late to the party

i think a lot of liberals need to confront the fact that they don’t actually believe everyone should have basic human rights. a homeless person could call me every slur under the sun and i would still want them to have housing, food, etc. the belief that everyone is entitled to basic human rights should not hinge on whether you “like” someone or not. at that point the entire ideology crumbles.

A lot of people do not have an ideology so much as that they have learned which talking points they need to agree with and espouse to fit in socially. They cannot extrapolate from those talking points to the ethic behind them because they have not thought deeply about why the people around them value anti-racism, welfare, privacy, equal opportunity, etc. A lot of people repeat planks of a political platform as if they are nothing more than team slogans.

i think a lot of liberals need to confront the fact that they don’t actually believe everyone should have basic human rights. a homeless person could call me every slur under the sun and i would still want them to have housing, food, etc. the belief that everyone is entitled to basic human rights should not hinge on whether you “like” someone or not. at that point the entire ideology crumbles.

Slowly, khipus are being deciphered. Fascinating way of keeping count and record.

While the Onion buying InfoWars is indeed extremely funny, very few of the posts I've seen commenting on the sale have mentioned that the families of the Sandy Hook victims apparently agreed to voluntarily reduce their lawsuit payout as part of a deal to ensure that the Onion would acquire InfoWars wholesale, rather than having the company broken up and auctioned off piecemeal, as the latter course could potentially have allowed some of those pieces to end up back in the hands of Alex Jones' cronies.

Like, yes, it is in fact very funny that InfoWars is now a wholly own subsidiary of Clickhole, but the real props go out to the Sandy Hook families who saw the opportunity and willingly gave up the additional millions of dollars that could have been realised by stripping InfoWars for parts in order to make that happen.

The families have been saying the whole time it isn't about the money - it was about stopping Jones. And this is the most effective way to stop Jones.

look I know it’s supposed to be a joke but that “irradiated wasteland” is the unceded homeland of the Paiute and Shoshone peoples and consists of fragile Mojave and Great Basin desert ecosystems that are actively being exploited and destroyed by mining interests who utilize the perception of desert as wasteland to justify their destruction of indigenous lands and communities. the joke's not funny. fuck off with this.

also, as to the "irridiated" part of this - here's an article by High Country News on cancer clusters in indigenous communities in the Southwest resulting from nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site (itself located on the ancestral homeland of the Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute) and the US government's continuing failure to compensate affected families. it's a horrific crime that the US government committed against its own citizens and the joke's not fucking funny.

wasn’t expecting this to take off but shoutout to the Australians in the notes - getting fed up with this kind of shitty rhetoric about desert landscapes and erasure of the indigenous peoples that have lived in them for millennia is Australian-Southwestern US solidarity

https://nuclearprinceton.princeton.edu/western-shoshone

"The Western Shoshone tribal nation has faced numerous ongoing assaults against their lands and bodies. Unceded Western Shoshone lands, Newe Sogobia, encompasses 60 million acres spanning from from the Mojave desert in California all the way to southern Idaho through eastern Nevada [1]. The 1840s California gold rush brought large numbers of settlers to Newe Sogobia. Settlers brought violence, federal troops, overgrazing, water scarcity, deforestation, and game depletion. The 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty rightfully acknowledged Western Shoshone ownership of the land. However it permitted non-Natives resource extraction with royalties paid to the Western Shoshone [1] . Unsurprisingly, the United States has failed to uphold this treaty. In the early 1900s federal departments began referring to Newe Sogobia as “public lands” without any legal grounding. In 1979 the US government presented the Western Shoshone with a $26 million settlement for Newe Sogobia. The Western Shoshone rejected the offer.[2] To this day, the Department of Interior has been working to coerce the Western Shoshone into signing.

Despite the fact that Newe Sogobia remains unceded, the US government claims jurisdiction over 80-90 percent of the lands. Western Shoshone have received no royalties despite extensive resource extraction and exploitation of Newe Sogobia. These lands are one of the largest gold-producing areas in the worlds and hold great potential for geothermal energy production [1] . In addition, the Department of Defense has conducted extensive nuclear weapons testing on Newe Sogobia and has long advocated for permanent nuclear waste storage in Yucca Mountain."

