earlgraytay

[earlgraytay]

More cuteness

#janelle monae #sesame street #cute #muppets #happy tag #:D

[earlgraytay]

Bert and Ernie are all things to all people.

They're kids who are summer camp roommates. They're teenagers navigating their first time living alone. They're established adults shopping for a bed together. They're an old married couple having the same bickery affectionate arguments they've had since they were kids at camp.

They're whatever age they need to be for the joke to land, and everyone from toddlers to old queens can see themselves there.

(also @theneighborhoodwatch this is your brand)

There’s a quote from Bert where he says he‘s “known big bird since he was a little bird” and the thought of it makes my heart cry so here’s that

#Sesame Street #bertnie #big bird #fanart #muppets #my heart

[earlgraytay]

Drag king Julie my beloved <3 Biting him biting him biting him <333

#julie joyful #welcome home #!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #gender

[earlgraytay]

So I taught myself how to use blender

#food #op i was asking myself “what anime is this from” and then i saw your comments #art #3d art

[earlgraytay]

#history #history of medicine #toast water

[earlgraytay]

I think Laios should play Spore.

#dungeon meshi

[earlgraytay]

Inspection of those Feratu

[earlgraytay]

Inspection of those Feratu

#bats #cute #smol friembs

[earlgraytay]

....I hate to break it to you, but it is exactly that serious.

In the same way that someone can drive drunk every day for a year and a half, and not wrap themselves around a tree, you can theoretically bind unsafely for a year and a half and not suffer any consequences.

But that doesn't mean that the consequences are fake. Please read the notes of this post. There's a score of people in there talking about how they fucked up their ribs with unsafe binding. Chronic coughs, rib pain, even outright disability.

Please don't do this to yourself. Get a proper binder.

Hey, PSA for younger/newer transmascs:

Tumblr has been showing targeted ads for "FTM binders" off Amazon. They look like this:

Do not buy these.

A binder is a piece of medical equipment. If you use one incorrectly, or use a poorly made one, you can really fuck up your ribs. This article from the Cleveland Clinic talks about how to bind safely.

A $14 binder is guaranteed not to be safe. There's a reason reputable companies charge more- sometimes a lot more. They have to carefully design binders so they don't crush your ribs or make you sick.

You know how everyone says Don't Bind With Duct Tape? Don't bind with Amazon binders.

#trans #transgender #transmasculine #trans boy #transmasc youth

[earlgraytay]

THINGS I NEED TO FUCKING KNOW: Why every fuckin trans man or nb person I know who binds is like “oh binders are the worst, you can’t breathe in them, I know someone who broke a rib once”,

And meanwhile over in historical costuming, we are fucking eating, sleeping, swordfighting, riding horses, and feeling great like this:

(credit: Jenny La Flamme, The Tudor Tailor, Verdaera)

Like is there NO overlap between people who want to bind and people who care about accurate 16th century clothing reconstruction techniques?

(I, okay, maybe it is kind of a niche interest, but…. REALLY? Anyone who’s made a boned binder, PLS SPEAK TO ME)

Keep reading

#binding #trans stuff #being a gender is suffering #being a gender is awesome #being a trans man is awesome

[earlgraytay]

"With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility we have misunderstood the universe"

#science #astronomy

[earlgraytay]

well now i need a Dungeon Meshi/The Adventure Zone crossover comic with a cultural exchange program where one side brings healthy, meticulous fantasy!Japanese cuisine and the other side brings the most atrocious processed fantasy!American garbage with an ingredients list full of arcane curses

#taz #dungeon meshi #laugh rule

[earlgraytay]

Why I Dislike PbtA Games, and How Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is Their Opposite

@tender-curiosities

It is no secret that I hate PbtA games.

Though due to a recent misunderstanding regarding another post, I’m going to preface this post by saying that this is going to be a very opinionated post and

I do not seriously think that PbtA games are inherently bad, though I may sometimes joke about this.

While I do often question the taste of people who make and play PbtA hacks, I do not think poorly of their moral character.

While I am going to call for PbtA to be used less as a base for games in the future, I’m not saying that the whole system and all games based on it should be destructified. It’s good for what it’s good for, but unless you’re doing that, I really think you should use something else.

