jayahult

[jayahult]

Well, based on all those four note posts I’m pretty sure that the bunnygirls are already flopping quite well.

bunnygirls should be more like bunnies. full of attitude. thumping all the time, jumping several feet in the air on a whim, overturning bowl and demolishing things, biting and beating the crap out of things with their feet, nipping

also of course flopping and randomly hopping a little

[jayahult]

my girlfriend asked me to make these

#love the idea that Cuno could throw a rock so hard that he could instantly kill a bear

[jayahult]

You Forgot

The problem is that you think she came back wrong. You're forgetting so, so many things. The first thing you forgot, of course, was that this was a bad idea - that desecrating a body, tapping into these dark rites, opening the way to the unknown and hidden things of the earth is not a work for a person so weak-willed as to not accept the one thing all people are born to do. That didn't stop you of course. Far harder to part with was your dignity. Nobody can have dignity when in the dead of night they six feet down to unearth the corpse, stinking, infested with maggots and certainly no one can have any dignity when they've yelped at the sight of a centipede emerging from someone's mouth. You forgot all sensible religion and turned to the blackest, foulest alchemy one could imagine, the black stitches, the pale and bloodless skin graft, the yellowed teeth of dogs and babes, the fresh blood which rolled down your arm. Oh, yes, you forgot it for her.

And you forgot the law, too, to provide for her eyes, her hair, her joints. Animals could do for some but not for all - you wanted only the best for her. You forgot the common morality to provide for her toes and her tendons and joints, those sayings of common sense about killing five men to save just one. That didn't matter. What her family wanted didn't matter. The work mattered.

And then she woke after all your months of work. Oh, yes, then she woke, and you were so, so afraid. She breathed in through long-empty lungs, and her chest flexed around the scars of autopsy and replacement, and her breast heaved with that first gasp - and oh, you nearly screamed if it weren't for the fact that you had forgotten to breathe in out of shock. As the damnable, contemptible man you are you became disgusted as she sighed out, spindly catsgut strings of her arms springing to life as she grasped the table and let out a great howl, a demoniac wolf-noise that must have been from the depths of Hell itself. You damn well forgot that the dead must keep their lips sealed for a reason; that the tombs out stay well shut, the corpses kept deeper, locked far away from the places of the living. Having forgotten your common sense you swallowed your bile and your fear, but not the disgust that sat in your head. You could never rid of that even when she was alive, not wholly. You thought that was the way love went sometimes, and so it seemed natural to you.

Foolish man you are, you clumsily tried to commune with her. She took well to talking, and still you seemed so disgusted with her. She said the same words. She took to the same mannerisms with only some new flesh, with freshly sharp canines and thirty-four more to spare - you'd forgotten how many she ought to have, but that was a small mistake considering everything else. But something was wrong, something was off - she was always needling you, irking you, trying to frustrate you or asking you too many questions. More and more that same disgust grew in you from the moment you first met. It occurred to you that perhaps something entirely different than the woman you knew was now inhabiting her body, and you quickly became certain in that determination, that sweet Vanya was gone and some daemon had truly come back that night and not her.

Of course, you were wrong. How could you ever be more wrong? A foolish little boy you were, skinning cats and sticking his nose where it ought not to be, you forgot so many things - the little things, like how she stirred coffee with her left hand, how she loved her meat rare, how she would delight in singing, how she would make cruel jokes and liked to poke herself with silverware, and how her arrangement with you left her bored and sad most days. No daemon-figure could imitate her mannerisms and her memories so exactly. But when you could not have her anymore, when Death snatched her up from you, when you lost the one person in your life you could control most, you forgot all of that. You say she came back wrong, that she isn't who she was. Deep down, you must know that you are lying, you sad fool. You forgot who you were bringing back.

#bringing this one back #my writing

[jayahult]

@modulottie: #do i need to play this#this sounds cool as hell Eh, well, need is a strong word. Is it really good? Yeah! It's a really great co-op shooter. It's a blast even if you don't have friends - the community is super solid and in general there's been a great early culture of being a good team player and helping out those that are still learning. It's also pretty reasonably priced at about 40 USD. That said, there are some flaws and things that might tarnish it a little.

