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#on the other hand if you think D&D is too complex I've heard wonders about A Dragon Game!
lich-slap · 3 years
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Not to get into any of the discourse right now (The post I just rebloged says my opinions on the topic better than I ever could) but, can we appreciate how great it is that Misfits and Magic won't be D&D? (it will be a system called Kids on Brooms)
Look, I love 5e, I really do, and I've always loved bending genres. Buuut a lot of D20's campaigns would've been more interesting game-play wise if they were done in another system. (Like actual murder mystery-rpg Mice and Murder would've FUCKED, y'all).
In the Q&A its said that from now on the campaigns will have "the game system best suited for that season's story". And that's so cool!!!! A major actual play like D20 switching to what will possibly be mostly indie games???? That's fucking huge!
There are sooo many cool indie TTRPGS out there! I hope we get an all magical-girl season with Glitter Hearts! And I get chills just thinking about what a Brennan Lee Mulligan City of Mist game might be like (though since it is a majorly urban fantasy setting, I'm unsure if it has a chance :()
It's really nice to see D20's push for more diversity in the industry go beyond casting and crew to the actual systems being used. It's something we can't get from other actual plays (on the regular, at least) because of contractual obligations. WoTC has ruled this industry for too long! There are other games!
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luna-rainbow · 2 years
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I have such conflicting feelings about the code words for the WS because on one hand I like anything that helps to support the argument that Bucky isn't to blame for anything that he did as the WS, but on the other I felt like they were very plot device-y, weren't used to their full potential, and, honestly, shouldn't even be necessary. The codewords were literally just used by the writers to justify having a "WS rampage" moment in CACW and to give a reason why Bucky would have given Zemo the information about the Siberia base and why he needed to be frozen at the end of the movie, once they fulfilled that use, they instantly removed them from the picture, not even showing us the how of how the code words were removed, was it a brain surgery, was it psychotherapies?
In a better world where people were less ableist, the codewords wouldn't have been needed for people to understand that Bucky was a victim without any control over his actions. I think back to when I first watched CAWS, before we knew that the codewords were a thing, and I thought it was pretty clear just from the bank scene that Bucky was a victim, but maybe that's just me?
I also feel like there's some ableism baked into the whole codewords thing towards dissociative disorders (maybe this is bc I've read a lot of Bucky fics that discuss dissociation as a part of the WS that are really good). Idk sorry if this doesn't make much sense, I just wish that this--like most parts of his storyline--were better written.
Thanks for the ask!
Make no mistake, the code words - like many parts of CACW - were definitely a plot device, and not there to help people understand Bucky had no control. It was the easiest "switch" for Zemo to gain control of Bucky and direct him to do his bidding. Bucky's rampage was necessary to set off the airport fight, because - this line seems to get overlooked a bit - Tony insinuates that he killed people in that rampage, which was why the Avengers were called upon to bring him in.
I...really cannot think of a real life equivalent for the code words, and the amount of reading required to confirm this is too much because reliable evidence on hypnotherapy is so scarce D= The whole activation sequence and Bucky's "consciousness" disappearing comes across like a hypnosis to me.
But my other thought is that the Winter Soldier seems fairly capable of making quick (straightforward/concrete) decisions about fighting, and combined with what Seb says about Bucky "being in a trance-like state", I wonder if it's almost like a sleepwalking/parasomnia situation. Interestingly, one of the theories about parasomnias is the inappropriate disinhibition of the basal ganglia during (non-REM) sleep.
I can't recall the exact line Melina says about the Winter Soldier program, but it was definitely the basal ganglia that she experimented on to get the pigs to obey her commands. TBH I don't think the scriptwriter was aiming for this - basal ganglia does a lot of stuff with motor control that's unrelated to sleep.
Can you induce a parasomnia state? Yes, zopiclone was notorious for doing this when it first came out, and some other toxins can do it too. I have not heard of hypnosis doing it, but...hey, this is Hydra.
