delfiend423

[delfiend423]

top tip for gms: if you dont want your players coming up with some stupid fuck name for their party just have an npc call them a collective nickname like youre gently offering food to a scared stray dog from a distance where it feels safe enough to not bolt on sight

#our two goblin brothers named the party a long time ago #we're the Sons of Bith #named for their mother I guess #supposed to sound like Sonnofabitch #but our DM mostly just calls us The Heroes of Icewind Dale #since we finished the Rime of the Frostmaiden #no biggy my character keeps getting called The Ill Omen and im so here for that #cue the my kid is a harbinger for the endtimes bumper sticker

[delfiend423]

Telemaine stop bullying him

[delfiend423]

the funniest thing about ttrpgs is that you can create a guy and say "his name is blorbo bleebus. he sucks severely. i hope that many misfortunes befall blorbo bleebus. he does not deserve to be happy." and at least one of your friends will immediately jump in to say "noooo... don't bully blorbo bleebus... i love blorbo bleebus..."

#me entering our d&d campaign: “this is my cringefail daughter you can hate her she has despicable qualities baked right in” #my dm 3 years into the campaign: #“she is the titular main character of this plot and she has to learn to love herself through the unconditional love shown by her friends” #me: “ok 🥺🥹”

[delfiend423]

idk what dm needs to hear this but you arent getting that done in a single session

#no but this is so healing #i used to be loathed to schedule my game bc i feared i didn't have enough gameplay prepped #but my players are so happy to just play in the space and the mundane of my silly world #half the time there's like a single red string of plot that gets uncovered in a 4 hour night #and then they tell me how much fun the session was #and you know what? i know that if we reached a point I hadn't prepared for and i asked to end early? #they'd be so cool with that and probably even happier to give me time to make things happen #love my group dude

[delfiend423]

I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.

#def saving this for later

[delfiend423]

"May your knife chip and shatter."

[delfiend423]

Guys, his name is Jace

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STARDIAMOND

You know like,,, the 24 point star / red crystals? STAR. DIAMOND.

#fantasy high junior year #fantasy high #fhjy #dimension 20 #thank you for coming to my ted talk

[delfiend423]

[delfiend423]

[delfiend423]

The Villeneuve Dune(s) can be broadly interpreted as one of the two possible futures Paul sees in the original novel

Spoilers below for Dune Part Two. (And for the original novel, but that's been out since the 60s.)

He had seen two main branchings along the way ahead--in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: "Hello, Grandfather." The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him.

The other path held long patches of grey obscurity except for peaks of violence. He had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor. Gurney Halleck and a few others of his father's men--a pitiful few--were among them, all marked by the hawk symbol from the shrine of his father's skull.

"I can't go that way," he muttered. "That's what the old witches of your schools really want."

Obviously the Doylist explanation for why there are differences in the new films is that the original book is 60+ years old and has certain elements no longer in cultural vogue that were adapted out or altered to better fit modern sensibilities, and I'm all for that. But I did find it interesting that there is an explicit moment at the end of Part 2 where Paul confronts the Baron, utters the "Hello, Grandfather," line, and kills him.

This isn't necessarily because there is any one choice that Paul makes throughout the course of the two movies that leads here instead of to the jihad. In point of fact, most of the changes that drive him here are caused by choices made in the adaptations of the films.

The causal chain that leads to Paul undertaking the spice agony is his failure to predict the attack on Sietch Tabr, rather than his failure to predict Gurney's attack on Jessica; this is, of course, necessitated by the omission of the Harkonnen scheme in part 1 to impair Thufir's Mentat efficiency and potentially drive a wedge between Leto and Jessica by framing Jessica as the traitor. The final push that causes him to make the decision is, of course, the vision he experiences of an alternate future in which he didn't have to kill Jamis, with Jamis counseling him to climb as high as possible before the hunt so he can see as far as possible. (In other words, he ignores Stilgar's advice of not listening to the djinn.)

Similarly, his killing of the Baron is necessitated by the adaptational choice to keep Alia as a fetus so the audience doesn't have to deal with a two-year-old talking like an adult and killing the Baron, which they probably did because it would have been distracting.

However, I might argue that a Watsonian explanation for the film omitting the two-year time-jump lies specifically with Paul's decision to explicitly disavow the prophecy when Jessica undergoes the spice agony, and to explain to the Fremen that her survival is because of her Bene Gesserit training. He then attempts to secure his position with the Fremen through secular deeds, rather than letting Jessica carve a place for them with the BG prophesy.