Now that that is out of the way, here’s what I have to say about it.

My first experiences with PbtA games were pretty rough. Monster of the Week was not the first, but it was one of the first ‘indie’ TTRPGs I played after having previously played mostly only D&D3.5e and 5e. I really appreciated that the use of 2D6 over a D20 meant that the dice results would be more predictable, and I really liked the various “classes” I was seeing. (At this time, I didn’t really understand that they weren’t really “classes” at all, though I think I can be forgiven for this because many people, even people who like PbtA games, still talk like “classes” and “playbooks” are interchangeable.)

I was very enthusiastic to play, until it came time to start actually “making” a character, and found that I couldn’t “make” a character. I wanted to make a nuanced, three-dimensional PC who was simultaneously stereotype-affirming and stereotype-defying, with a unique backstory and dynamic with the other characters—but when I went to actually fill out the character sheet for basically any “class”, I found that most of the backstory and most of the personality for my character was being set for me by the playbook. It felt like the only thing about the character I really had a say in was their name, and that two PCs of the same playbook would actually turn out to be almost identical characters. At the time, I thought this was very restrictive and very bad design.

Later, now that I understand the design intent behind it, I still think of it as very restrictive, but I think of it as very bad design for me, not inherently bad.

When I play a TTRPG, I want more freedom in who my PC is. That doesn’t mean I want less rules, in fact having more rules can often increase freedom, but that’s a different post. I want to create original, unique characters, that I won’t see anywhere else. If it’s a class-based system, I want that class to barely touch the details of my character’s backstory or personality, so that I can come up with something original and engaging for why and how this “Fighter” fights. This means that two level-1 Fighters, despite having almost the same mechanical abilities, will potentially be very different people.

PbtA games don’t let you do that. In a lot of PbtA games, you’re not playing your own original character, you’re playing someone else’s character, that every other player that has picked up the same playbook before you has played. It’s more like “character select” than “character creation.” I think I could liken it to playing Mass Effect or The Witcher. Every player may pick a few different dialogue choices in those games that change the story, but we’re still all playing Shepherd or Geralt. No one is going to experience a new never-before-seen story in Mass Effect or The Witcher, which is very much a factor of them being video games and not TTRPGs, and therefore limited to the amount of code, writing, and voice-acting that can go into them.

This anonymous asker who sent a message to @thydungeongal seems to feel pretty similarly to me about PbtA games, and @thydungeongal's response is a very good response about how people find this appealing.

I have more respect for PbtA now than I did, but I still don't like it because to me it seems to play so much against what I consider to be the strengths of TTRPGs as a medium, much like how video games like The Last of Us and David Cage games play against the strengths of the medium of video games, and I will never like it. But other people clearly do, so to each their own.

Then another reason I don’t like it is because I think it’s oversaturating the TTRPG space. I’ve referred to PbtA before as “indie D&D5e”, and i do think that’s a reasonable comparison, because in much the same way that you always hear “D&D5e is a system that can do everything”, I think a lot of people seem to be under the impression that the PbtA system is a system that can do anything. It’s kinda the système du jour for indie TTRPGs right now, and many iterations of it make it clear that many designers do not consider how PbtA differs from more traditional TTRPGs, and how it is specialized for different types of TTRPG gameplay. Just like how I feel PbtA isn’t playing to certain important strengths of TTRPGs, I think that many—maybe even most—PbtA hacks don’t play to the strengths of PbtA. But this isn’t really PbtA’s fault, that comes down to any individual indie TTRPG developer on a case-by-case basis. And the cure for that is something I’m always saying: If you are going to be a writer, you have got to read lots of books. If you are going to be a director, you have got to watch lots of movies. If you are going to be a video game developer, you have got to play lots of video games. And if you are going to be a TTRPG designer, you have got to read and play lots of TTRPGs. That and you have to understand that TTRPGs are specialized. Even "agnostic" systems like PbtA are somewhat specialized, and therefore might really not be a great fit for the game you’re trying to make.

That and, to get more subjective again, there’s like an ocean of them, and I don’t even like the ones that are actually good.