It does have GAS stuff; it's relatively minor, and there's nothing that technically can't be acquired with in-game awards, but it's still in there. I personally think that it's handled about as well as you can handle games-as-service stuff. All of the "premium" rewards so far have been balanced towards being alternatives instead of being clearly superior to other stuff. For example, the most recent War Bond (the like... semi-battlepass? Thing, they're not quite battlepasses and not quite in-game shops, they're weird) introduced a single-shot grenade pistol. This isn't strictly superior to other pistols for a lot of reasons (it's a horde game, and a single shot pistol that has to manually reload every shot isn't always great even with AoE and high damage) but it also opens up a lot of options (enemy spawners require some kind of explosive to be used on them to close them up; the pistol lets you effectively carry eight extra impact nades to do this with, and lets you do it from farther away a lot of the time; this in turn lets you take more utility-focused grenades yourself, or use your normal grenades directly on enemies more often) and so it essentially is a side-grade, not an upgrade. This generally goes for every weapon - everything has its own niche, and even at high levels of play a lot of weapons and stratagems have unique uses, but I could see how getting these things being accelerated pretty vastly by spending money might cause some people to balk.

helldivers 2 is really fun. I like that the game makes you feel overwhelmed and on the brink of panic at all times. its tutorial is legitimately bad, like it deliberately does not tell you how to play most of the game beyond “here’s how to shoot a gun and use equipment” but it’s for diegetic reasons, like the guy who leads you through the tutorial is a starship troopers buck turgidson style character who speaks to you exclusively through a microphone and tells you you’re one of Earth’s greatest heroes for shooting a wooden cutout of an enemy

[jayahult]

Listen, I’m neither here nor there about machine automation - it’s good when does good things and bad when it does bad things - but people who chatter about their beliefs without actually following through are just less respectable (though often more moral) than those who are actually willing to take action. Firebomb a datacenter! Sabotage a chip production factory! Then I’ll respect these so called “Butlerian jihadists.”

extremely funny to me that like just 5 years ago everyone was (rightfully) making fun of the concept of ai/robots being used as a racism allegory in sci fi, because obviously nobody would ever treat a robot like that, and now we have the world's most GAD-inflicted internet users calling for a literal butlerian jihad. crazy how things change

#this is me being facetious btw #obviously you shouldn’t do that #and I don’t think anyone but some wacko Yudkowskyites have suggested actually bombing data centers. #I am exaggerating for the sake of a joke

[jayahult]

I mean. I’d have a lot more respect for it if they were actually doing the Butlerian Jihad, at the very least. Otherwise it’s just blather.

extremely funny to me that like just 5 years ago everyone was (rightfully) making fun of the concept of ai/robots being used as a racism allegory in sci fi, because obviously nobody would ever treat a robot like that, and now we have the world's most GAD-inflicted internet users calling for a literal butlerian jihad. crazy how things change

[jayahult]

It’s really well designed. There are basically a billion scenarios that the tutorial doesn’t prepare you for at all - even the basics of taking cover, which is essential for fighting the automatons, or any enemy with substantial amounts of armor. It does introduce some of those concepts more slowly as you advance through the difficulty levels, but even early on you’ll find yourself getting overwhelmed or panicked as you encounter new kinds of enemies with increasing regularity. At the same time, it also really facilitates a feeling of mastery over the game - when you’ve got enough experience and knowledge to successfully split off from your party and complete a side objective without any help, letting your team get the mission done earlier, you feel great. When you stop dreading heavily armored enemies and learn to scythe through them with support weapons and stratagems, you feel powerful in a way few games can manage.

