Renaissance Woodsman

dungeon meshi tarot cards! i'll be making these into wooden charms and stickers, maybe individual cards, too. let me know if you'd prefer sticker sheets (smaller, cheaper) or a sticker pack (larger, more expensive). i am tempted to make a full deck but that would be a very big project and expensive to produce. i'd have to kickstart it for sure, and i dont know the legalities of big scale fan projects like that. i might make more cards in the future for fun, tho!

card explanations under the cut because i did my research~

Utena turning into a car has to be the most danny_devito_getting_it.gif scene in history. It's so absurd. How can you not laugh? And the bit after, "Did you think you were the only one who could turn into a car?"

But in context, the show is taking it seriously, so you try to engage with it. Okay, the car. Akio's car was a metaphor for sex, and it was a weapon he wielded to control and objectify everyone. But Utena is the car. And her ring, the symbol of her constructed knighthood, becomes the key. And in Anthy's moment of hesitation the car rusts, but as soon as she turns the key, it bursts off revealing shining pink. Anthy, the most narratively objectified character. But Utena isn't trying to free Anthy, she's a tool for Anthy to free herself. Suddenly actor and object swap. Anthy is in control. She drives. Hard. Fast. 500 kilometers per hour. The car is run ragged. Down to a shell of a shell. But the sun rises. They kiss.

You must understand that Utena is 100% subtext and 0% text. The swords are a metaphor. The car is a metaphor. The school is a metaphor. The girl who lays an egg is a metaphor. Utena Tenjou is a metaphor. The boxing kangaroo... Well I'm not sure what it means but I'm sure it's a metaphor.

Everything is sex except sex, which is power.

Everyone needs to watch this show

Utena turning into a car has to be the most danny_devito_getting_it.gif scene in history. It's so absurd. How can you not laugh? And the bit after, "Did you think you were the only one who could turn into a car?"

But in context, the show is taking it seriously, so you try to engage with it. Okay, the car. Akio's car was a metaphor for sex, and it was a weapon he wielded to control and objectify everyone. But Utena is the car. And her ring, the symbol of her constructed knighthood, becomes the key. And in Anthy's moment of hesitation the car rusts, but as soon as she turns the key, it bursts off revealing shining pink. Anthy, the most narratively objectified character. But Utena isn't trying to free Anthy, she's a tool for Anthy to free herself. Suddenly actor and object swap. Anthy is in control. She drives. Hard. Fast. 500 kilometers per hour. The car is run ragged. Down to a shell of a shell. But the sun rises. They kiss.

100% Correct

I GOT TO SEE SOME OF MY BUCKET LIST SEA LIFE TODAY!!!!!!

Photos below cut

I'm talking about things like threatening their loved ones, destroying their childhood homes, having someone they trusted betray them, forcing them into situations reminiscent of past traumas, etc.

I'm planning a special one shot for a friend with an already established character. And I was brainstorming details for one idea I had when I suddenly interrupted my own train of thought by saying "Wait a minute, I can't just torture them, can I?"

And that led me to thinking about how I like to see this sort of thing play out when it's my character, versus how other people probably feel about it.

My personal feelings are that I'm cool with my DM using things from my backstory to make my character's life harder as long as they do it in a way that doesn't dictate or assume what my character did/would do. Like, they can make bad things happen to my character now as long as I can freely react to it, but I don't want them to insert or change things that happened to the character in the past without asking first.

Thoughts?

This is fascinating, because to me the whole point of a backstory is to create hooks for the current, collaberative, story. If you don't want it mucked about with (within the tone of the game) then why include it at all? I do love taking suggestions about how exactly to do that from my players, if they have an interesting direction they want to take it I'd never override that. Heck, at the start of my current game, I listed the antagonists and my players spouted off a whole host of personal grievances against them. They certainly wouldn't object to me adding to them.

In my opinion though, typically killing is one of the least interesting things to do. Kidnappings, threats, and transformations all offer ongoing hooks with possibility of a happy ending. Sometimes good old fashioned revenge is best, but not usually.

Oh shit I'm doing this one right now! Werewolf apocalypse has many benefits over zombie apocalypse.

Reread Equal Rites recently. I used to think it was about feminism and little girls getting the same opportunities as little boys. Which, it isn't not about that. But ALSO.

It's about an intersex kid.

It's about a little girl born with a staff.

And that's Not Right.

The adults in the room- her father, the 'medical professional'- attempt to remove the staff, by blade and by fire. The fresh little baby SCREAMS. So they agree to pretend it doesn't exist. She'll probably grow up just a regular little girl.

right?

But just around the onset of puberty..... it becomes apparent, not to her, but to the adults, that she's not going to be Regular.

