Erika Chappell 🏳️‍⚧️ Stop Asking For STLs

Just wrapped up a campaign of The Wildsea, where the final session I got to do the thing I love the most in any RPG:
Screw my character up in some soap opera bullshit :3.

(im playing a wax sculpture being piloted by a bee hive like a mecha in order to read books)

beeatrice rolling into the docks with a megaphone like “barter requires either extremely high trust societies or one group deliberately taking the L to work! switch to beecoin you foolish mammals!”

im so tired of paying for shit with loose handfuls of bugs and buckets of teeth i swear to god

this region is a slave economy!!!!! nobody can maintain steady trade links because the closest thing to fungible goods is *people*!!

my tiny hexagon coins are gonna solve so many problems (with new problems!)

we’re doing the last sessions of wildsea so my character’s final goal for the campaign is to finally invent money and put an end to the scourge of barter

Echoing this, I know too many people who nobly and heroically cooked their brains watching Israel blow apart children for a few years and now they are functionally insane and blackpilled. Do not watch the footage of war crimes. You don't need to.

for all it matters from a bluesky gamer account like me: no war in iran. this attack is horrific and all decent people of the world must oppose it with no hesitation or equivocation about iran's government or nuclear programs. that's irrelevant to the pointless depravity of this bloodshed

the 5 proxy incusors in bright blue, with their sensor backpacks. the sergeant's sensor is red like his helmet

9 intercessors from two squads. they've got the volumetric shading done on the blue, and some of them have the black details blocked in

day was bad so i spent hours doing painting stuff

the incursors just need a tiny handful of details to finish, and all these intercessors got the blue glaze progression done

everyone mocks Tuxedo Mask for being useless but I'm glad to be represented as a guy who is useless

i was just talking to juice bot (who is real, and my friend)

more robot girl, I need to come up with a name for her

yeah. it's to the benefit of many different kinds of politics to expand the meanings of ideological words, to say "this position implies all these other positions" and to fight with people who want to use a different definition. part of developing your own politics is disentangling those positions

it's for this reason that 'socialist' is only one of the things i am, and i hold other positions that i explicitly see as distinct from socialism. so i am a socialist *and*, for example, am anti-censorship, but i won't claim i am anti-censorship because i am a socialist.

like, historically, socialism has aligned itself with anti-imperialist movements because modern imperialism is entangled with capitalism. but nothing about socialism inherently *contradicts* the practice of imperialism; a committee of workers is fully capable of voting to loot their neighbours

socialism is just "socialized control of the means of the production, as opposed to private or dynastic control". that's it. it doesn't inherently involve any other positions than that; there are many positions which have *aligned* themselves with socialism, but they're not one and the same

it's not even that, it's more "censorship and socialism aren't mutually exclusive, but the fact socialism doesn't automatically mean no censorship doesn't mean socialism is bad". they're not intrinsically related, and its frustrating when people act like they are (in either direction)

yeah but its a different one than the tension between labour and capital that socialism aims to resolve

socialism is the practice of the progressive resolution of a set of social contradictions, not the abstract desire for the world to take the shape i personally want in all spheres

i'd obviously prefer the former! but my point is that individual preference like that (or like wanting to make a weird art) get trumped by collective decision-making in these situations, and that doesn't change the material basis of socialist economics

depending on how that society chooses to make resources available on independent scales, it might or might not result in a flourishing of smaller-scale independent gonzo art, or there might be an intensive populist censorship regime in place

it's not really a should-or-shouldn't argument, i'm not arguing from preference or moral principles. i'm saying that a consequence of a truly democratic system of production would likely be a reduction of resources toward the social production of unusual art

the existence of cool gonzo socialist art is both cool and a reflection of unfortunate compromises. we should have been sixty movies deep into bland, soulless, MCU-esque socialist megafranchise films when the soviet union fell

no, but i do think they should have. the idea is to socialize social production, after all, and i believe a fair criticism of soviet-aligned socialist projects is that the legacy of one-man management overriding worker committees recreated many capitalist practices

if we're all voting on what movies get made, we're not freeing directors from controlling producers chasing the largest possible audience, we're turning the largest possible audience directly into those producers

i'm not sure how you imagine anyone gets big budgets to take massive swings in a world where art is funded, produced, and executed democratically. 'massive swings' usually implies some kind of break from convention and expectation, and collective control would naturally reign in those impulses.

like, don't worry, there will still be terrible art under socialism, it'll just be the result of incredibly incompetent committees instead of incredibly incompetent nepo babies

like, to put it bluntly, the purpose of communism isn't to produce good art, it's to democratically control the means of production. there may be situations where this will be better for art, and situations where it will be worse for art.

like, i'd wager like 80% of the people on a given film set have in them a bonkers pitch for a movie that'd be a wild ride if somebody dropped a hundred million dollars on them. how the hell do you build an system which can do that fairly?

the fact that we have a system that sometimes grants lone weirdos huge budgets to wrangle production crews does result in fun movies! and its also only possible because of massive exploitation and inequality. there's not really one without the other.