brain over the years. Experts have dedicated their lives to trying to understand it. Impassioned devotees have ruined themselves and their communities attempting to follow its advice. Even people who agree that it's stupid tend to agree that it should still be preserved and studied, even though trying to recreate some of its systems or apply the super advanced technology involved in its creation to other tech has yielded negative results (it makes everything else dumber too).

Source One is Burchard of Worms' Decretum, Book XIX. The Decretum was a collection of canon laws compiled in the early half of the 11th Century. Book XIX, or The Corrector, was a penitential: basically a guidebook for confessors. Here's a sin, have u done it, here's your penance.

One of the questions for women was, essentially, "Did you make a dildo, strap it to yourself and fuck someone with it?". The original text is in Latin, and there's a few translations floating around of what it said. Here's one, which I spent the past three days looking for, because I wanted a direct source:

Have you done what women are wont to do: to make a certain device in the form of a male member to the measure of your will, and to tie it to your own or another woman's genitals with some ties, and commit fornication with other women, or others with the same instrument, or with another with you? - Translated from Latin, taken from "Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche nebst einer rechtsgeschichtichen Einleitung", F. W. H Wasserschleben

Pretty cut and dry re: the use of strap-ons. And dildos, because the next question is "and did you use this device on yourself?"

The second source is from the trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer, specifically Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477) by Helmut Puff, which has an analysis of the trial as well as a translation of the trial texts.

Katherina is the first recorded woman to be executed for homosexuality. There's a lot to be said about her and the way she performed gender but what I'm interested in today is the strap. So, from the court text itself:

...She made an instrument with a red piece of leather, at the front filled with cotton, and a wooden stick stuck into it, and made a hole through the wooden stick, put a string through, and tied it round; and therewith she had her roguery with the two women...

This is a new one.