Zackc43

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15 Jun 18:07

"Haters Gonna Say It's Fake" Is A Very Good Meme

by Tom Ley

Nobody likes trick shot videos anymore. If you watch enough bros in backwards hats throw a football into a moving trash can or whatever and yell, “Bro, sick!” as the beat drops, you’ll eventually find yourself wanting to flee the earth to live in outer space. But thanks to the power of memes, trick shot videos do still provide some value: they are here to be pilloried by the “Haters gonna say it’s fake.”

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12 May 20:55

That Excellent Simpsons Quote Search Engine Now Makes Gifs as Well

by James Whitbrook

Frinkiac, the delightful timewaster that lets Simpsons fans search for their favorite quote and instantly find the matching screencap, just got even better: now it lets you create gifs, too. The world’s productivity just took a serious hit.

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11 May 16:27

The lost colours of D&D

by Joseph Manola

So I looked up ogres in the 1st edition Monster Manual recently, and I came across this text:

The hide of ogres varies from dull blackish-brown to dead yellow. Rare specimens are a sickly violet in color. Their warty bumps are often of different color - or at least darker than their hides. Hair is blackish-blue to dull dark green. Eyes are purple with white pupils. Teeth are black or orange, as are talons. Ogres wear any sort of skins or furs. 
And I thought: ...wait, what?

Ogres come in three colours: blackish-brown, yellow, and violet. They are covered in 'warty bumps' of 'a different color': so presumably you could have a yellow ogre with violet warts, or some even weirder combination. Their hair is either blue or dark green. Their eyes are purple with white pupils. Their teeth and claws are either black or orange. In short, I have been imagining D&D ogres wrong for my entire life.


All your ogres were supposed to look kinda like this.

Imagine, for a moment: a nine-foot tall brute of a monster with violet skin covered in yellow warts, orange teeth and claws, dark green hair, and purple eyes with white pupils. That, apparently, is what D&D ogres are actually supposed to look like. Did anyone ever describe them like that? Did anyone draw them like that? All the illustrations I can find just depict them as great big grey-brown thugs...

A little more reading soon demonstrated that the ogres were not an isolated case. There were yellow bugbears with brick-red fur, green eyes, and red pupils:

The skin of bugbears is light yellow to yellow brown - typically dull yellow. Their hair ranges in color from lusterless tannish brown to brick red. Their eyes are greenish white with red pupils.

There were silver-haired, amber-eyed elves wearing yellow clothes and purple cloaks, and nicknames based on their eye colour:

Grey elves have either silver hair and amber eyes or pale golden hair and violet eyes. The latter sort are generally called faeries. They favor white, yellow, silver, or gold garments. Their cloaks are often deep blue or purple.
There were gnolls with green-grey skins, reddish manes, amber nails, and armour made of horn:

Gnolls have greenish gray skins, darker near the muzzle, with reddish gray to dull yellow mane. Eyes are dull black and nails are amber colored. Their armor is of horn, metal plates, and leather; like their fur capes and vests, it is shabby, and the latter are moth-eaten and dingy, being brown, black or grayish pelts.

Gnomes were the colour of wood:

Most gnomes are wood brown, a few range to gray brown, of skin.

Goblins can be red, yellow, or orange (no green ones yet), with red or 'lemon yellow' eyes:

Goblins range from yellow through dull orange to brick red in skin color. Their eyes are reddish to lemon yellow.

Or maybe their eyes are actual lemons!

Red hobgoblins with orange faces and blue-red noses:

The hairy hides of hobgoblins range from dark reddish-brown to gray black. Their faces are bright red-orange to red. Large males will have blue-red noses. Eyes are either yellowish or dark brown.

The brown skin of orcs has a 'bluish sheen' and their ears and snouts are pink. (This is back when orcs were still pig-men, of course.)

Orcs appear particularly disgusting because their coloration - brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen - highlights their pinkish snouts and ears.

Red, orange, yellow, purple, blue... all those colours bled out of the game as time went on. Modern orcs are green. Goblins are green. Gnolls are brown. Hobgoblins are sometimes orange but usually brown. Ogres are brown. Bugbears are greenish-brown. Gnomes have human skin-tones, rather than being wood-coloured. Even elves have become far less glam-tastic than they used to be.

Now, there are probably a whole lot of reasons for this. One would be the move away from stories inspired by 1930s weird fiction, which drew its colour palette from the Decadent and Surrealist art of the previous generation, and towards those based on 'map fantasy' novels, which made use of a more chastened colour palette derived ultimately from the Pre-Raphaelite art of the 1840s. Another would be the enormous popularity of the goblinoids from Warhammer, which firmly fixed orcs, goblins, and their kin as 'greenskins' in the popular gamer imagination. A third would be changing fashions in fantasy art, away from the space-rock psychedelia of the 1970s towards the much more grounded grey-green-and-brown aesthetics of most modern fantasy illustrations.  (Erol Otus loved using neon-bright colours. We shall not see his like again.) The move towards more naturalistic colouration certainly makes the monsters feel a bit more 'realistic'; a green goblin and a brown ogre feel like variations on real creatures, things that might conceivably evolve in a natural environment full of mud and trees, whereas a yellow goblin and a purple ogre feel like escapees from a children's cartoon.