Now that I’ve talked about how I don’t like PbtA games, I’m gonna talk about a game I do like: Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Obviously, I like it because I’m the lead writer for it, but I would also like it even if I wasn’t the lead writer for it, because it’s just my kinda game. Eureka is the opposite of a PbtA game. I wrote it to play to what I feel are the strengths of the TTRPG medium.

Eureka’s character creation uses personality traits as a mechanical element of the character, but it does so in a deliberately freeform way. You build your character’s personality out of a list of traits, so who your character is is very much linked to what your character can do, but we aren’t just handing you a pre-made character.

Eureka is designed to incentivize organic decision-making by the PCs, most often by the mechanics of the game mirroring the world they live in. Every mechanic aims to create situations wherein “what will the PC do next?” is a question whose answer can be predicted - it doesn’t need to be ordained by a playbook.

One of my favorite examples of this is, rather than a “Fear Check” forcing the PC to run away if they fail, or “Run Away from Danger” being a “Move” on their character sheet, Eureka opts for the Composure mechanic. The really short version is that one of the main things that lowers a PC’s Composure is encountering scary stuff, and the lower a PC’s Composure, the more likely they are to fail skill checks, and the more likely they are to fail skill checks, well, the less brave they and their player probably feel about them standing up to this scary monster. So if the PC has low Composure, they are more likely to choose to run away. The lower their Composure, the better idea that will seem.

This system really really shines when it comes to monster PCs in Eureka. Most monsters benefit a lot more from having high Composure, but have fewer ways to restore Composure than mundane PCs. Their main way to restore their Composure is by eating people. The rulebook never says “your monster PC has to eat people”, but more likely than not, they’re going to be organically steered towards that by the game and world itself. Sure, they could decide to be “one of the good ones”, and just never eat people, just like you reading this could decide to stop eating food. You technically could, but when your body starts to fail, how long would you? (This is a big part of the themes of Eureka and what it has to say about crime, disability, mental illness, and evil. People don’t just arbitrarily do bad things, it is often their circumstances that leads them down that path until they see little choice for themselves in that matter, and “harmful” people are still just as deserving of life as people who “aren’t harmful”, but that really deserves its own post.)

It has been said that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually arrives at much the same end as the PbtA game Monsterhearts, and I actually don’t disagree, but it gets there from an entirely different starting point and direction. The monster PCs in Eureka are very likely to eat people and cause drama, but it won’t be because they have “Eat People and Cause Drama” as a “Move” on their character sheet.

Monsters in Eureka have a lot of abilities, which they can use to solve (and create) problems as the emergent story emerges organically.

(Oh and Eureka is about adult investigators investigating mysteries, and sometimes those investigators are monsters, not about monster kids in high school, to be clear. The same “end” that Eureka and Monsterhearts reach is that of the monsters being prone to cause problems and drama due to the fact that they are monsters, though this isn’t the sole point of Eureka, just one element of it.)

You can pick up the free shareware version of this game from the download link on our website, or the full version for $5 from our Patreon.

And don’t forget, Eureka is fundraising on Kickstarter starting on April 10th, 2024! We need your support there most of all, to make sure we hit our goals and can afford to make the best version of Eureka we can make!

Interested in branching out but can’t get your group to play anything but D&D5e? Join us at the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club, where we nominate, vote on, and play indie TTRPGs, all organized by our team with no strict schedule requirement! Here's the invite link! See you there!

We also have merchandise.

#ttrpg #eureka: investigative urban fantasy #indie ttrpg #tabletop

[earlgraytay]

So, hi, in my other pair of pants (the one without the Presidential shoelaces) I'm a ghostwriter, and I've worked with youtubers. The anon you just got is so full of horseshit that they could probably qualify for the Kentucky Derby.

here's the thing. a lot of youtubers do, in fact, have a team working with them, that is not their friendgroup; it's more common than you'd think. but most of the time, these are not hired employees; these are freelancers working on contract.