I know this is getting long already, but I thought it's useful to talk over the components of consent:
- You have to have available all the relevant information about the risks/benefits, potential outcomes, and any other major concerns that might influence your choice - You have to have understood the information - You have to be able to synthesise the information and form a judgement that takes into account the possible outcomes - Finally there's a component about communicating the decision which doesn't apply here.
In Bucky's case - he definitely does not get given the full picture when he goes on missions, especially when you consider that they wipe his memory to take away his knowledge of the situation. It's also doubtful whether he would be able to understand complex contextual and abstract information, or form a judgement based on that (I tend to lean no).
So regardless of whether Bucky is in a dissociative, hypnotic or parasomniac state, he still did not consent to participate in killing his targets, and he should not be held responsible.
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road-rhythm · 3 years
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Hey! Sorry if this is weird, but I really enjoyed your fic "The Very First Stone" and I was wondering if you would say more about the setting and the folklore in it? You mentioned in your notes that it's based on a real town and in general it seems like you put a lot of research into your stories, so I was just wondering how much is real and how much is fiction.
The fic in question
So a lot of things in that fic are indeed ripped straight from real life, and you are correct, I tend to research A Lot. To say nothing of the timeline. I hated myself the entire time I was writing it. It's a sickness.
Anyway, I feel like details in fiction can be plotted along axes of accuracy and plausibility, thus:
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Quadrants B and D are probably the least entertaining to talk about, though as B is relevant to your ask I'll show some stuff that (probably) goes there. Quadrant C is usually interesting to writers from a craft perspective, but assuming too much about which inventions were convincing seems unwise, so let's start with quadrant A.
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Real shit that seems fake
A lot of things in quadrant A will be about either religion or geography. To say that the religious items "seem fake" is of course to imply that these things are bizarre and other; that in turn assumes that the reader is an outsider to this particular religious subculture. If you are not an outsider to it and find this chauvinistic, I am moderately sorry. Although I personally find pretty much everything about the brands of Christianity that inform so much of this fic incompatible with my own values and beliefs, I did sincerely want to represent it as something complex, by no means devoid of merit, and above all real, a force of paramount importance in millions of people's lives. On the other hand, I have met some real nuts.
Religion
The Christian Flag
It's real, and a couple buildings in the lake town the fic is based on fly it today. A lot of denominations use it in one capacity or another, apparently, but I've only ever personally encountered it in the context of American evangelical Christianity. I have never seen it flown or displayed otherwise than level with the national flag.
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(Not a particularly good picture, sorry.)
Pledges of Allegiance to the Christian Flag and to the Bible
I was home schooled as a kid. This was not because my family was religious—we weren't in the slightest—but since literally everybody else in the home schooling community there not only was Christian but was home schooling because of this, we knew some very devout evangelicals. At least two families were Quiverfull.
If you're wondering whether any of their practices registered to young Roadie and sibling as odd, yes, they did. One time I was at a bonfire for some short-stay camp and three of the kids got into a serious debate about whether this constituted burning crosses. Another time while in the woods owned by a family that for some reason had a lot of free-range peacocks I was handed a pamphlet that explained that the reason it's difficult to memorize the entire Bible verbatim is because Satan doesn't want you to. I got to peruse some Chick tracts on a couple of occasions, and I once got given a Cooper Kids Adventure and urged to read it, as this would surely open my heart to the message of the church. (It didn't, but I remembered the book vividly enough to use it to shitpost about antis twenty-five years later.)
Anyway, yes, both these pledges are real. This one Quiverfull mom had her kids say the pledge to the Bible before they started school every day. The pledge to the flag I never knew about until later. I think I first heard of it on the Apocrypals podcast. (They're on Tumblr and worth a follow, but I ain't tagging them in this.)
The church marquee (A 4-IN TONGUE CAN BRING A 6-FT MAN 2 HIS KNEES)
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Before it was a meme, this was an actual church sign. I have seen it displayed unironically in the wild as recently as 2018.
"my cousin Bethany, she got baptized in an inflatable pool down by the speedway"
Circumstances of the baptism of a distant cousin living outside the Triangle.