Still, though.... orange goblins. Blue-green pig-orcs. Yellow bugbears with red fur. There's something to be said for them. Their 'unnaturalness' could be a strength as well as a weakness: these sound like things which broke out of a wizard's lab, or crawled out of a crashed spaceship, or stumbled through a portal from a world very different from our own. They have an obvious out-of-place oddness about them. Why do bugbears have red pupils? What kind of fucked-up world do they see through their green-and-red eyes?

The bugbears walk amongst us!

In my games, I've always described humanoids as grey, or green, or brown; but the next time I run something with more of an old-school, science-fantasy vibe, I think I'm going to mix it up a bit. Bring back the blue orcs and the yellow goblins and the green gnolls and the purple ogres. If nothing else, they should act as big, brightly-coloured signs that we're not in Tolkien any more. 
09 May 14:34

The Woman in This Famous Painting May Have Suffered from a Nerve Disorder 

by Jennifer Ouellette on Gizmodo, shared by Cheryl Eddy to io9

The American artist Andrew Wyeth found inspiration for his most famous painting in a neighbor woman who suffered from a crippling, mysterious disorder that baffled her physicians. Now a child neurologist at the Mayo Clinic thinks he’s found the correct diagnosis.

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27 Apr 22:50

Lovecraft, Nerds And The Uses of Ick

by noreply@blogger.com (Zak Sabbath)
You might not like Lovecraft, but chances are you like something Lovecraftian--like this or this. So, one more time, let's talk about Lovecraft....

Imagine someone loved, someone you know the story of: your brother, your dog, your lover, your parent, Prince, Lemmy, yourself--someone with a definite content you can imagine, with unique details that apply only to them.

Then imagine you discover their story has ended. They're done, as are their works. Something was continuous and unique and now it isn't anymore.

That's fear of death. That fear is not Lovecraftian. The weak, worried man and his bleak work were afraid of many things, not death so much.


In his most classic works, the ones that make him important to later writers, artists, filmmakers and game designers, death is rarely the point. Death is one of many by-products (insanity, disturbing hybridization, obsessive Cassandrian documentation) of a more terrible revelation. Half the time the monsters are barely active, much less murderous. The horror is simply that there was contact.

Alien is a lot like At The Mountains of Madness (and Prometheus is even more like it, as many folks have noticed) except when it's being a thriller--Jones! Here kitty kitty--that is, when it's afraid of death.

The old gothic horror's set dressing is death: skulls, skeletons, vampires--and the gothic has love in it, so that you care about the victim when death happens. Lovecraft was another thing: characters you didn't come to care much about discontinuing--or living right past the moment they might've died and instead, at the real climax, being made witness to a horror. And what was the horror of, if not of death?

It was a horror of a pullulating, spawning, unknowable, inevitable and important otherness--that thing Werner Herzog was talking about when he went into the jungle and described as "…this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication...overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order." That is: life.


Autobiographically:

He faced death with courage. Struck by a cancer of the intestine which had spread throughout his body, he is taken to Jane Brown Memorial Hospital on the 10 March 1937. He will behave as an exemplary patient, polite, affable, of a stoicism and courtesy which will impress his nurses, despite very great physical suffering (happily attenuated by morphine).

That's from Michel Houellebecq's H.P. Lovecraft - Against the World, Against Life, which argues, well, that HP Lovecraft was against the world and against life. Ok, so he wasn't scared of dying, was he so weird as to be scared of living? Absolutely, totally and--in a letter written a few days before his improbable marriage--articulately:

And as for Puritan inhibitions-I admire them more every day. They are attempts to make of life a work of art - to fashion a pattern of beauty in the hog-wallow that is animal existence - and they spring out of that divine hatred for life which marks the deepest and most sensitive soul...An intellectual Puritan is a fool - almost as much of a fool is an anti-Puritan - but a Puritan in the conduct of life is the only kind of man one may honestly respect. I have no respect or reverence whatever for any person who does not live abstemiously and purely.

Lovecraft was so grossed out by sex, commerce and casual social ties that he left them entirely out of his fiction. As for race:

 The organic things inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call'd human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of the earth's corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They — or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed — seem'd to ooze, seep and trickle thro' the gaping cracks in the horrible houses ... and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness. From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal lineaments of the morbid soul of disintegration and decay ... a yellow leering mask with sour, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point …

There are two remarkable things here: first--it's vintage Lovecraft. Second, it's not from The Horror at Red Hook, it's from HP's letter to a pal describing my grandfather's neighborhood in NYC. 

Lovecraft's specific brand of racism arose from disgust, the disgust from ignorance, the ignorance from another and larger fear: fear of unmediated intercourse with other people. That is: life.


Lovecraft is what happens when we take a familiar figure--the shy, nervous, fragile, conflict-averse, fastidious, introverted bookworm who is hopeless with money and whose main social outlet is nerd conventions--and put him in an era, class, family and professional situation where avoiding The Other is the path of least resistance. This is a man who never learned anything in a bar or a short-order kitchen or on a ballfield; he learned from parents and books and nothing he learned there taught him about these “italico-semitico-mongoloids” he lived among.

