i dont wanna be a person and do human things like talking to people or going to school/work.. i wanna….. be a little ball of moss on a tree……… in a forest……. possibly a magical forest……
Here’s a little trick I’ve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you don’t want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.
In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between – and often during – adventures. This doesn’t come out of any individual player character’s starting budget; it’s just provided as part of the campaign premise.
Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds aren’t spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.
Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:
1. If it’s something that any fool would have packed for the trip and it’s something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Player’s Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagon’s total.
2. If it’s something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if it’s something that’s unlikely to have been available for purchase at any of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on what’s needed. The results are read as follows:
Success: You find what you’re looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if it’s not on the list) from the wagon’s total.
Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what you’re looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it won’t ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.
Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and can’t try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.
As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe what’s been destroyed in lurid detail.
This is actually pretty neat. I don’t think I’d want to use it for all my games, but it could be a lot of fun to work with
the thing i’m going to miss most, honestly, isn’t the porn, but the fact that people felt free to express themselves here, to vent, to complain, to celebrate. no other social media site has that.
and i think that part of it is because tumblr managed to really remain as close to outside of “real life” as possible. your parents aren’t on here. the people you see in real life aren’t on here. it was truly a space that was able to exist for you.
the people you followed and who followed you did so not because they felt some personal obligation (in the way facebook and twitter can feel), but because they liked what was being posted. they liked you being you, or at least being your tumblr persona.
and, perhaps more importantly, we all existed as a username. what appears next to your posts was nothing more than an avatar and that. real names were not only not required, but also discouraged, because you wouldn’t see them.
all of these things combined really created such a weirdly unique experience. and i’m really going to miss it
to expand on this a little, and bring in some thoughts brought on by some other reactions i’ve seen
tumblr was (and is, at least for now) very much a part of the Old Internet, the internet of the early 2000s, where you had a space to be weird and experiment and play around however you want. the internet that was really exemplified by geocities, a free-for-all smorgasbord of things that each publisher found interesting and felt like sharing.
i think it’s fair to compare the change of the internet to gentrification. we very much started with this wild west, no-mans-land that was inhabited by outcasts and artists who went by pseudonyms. as time went on that became less and less the case. now almost every site has a real name policy, and literally everyone is on the internet.
tumblr managed to stay weird until recently. tumblr managed to keep the oddballs hidden, to let people inhabit whatever persona they wanted, and to create and discard them as they pleased. and that’s something very special. something that “normal” society doesn’t have.
if you go on twitter, you’re expected to go as yourself, and while you can create numerous profiles, changing between them is difficult, and twitter will do its damndest to make sure you find people you know in real life. same with instagram. facebook is even more “real life”. and there’s a consequence to that. all the baggage that exists in real life exists with those sites.
on twitter the most popular posts are by celebrities, by names you’ve heard of in passing. on tumblr the most popular post is literally some shitpost by a random user.
facebook, and all the other “real name” people, talk about how that keeps people authentic, how it makes people act better, how it’s a “meritocracy”. they all exist in an ignorant privileged white boy bubble. without a real identity attached to an idea you don’t know what the person behind it looks like, you don’t know the life they live, and because of that your unconscious biases can’t come in to play (okay yes they can because we have biases around word usage, but less so than around skin color). the real “meritocracy” is the one where everyone is at a level playing field. and that was, to an extent, the old web (ignoring access to resources and limited internet access for a second if you will).
kicking off nsfw content and “female presenting nipples” is just another step of that old web disappearing, and the gates of capitalist, oppressive society going up again. and that’s what’s sad.
the last hold out of the old neighborhood is being torn down for condos.
man the crazy thing about babies is that like, some people would think that reading a baby a book about farm animals is teaching them about farm animals, but really it’s teaching them about the concept of a book and how there’s new information on each page of a single object, but really, beyond that,it’s teaching them how language works, and beyond that it’s really actually teaching them about human interaction, and really really it’s them learning about existing in a three-dimensional space and how they can navigate that space, but actually, above all it is teaching them that mama loves them.
Or, in the case of the Sams Vimes, it’s teaching them that Papa loves him.
that in the Chinese version of Disney’s Mulan, the fake name she gives is “Ping”, but her family name “Fa” in English is “Hua” in Chinese, therefore her full name is “Hua Ping”, which is literally “Flower Vase”, and that’s why Shang is so bewildered because it’s a silly name.
but OP how could you not tell them the best part
“hua ping”/flower vase is chinese slang for “camp gay”
I—
Mulan, introducing her soldiersona: Hello yes it is me, a twink
tumblhoard-paladinkit 