Chapel for lake baptisms
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I never saw any actual baptisms take place at it, but the chapel's really there, with the stairs leading straight into the lake as described, so I'm pretty sure that happens. Or did: the real-life Jewel Lake was famous for decades for astonishingly clear water, but in recent years human activity (mainly boating and jet skiing), interference with the water level via a man-made outflow, and climate change (rising temps) have contributed to rampant algae growth throughout the whole body of water. It is now green soup. Which doesn't stop people getting in it, but I suppose might make it less appealing for ritual cleansing.
Strip-mall church where John meets Silas
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I guess I slightly lied; the Family Dollar’s down the street.
The church service Sam attends
is based on services I attended over a period of some months as part of my research.
Please don't get the wrong idea; I didn't attend months' worth of services for a religion I don't believe in to write a Supernatural fanfic. I was doing that anyway, because I wanted to understand religious extremism in my home country (USA) a little better. I'm not a journalist. There was no payday. I was just curious, so I did it. Then I used it to write a Supernatural fanfic.
Churches are thick on the ground in Beulah County's real-life counterpart. The brand of Christianity I was interested in was the radical, evangelical sort that I'd stood on the outside of as a kid in a small home schooling community, that gave us Patrick Henry College (whose first-generation graduates are coming home to roost in exactly the political positions the movement exists to funnel them into), that so many friends I’ve met over the years have escaped from. So what I did was pick the church that looked the kookiest and go there.
I'll be honest, it wasn't as kooky on the inside as I was expecting. I do believe a lot of that is rhetorical strategy: the radicalism is there, and not far under the surface, but the church doesn't want to scare off newcomers so opts for a frog-boiling approach. That probably sounds very cynical. Well, I am pretty cynical about religion, but I also believe rhetorical manipulation is never entirely absent from human communication and pretty much a gimme in any kind of proselytization. The church leadership I met struck me as more sincere than I thought they would.
If anybody is actually still reading this, perhaps you're slightly appalled by my ethics. After all, I did insert myself into a religious community in, if not exactly bad faith, certainly a conspicuous lack of it. I was ambivalent about it at the time; I'm less so now I've had some months to think about it. In any case, here are my arguments for the practice:
They did say all were welcome. I didn't attend any of the very small, clearly very traditional Pentecostal or Baptist churches burrowed back into the pine trees that I definitely considered and whose practices I would have liked to see very much, because while those places did sometimes have a line reading "all are welcome" on their little marquees, they vibed a lot more insular. This church, by contrast, appeared to be engaged in outright advertising war with its competition for the souls of Beulah County. They have a website that's actually pretty slick for what it is. They have bumper stickers. They have t-shirts. It's not a mega-church, but I get the distinct impression it aspires to mega-churchdom.
I met the head pastor and told him (broadly) why I was there. I told him I was curious about the church's practices and culture (true), that I'd had a fascination with religion as a outsider since childhood (true), and that I was not myself a believer or sure I was capable of belief (extremely true). I did leave out relevant things about myself, like the fact that my response toward the church's explicitly patriarchal creed of spiritual headship starts and ends with "go fuck yourself," but so did they. In fact, I note that the list of beliefs available on the website today no longer includes the portions about "traditional gender roles" or sexuality. They were definitely there in early 2019, and the sermons still being published confirm that the beliefs themselves haven't gone anywhere, but the institution has seen fit to remove their explicit enumeration with Biblical citations from the credo page. Interesting.
Fundamentalist evangelical Christianity is not a private pursuit. It wreaks havoc at every level of American government and society, by design. It is my fucking problem, and I consider anything I can do to understand what's driving it my prerogative.
In the end, I'm not sure I learned that much. I certainly didn't walk away feeling like I understood, once and for all, why the thing is the way it is or why it's so widespread. I guess I was mildly surprised by how much psychological insight the messages displayed—that they correctly identified various emotional/spiritual problems common to nearly all humans and offered persuasive (and for many people, effective) solutions—but, like… I shouldn't have been. So I guess to that extent, the experience served to blunt the edges of some knee-jerk othering. But mainly the rhetoric was what was interesting.