In these conditions his fear of life--which we can just go ahead and call his nerdiness--could only encourage his racism. I just want to be alone in bed with my books. And he is kind of a perfect test-case because he wasn't otherwise generally an asshole: people who he did mix with reported a courteous, kind, generous man, eager to reach out through amateur press associations (the pre-internet) to help fellow aesthetes through the terror and darkness that is this mortal coil and its ungentlemanly expectations.

He looked on New Yorkers with repulsion but he looked on New York with awe:

I fell into a swoon of aesthetic exaltation in admiring this view – the evening scenery with the innumerable lights of the skyscrapers, the mirrored reflections and the lights of the boats bobbing on the water, at the extreme left the sparkling statue of Liberty, and on the right the scintillating arch of the Brooklyn bridge. It’s something even more powerful than the dreams of the legend of the Ancient world – a constellation of infernal majesty – a poem in the fire of Babylon! (…) All of this happens under the strange lights, the strange sounds of the port, where the traffic of the whole world is concentrated. Foghorns, ships’ bells, in the distance the squeals of winches… visions of the distant shores of India, where birds with brilliant plumage are set singing by the incense of strange pagodas surrounded by gardens, where camel-handlers in their colourful robes barter in front of the sandalwood taverns with deep-voiced sailors whose eyes reflect all the mystery of the sea. 

...and, though not experience-curious, he was book-curious. He knew at least that the amoebas and pithecanthropoids that occupied its streets came from faraway places and these places had cultures--and it might be to this vision of the city and this knowledge that we owe an insight that makes his stories more than the sum of his terrified parts. The honest, perceptive, innovative artist in Lovecraft is decisively getting the upper hand over the arrogant racist whenever the stories remind us that the incomprehensible and inimical aliens are not just bigger, but older, wiser and immensely more sophisticated and significant than those they disturb.

This reveals a strange paradox of the imperial racist--the works of these foreigners are magnificent, their physical presence is loathsome. In Lovecraft, the "primitiveness" and "degeneracy" only come when the xenomorphs mix with-, or are worshipped by-, the humans--again, it is contact that is bad.

The racist made these stories horror stories, but the artist made them about gods. And if there are any gods, we should all be afraid of them. This is a fear that can be about many other things, it has legs.

Lovecraftian horror--the genre--is easy to copy: books, neuraesthenia, tentacles, all that. But if the ideas were all there were to it, we could just read Burroughs instead. Lovecraftian horror--the emotion--is rarer: disgust and awe in the face of the alien. 

Lovecraftian disgust and awe can be evoked in relation to things that don't appear anywhere in Lovecraftian fiction--for example, in Alien it's about the processes of human reproduction.


The awe is the reputable part, we understand awe, if not the objects of awe. So let's look at the disgust:

Mandy instantly dislikes anyone wearing a one-sleeved dress and I am suspicious of those who, for any reason, wear Crocs. Very many people, far past any genuine concern for physical safety, are scared to go into a porn theatre--or to certain bars.

These are minor examples of Lovecraftian disgust.

While Lovecraft was afraid of life and intercourse with people unlike himself, Lovecraftian disgust more generally--the kind the stories expand on and incarnate--is aesthetic, taste-based: an aesthetic fear so severe that it overrides the curiosity or sense of fairness that would discover whether that fear was justified.

It is kind of the opposite of Stendahl syndrome.

Lovecraftian disgust is not disgust at clear signifiers that death is near--wounds and wolf tracks--that would be rational. Lovecraftian disgust is never rational, it is emotional and emotions are evolution's first-drafts of thoughts, made for when there's no time for evaluation, or no imperative demanding one.

Lovecraftian disgust is visceral, the kind that goes ick. The feeling of having a gun to your head isn't ick. Ick is a fear of life--someone else's icky life. Fear of mollusks, for instance--which are totally harmless--is Lovecraftian.
ick

Once I met an art student who was making a really ugly painting of bearded men at prayer and doing it on purpose. I asked why and she said they were Muslim fundamentalists and she (she was of Middle Eastern descent) wanted to make Muslim fundamentalists look ugly and ridiculous and gross, and make people associate the image of fundamentalists with grossness. This was an attempt to recruit Lovecraftian disgust as a propaganda tool.

Likewise Trump complaining about how John Kasich eats is an attempt to recruit Lovecraftian disgust to political ends. But then so is the way we retweet how hideous Trump's toupee and terrible pigleather face are. 

In Taxi Driver, DeNiro's disgust is supremely Lovecraftian:

Whatever it is, you should clean up this city here, because this city here is like an open sewer you know. It's full of filth and scum. And sometimes I can hardly take it. Whatever-whoever becomes the President should just really clean it up. You know what I mean? Sometimes I go out and I smell it, I get headaches it's so bad, you know...They just never go away you know...It's like...I think that the President should just clean up this whole mess here. You should just flush it right down the fuckin' toilet. 

...as is Rorschach's disgust in Watchmen (created by avowed Lovecraft disciple Alan Moore)--in both cases the filth is clearly literal grime and a metaphor for every other sin in the city.

The dirt in a city, the tan, the toupee, eating, praying, the simple ugliness of people we think are ugly: all signs of life, not death. And icky.


