Moth

Worth noting: After the end of the three-year pilot program this year, the Irish government found that for every pound invested, they got 43% profit. Keeping artists alive and financially safe is not just for moral good, it's also beneficial in terms of economics. Just let artists keep making art.

Oath of Moment 【OATH OF MOMENT】 An Astartes Roleplaying Game They shall be my finest warriors, these men who give of themselves to me. Like clay I shall mould them, and in the furnace of war forge them. They will be...

SURPRISE!

I had an idea on Tuesday for how to do the Perfect Space Marine RPG, so I wrote the Perfect Space Marine RPG.

It's both a shitpost and a dead serious game. And it's, uh... 34,000 words long?

Anyway enjoy!!!

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Hasbro wotc has very intentionally built a brand identity around the game that is a complete misrepresentation of what the game actually is: a game about being violent and inflicting violence. And it's MASSIVELY successful

Yes, "If your favorite way to play D&D is to do something else instead, then maybe you don't actually like D&D" is true.

Significantly, the broader "If your favorite way to play RPGs is to do something else instead, then maybe you don't actually like RPGs" is also true.

I really want to have an opinion on that D&D thing but I just don't have the energy.

Play Fellowship. Play Beacon. Play Fabula Ultima. Play Dragonbane, or Draw Steel, or Daggerheart. Play literally anything else.

a chart showing amazon's rising emissions

a chart showing amazon's rising emissions

a chart showing amazon's rising emissions

a chart showing amazon's rising emissions

Amazon's big server might be down but that doesn't mean I can't post my charts showing how fundamentally bonkers their energy consumption and associated emissions are :)

Fun fact: 2 years ago they stopped sharing their total electrical energy consumption, cool!!!

ketanjoshi.co/data-sharing/

Arguably, one company should not be responsible for 33% of online services

(Since people are reposting their popular tweets here…)

From my experience of drawing sound effects by hand, I realised that you can easily make font-based sound effects more exciting as well—by exercising intentionality and control.

Here's some examples.

AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea South Korea’s AI learning program was rolled back after just four months following a backlash from teachers, students, and parents, underlining the challenges in embedding the technology in education.

South Korea pushed AI hard in schools. The national program was aborted within months, following massive pushback from students, parents and teachers, after a fortune had already been spent by both the government and education publishers
restofworld.org/2025/south-k...

the endpoint of chatgpt and other llm chatbot interfaces is a cohort of people who don't really live so much as they are on a sort of guided tour of their own lives, who have more or less totally abdicated agency and responsibility in favor of a step by step template of how to pretend to be a person

"They're trying to convince people they can't do the things they've been doing easily for years - to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies - to write that for you." We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, "that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won't know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can't do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won't have to process grief, because you'll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it's going to destroy humans, long before there's a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people." - author and filmmaker Justine Bateman from a piece by Emine Saner for the Guardian

Author and filmmaker Justine Bateman on generative AI

Cool. Can we all have 15 years leniency from water bills?

Trans pupils in Scotland are limiting food and drink intake to avoid using school toilets, fearing they might be ‘outed’ The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) has said the Scottish Government’s newly revised guidance on supporting trans pupils in schools "falls short" of providing clarity to schools, teachers, par...

Trans pupils in Scotland are limiting food and drink intake to avoid using school toilets, fearing they might be ‘outed’

www.scenemag.co.uk/trans-pupils...

Digital painting of a manticore. His arms are draconic with bat wings folded, and his clawed reptilian hands rearing to the ground. He has a lion's torso, and a scorpion's tail. his mane is dark brown, and he has a human face with facial hair and sharp teeth.

Digital painting of a chimera. He has a lion's body, a serpentine dragon's head for a tail, and a golden mane. He has three heads; a green dragon, a black goat, and a humanoid face with facial hair.

beasts | 2022

Art by • Mark Zug

Birthday sale ends at midnight tonight!

OH YEAH did I mention that pre-orders have a 20% discount until the 5th of November??

Probably the best price you could grab this actually physically massive tome for. This book is 300mmx260mm. It's bigger than the D&D PHB. It's encyclopaedia sized!!

Commissions are open!

Here are my standard rates and some examples!

DM or email Skullmonkeycomics@gmail.com
#commissionsopen #characterdesign #dnd

I'm watching that documentary "Before Stonewall" about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting. The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one "known homosexual". The "known homosexual" is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson. So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there's nothing wrong with him mentally and he's never been arrested. When asked whether he'd take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he's gay, he says that they didn't up until tonight, but he guesses they're going to find out, and he'll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like ... why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says "I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself." 1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium. Despite the pseudonym, Dale's boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary. Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson's disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

Some amazing gay history. Listen up kids.

Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posts contract after turning down Riyadh Comedy Festival Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posts contract after turning down Riyadh Comedy Festival

Okatsuka posted the censorship rules for the controversial comedy festival, noting how many "You can’t say anything anymore!" comedians have signed on.
www.avclub.com/riyadh-comed...

A figure of Kamille Bidan from Zeta Gundam holding a handgun, accompanied by the text: I'm joining the war on autism on the side of the autism

Queen

Heeey! Yes, this is out.
I made the cover!
Finally some new art to share.

A tanuki (the mythical kind, looks a bit like an anthropomorphic raccoon) with amber eyes smiles cheekily. She is wearing a conical sun hat common in east asian cultures, and her other clothing matches that theme. A gentle green robe layered over a rich orange. The robe is tied at the neck with a string of seven coins.

My replacement Season of Ghosts character!
This is Maru, a tanuki champion of Kofusachi.
She's been having fun turning into pots and bowls and kettles. And also trying to stop [redacted] (avoiding spoilers).
Art by @inkviral.bsky.social

#pf2e #pathfinder #art

The cover of a book called Hard Wired Island: Second Gig (it's a mystery and you shouldn't worry about it.) The background is a daytime street in Grand Cross, Hard Wired Island's cylindrical space station city; the street continues on far into the distance until it's following the curve of the cylinder up and out of sight. Five people are crossing the street in the foreground, Beatles Abbey Road Cover style: a mysterious white-haired woman with heavy cybernetic augments and a heavy coat, a large man with a purple suit and a nice hat, a pink-haired punk woman with shredded jeans, a big green jacket, and a baseball bat on her shoulder, a purple-haired rocker with a varsity jacket, carrying an amp and a guitar; and a dark-haired human-like android lady dressed like an emo. They're being watched by two armed surveillance drones (latest fad). There's also a cat sitting on a window several stories above the ground in the BG, which I think is neat.

you can't excise trans people from society because transness is an emergent property of free will. if you divide the world up into men and women and say men do this and women do that, some people are going to say that sucks, fuck you, i do what i want. it doesn't get more complicated than that

Artists! Repost with your blue art 👁️ 👄 👁️

(I think this counts)

And just before that was outright transphobia, which keeps getting cut off the reporting for some reason

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

Stanhill, Lancashire, 1764. Wear and carpenter James Hargreaves invents the Spinning Jenny, the first practical spinning-frame, to make the tedious task of producing cloth a little bit faster. He doesn't know it yet, but this will destroy the world. Spurred by inventions like his, the industrial revolution will transform everything -- work power, the wealth of nations. Society as we know it began here, and it wasn't great for everyone. But a group of weavers and textile workers saw this future coming. And did their best to prevent it.

"Curse you spinning jenny, you ruined everything!" The standard narrative does that LUDDITES were foolish lunatics who, in fear of technology, decided progress was bad, and started hitting it with sticks. But the truth is entire ways of life were being destroyed. Previously, skilled craftsmen were respected for the time and effort it took to do their work. The entire family usit would form a cottage industry - creating something valuable, and command a decent living. But when a machine can work 10 times faster its owner can charge less for the prodcts- craftsmen couldn't compete and were left out of work almost overnight. And as factories became a fixture of the british landscape, these now unemployed labourers often ended up working the factories that had just destroyed their way of life. Britain was the most prosperous nation in history, factory owners became extremely wealthy and influential. But the people doing the actual work saw almost none of it.

Factory work paid little, since "the machines" did "the real work" human labourers were deemed unimportant and replaceable. FUN FACT!: Factory owners preferred to hire ORPHANS since less people would notice if they were maimed or killed on the job! Now the owners quickly realized the workers might notice they did all the work for almost no pay. If they went on STRIKE or ARGUED FOR HGHER WAGES, this would threaten their tremendous wealth. In 1799, Parliament passed the Combination Act, which made FORMING TRADE UNIONS, COLLECTIVE BARGAINING, AND GOING ON STRIKE ILLEGAL. Organizing against the rich became a crime.

If you were living through it, opposing the industrial revolution wasn't techno-phobia. It was SELF-DEFENSE. The combination act forced unions underground into secret societies. And the greatest secret of all was their leader - Ned Ludd. Ned had been a folk character for years. In one version after being whipped by his master, he smashed two knitting frames in a rage. In more fanciful versions, he then escaped to the Sherwood forest, here he lived among the animals as their king. Some versions specifically call him 'Much Better Than Robin Hood'.

Happy Labor Day!

Today we're bringing you The First Union, as told by HBomberguy (@hbomberguy.bsky.social) and illustrated by Skutch (@skutchdraws.bsky.social) It's the dawn of the industrial revolution, and of the way many of us work...

Have you ever heard of the term "Luddite" from an elder?