I don't mean only, or even mainly, what was said or how. I mean the service as a whole. From start to finish, it's a carefully orchestrated experience, immersive and multimedia in a way none of the church services I ever saw as a guest musician were. It would be easy to lambaste them for emotional manipulation—except emotional manipulation is a feature, not a bug, and I don't think they're terribly untransparent about it. I still wonder how qualitatively different these modern-day protestant services are from historical ones that used (say) Bach's masses for their original intended purposes.
I was fascinated by the staging (it's much as described in Sam's chapter; they have these stylized crosses that double as the church logo, and rather than just A Cross front and center, the stage has two of these, like, trademarked crosses (yes, backlit in purple) to either side, centering the pastor), and by the timing (again like Sam's chapter, they have a giant digital clock over the stage displaying a countdown to the start of the service, and then the pastor comes jogging out right on the mark like a talk show host; the musical numbers are carefully woven into the instructional segments, and the band will start quiet little riffs while a speaker is still going to underscore what they're saying and give it a little emotional gloss), and by the props (the paper chain really happened; one week there were big building blocks made out of cardboard boxes; ceiling tiles appeared on the wall glued in abstract patterns at one point and I waited all sermon for an explanation of their significance that never came), and by, yes, the disco lights.
But probably the most interesting feature was the altar call. I didn't know it was called that at the time; I had to describe to exvangelical friends a few times before somebody went, "Oh! Yes! That's an altar call!"
Once I had the name for it, I could look it up online, and that was really interesting because it turns out altar calls are actually quite controversial even within evangelical circles.
It happened a lot like in Sam's chapter. In fact, I thought I was going to have to write a sermon myself, but while watching video archives on the website to get the diction, I happened on one that basically did what I needed—the David and Jonathan one—and worked off of that.* Of course I cut stuff for length, but that was the general shape of it.
After the sermon, the pastor invites everybody to come down to the stage and pray. In this particular church, a primary purpose of this was for laying on of hands. As in, you go down there and a pastor lays hands on people and those people lay hands on everybody else in a kind of human chain and the purpose of this, as announced via microphone, is spiritual and physical healing. I have since found out that this is not common. Laying on of hands, people have told me, is 1) primarily for induction of clergy, and 2) otherwise reserved to special occasions. Not a routine part of weekly services either way. But it was part and parcel of the altar call at this church. Their official creed mentions a belief in speaking in tongues; I only heard that happen once, but unlike Sam, I never went down into the heart of the mosh pit. I mostly watched from across the room.
One interesting thing that ended up on the cutting-room floor was that there were notably fewer Bibles around than you might have expected. In fact, there were fewer Bibles in this church than in any other I have been in in my life. Congregants brought Bibles with them, many of which were study editions and frequently accompanied by a notebook, but when the preacher told us all to open up to a particular chapter and verse, we were on our own. As in the fic, there are no pews. The space much more closely resembles an auditorium than a traditional church sanctuary, and the chairs are those ones you see in convention halls that lock together on the sides to form rows.
On their bottoms, there are wire book racks. There are no books there, Bibles or otherwise. Instead what you will find is a survey card, aimed mainly at newcomers; I no longer have mine, but to the best of my recollection, it looked something like:
NEWCOMER SURVEY Today, I… [ ] Found fellowship in praise [ ] Understood the truth of the Word of God [ ] Accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior [ ] Made a decision to follow Jesus Christ in my life [ ] Am ready to be baptized and born again
Sam flipped it over. The reverse read:
NEXT STEPS I'm interested in… [ ] Growth Track: Adults [ ] Growth Track: Youth [ ] Donation: Beulah Flood Relief [ ] Donation: Finding the Few & Vision-Giving [ ] Donation: Missions [ ] Tithing
A pen or stub of pencil is helpfully included to complete the card, which can be redeemed at a station in the lobby after the service for a t-shirt.