Silence of the Lambs is a fascinating case: Hannibal Lecter is pure gothic--cold, crisp, polite, intelligent, quiet, patient, efficient, articulate, inevitable, living in a stone room, arguably charming. Like Dracula, he is asexual but apparently capable of a weird kind of romantic or at least personalized affection toward our hero and he is as bald as a skull. And he is seen killing, repeatedly, because people are in his way.

Buffalo Bill--whom he never shares a shot with--is sloppy, shifty, loud (always listening to music--and pop music, not dead people music like Lecter likes), awkward, breeds moths, has a dog and long hair and moans about fucking. Bill is all about life and therefore Bill is icky. He is a whole subculture of one down in his lived-in basement. (A trans friend who loves this film said she feared transitioning for years because she was afraid of being like Buffalo Bill.) And we never see him kill anyone--and even Lecter points out that for Bill, the murder is incidental--it's simply a result of Bill's total indifference to the lives of others while carrying out his own imperatives.

Lecter is bone, Bill is flesh.



As even the dullest bulbs notice, DIY D&D and OSR gaming in general emphasize the horror end of D&D--a lot more than TSR ever did. Part of it is the high mortality rate of the low-level game: If you're playing zero-to-hero D&D, then you'll lose a lot of zeroes and when this happens the only consistent aesthetic this really fits is either Dungeonmirth/Python style life-is-cheap black humor or survival horror. Horror is totally metal and horror is grimdark and those things, done well (ie like Warhammer used to do it) are both good.

LotFP: Weird Fantasy and other DIY D&Ders have often foregrounded horror--and occasionally even went ahead and claimed horror is helpful and good for you and worth pondering.

A formidable example comes from the poet Patricia Lockwood contemplating a Donald Trump rally, which I recommend you read but which I'll excerpt a bit of here to keep life linear:

It’s us, was the undercurrent. It’s just us in here. A handshake moved through the air as the speech walloped on, and then something more than a handshake. The more he spoke, the more Trump sounded like a rich man at dinner with a young woman whose passport is her face and her freshness, explaining to her the terms of the arrangement: that he would wear her on his arm, turning her toward the lights, that she would defer to him in public, that he would give her just enough of what he has to sustain her. I wrote in my notebook, “Trump is offering to be our sugar daddy? He wants to make America his trophy wife?” What he was really promising was freedom to move in the world the way he does, under his protection, according to his laws. Nobody owns me, he keeps telling us, not the lobbyists, not the Republican high-ups, not the Washington insiders. I’m not in anybody’s pocket; hop in mine. His wives, you might have noticed, grow lovelier and lovelier. It is a practiced seduction; it has worked before. We ignore it at our peril.

An example of the dangers of avoiding horror is offered by the RPG community itself:
From Something Awful's RPG forum--where people go to reaffirm each others' Lovecraftian disgust about women not playing the same edition of D&D they do.
There's a decent chunk of people who think Lovecraftiana and other disturbing horror themes in games are badwrongfun--and in fact that all not-power-fantasy themes are badwrongfun--and they all have something in common: they definitely do not want to talk to gamers who disagree with them. They're cool with attacking them, smearing them, and even reading their books to make fun of them, but they view the idea of engaging them as a contaminating anathema. A good chunk of them would be suspicious of this essay simply because it contains someone talking about Lovecraft (who is icky).

Again: an aesthetic fear so severe that it overrides the curiosity or sense of fairness that would discover whether that fear was justified.

This person who attacked Scrap Princess for inventing a biohorror stinger monster said "I lack both the capacity and the will to understand anyone who would accept that in their game".

The person on RPGnet who attacked Shanna Germain and a part of the game Numenera she wrote said "When I read the Numenera page in question, I thought/felt 'Whoever wrote this is probably evil”--and many game designers and moderators piled on.

Fred Hicks--the game publisher who attacked Kingdom Death--refused to talk to the women who defended it or the creator of the game explicitly on grounds of his (Fred's) fragile mental health.

The designer who claimed sexy zombies appear in games because people are secret necrophiliacs explicitly refuses to talk to, say, women who cosplay as sexy zombies, refuses to talk to anyone who disagrees with them, like Fred, on grounds of fragile mental health and deletes them when they talk.

These acts of Lovecraftian disgust are the result of years spent in sheltered internet pockets being told there are no personal or professional consequences to dehumanizing someone just because they like something you think is icky--and nothing good can come of talking to someone less than human.

These sheltered, life-phobic souls: shy, nervous, fragile, conflict-averse, fastidious, introverted bookworms, whose main social outlet is nerd conventions, with their small circle of gentle hobbyist correspondents are, ironically, imitating Lovecraft because they haven't read Lovecraft, or haven't learned anything from reading him. They aren't recognizing the disgust they're feeling for what it is despite having its consequences cleanly personified in the historical record.

When there is ick, there is fear, where there's fear there is ignorance, where there's ignorance there's disgust, and where there's disgust, prejudice.

Not everyone needs to face every horror---but if you never learn from horrors, you become one.


25 Apr 13:28

West Marches for Kids, Redux

by Michael Prescott
As I'm sure I've mentioned, I run an annual World of Dungeons at a winter retreat for the families of my daughters' primary school.  The first year, I sat at a table in the cafeteria with a pen and a roll of butcher's paper and drew a map.

