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people who don't follow chess I promise this post is really funny

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I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

#I remember a story an old man once told me while I was working at the local historic society #He had a brother once and they'd been hopping fences as boys are wont #this was back in early 1950s #his brother hopped a fence and went face first into a vat of boiling lye #because one of their neighbors was boiling lye in their backyard #you could do that back then #it took the boy a week to die #there are laws now against that kind of thing #the old guy said he gets kind of annoyed whenever he hears people complaining about safety regulations being kind of anal #because man a lot of kids didn't make it #we just sort of forget about them #but ask your grandparents about it some time #those laws aren't just written in blood #they're probably in front of somebody's children there #and they exist for a reason #the reason is not burying people and often kids

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Elephant Trunk Snake aka Javan File Snake (Acrochordus javanicus), family Acrochordidae, Malaysia

photograph by Bryce Trevett

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At the end of it all.

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#cats are just the weirdest little guys

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unfortunately no eclipse photography can ever outdo the waffle house one from 2017

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Total eclipse of the Bun 🌑✨

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Oh it goes back even further than that! There were honest to goodness mutant psychics running around having duels during the Renaissance. Like, the Carnival of Shadows and their leader? Yeah, the mask she wears has the soul of a telepath from the 1600s who was defeated in a psychic duel with a psychic priest/Inquisitor when she'd gone crazy and turned Florence into a giant hedonistic cult (so the Bonfire of the Vanities? That was her). Did I mention that DeVore consumes, at minimum, two human souls a day?

CoH lore is hopelessly late 1990s/early 2000s edge and alternates between making me roll my eyes at it and loving that they at least put thought into how bizarre a world it really is.

Of course, I'm also the weirdo who has an alternate universe Nemesis automaton from a dimension where Nemmy wasn't a horrendous turbo-racist asshole and that whole character came because I A) wanted to play a Titan Weapons brute and B) grabbed the name Nemesister. So, yeah.

Thanks to my rambling this weekend, I am overflowing with love for an MMO that hasn’t been in development since 2012, because goddamn the worldbuilding for the setting of City of Heroes and City of Villains was just superb.

Do you want an MMO that begins as a pastiche of superhero comics that lovingly, cheekily engages with its source material, building up a cohesive world where the fantastical stuff feels unexpectedly real and grounded in the society, more so than most of the comics it's inspired by? Do you want that, and then to watch it slowly, gently tip its backstory into existential, cosmic horror via genre critique?

I'm in no way kidding! More below the cut.

Well, part one of more, because there's a lot to unpack here.

A lot of new superhero continuities these days treats its central premise as an anomaly. For the most popular example, the MCU treats public knowledge of superheroes as something that started with Captain America in WWII. Before his exploits, the fantastical aspects of the setting were forgotten about and hidden from the world. The DCEU begins similarly with Wonder Woman in WWI, a member of a mythic society forgotten by time.

At first, Earth in City of Heroes seemed to go with a very similar premise, though it predates any of those movies: Superpowers were unknown to the general public until the early 1930s, when some people suddenly began gaining incredible new abilities, and mythical critters not seen since ancient times made themselves known.

But that’s just the basic sales pitch. As you dug into the setting and City of Villains expanded the lore, perspective shifted into something entertainingly stranger.

Everyone knew about Nemesis, the clockwork robot-making mastermind who'd terrorized Paragon City from the early 1930s, just when superheroes were first appearing on the scene. Turns out he was an immortal Prussian nobleman born who first went on an automaton-backed crime spree in 1820s, seemingly died when the British Navy bombarded his headquarters in Malta, then reappeared in the 1860s to supply the Confederate Army with mechanical cavalry until General Sherman shelled his mountaintop base on his march to North Carolina. Nobody was ever able to replicate what the did, and with his (apparent) death, he was no longer relevant after 1865. As of the 1930s, anyone who wasn’t a history buff had forgotten about him.

And sure, everyone knew there was an underground city of evil wizards, dead for long eons until they rose again to take human sacrifices from the surface world of Rhode Island (I’m still not over that). But actually, they were active in London during the Victorian mysticism craze, then moved their operations back to their homeland of subeterranean Rhode Island with the outbreak of World War I. They made the news across the continent. They got outlawed in multiple countries. They were a big deal, until the war took the attention off of them.

Hell, one of the people who fought all these weirdos was a random teenager who'd just... always been able to teleport and turn invisible, even prior to the '30s. He wasn't even a main character or anything! His parents knew, and tried to convince him to go get training. Teleportation training. Like y'do, with your socially awkward, teleporting kid.

This setting never actually had a mundane world that was unaware of the fantastical. The fantastical was normal. The arrival of superpowers in 1930 wasn’t a hard fork between history as we know it and theirs, or a reveal of some secret world that rational minds had long denied. It was just a dramatic escalation of what had already been happening, that everyone knew about. Armies of the 1800s had to develop anti-robot tactics. Alastair Crowley publicly dissed an actual wizard cult because they were dangerous competition. Parents worried over the mental health of their superpowered teens. That was normal.

The sheer numbers of fantastical events that started happening after 1930 were not normal. Or at least, not at first. People slowly adjusted over decades, as more and more young people grew up in a world that had always been that way.  

What nobody realized at that point was how the new normal bordered on a state of cosmic horror.

And that’s where the setting really starts interrogating its inspirations.

#city of heroes

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Inspired by being Assigned Orange Cat at Tumblr

My orange lad, is well... He's orange, you know how it is 🥴🧡

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Hey, sorry to bother you but I remembered that you made a meme some time ago of chibi Noelle dancing to Jingle Jangle Jingle, is that still on your blog?

Hi! Yes it was from about 2 years ago. I'm glad you remember it ♡

I archived the video along with other art from the old canon. It's kinda old too so I've been meaning to remade it but haven't got the time to.

#I love this one #Gremlin Noelle! :D

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Classic spell

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REPOST : Roman stylus 70AD, in comon vanacular translates into “i went into the city and all i bought you was this lousy pen” , link and full translation in the comments [640 x 320]

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just so you know