Xavid

White people here in the US like to freak out about what Brazil is doing to the Amazon because they don't want to grapple with the fact that less than 1% of the tallgrass prairie the US originally had remains, and that prairie was absolutely doing as much carbon capture as the forests of the Amazon

I think the part of underwater basket weaving as a concept that pisses me off most is that the origin of it as far as I can tell was a course on the actual reed basket weaving practices of Native American societies that used submersion to soften the reeds.

The very fact that support staff can either be so misinformed as to assume the worst possible policy or so malicious as to misinform others is actually even MORE of a reason to never stop calling, assume the worst, and force them to assure they won’t stand for censorship of any shape or shade.

Crazy making that every day we wake up to more information about millions of ppl being violently slaughtered while the most powerful Empire in the world openly shifts to dictatorial fascism & also there is LITERAL SMOKE FROM THE WORLD BURNING filling the sky & we still have to answer emails

Save SEPTA! | Home SEPTA is facing a historic funding crisis that will result in the end of the system as we know it!

gutting septa is gonna singlehandedly devestate philadelphia and i cannot believe those bastards in harrisburg think its a good idea

please write in to tell them how awful this is:
savesepta.com

Trump’s Washington police takeover echoes history of racist narratives about urban crime - The Boston Globe The president's rhetoric echoed that used by conservative politicians going back decades who have denounced American cities, especially those with majority non-white populations, as lawless or crime-r...

credit where it's due, i would not have expected the globe (via the AP) to be this clear in their writing, never mind the actual headline.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/12/n...

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Challenging dimorphic binaries

Hi Itch, author of the original article here. Thanks for ignoring my repeated requests to comment, and then coming out of the woodwork days later to claim that my article - which verified each game's indexing status independently - is 'full of misinformation.'

You're full of it. (thread)

not to be twee but i don't think the planet is doomed or that palestine can't be liberated or that ai will cause an inevitable rot in human creativity or that fascism will destroy us all. i might die tomorrow and the movements i'm a part of will work and move forward. until then, gotta keep it up

it's really annoying and it goes against most common thought circulating right now but there's no inherent virtue or art in suffering. you're not gonna equalize things through ritualized self-torment, you've gotta actually put good out there and to do that you need to care for yourself first

A version of what I say every time I go to the vendor room at a software conference, which is that everybody wants to sell me answers, but what I want to buy is the ability to ask better questions.

AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study Artificial intelligence, touted for its potential to transform medicine, led to some doctors losing skills after just a few months in a new study.

“The AI in the study probably prompted doctors to become over-reliant on its recommendations, ‘leading to clinicians becoming less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance,’ the scientists said in the paper.”

We're not in theoretical "they could come after sfw queer content LATER" territory anymore. It is being used to come after sfw queer content NOW.

Spread this around, send the article to any and every news outlet/content creator you can think of. The alarms need to be sounded

And KEEP CALLING

The fact that some people have had allergic or other reactions that preclude them from getting a specific vaccine is not an argument for that vaccine being dangerous. It's an argument for the rest of us to get vaccinated so that herd immunity protects the people who aren't able to get that vaccine.

More and more people reporting today that Stripe - the payment processor that Itch said were putting the most pressure on them - now have staff actively confirming that yes, they are censoring LGBT content, adult or otherwise. That this is official company policy.

This seems kinda significant.

Trump’s War on Measurement Means Losing Data on Drug Use, Maternal Mortality, Climate Change and More By slashing teams that gather critical data, the administration has left the federal government with no way of understanding if policies are working — and created a black hole of information whose…

In agency after agency, the U.S. government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of policies.

(Published April)

now i'm no scholar but i suspect there may be some truth to the assertion that lesbians are treated as inherently sexualised

Exploring queer analog games with Edmond Chang Why reaching beyond representation is critical for tabletop’s cultural future.

"The most important thing about queer games, be they digital and or analog ... is that it's being produced by queer people, or by people of color, with particular kinds of experiences."

A conversation with @edmondchang.bsky.social about researching the wonderful ambivalence inside queer games.

Also? talk to a homeless person you freaks. My neighbor is on the street and his wife has fucking cancer. My friend has been raped and gets all her shit stolen like once a week and people treat her like dirt for asking for a dollar. How does your soul get so rotted that you think THEY’RE the problem

I think about the Baltimore uprising every single day. I don’t think it’s talked about enough. The way it was suppressed (national guard, curfews) absolutely shattered my view of the world then (I was like 19) and seeing the same tactics being implemented at scale by our nazi govt makes me so sick.

But this experience (as well as my experiences with various flavors of LARP) does make me feel like there's a lot of space for quality narrative ttrpgs with relatively scripted scenarios that I haven't really seen people explore much in English-first games.

But we did the example scenario in the Kedamono Opera book and it worked really well despite being basically linear with some options. I think this is partially a culture thing, Japanese TRPGs seem more scenario-focused than non-dungeon English-language indie ttrpgs in my experience.

Another thing re: Kedamono Opera is I haven't seen a lot of canned one-shot scenarios for other narrative ttrpgs. Many narrative games, even those designed for one-shot stories like Lady Blackbird, tend to focus on improvisation and flexibility to go in different directions and discourage planning.

(P.S. This is also giving me a fun idea for my thief game: to have planning scenes mainly so you can say something you intend to do and thus jinx it such that that will go wrong somehow. ^_^)

Old and busted: the grail is the simple cup of a carpenter.
New hotness: the grail is made out of primordial shark teeth.

You should definitely check out Kedamono Opera if you haven't already!

And to conclude:

I like both approaches, but the specificity of portents combined with a set scenario structure letting us jump quickly from scene to scene kept the session moving and helped us cut to the action, a different feel from a more open-ended author-stance-planning game.

I think the way that portents either come from character or from the scenario you're playing let them be very focused and specific, which is a very different vibe from Chuubo's quests (which often have pretty open-ended or symbolism-to-interpret beats).

The core of it is portents, narrative beats you have to hit before the end of the story. The closest comparison point is quest flavor and major goals from Chuubo's and other @jennamoran.bsky.social games, but it felt a bit different in practice in interesting ways.

Kedamono Opera Kedamono Opera is a dark fairytale roleplaying game where players take on the roles of powerful, soul-hungry monsters known as kedamono, deciding whether to aid or prey upon desperate humans who seek ...

Played Kedamono Opera (lionwingpublishing.com/collections/...) and had a blast! It seemed cool from reading it but I wasn't sure how it'd be in play. But playing it was one of my best narrative ttrpg experiences I've had, so much building on each others' ideas and just a really unique premise.