It looked like this:


Before long, some kids wandered by, asked what I was up to. "Drawing a map," I said.

"What for?"

"An adventure role-playing game."

"What's that?"

When I explained it to them, their eyes nearly popped out of their heads.

"I wanna play!"

"Me too!"

"Okay, go and find a couple more friends, and decide where you want to go."

An hour later, we were all off to Raventree and the Doughman's Wood. The next year they did back-to-back sessions of Sorg Devours (The Coming of Sorg) and River's End (Though Flesh Be Vast).

This past year they explored the midden mine (Midden of the Deep) then hacked their way to the top of Tannoch Rest-of-Kings.

I started coloring the locations they've visited between games, and adding a few new locations for them to visit in the coming years, so now the map looks like this:


Running sessions for parties of nine eleven year-olds is intense.. I think I go through two bottles of water at a session just keeping my throat from drying out!

19 Apr 14:46

Slither.io is an addictive mutiplayer snake game

by Rob Beschizza

slitherio

Slither.io is the classic game Snake, but massively multiplayer and with the ruthless eat-and-grow mechanic of Osmos. The "eat" mechanism is subverted: hitting other creatures results in death, so you must instead outmanoever them and force them to hit you. On my best run, I got eaten at 7,000. Can you do better? [Thanks, Joel!]
13 Apr 19:05

byrongraffiti: I watched this like 50 times today lmfao



byrongraffiti:

I watched this like 50 times today lmfao

12 Apr 13:12

Shit Just Got REAL in North Carolina

by John Cole

If this does not make your damned day I don’t know what will:

There’s a new kink in North Carolina’s LGBT controversy: A popular porn website is banning all computers from “The Tar Heel State.”

XHamster.com has been refusing to serve anyone from North Carolina since 12:30 p.m. EDT, Monday.

Instead, users with a North Carolina IP address are just seeing a black screen on their computer — no porn.

The extreme measures will stay in place until North Carolina repeals House Bill 2, a law passed on March 23 that effectively prevents cities and counties in the state from passing rules that protect LGBT rights.

XHamster.com spokesman, Mike Kulich, said the website believes in equality for everyone.

“We have spent the last 50 years fighting for equality for everyone and these laws are discriminatory which XHamster.com does not tolerate,” he said in an official statement sent to The Huffington Post. “Judging by the stats of what you North Carolinians watch, we feel this punishment is a severe one. We will not standby and pump revenue into a system that promotes this type of garbage. We respect all sexualities and embrace them.”

Kulich told HuffPost that the company’s statistics show that North Carolinians are more open-minded — at least about their porn — than laws like HB2 might suggest.

“Back in March, we had 400,000 hits for the term ‘Transsexual’ from North Carolina alone,” he said. “People from that state searched ‘Gay’ 319,907 times,” he added.

In other hilarious and unfortunate news, I tried to find a picture of a redneck watching porn for this post. That was a mistake I will never make again. Unless you have safe search enabled (which I do not), I implore you not to google “redneck+watching+porn.”

07 Apr 19:26

Teavana Tea cheats you twice

by Mark Frauenfelder

teavana

Have you ever had a sample of tea in a Teavana store? I have, and I loved it. I bought some based on how much I liked the taste. But when I got home and followed the directions, the tea tasted weak. I figured I just didn't know how to brew the tea as well as the expert teenagers who work at the Teavana store.

But it turns out Teavana's in-store samples use up to "three times as much as the instructions for brewing at home," according to the Consumerist. That's why it was so strong and flavorful. If I wanted to make the same strength of tea at home, I'd have to use a tablespoon, not a teaspoon, effectively tripling the price of the already expensive tea.

I stopped buying Teavana, but on Monday I saw a can of Teavana Royal English Breakfast Loose-Leaf Black Tea at Starbucks for $9. It was a pretty big can so I thought it was a good deal. I bought it. When I opened the can at home, I found a small plastic bag stuffed in the bottom of the can, containing the tea. In the photo above, you can see how much tea was in the can. It fills about 1/3 of the can.

I like the tea, but there's no way I'll get 20 cups from the can, as the label suggests.

07 Apr 14:37

Der Giftschrank

by noreply@blogger.com (Zak Sabbath)
So over on the 99% Invisible podcast* they have a whole episode about the history and functions of Der Giftschrank--"the poison cabinet"--which is not a low-hiss goth-industrial band (ok, probably by now it is, but anyway…) but a locked area in a library where restricted-access books are kept.

These things are not unheard of- in the kinds of fiction we make games from--there's the Forbidden Books section of the library in a Simpsons Halloween episode and if you read pulp horror novels from the 70s it's obvious the Vatican Library consists of nothing but evil devilbooks--but the existence of Giftschranke--and not just outright banned books--imply several interesting (and gameable) things that deserve to be looked at in more detail...

1. Ideas are dangerous

The concept of dangerous information is a commonplace--the Panama Papers, blackmailables, rocket fuel formulae, hoaxes, datatheft in Shadowrun, etc.--the concept of a dangerous idea, however is a lot more arcane and more fun. 

Outside concrete facts (real or fake) that people don't want other people to know or believe, there are a few ways ideas can be dangerous:

Heresies--This can run from the Phibionites to like Cthulhu worship.

