#huwminations

I’m out. This site is bad for my ADHD and bad for my mental wellbeing in general, and I feel like it’s been holding me back. My dashboard used to entertain me, but, aside from the occasional fun shitpost, these days it does nothing but aggravate, confuse, and depress me. I’m in a very different place now from where I was in the early 2010s when I started out here.

I’ll still be checking my messages occasionally over the next week or so, on the off-chance that any of you still want to get in touch with me and grab my contact details, and I don’t intend to deactivate, at least not straight away. But I’m not going to be posting any more. I’m thinking of starting a blog - a proper blog, not whatever the fuck kind of nightmarish Frankenstein platform Tumblr is - where I can talk about game design and worldbuilding and writing, things that make me genuinely happy rather than just distracted, but that won’t happen until I finish with my degree next month.

I wish you all a better online experience.

it’s impossible to develop an absolute definition of war (this was the only essay I ever failed and I put it down entirely to the guy who marked it, who was known to be an absolute jackass)

hoplites fought in deep formations because, in battles that resembled huge armoured rugby scrums, their weight was a more important weapon than their spears

Roman legions beat Greek phalanxes because the legions were more agile and the Greeks started relying too much on the phalanx to the detriment of their other forces

Pompey may have been really good at fighting pirates but he couldn’t have done it without the massive army and fleet the senate gave him

though weather and climate concerns could affect communities in early modern Europe on a local level, the “Little Ice Age” theory espoused by some historians overplays its impact on Europe as a whole

Machiavelli’s political thought was actually highly derivative - he was just blunter than most about what he was preaching

Emperor Charles V of Spain trying to be a universal monarch was broadly bad for the empire but good for the monarchs that came after as an example of how far was too far

the Dutch Revolt may have been sparked partly by religious concerns but it was never quite a religious war

judicial mercy in England was mostly used as a tool to get around overly harsh laws that couldn’t be changed without weakening the perceived legitimacy of royal and divine authority

prosecutions for witchcraft ended mostly because of a decline in popular belief in a global conspiracy of witches, triggered in places by religious interventions against superstition

whipping as a punishment was only ever private when the social cost of whipping somebody in public outweighed the deterrent and humiliation factors

Zola really likes perverse dualities in his writing

arms races don’t directly cause war but they make it much easier for small disputes to become wars

international mediation is very useful when it works but there are too many situations in which it doesn’t work to call it essential

realist international relations theory posits that war is not only natural but inevitable because it will always eventually be the best rational decision for somebody (this is bullshit but okay)

the start of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War was only as much of a mess as it was for Israel because the one guy in charge of their intelligence service at the time had already decided Egypt wasn’t going to invade and refused to change his mind in the face of evidence

the international law surrounding piracy is a poorly thought out mess of contradictions and practically useless powers and in dire need of reworking if we’re going to tackle piracy in the long term

states or actors are never impossible to deter, but the costs of deterrence may sometimes be too high for the deterring party to bear

I wonder if part of the reason some people feel the need to classify same-gender attraction as fundamentally Different from different-gender attraction is that their ideological framework has built up the latter as inherently predatory (men’s attraction to women) or brainwashy (women’s attraction to men).

Like, you other yourself from straight people by claiming that they experience nasty (and fucking hell do I hate what that word has become) attraction and expressing revulsion or confusion or pity - and that last one is especially egregious. I’ve seen more than a few “I can’t understand how women are ever attracted to men, why won’t they just date me girls instead” posts, and they never fail to rub me up the wrong way.

But then you realize, fuck, you’re attracted to the same people they are, but you’ve already pigeonholed that kind of attraction as dirty and cringeworthy, so you have to come up with, like, Attraction to Women 2.0, and prop it up with paper-thin discourse. It’s different and special and not at all like the ugly kind we keep yelling about, we promise!

I get that attraction insecurity is an issue. I get that there are lesbians who are worried about their attraction to women being predatory somehow, and I get that there are gay men who feel the same way about their attraction to men. But this does not seem like the right way to fix that problem.

Good things in Starfinder:

Can’t have caster supremacy if magic only goes up to 6th level! (roll safe guy)

CMB and CMD are finally dead

No more iterative attacks, seems like it’ll speed up high-level combat a bit

Class-agnostic archetypes - I’m really interested to see where these go, though I wish the corebook had more than two

HP isn’t randomized any more. I don’t think I ever played with a group that didn’t houserule fixed HP per level, but it’s good to see it being official now

Stamina points

Racial bonuses being, like, two or three things rather than the kludge of minutiae from before

Speaking of racial bonuses, the two lashunta subraces are no longer sex-based, thank heavens

There’s no longer five million different kinds of bonus

Point buy is less complicated and, I think, less gameable

Starship rules right out of the box

Bad things in Starfinder:

Old core races no longer core except humans (weird choice tbh)

Seven classes is a bit anemic

Weapon and armour variety is somewhat lacking at lower levels - it’s fine later on, but most starting loadouts are going to look rather similar, probably moreso than Pathfinder since there’s no longer five hundred different melee weapons

Technobabble is a touch heavy at times

Themes feel restrictive, I especially don’t like that themeless characters are explicitly weaker

The mechanic class gets two options for a robot sidekick and one is just vastly more interesting and choice-rich than the other. Like, drones get a whole build-your-own system like eidolons but metacortexes are much weaker in that respect

The conversion guide is somewhat lacking, especially for monsters, which is what we need it for most since we don’t get the bestiary for another two months

For thirty years and counting, Five Peak Island has sweated under human occupation. As the only abundant source of the rare magical mineral burnstone, it was a prime target for Protectorate colonisation, and the native orcs were defenceless against the steel tide.

