Alchemist

Paper cult club is a year old! Happy birthday, paper cult club!

papercult.club

I'm trying hard to temper my distaste for the people running this with a clear analysis of what's happening, but there's really no other way to parse "Wii sports kill shot mashup tweeted by White House"
than ghouls peacocking for ghouls by making corpses with the most expensive military in history.

The Trump administration selecting for pure ideologues means no one in the room could read a map or do basic ballistic math and now everything's going to get more expensive as people keep dying to serve a war whose entire desire effect is making snuff films with military cameras for social media.

Naser is suffocating 🆘 His thyroid is crushing his airway. Every breath is a desperate fight for life, and I can’t afford his medicine. This isn’t pride, it’s survival. Time is running out. Please, don’t scroll past his nightmare. Your help can give him another breath.
chuffed.org/project/155233

That was me when I learned the current Spider-Man actor was younger than me

TFW you realize that the new RE protag is younger than you by 2 years

I just realized that Grace is in my age range, which means...

#residentevil

Just in general, the sheer fucking chutzpah of suddenly *complaining* about there not being campus protests THAT HE WOULD BE COMPLAINING ABOUT IF THEY EXISTED AS WELL.

No matter what you do (or don't), you're a disgrace and deserve to suffer.

That's the wisdom of the pundit class.

This is correct, imo. A Democratic administration successfully broke students' will to protest. They won nothing and faced massive consequences. NO ONE stood up for their free speech rights among mainstream pundits.

Now they're to blame for the Biden administration's success at repressing them? No.

Respectfully, eat shit. Those kids were expelled, arrested, and targeted relentlessly by their school administrations with the specific goal of preventing further protest. Eighteen year old kids were held down and maced by campus security, hit point blank with tear gas canisters by riot cops.

Ok I need to watch this now

Remember when people used to be all “hard times creates great art” because no actually it’s just this.

A tumblr post from orteil42 (cookie clicker dev) that says: am i losing the drive to create things for an increasingly alien and hostile world whose mounting taste for fascism feels like a cold metal vise around my skull or am i just lazy and unmedicated and looking for excuses

Sorry for the lack of activity it’s literally just this

Watching 20 Tomahawks blasting through a mountain pass to blow an empty airstrip up and thinking "that's 20% of a year's production capacity." THAADs being toasted left and right.

Gulf War One was like viagra to this kind of guy, trying desperately to salve the sting of Vietnam, a big dumb oorah spectacle full of US military toys blowing up T-55s, and every war since then has been nothing but a series of quagmires and humiliations with a seven figure civilian death toll

Bad week to be a China hawk or a NAFO guy who worships the talismanic supremacy of American weapons.

But it'd very much be alighted with 80's soft fantasy aimed at kids. Faeries and grumpy dinosaurs and inexplicable pirates.

The thing is neopets could be an adventure game in and of itself! A lot of neopets internal lore are about quest and adventures and themed lands. Recent storylines had a curse going through and turning neopets grey and giving them depression.

😍

folks complaining about this taking 3 years and I need you to realize that each episode of Steven Universe took a 12-13mos. to make from start to finish! Animation takes TIME! So much time. Especially something stylized like this

'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out:

www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

okay so sam altman publically saying he wants people to rent "intelligence" from him like a power or water utility dropping the same day as a bunch of exploited african ai day laborers speaking out about their mistreatment by tech firms really tells us a LOT about what altman really means

The human experience is so gigantic, so ripe for different interpretations across every artistic medium. If you cannot conceive of drama and intrigue and emotion in something as banal as caring for a pet you are pathetically incurious for art, let alone to be making it.

It is not an enlightened take to say that you need combat rules for simulation but can handle roleplaying everything else. It demonstrates such a lack of perspective that one must ask why you even chose ttrpgs in the first place.

It speaks to a horrifying level of juvenility in this medium, that after 50+ years it's still a challenge to deliver on systems that deal with literally anything other than imperialist extermination.

Uwe Rosenberg's Agricola board game

This is my continued "why do we need mechanics for socializing" bugaboo. It says everything about the ethos of ttrpg design that there is a literal mental block on gamifying *anything*. Something that is so well trodden in board game spaces it's considered blase

🫂