Political propaganda--After WWII, Mein Kampf was placed in Der Giftschrank.**

Erotic works--Ideas upsetting to gender norms and whatnot or just, like, smutty pictures. Franz Von Bayros was in Der Giftschrank in the Yale art library.

Malculture--Ideas and images that are not overtly propagandistic but which are considered to make bad social practices seem desirable. During the Cold War, the East Germans kept American fashion magazines in Der Giftschrank. 

This last category is probably the most interesting and underexplored in game settings--because it speaks not to the kingdom's fear of evil clerics (been there), rival kingdoms (done that), or naughty bits (a cliche as old as Dragonmirth) but to the society's view of what makes itself different philosophically from its neighbors and what it thinks could destroy that. The Giftschrank says not only "we are not fashion magazines" but "we could be ruined by widespread dissemination of fashion magazines". What is in a setting's Giftschranke on cultural grounds tells you a lot about every single NPC from that setting and a lot about how PCs will be received.

Would Minas Tirith have Giftschranked literature depicting the joys of a simple rural life as undermining to the values of self-sacrifice and duty it demanded of young men holding the line against Mordor? Would The Hobbit itself have, therefore, been 'schranked?

Actually, probably not, because of one of the other interesting things about Giftschranke…
Poison Idea


2. The Society Thinks These Dangerous Texts Need To Be Studied

…I see Minas Tirith more as a book-burning town and Giftschranking isn't burning--or banning. The Giftschranke speaks to fear of ideas, true, but it also speaks to the admirable (per se) and sophisticated notion that even bad ideas need to be understood--all the better to combat them. Giftschranking restricts but does not prohibit access.

Reasons a culture might want to study 'Schranked texts:

Ulterior: Like secretly the Pope is a Chaos Cult member or jerks off to the saucy books. Like most hoary plot cliches, it's as dull in theory as it is useful in practice.

Forensic: If the authors of the dark text or their acolytes are yet among the living, the works may contain clues to hunting them down. Clearly the easiest schrankenmotiv to work into a game.

Scholarly: People just read this stuff to compile histories or studies or whatever. Suggests a relatively sophisticated culture where people have a lot of free time to do disinterested research. These kinds of individuals and institutions are unusual in fantastic settings (as they are in life) but can be a rich source of random gp-for-mcguffin fetch quests--again, as they are in life.

Rhetorical: This is mentioned in the podcast--reading a text makes it easier to refute its arguments. This is fun in a game because it suggests soft power and genuine persuasion are an engine in the setting rather than the more obviously gameable route of conversion by the sword. All across the kingdom there are clerics and monks explaining that rain can't be the tears of the Inestimable Cloud Titans because cloud titans are known to be warm-blooded and clearly…etc They make posters and have bake sales when they spread the word. The subtle permeations of propaganda can be fun because they are often unrecognizable as such at first. Like the Gnithians may be shocked to see that--counter to what they've been told for centuries-- elves do not actually fear water. 
Venomous Concept


3. Access To the Giftschranke Is Limited To The Worthy

Depending on the reason for the 'Schranking and the Gifting, access will be limited in one or more of the following ways:

Only the learned: A test of scholarship is implied.

Only the good: Tests of ideological or behavioral purity are implied.

Only the great: Signs of status and influence are required.

Only the initiated: Signs of membership are required.

Tests are always interesting in games, as they provide excuses for challenges, while signs of status or membership are effectively mcguffins to be chased. Also: all of this implies guards, security, etc, like around any treasure in any dungeon.



4. The contents of Giftschranke change

Regime change alters the contents of the Giftschranke--Germany's went from being heretical texts, then to pornography then to Nazi literature. The history of Der Giftschrank is a history of what the biggest monster is at any given moment.

So: you dig deep into the dungeon, fireball your way past the ancient reptile women and long-dormant golems, pick the lock and find…only books. But what's in those books tells you about that society's vulnerabilities.



5. Giftschranke can be virtual

The podcast notes that a new critical edition of Mein Kampf is coated with scholarly glosses debunking its arguments and providing historical context, calling this "a virtual Giftschranke". In college my epic lit teacher's copy of the Bible came the same way. 

The strategy of presenting a despised text through a scrim of critical thought which undermines or at least redirects interpretation of that text is an old one--the word "gloss" itself begins with margin notes on Bibles (and ends with the ironic quote tweet and Something Awful.com's shitty FATAL and Friends thread--where game books the SA harassment clique don't like are hateread under the protective fiction that all the books they don't like are somehow like FATAL). The idea of a dangerous text being circulated with these interpolations intact literally adds a new layer to the concept of the Eldritch Tome--you get the text, but you also might get who knows how many other mothers telling you what it means to the Snailmen, to the Shell People, to the Ranks of Khaine.

Even today, asking yourself what a society refuses to disseminate without commentary ("without context") attached tells you a lot about its values.