The small touches and art details also go a long way here. The environments and soundtrack, even when repeated, feel well chosen and solid. A lot of people have pointed to Starship Troopers and Terminator as reference points, and that’s true, but I feel like Star Wars might be an even bigger one here, especially with the automatons. The in-game propaganda is also great.

helldivers 2 is really fun. I like that the game makes you feel overwhelmed and on the brink of panic at all times. its tutorial is legitimately bad, like it deliberately does not tell you how to play most of the game beyond “here’s how to shoot a gun and use equipment” but it’s for diegetic reasons, like the guy who leads you through the tutorial is a starship troopers buck turgidson style character who speaks to you exclusively through a microphone and tells you you’re one of Earth’s greatest heroes for shooting a wooden cutout of an enemy

[jayahult]

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

[jayahult]

This is honestly one of the under-discussed things in a lot of fantasy universes: faith doesn’t quite exist in the way it does in our world. Saying you “believe in [a] god” in a world where gods probably exist and do things is less like religious faith and much more like the kind of faith one might have in an organization of political party. It reminds me a little of a gag from The Order of The Stick, a comic that generally parodies 3rd edition D&D. In it, the character of Elan is this sort of stupid bard, who is hapless but good at heart. He muses for a moment on war and comes to the conclusion that if there were no plane shift spells, and no resurrect spells, then no one would ever go to war. After all, think about it: if death was always permanent and there was no definitive proof of the afterlife, then war would become almost totally irrational - every soldier would be risking everything for small amounts of pay without knowing whether their death would even mean anything, and so you could never convince them to go on the march!

the coolest/funniest part about religion in the Elder Scrolls universe is that, with very few (if any?) exceptions, all of the various daedra/gods/deities worshipped across Tamriel provably exist and have divine powers. you can literally meet most of them face to face and have a chat. this has two main implications, one interesting and one funny:

choosing to worship a specific god in a fantasy world where multiple gods provably exist is a way different vibe than picking a specific religion to adhere to in Real Life, where most religions are mutually exclusive and directly contradict one another

when a cult pops up and starts kidnapping civilians to sacrifice to their demon god in the hopes that he'll bring about the apocalypse, the vibe is less "look at these deranged lunatics who are so detached from reality that they'll commit unspeakable acts against their fellow man" and more "oh christ, not THESE assholes again". like the issue isn't even that they're crazy, they're objectively correct, they've just aligned themselves with the Pure Evil Side for some unknown reason

[jayahult]

#yep! #far-right hindu nationalist party / movement in india #very nasty stuff from what i hear

[jayahult]

this is the most tumblrified man to have ever existed

#grandpa behavior #tbh

[jayahult]

Obviously, it becomes apparatchik yaoi. You may disagree with the general principles or execution of communism, but Marxist scholars have clearly laid this out time and again over the generations.

under communism what happens to salaryman yaoi

[jayahult]

Hm, I don’t think I agree. I mean, obviously there are a great number of people who are or have been in shitty relationships with men, but the relation to erotica is often fuzzier than simple cause and effect. People develop fetishes and sexual predilections for obvious reasons, but also sometimes a person is just… wired like that, for lack of a better term, or at the very least has that interest without any obvious cause. The idea of a violent / controlling / otherwise shitty character who has a secret good side or vice versa is very erotic for a lot of people for reasons more complicated than simple conditioning or projection, is what I’m saying.

my theory on why booktok is like that is all the booktok women have a toxic ex they're still deeply in love with which is why all the plots are "objectively horrible guy ends up doing something positive that completely contradicts his presented character". they're trying to manifest it irl

[jayahult]

I wonder to what degree it becomes, like, rote or unfun. Like, is it like QA testing in video games where they’re doing the sex toy equivalent of checking every wall for clipping issues? Or is it more of a sommelier thing?

Imagine being a tester for sex toys. Wild

[jayahult]

guy who gets mad every time he sees a setting with inherited magic because that's inherently antidemocratic

#me

[jayahult]

could there possibly be something about systems that assign traits to you based on fundamentally arbitrary and uncontrollable aspects of your birth that chafe against gay and/or trans peoples experiences

#the cruel and uncaring stars

[jayahult]

L + The day I prostrate myself before the uncaring and fell will of the movement of the stars is the day I die + To follow such notions is a rank debasement of the human spirit and its inner will + Such crude and improper divinations must be eliminated without exception + RATIO!

a lot of queer people i know in real life are either into or open to talking about astrology but online i think ive noticed a lot more people who dislike astrology and im super curious to see if that holds up.

please reblog for sample size and elaborate in the tags if you want!

#the cruel and uncaring stars