Geography
"Blinding white" sand
So much.
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Everywhere.
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The stuff looks almost like powdered sugar in places. It’s absurdly bright. Which really does help to set off the…
Blood-red water
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Southeastern North Carolina has a shitton of pine trees, a very high water table, and a shitton of pocosins. You don't really need a pocosin—any slight depression will do—but the area featured is more pocosin than not. Anyway. There are so many pine needles that they tint the water.
It's hard to photograph. In person, the color can range from dark, coffee brown—almost black—to whiskey amber, with a deep, red-amber being fairly common. You see it in lakes, pocosins, creeks, and puddles. The abundance of pale sand around notably enhances the effect.
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(This one is not my picture: it was taken by Dan Griffin of the University of Arkansas on the Black River. The bald cypresses seen here are estimated at around 2,600 years old.)
The only part that's made-up is both the red water and perfectly clear water coexisting in the same body. The real-life Jewel Lake is not fed by a creek; it's an ellipsoid lake with no obvious source and nobody knows how it got there. Eastern NC has a lot of lakes like that, though as far as I know only that one is (was) clear. I smashed two lakes together into one lake with a handwavy explanation about a creek because I liked the effect. I am cheap.
Hog lagoons
I don't know how fake these maybe seemed. I mean, I hope they didn't seem too fake, since my plot hinged on them and all. But are they really Ghostbusters II-pink? Are they really that dangerous? Can they really kill anyone who disturbs them, even (say) healthy teenagers just trying to dunk another healthy teenager without getting in themselves?
Yes
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yes
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and yes.
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If you're wondering how communities economically dependent on industrial hog farming are impacted by close proximity to these, the answer is not well.
(Incidentally, though white conservatives often point to calls for hog farming regulatory change as an example of tree-hugging environmentalism taking aim at the family traditions of hardworking (white, natch) small-scale farmers just trying to keep their wholesome way of life alive—going to far as to piss me the fuck off by outright stealing the slogan "No Farms, No Food" from the American Farmland Trust for their shitty propaganda—hog farming in the state is overwhelmingly industrialized, and all those campaigns came out of fucking Smithfield. And the operations are highly concentrated in poor, majority non-white areas—areas with high dependence on well water and low access to healthcare. And that's been the case for decades (at least).)
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Real shit that seems real
Hopefully, the folklore and folkcraft portrayed in the fic fall here. To wit:
Silas Ward's yard protections
Lifted straight from Arts in Earnest: North Carolina Folklife:
AGAINST ALL WITCHCRAFT WROUND THE HOUSE: Buy 4 cans of lye; punch 9 holes in the bottom of each can; turn the holes toward the ground and bury one can round on 4 corners of your yard. Sprinkle some salt, red pepper and sulpher around your front yard and back doorsteps.
According to Arts in Earnest, these recipes were found among the effects of a Charlotte root doctor murdered by a client in 1979.
The madstone
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(from grandviewoutdoors.com)
Madstones are just bezoars under an American name. The term applies primarily to stones from deer (some purists would argue only from deer) rather than goats, but that's what they are. In historical folkcraft, they were used primarily as a treatment for rabies (less commonly spider or snakebites since those are so time-sensitive—the more common folk remedy for those is moonshine); I know I found a couple sources that talked about them being used against witchcraft, but that part of my research happened well over a year ago and I've misplaced a lot of references.
However, none of them had anything about victims holding the stone in their mouths. That part was straight-up invention for Teh Dramahs.
Anyway. That's… that's probably enough.
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Anon, you might not be, but I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED me this, because if there is one thing I love, it is SHOWING MY WORK.
TEACHER: Show your work ROADIE’S CLASSMATES: *groan* YOUNG ROADIE [softly]: You will know the taste of regret.
You're welcome. I hope it's salty enough.
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*I’m not linking back to the church website from either this blog or AO3, for reasons I trust are obvious.
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Bonus: I wish I were making it up about the “samurai,” but no
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