6. There is a moral and/or intellectual class system

In examining the philosophy of the Giftschrank note these four things:

A. There are dangerous texts
B. There is a kind of person for whom the text is not dangerous (it is for their perusal the books are preserved)
C. There is a kind of person for whom it is (they are not allowed in or are presumed not to have those intellectual tools)
D. The second kind of person is, nevertheless, still enough part of the society that they are welcome to read its other books

Person C is not interpreted as the enemy--after all, they are free to access the rest of the library. They are citizens, but second class. They are the ruled, but not the rulers. They can't handle the truth--but they are welcome to join the infantry, till a field, pay the taxes that create the Giftschrank that excludes them. The actual enemy is out there (they wrote the book) but they are a wolf, and the second, protected, class are sheep--someone you have commerce with- but are suspicious of-. These are the gullible and persuadable, the ones for whom ideas are truly dangerous, but who are nevertheless too useful to exile to the world of the evil. In all societies this class must include literate children, but it's most interesting and frightening when this class includes adults--who are allegedly legally and morally responsible for their own actions.

Only in the light of a malleable-but-not-anathematized class does the concept of "a dangerous idea" even makes sense--and in that same light the giftschrank's suspicion of democracy is made clear.***

Whose needs does the existence of this lesser class serve? The feudal monarch's, obviously, also the capitalist's (someone has to buy Crocs)--this can push worldbuilding away from seeing the society as a monoculture, with all the Shadow Dwarves privy to the same education.

This institutionalized condescension also makes 'schranked works extremely valuable--not necessarily to the sheep to whom PCs or malefactors might deliver them, but as a hostage. What ransom would a pope pay to keep Docetism off the streets?

Come to think of it--might be a good funding model for LotFP.
-
-
-
*Thanks for the recommendation, Ram

**The podcast notes that in Austria, inspection is still forbidden to minors and goths.

***The profoundly goofy and profoundly conservative philosopher Leo Strauss held that all philosophy was essentially dangerous in the hands of the masses (thus Hitler, thus Stalin) and that no 'Schrank was schrank enough to keep the Gift away from them--yet still they must be ruled. Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Bork were big fans.


05 Apr 11:54

Seriousness and sincerity: how to tell jesters from trolls

by Rob Beschizza

types

Trolls, when cornered, often excuse themselves as Shakespearean fools of the modern age, as jesters. Given that the term "troll" spans a vast expanse from cute to abusive, this grasp at virtue seems legit. But there's a plain difference between jesters and trolls: sincerity. Jesters are unserious – a good thing! – but that doesn't mean their performance is insincere. Trolls, though, are both of these things.

How, then, do you see a troll for what they are? Unseriousness is visible, but insincerity is often not.

Mercifully, the excuse itself is a clue. Trolls don't really get the difference between themselves and the noble, world-improving court fools of their imagination.

So, when scrutinized in ways that require sincerity, they stop being unserious as well. Instead of proving themselves to be Jesters, they become Squares, serious and sincere, explaining themselves at sententious length until they can retreat back to the Troll corner and resume normal operations.

The people to really watch out for, though, the truly Machiavellian types, are people who are serious yet insincere. These Worms (lots in Silicon Valley!) slide across the opposite diagonal: whenever cornered for their shenanigans, they're disturbingly good at excusing themselves as Jesters – unserious in tone, yet ostentatiously moral.

The corollaries are also true, I find. When otherwise happy, decent, respectable Squares get defensive, they transform into amazingly unpleasant Trolls. And true Jesters, in their weak hours, tend to moonlight as Worms, manipulating others with affected seriousness.

This is just a dumb chart on the internet, of course, even dumber than the Mills Boon personality test or whatever it's called. Reality is more finely-grained. But once you start spotting people moving on those diagonals, you'll never miss it. And because the internet is now everyone's permanent record, they can't hide it.

arseholedirections

28 Mar 22:43

The "American College of Pediatricians" is a hate group with fewer than 200 members

by Cory Doctorow

American-College-of-Pediatricians

Not to be mistaken for the legitimate American Academy of Pediatrics, which has 60,000 members! (more…)

23 Mar 12:42

Good news everybody

by Richard Mayhew

The ACA is 6 years old today.

It is potty trained, knows the alphabet and it is starting to use phonics as the 100th day of Kindergarten has passed.

Is the ACA the epitome and capstone of health care and health finance reform? No!

Is it a massive improvement over the pre-ACA status-quo where the entire system was slowly death spiraling? Yes!

Are there massive changes to service delivery that are going on underneath the radar that have and will continue to alter the US healthcare delivery sector with an aim to better quality at the same or lower costs? Yes!

Is this worth celebrating for a day? Yes

Tomorrow should we get back to work to making things a bit better wherever we have the ability to do so? Yes.

04 Mar 18:41

I’ve Been Saying This Since Day One

by John Cole

Krugthulu:

By the way, I predict that even if Mr. Trump is the nominee, pundits and others who claim to be thoughtful conservatives will stroke their chins and declare, after a great show of careful deliberation, that he’s the better choice given Hillary’s character flaws, or something. And self-proclaimed centrists will still find a way to claim that the sides are equally bad. But both acts will look especially strained.

Google Kubler-Ross, peeps. Anyone who thinks this election is going to see enormous Republican cross-over for Hillary or Bernie to protest Trump needs their fucking head examine.

01 Mar 17:28

amyvernon: inspiringpieces: Oscar Nominees Pose with Younger...