The medical professional tries again to rectify matters. She tries to destroy the staff while the girl is unconscious. The girl screams. The adults give in. They aren't monsters.... but life will be so much harder, so much less foreseen, for this strange little girl....

They try to raise her 'right'.

If she won't be a conventional woman... maybe an unconventional woman. A Powerful woman- in the way that women can be powerful. Are permitted to be powerful.

But she's not a woman- she's a child. What will she be, when she's grown? A Witch. A Wizard. She can't be either. She can't be neither.

(The term 'warlock' is repeatedly invoked and scoffed. The etymology of 'warlock' is 'breaker of oaths'. Counter to the covenant. Rulebreaker.)

Right.

@lizardho I think she took your advice

Oh fuck yes, reblogging the FUCK out of this 🥹😍😎

When Everything Everywhere All at Once said “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on" 

When the Good Place said “Why choose to be good every day when there is no guaranteed reward now or in the afterlife… I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.” 

When Jean-Paul Sartre said ”‘Hell is other people’ is only one side of the coin. The other side, which no one seems to mention, is also ‘Heaven is each other’. Hell is separateness, uncommunicability, self-centeredness, lust for power, for riches, for fame. Heaven on the other hand is very simple, and very hard: caring about your fellow beings.“

At the beginning of 2024 I started keeping track of English words I learned over the course of the year. In 2024 I encountered 85 84 [whoops, there was a duplicate] new words spontaneously — that is, I encountered them in books, films, or other media, and did not flip through the dictionary or Google “lists of unusual words” — my goal is to make a list of 100 words in 2025, but for now here is my 2024 list.

Please be kind if there are words in here that seem obvious or common to you, or if there are some that you’d consider added incorrectly (some are slang or borrowed words from non-English languages, for example).

Damn, I have a pretty big vocabulary and I only knew 25 of these, and 4 of those are stretching the definiton of "know". I gotta up my word of the day game, I really like this idea.

Embarassingly enough the biggest source for new vocab since I left schooling has been magic the gathering; I swear wizards of the coast is singlehandedly keeping the thesaurus people employed.

TTRPG metaplots are so interesting to me but more TTRPGs should get truly weird with their metaplots

Potential Metaplot fuckery:

Alternately, major metaplot events are decided by the outcomes of UNRELATED competitive games. Take a page from League of Legends and decide the outcome of an in-universe war based on competitive League of Legends.

All campaigns are considered canon, and it's an (unenforcable) violation of the game's rules not to publish transcripts online. The actual publisher spends most of their time writing convoluted explanations for conflicting plotpoints, and even more convoluted future books.

I mean, it's at least little bit funny how Hasbro's efforts to position Dungeons & Dragons as a universal entry-level game have managed to undo thirty years of development in D&D's culture of play and we're back to litigating whether "you should create characters who actually have a reason to go on adventures rather than expecting the GM to do backflips to justify their presence" is unreasonably imposing upon the player's creative freedom like it's fucking 1994.

I used to get shit as a dm for running a campaign where my players weren't allowed to make human-esque (human, epf, dwarf, etc.) And they didn't play the character they made cause they had no backgrounds (amnesia campaign)

The shit was not from my players either, they fucking love it, I still run it

(Speaking of if my players see this get Ray on doing his turn for our campaigns so I can have my turn again/lh <3)

I banned a few things in my current campaign for setting reasons, and my players were skeptical, but took to it well. Honestly I think if I ever run D&D 5e for people I know less well (doubtful), I'll ban at least one arbitrary thing as a filter for people who expect too much yes-manning from a DM

Has anyone done this yet?

Prev gets me like nobody else.

Down to the bones of the setting, CSM is about using people. The humans and the devils enter into "consentual" agreements to violently use each other's bodies. Like a mutually abusive relationship, but the harm they do to each other is never equal. The imbalance of the bargain is explicitly tied to the more powerful one's whims, and to the less powerful one's deperation. (And the devil is not always the aggressor, mind. The humans keep some locked away to ply them for their power.)

And then the main villain comes along, the walking embodiement of coerced consent, to hammer the point home.

It's Anthy consenting to let you pull the sword from her chest all the way down.

I know writers who use subtext and I am stabbing them

Hottest new fighting game of 2004

severance is a good tv show go watch severance

Just ignore everyone's dice rolls.

You succeed or fail based on the movement of clouds and the song of the birds, the dice are just there for enrichment.

Okay this isn't exactly the same thing, but I ran a play by post game where success was based on a fake in-world astronomy and lithomancy. I was literally casting stones and then messaging a discord stuff like, "Hmmm. The virtue of decisive action has fortunate signs this week."