This disagreement between the two of them causes her in turn to take a more active approach in cultivating Paul's status as Lisan al-Gaib, which accelerates the timeline of the Fremen being ready to submit to him. In turn, Paul focusing more strongly on guerrilla war against the Harkonnens accelerates the timeline of Feyd-Rautha being put in charge of Arrakis and cracking down hard in the north, leading to the aforementioned crisis point of Sietch Tabr being attacked without Paul's foreknowledge.

Notably, while we do see the shrine of Leto's skull in the film, we only see it in a vision; there is no moment in the movie where Paul explicitly finds his father's remains and enshrines them. Hence, going from a strict interpretation of the film's "text," this is not the future in which the legions are marked by the shrine, because the shrine doesn't exist. It is the other future. The compression of time means that Paul and Chani's relationship is much newer and more fragile and doesn't survive the strain of his apotheosis, and that's what sickens him most.

Of course, the "Hello, Grandfather" path also leads to the jihad, because Paul's tragedy is that his very existence was always going to lead to it, regardless of what he chose to do.

And Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become. He had shown them the way, given them mastery even over the Guild which must have the spice to exist.

Obviously none of this passes explicit, close scrutiny, and is more of a fun "if you squint and look at it a certain way it kind of makes sense." I expect that the line was put in as a nod to the original book, no more or less, but making up head-canons like this is fun for me and if even one other person finds it edifying then I consider sharing it time well spent!

#extremely good take thank you

[delfiend423]

love seeing everyone who enjoyed Dune Part 2 saying they've never read Dune Messiah and they'll have to read Dune Messiah. Yall are not ready.

I've read all six books. its an absolute mindfuck freak-show waxing-philosophical eon-sprawling walk in the park gang. Buckle the fuck up and plan to at least also read Children of Dune thank you

#dune #dune part 2 #dune messiah #children of dune #god emperor of dune #heretics of dune #chapterhouse: dune

[delfiend423]

Reblog if your favorite pokemon is

[delfiend423]

Siobhán Hapaska, Robot, 2001 // Pang Maokun, Destiny 命运; Hand in Hand 牵手, 2019 // Shorra, Death of a Cyborg (after The First Mourning by William-Adolphe Bouguereau), 2015

[delfiend423]

babe wake up new game changer ep dropped

[delfiend423]

let’s groove tonight, share the spice of life

[delfiend423]

[delfiend423]

“In a long essay about the televised incident, Wheaton makes a lot of salient, emotionally vulnerable points about his reaction to David’s stunt, tying it in to memories of parental abuse he suffered as a kid—pointing out, among other things, that, within the agreed-upon fiction that we all adhere to pretty fervently around all things Muppet or Muppet-related, Elmo is a child. Writing, Wheaton notes that “Elmo is an avatar for children all over the world. Children who are too small to understand Elmo is a puppet will know that a man attacked someone they love for no reason, and that will frighten and confuse them.””

—

Wil Wheaton condemns Larry David for his Elmo-based violence

This story is a week old, and has blown up today. The right wing smoothbrains are out in force, doing their usual thing, until they get distracted by the existence of a successful woman somewhere in the world and have to go rage against that.

I don’t know why this is happening today. I don’t know why right wing clout chasing incels have decided to make this their Thing today. It’s all very confusing, especially a week after the fact.

But I want to put something here that I added to my post on Facebook, that those dudes (it’s always dudes whose entire personality is “MONSTER ENERGY DRINKS!”) need to hear but won’t understand:

A lot of us who had the same visceral reaction to a grown man putting his hands on a child (Elmo is 4 years old) in anger, without consent, and then laughing about it all share an experience that you should be grateful you don’t share with us. And when you say your shitty little toxic and cruel thing, when you reduce the whole thing to a puppet and a joke, you’re doing to us what the adults around us did when we were kids. And it hurts all over again. Are you really someone who wants to hurt another person simply because you can? Maybe take the impulse to be a jerk and redirect it into being grateful you have no idea why this is so upsetting to so many of us.

Larry David put his hands on another performer, without consent, in a segment he was not part of. That, alone, is not okay. It is not EVER okay. The fact that so many people don’t get that, or are deliberately choosing NOT to get that, is telling.

But as I said, Elmo is a child, and he is a friend to children, so all the kids whose parents were watching the Today Show with them, because Elmo was on to talk about sharing big feelings and caring for your mental health, got to watch this man storm into a set, and angrily attack Elmo.

That’s indefensible behavior, and calling me names doesn’t change that.