Prepping for the Delta Green game I'm going to be running
This is what my Mi-go are going to look like
bramblesand reblogged
bramblesand reblogged
I cannot comprehend how and why literally hundreds of people have reblogged the ant post with a comment of:
"so this is just [insert real mental illness (usually PTSD) here]"
Like, did you not understand the post? Do you not read the things you put on your blog? This is a text based medium, if you aren't going to bother to read and understand the things you are reblogging why are you reblogging them?
I am certain darkersoul's decision to reblog the post with the inclusion of a kind of bad but unfortunately much more easily understood list of tropes in the reblog chain is somewhat to blame, but that's really no excuse.
TBF that's just the version that crossed my dash, I didn't even think about it. But agreed I have seen some horrible takes on that post in my notes too and it gets on my nerves as well.
You're fine. It was happening before that too, just a little less often.
I cannot comprehend how and why literally hundreds of people have reblogged the ant post with a comment of:
"so this is just [insert real mental illness (usually PTSD) here]"
Like, did you not understand the post? Do you not read the things you put on your blog? This is a text based medium, if you aren't going to bother to read and understand the things you are reblogging why are you reblogging them?
I am certain darkersoul's decision to reblog the post with the inclusion of a kind of bad but unfortunately much more easily understood list of tropes in the reblog chain is somewhat to blame, but that's really no excuse.
Always read the fine print.
bramblesand reblogged
People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.
An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.
Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.
It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…
It’s an ant again.
Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.
This is madness.
Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”
forms of eldritch horror include but are not limited to - nobody will ever believe you, you must live alone with this knowledge - you will never feel safe again, and you realize you were never safe before - everything that was familiar is now strange and abhorrent to the point anything that now seems normal should be held in utmost suspicion - having this new knowledge has opened doors that will continually reveal new equally cursed knowledge without end - death and madness are no longer escapes
I’ve always felt that the idea of madness or sanity in an eldritch horror sense were misnomers. If anything, I feel a better term is a change of perspective. There is nothing inherent in seeing a greater being that “drives you insane”, it’s that this being doesn’t fit into your previous worldview at all and you have to wrestle that. Every character can and should react differently, changing in ways that “make sense” for them. It’s either a change in worldview or attempting to fit the greater being into your preexisting one. Both will have negative results, but will be interesting as hell to explore.
You know what? Unironically, I think this is the best comment I’ve seen on this post.
Okay, so maybe this isn’t the right place for this, but could there ever be an instance where the result of these experiences is not horror, but peace? Even bliss? From gaining such perspective, your mundane problems are no longer blown out of proportion by your anxiety? Sure there are bigger things that defy expectation that you learned of, and possibly lost the ability to comprehend. But why would that be a problem, let alone *your* problem? That’s just another item on the list of things out of your control. You and your mundane problems, however, are in your control. You and your problems are no less real despite being insignificant on the cosmic scale. And now you’re equipped with some perspective that let’s you go about your life with an even head.
Yes, that is a perfectly reasonable response a well-adjusted character could have to this situation, but if it's a large shift in personality it's still strange from the perspective of someone else, and this trope has always been more about how this looks from the outside.
Someone suddenly finding a profound and unshakable sense of peace can still be unnerving, particularly if they can't explain why.
Cosmic horror is all about the terror that can be found in encountering the unknown (or unknowable), not the knowledge itself being evil. This is another thing a lot of bad cosmic horror gets wrong.
bramblesand reblogged
safijiiva
Holy shit Lee’s Detective Agency show lesbian furry milfs
Well, guess I'm done with the headhunting for this event then.
bramblesand reblogged
Really good article exploring our tendency as a community to ostracise, condemn and bully each other. And also what we can do better 🐌🐛
“Small perceived betrayals are, to our animal bodies, indistinguishable from all the many betrayals and abuses of the past.”
“Loving contact releases oxytocin and other hormones that relax our bodies and prime our brains for relational thinking, awakening our imaginations and allowing us to envision new and better ways of dealing with conflict.”
“De-escalation means proceeding from inner security and general good faith — not the naïve good faith that everyone is innocent and trustworthy, but that everyone has the potential to be.”