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/8/29/a-message-from-the-most-bombed-nation-on-earth

"Our country is approximately 40,000 square miles (25.6 million acres), from just west of Las Vegas, Nevada all the way to the Snake River in Idaho, including a 350-mile (563km) wide strip in the Great Basin. There are approximately 25,000 to 30,000 Shoshone lineal descendants but the United States places the number much lower based on blood quantum (a percentage of ancestry).

We have been on this land for at least 10,000 years.

...

On January 27, 1951, the first nuclear test took place on our land, when a one-kilotonne bomb was dropped from a plane flying over the site.

Over the next 40 years, it became the premier testing location for American nuclear weapons. Approximately 928 nuclear tests took place on the Shoshone territory – 100 in the atmosphere and more than 800 underground."

I'm absolutely stoked by the entirely-speculative but not-unrealistic idea of Dimension 20 moving to primarily Kids on Bikes variants and Critical Role moving to primarily Daggerheart

Further evidence: D20's Time Quangle feels like a last hurrah of Intrepid Heroes 5e campaigns, and I get the same vibe from CR's recently announced mix-and-match live shows. Also, among those live shows was the announcement of a Daggerheart session set in Exandria...

Additional disclaimer because I can't help myself: by "last hurrah" I certainly don't mean to say I think neither company will ever touch 5e again. But I do think it's not going to continue to be their go-to system.

‘How could Brennen forget fire immunity’ ‘How does Brennen forget they have counterspell’ ‘How did he fall for that trap it was SO obvious’

Anyone who has DM’d EVER knows the pain, I forget the names of my OWN NPC’s the second after I name them, you think I know which spells my players have? I don’t even know the spells of the main NPC that is with my party right now (and has been for MULTIPLE SESSIONS)

It’s obvious for players/people watching cause they only see the tip of the iceberg that the DM needs to know

Though also, this is true for me and I'm 100% certain it's true for Brennan too: it is so, so much fun as a DM to pretend to be surprised by a move that I absolutely knew you were going to do

Want to play Never Stop Blowing Up at home? You can now download PDFs of the game system from the Dropout Store!

Want to play Never Stop Blowing Up at home? You can now download PDFs of the game system from the Dropout Store!

A very useful thread on Bluesky:

(There is a lot more. Rather than give you all the images, I've copied the full text below.)

Yeah I genuinely do not buy the argument into the value of mythology as a valid form of comparanda.

Again, I wrote up some stuff about it in how pop feminism is a victim of our pattern seeking brains and I think that a lot of comparative Indo-European mythological scholarship is also a victim of this predisposed nature of how we can like... attribute patterns where there are none to be had.

Like we can establish sound changes and their correspondences by a set of constraints (or rules) that govern them. What do we have that can establish formal relationships between myths? What are there to make sure that they aren't coincidences?

Sure, you can say that gold and geld are not through the reconstruction of sound changes that go back to PIE—but how can one even be sure in the regard that people want to see patterns in things with archeological material? Or the stories that people tell?

A sky deity that can be reconstructed in the mythology of IE-speaking people? Yep, must be a shared ancestor and not some kind of pattern that we independently invented like 30 different times.

Again I don't know how people can take this seriously except for works that project one's ideologies into the past.

Yeah I'm of the opinion that the most we can do with linguistic data is infer the mays and may nots of the culture but we cannot really say for sure what they were like.

From linguistic evidence we can infer that the shared ancestor of the Evenki and Even had reindeer pastoralism because they have words that trace back to Proto-Ewenic; however, we can't really say for sure for shared immaterial cultural traditions and such.

Like, of course the word for 'headhunting' can go back to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, and can infer the existence of headhunting at least. but like… hypothesizing in which how they headhunted through comparative cultural data seems to be very odd to say the least; as shared innovations can just be parallel or just… independent formed from one another. It's also to note that culture is not driven by unconscious thought and that the drift itself is not… quantifiable by any means that I've read.

Like this is what gets me when people cite stuff like "Oh the Pleiades myth is so old that Aboriginal Australians and Greeks share this story" but like—personification of celestial bodies is so common, and the deification of the Pleiades is shared between other cultures like Japan for example (hence, Subaru)

Like, it's hard to say for sure what is what—like you can make connections for sure, but it's kinda hard to infer whether these are substratal influences, coincidence, or shared ancestors.