Desperate to deprive the humans of the burnstone they need for their most terrifying war machines, an orcish warhost of the Thunder Clan has launched a counterattack to liberate Five Peak Island. The attack was plagued from the start with supply problems and bad weather, and, after several days of merciless attrition, the orc battlelines have started to crumble. The army is falling back to the port of Vankir on the island’s east coast. Tomorrow at dawn, the fleet will set sail and withdraw what’s left of the warhost.

You are the remnants of an elite orcish commando unit, deployed behind enemy lines to sabotage human infrastructure. You’ve taken very heavy losses and largely failed your objectives, and you’re too far into Protectorate territory for the Thunder Clan to launch a rescue mission. If you’re going to get out of here, you’ll need to do it yourselves.

You’re alone, surrounded, and running out of supplies. Night is falling. You have until dawn to cross several miles of dense forest, magically charged and riddled with human patrols, and reach Vankir.

When I first started getting involved in proper SJ communities, I spent a lot of time with the Bad Sort of Feminism - the sort that hears “toxic masculinity” and interprets it as “all masculinity is toxic”, that makes posts like “girls are great and boys are just so mediocre amirite” - it was what crossed my dashboard. I was resistant to it at first, but I still felt I was objectively wrong to feel that way, because doing so was disagreeing with feminism and feminism was Right. (My view of ideology wasn’t too nuanced back then.)

I’d been raised a staunch feminist, mostly by my mother; I don’t agree with her whole ideology (she has some interesting ideas about trans people - not full-blown TERFism but sometimes she gets uncomfortably close), but I’m grateful that she brought me up to stand for the absolute equality of all genders and against misogyny.

By contrast, my secondary school, the source of most of my meatspace social life until about two years ago, was not a good place for feminism. It was a private school, and until I was sixteen my classes were all-male, and the environment was not at all conducive. I was told I’d been “brainwashed” by “feminazis” a lot. I didn’t care about that so much, but it meant that Tumblr SJ, for all its obvious, uncomfortable flaws, felt like a source of reason away from what I was starting to see as a very irrational community.

And, in hindsight, that really, really hurt me.

I don’t think my self-worth has ever been worse than it was in that phase of my life. It’s still recovering. I was male, I was Bad, I was Broken. I couldn’t even recognise it when I was in a borderline-abusive relationship because it couldn’t be a real issue because I was male. I wasn’t worthy of love or respect - I couldn’t strive to be one of the good ones, so what was the point of even trying to interact with good society? And yeah, I’m gonna say it up front:

Learned hatred of maleness and masculinity is probably a significant part of the reason I am agender now, and that is fucked up.

I don’t care if this is the wrong reaction, if you’re allowed to make these posts and have a good ol’ chuckle at the expense of men because hierarchies of oppression or bigotry equals power plus privilege times the square root of toxic, if I’m not allowed to be upset because misandry doesn’t real or because I’m trying to silence brave strong women from their brave strong act of making fun of men on the Internet. I’m hurt regardless of whether or not your praxis says I can be.

There’s that post going around about the Overwatch Lunar New Year celebration, where one person says it’s racist and a bunch of other people argue that it’s not. (All of these people - on both sides - were actually Chinese and did observe LNY, so I trust their judgement.) I’ve taken a look at both sides, and I’m with the people who say it’s not - I think one or two things are a little iffy, but, to my eyes, there isn’t anything there that’s actually offensive. I especially don’t agree that any of the new skins constitute yellowface.

Alright, whatever; I didn’t completely agree with all the commentary, so I held off on reblogging. Point is, going back to OP’s blog to see if they’d reblogged the post themselves to add counterpoints, the main thing they seemed to be upset about was that people were only listening to the Chinese people on that post who agreed with them.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about the right in my time examining and studying politics, it’s that right-wing politicians are chameleons. They find the angle that works and they glue themselves to it even if it’s not quite what they want, because it’s close enough. This has been something of a year of exceptions to that, granted, what with the Brexit debate and the Republican nominees loudly rejecting Trump, but, when all’s said and done, the right will generally close ranks and work as one. Not always perfectly, but they’ll do it.

The left has never been good at that. The left cares. The left doesn’t like compromise because it honestly, truly believes that its policies are morally correct and compromising on them constitutes a concession to evil (for want of a better way of expressing this sentiment). So different factions of leftists spend time debating and discussing and many will outright oppose each other, which isn’t wholly a problem - this kind of discussion can often lead to clearer thoughts and the development of ideas, and I credit it as a significant reason for leftist political thought now being as sophisticated and many-threaded as it is.

But we can’t work out when we need to shut up and swallow our principles to increase our chances. We’ve never been very good at pragmatism. If we can’t have the society we want, what’s the point, right? Diluted versions of our objectives are worthless. We’ll actively oppose other strands of the left which don’t give us all of what we demand, and, in hard, practical terms, that decreases our chances of getting any of what we demand.

Some kind of synthesis of all the disparate fragments of the left is needed for us to constitute a proper, organized opposition to the right. But, at the same time, I can’t very well ask people to compromise on the values they hold dear. I’d be a pretty awful leftist if I did that, right?