Leonardo DiCaprio in 2013 (left) and 1989


Jared Leto in 2014 (right) and in 1994


Matthew McConaughey in 2014 (left) and in 1996


Jennifer Lawrence in 2014 (right) and in 2007


Julia Roberts in 2013 (right) and in 1989


Sandra Bullock in 2014 (left) and in 1993


eryl Streep in 1980 (left) and in 2013


Tom Hanks in 2014 (left) and in 1980


Christian Bale in 2013 (left) and in 1987


Amy Adams in 2014 (left) and in 1999

amyvernon:

inspiringpieces:

Oscar Nominees Pose with Younger Versions of Themselves

Is Meryl Streep a witch?

25 Feb 13:16

Australian Animals That Won't Kill You, Ranked

by Luke Plunkett on Kotaku, shared by Tim Marchman to Deadspin

I am Australian. I have noticed online that people who are not Australian seem to work under the assumption that this is an island of death, where every step you take you run the risk of being bitten, stung, impaled or eaten alive by a murderous wild creature. I am here today to tell you that they are only half right.

Read more...










25 Feb 13:10

Sports Highlight Of The Day: Dog Blocks Cat

by Barry Petchesky
Sports Highlight Of The Day: Dog Blocks Cat

There are no sports. This is mildly athletic. Take it, please.

Read more...










08 Feb 18:25

90s-forever: newstitches: video-hall-of-fame: me as a...



90s-forever:

newstitches:

video-hall-of-fame:

me as a parent 

lmfao @90s-forever

Hahahahahahah

04 Feb 13:46

This Amazing Simpsons Search Engine Matches the Perfect Screencap To a Quote

by James Whitbrook

There’s a still—and a matching quote—from The Simpsons to fit pretty much every occasion in human history. Finding the perfect one, however, just got incredibly easy with the public release of Frinkiac, which trawls through millions of images to match whatever Simpsons quote you put in.

Read more...










03 Feb 16:07

An adorable magic trick

by Cory Doctorow

tumblr_nxrfz6D28m1uujqcyo1_250

(Thanks, Dimitrios!)

28 Jan 13:28

King Cake Baby Is Going To Give Someone A Heart Attack

by Barry Petchesky

It’s King Cake Baby season again, which means the most terrifying occasional mascot in sports is back to put the fear of god into anyone who locks eyes with it.

Read more...










27 Jan 13:32

What I did on my humble-brag trip to Western Maryland

by David Simon
For reasons too improbable and esoteric to explain, I was recently invited to a small coterie of vacation shacks in Thurmont, north of the city of Frederick in Western Maryland.  Franklin Roosevelt christened the joint as Shangri-La — in honor of his “Lost Horizon” reference following the Doolittle Raid against Tokyo — and that name […]
18 Jan 15:26

"Late stage capitalism" is the new "Christ, what an asshole"

by Cory Doctorow

CY0dDHRU0AAZ-vs

If you've grown weary of recaptioning your New Yorker cartoons with any of the other universal punchlines ("Christ, what an asshole," "Hello, I'd like to add you to my professional network on Linkedin" and "What a misunderstanding," to name only three), Matthew Garret invites you to try "Late stage capitalism." Works a treat! (more…)

15 Jan 15:42

Elderly birdwatcher makes mincemeat out of Oregon domestic terrorist/mall ninja

by Cory Doctorow

Old-man-bird-watcher-Sized

79-year-old Robert Saunders was birdwatching at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge -- checking on some owl chicks -- when a "red-faced pudgy man with a big gun" demanded he identify himself and get down on the ground. (more…)

11 Jan 21:29

Something Happened on the Day He Died: A Tribute to David Bowie

by Lou Anders

David Bowie’s death hit all of us hard. But Lou Anders, award-winning editor and author of the Thrones and Bones trilogy, wrote an especially eloquent tribute, explaining how Bowie threw the creative gauntlet down as a challenge for the rest of us.

Read more...










11 Jan 19:03

The stars look very different today

by Mark Dery

happy-birthday-david-bowie--large-msg-135764424027

"The stars look very different today." I've written, on several occasions, though most revealingly here, about glam's desperate importance to those of us marooned in the beige, tract-home nightmare of '70s suburbia.

(more…)

30 Dec 01:42

(SPOILER ALERT) While discussing intergalactic progress...

by MRTIM

23 Dec 13:33

Boston Dynamics' Robo-Dogs Pulling a Sleigh Is a Terrifying Glimpse of Christmas Future

by Andrew Liszewski on Gizmodo, shared by Alissa Walker to io9

If you thought waking up on Christmas morning to above-average temperatures and no snow on the ground was scary, Boston Dynamics gives us a far more terrifying glimpse into a dystopian future where Santa’s reindeer have been replaced with (highly kickable ) trotting robotic dogs.

Read more...










22 Dec 15:48

Cards Against Humanity asks Hannukah backers whether to destroy a Picasso

by Cory Doctorow
animation (2)

https://vimeo.com/148548977

The Cards Against Humanity 8 Sensible Gifts for Hannukah collected $15 from 150,000 people and converted the dough to a series of gifts, including customer CAH cards, socks, a day off for a factory's worth of workers in China's Pearl River Delta, and an original 1962 lino-cut of Picasso's "Tête de Faune." (more…)