I've never been particularly interested in this aspect of IE studies myself, but from what I can tell of the studies in this area that try to establish a common origin with some rigor, they rely not on the general similarity of the ideas or elements of the story, but how the elements of the story fit within the culture generally, if anything stands out, and particular details and/or specific actions (e.g. not that there is an underworld guarded by animal guard(s), but instead that the animal is a dog with many eyes; not that there are three hunters pursuing an animal, but that the second hunter carries a cooking pot) – even more though, they (should) try establishing shared linguistic components, which can mean names of the same origin, archaic morphology or syntactic structures, similar (metaphorical) use of specific words (especially as they deviate from their expected use), identical stylistic features and so on (in appx. order of significance). Once you go beyond a single language family, the thing that remains are syntactic structures (depending on the characteristics of the language families involved, of course), metaphorical use of words, stylistic features and story details (the latter not really linguistically relevant, as mentioned), so there's automatically fewer things you can operate with and the conclusions must necessarily be more tentative.

But I think there's one other thing that should be pointed out: the default position with regards to whether certain myths are related is "we don't know." Both shared origin and independent innovation are non-trivial claims, and there's always the possibility of borrowing. Of these the shared origin one definitely requires a higher threshold of confidence, but if it cannot be demonstrated, that doesn't automatically make the myths independent innovations – that has to be substantiated as well, plus there's always the possibility of borrowing as mentioned.

And in particular in a situation where there is evidence that speakers of X, Y and Z were once part of a single community of speakers, then if they share a story that has similar elements, both the independent innovation and borrowing options seem to be even more non-trivial, i.e. require even more substantiating for one or the other option – an independent innovation of X vs. something demonstrably shared by Y and Z for example requires a break in tradition with subsequent unrelated introduction of the same idea; and it seems to me that something that is trivially introduced is similarly trivially maintained.

Attempts at a reconstruction will always be an imperfect approximation of a reality we have no access to and things can happen in such a way that by their very nature we will never be able to tell how exactly they happened. This is why when e.g. you cannot demonstrate that two myths share a common origin that means just that – it cannot be demonstrated. In reality they might well share an origin, yet all the relevant details and linguistic elements have been replaced, stripped away etc. to the point where all we can say is we don't know. To take independent innovation as the automatic default option would be wrong too, then. We might of course say that given all the available information it is equally or even more likely to be an independent innovation or a borrowing and that would be methodologically sound and even true! But note crucially "given all the available information," "likely," "or."

official linguistics post

The onion buying Infowars is the best possible scenario. They actually understand how to report on alex, and they'll know what to do with his assets.

And remember: Alex does not get a dime from the sale. Everything goes to paying the Sandy Hook victim families.

gamestore tgirl is so holy. gamestore tgirl is the proof that we can be happy just as we are. gamestore tgirl does not forgo her boyish interests for boring ones we are expected to enjoy to Affirm our Womanhood. gamestore tgirl does not cast her tyrannid army away for makeup tutorials watched in bed from a stickerless macbook. gamestore tgirl does not abandon her old friends, as long as they treat her right and bring extra dice. gamestore tgirl forgives their transgressions, the ways in which they are bad, the ways in which she is bad too. gamestore tgirl is a beacon of hope. gamestore tgirl blazes ways for more of us simply by existing in a space of enjoyment. gamestore tgirl i love you forever. gamestore tgirl i owe you my life.

this post is dedicated to the gamestore tgirl i saw at the mtg war of the spark pre release in 2019. i cant remember what you looked like but i know you were beautiful. gorgeous tranny voice that i heard across the room. when i saw you my vision went tunnelled and i had just such a beautiful moment of realization. this was in my "wearing my gfs panties every day but still cis tho" era and seeing you come in, be greeted by a crowd of friends who knew your name and were excited by your presence, gave me so much hope. hope that i too could be happy and trans. that i too could be someones gamestore tgirl. the next morning i bought my first girl clothes that were really mine. i wish i caught your name. i hope you're well forever.

having brain rot about your own TTRPG character is so embarrassing. yes i love her and i think about her all day and i’ll take any excuse to talk about her. no, there’s no book or anything for you to read. she’s my emotional support rogue. she’s my fidget toy. i wish you could meet her. i made her up inside my head.

You can support me on Patreon for £1 and help me keep making art

being a certain gender doesnt make you evil. youre not automatically evil just because youre a man youre automatically evil because of the amulet