I can't talk too much about my specific clients, because NDA- suffice it to say I'm not working with anyone you've heard of- but the vast, vast, vast majority of youtubers who hire help are not coming at this from the perspective of Wanting To Be A Boss. they are coming at this from the perspective of "I am a skilled professional who needs a skilled professional to do [xyz thing] that my team can't do". they are not hiring an employee, they are contracting with a freelancer.

i'm not going to say that a freelancer's clients don't have power over them. they absolutely can- especially if you're in the hell that is working at an agency. but the power dynamic is very, very different. freelancers, as a rule, have multiple clients. if you've only got one, you're doin' it wrong. as such, if you're freelancing, everyone knows that their business is not going to make or break your livelihood. they can take a dent out of you if they want, sure- but losing their business won't make you homeless unless a lot of other things go horribly wrong.

so for most youtubers, the default stance you take with your contractors is not coercion, it's negotiation. you tell people what you want them to do, yes; you hired them to do something specific. but you have to work around their schedules, their abilities, their creative style, and so on. you generally have to let people do what they want the way they want, as long as it's in on time and meets your specs. if you start trying to lean on a freelancer too hard, a freelancer with any hint of backbone can and will walk.

there's some heinous, heinous abuse in the youtuber world, don't get me wrong- but by and large, it's not contracted freelancers. it's mostly either a) people who fundamentally misunderstand the difference between a freelancer/client relationship and a boss/employee relationship, or b) people who got hired to work with a Big Name thinking they were going to be ~a core part of the creative team~, who treated the relationship as a personal/creative relationship and not a business one, and who didn't cover their asses because of that.

also, I don't know enough about how DFTBA runs their business to confirm, but I'm... like, 99% sure that even at their scale, they wouldn't be owning and running their own warehouses, because that is a colossal waste of resources. i'm willing to bet that they contract with a company that owns and runs merch logistics, the same way they'd contract with a writer or video editor or sponsor.

the idea that hank green owns a warehouse?? that some rando who works at?? could just talk to him??? gets funnier the longer you think about it.

TLDR: Anon is so wrong they don't even know how wrong they are.

The majority of professional YouTubers, particularly the more established ones, are bosses. Their economic interest rests on their ability to exert coercive power over their employees, including the coercive threat of homelessness. When they post about politics it's important to remember they aren't doing so from an uninvested position.

Look at it this way, if a packer at a DFTBA warehouse came to Hank Green saying their rent had increased and they could no longer afford it do you think he'd offer them a raise or more hours?

I mean tbf Hank Green is roughly as representative of youtubers as, I don't know, Taylor Swift is of musicians. Really, really riding the far edge of the power law line.

So like

When they post about politics it's important to remember they aren't doing so from an uninvested position.

is of course entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the average 'pro' youtubers invested economic position is the desperate need to ride the algorithm and avoid pissing off BetterHelp or whoever's still buying ad reads on video essays these days. Making enough money to have employees is a, like, .01% thing.

#i'm sorry if this makes no sense it is like 7 AM and i have not slept #my fucking industry #youtubers

[earlgraytay]

One of my absolute favourite ways to get a story is:

kid watches/plays/reads piece of semi-disposable, ill-thought-out children's media

kid has the kind of ecstatic experience with a story it's easiest to have as a kid, where these characters come to mean so much to them and they are, truly, Blorbo

kid grows up and gets to- officially or otherwise- retell the story of Blorbo, for an adult audience, with few restrictions on content

Examples include:

#the earl speaks #on writing #the protomen #mcu

[earlgraytay]

Hey, PSA for younger/newer transmascs:

Tumblr has been showing targeted ads for "FTM binders" off Amazon. They look like this:

Do not buy these.

A binder is a piece of medical equipment. If you use one incorrectly, or use a poorly made one, you can really fuck up your ribs. This article from the Cleveland Clinic talks about how to bind safely.

A $14 binder is guaranteed not to be safe. There's a reason reputable companies charge more- sometimes a lot more. They have to carefully design binders so they don't crush your ribs or make you sick.

You know how everyone says Don't Bind With Duct Tape? Don't bind with Amazon binders.

#transmasc #trans man #being a gender is awesome #GOOD ADDITIONS THANK YOU STEAMDYKE

[earlgraytay]

Dictionary writers working overtime to put out a new edition every time the evil king spells a word wrong at the kingdom spelling bee.

#glider kids #glider kids inspo