“There is a difference between ending a relationship with an abusive person and demanding that the abusive person should be “disappeared” from society.”
This is indeed a really good article, and people should read and share it.
Also, as someone who has learned in some depth about the HPA axis, I can say the science checks out too.
bramblesand reblogged
tarasaurus98
Americans, vote like your life depends on it because if this bill passes it literally will. They’re straight up trying to make it legal to arrest people for existing as LGBT.
If any of your sneering people think “Oh, it’s just the transsexuals; no one cares”, I guarantee you that once they strip rights from us, they’ll just move on up to the next group on the hierarchy, because that is and always has been how fascism works.
The bill being discussed here is H.R.9197 and it goes farther than is being described. This bill isn’t a prelude, it in and of itself tries to, effectively, ban “sexual material” from being viewed by someone under the age of 10. “sexual material” which it defines as anything pertaining to”Any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity, any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of human genitals, or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation or related subjects“. This is an outright assault on all of us in the LGBT community and beyond that would ban us from existing in spaces where children would be expected to be present, or attempting to teach children that we exist so they don’t suffer like many of us did and don’t cause others to suffer.
Do not undersell the seriousness of this bill.
bramblesand reblogged
No-context lines from an essay I somehow got a 100% score on.
wheres the essay op
It’s not my best work. I knew the professor wasn’t going to read more than the first two paragraphs and the works cited, and I’m almost certain that is the only reason I got the 100%.
But here you go:
bramblesand reblogged
People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.
An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.
Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.
It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…
It’s an ant again.
Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.
This is madness.
Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”
forms of eldritch horror include but are not limited to - nobody will ever believe you, you must live alone with this knowledge - you will never feel safe again, and you realize you were never safe before - everything that was familiar is now strange and abhorrent to the point anything that now seems normal should be held in utmost suspicion - having this new knowledge has opened doors that will continually reveal new equally cursed knowledge without end - death and madness are no longer escapes
I’ve always felt that the idea of madness or sanity in an eldritch horror sense were misnomers. If anything, I feel a better term is a change of perspective. There is nothing inherent in seeing a greater being that “drives you insane”, it’s that this being doesn’t fit into your previous worldview at all and you have to wrestle that. Every character can and should react differently, changing in ways that “make sense” for them. It’s either a change in worldview or attempting to fit the greater being into your preexisting one. Both will have negative results, but will be interesting as hell to explore.
You know what? Unironically, I think this is the best comment I’ve seen on this post.
Annoyed with how many types of elves there are in D&D these days? So am I! Here’s the solution I’m going with:
All elves are the same race, they just take on aspects of their environment after living somewhere for a few decades.
Someone wants to play a wood elf? Well okay, that just means they spent the last 30ish years of their life in the woods for whatever reason.
Wood Elf - forest, Drow - underdark, High Elf - city/developed area, Sea Elf - coast/underwater, Shadar-kai - shadowfell, Eladrin - feywild, Etc.
It doesn’t really change much, but it doesn’t require you to fill every corner of your world with a different flavor of elf to accommodate them all.
I finally got all 70 of my Elite 2 operators to level 60.
This took far too long.
I got high and read a post you made about an ant and like….. help????
In the grand scheme of things nothing anyone will ever do matters.
in the time between the big bang and when the universe finally succumbs to entropy (becoming an endless void filled with tiny particles that will never again interact) 100% of that time will be taken up by the black hole era.
Obviously that’s not exactly true, but it is not feasible for me to put that many decimal places in this post, so I will round.
We are living in the impossibly short moment it will take for the black holes of this universe to form, and anything resembling our species will be gone long before the last star goes dark.
People aren’t designed to think about this sort of thing, so don’t, worrying about it won’t help anything. We have our own responsibilities, our own momentary structure slowly succumbing to entropy. All we can do is keep living, keep trying to make things better.
Humans are a communal species, all of our great accomplishments could never have been done alone. That’s what matters, making this tiny speck of dust a better place for each other, to make our little lives a little less miserable.
And maybe, one day, someone will find a way to escape the inevitable dark.
Does that help?