Ponydora's place

If your boss could, they would work you to death and dump your body behind your workplace without the police caring. If they cannot do this to you right now, that is historically contingent - they used to be able to do this to you, they currently can do this to other people, and in the future they will likely be able to do this to you again. The only thing that has ever prevented them from doing so is worker organisation and violent resistance against violence. You are livestock to the ruling class. Never trick yourself into thinking that these people will not slaughter you as soon as it benefits them, and do not avert your eyes from the slaughter now.

2024 is a terrible year to be a henchman. The word "minion" is barely usable and you can't even say "goon" anymore.

I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."

That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.

Saw a post about the sesamarot and wanted to share my favorite reading

The guy asked, the cards gave the most direct answer possible.

The cards responded with a solution the asker was capable of understanding. Sesamerot believes in accessible learning.

I think my favourite feedback I have every recieved on a character pitch wasL "You cannot play a Rokea because this game is set in rural Colorado" "You still cannot play a Rokea even if another PC is playing an aquarium owner."

you know what? I'm nailing my colours to the mast:

The default rpg that's used as a yardstick, in my view, is not D&D. It's Vampire The Masquerade 20th Aniversary Edition.

It has everything: Action! Melodrama! Politics! Intrigue! Horror! Romance! Bleak Social Realism!

Still want a fantasy game with swords and dragons? We got that, it's called Dark Ages Vampire!

When pitching me a game, the big hurdle you need to overcome is "why am I not running this in Vampire?" Call of Cthulhu? Vampire has plenty of cosmic-horror tentacle monster cults, just throw a hidden baali cell into your setting. D&D? Play a dark ages game and all be members of a vampiric order. Monsterhearts? That's just standard Camarilla Toreador behaviour! Paranoia? The prince is a malkavian, have fun. Rolemaster? That's just dark ages again, and trust me our mechanics are fiddly and pedantic too.

Being picky and don't want to play a vampire? No problem, there's a splat-book for playing as regular mortals, who may or may not have psychic powers.

Seriously, Vampire: The Masquerade has so much range as a game. Even more if you throw in bits of other WoD gamelines or elements from v5. Mage even has sci-fi space explorers fighting tentacle monsters on the surface of jupiter and I am not joking.

This is not a bit or a funny joke. I genuinely, 100% believe that Vampire is a better Default Game that can Do Everything than D&D and its imitators.

Since you brought up Traveller in an earlier post, now I'm curious how to do Traveller in Vampire

There's a few approaches. Now, since our setting is vampire-urban-fantasy rather than space opera, instead of a spaceship, our PCs have some other mode of transport.

Remember, cities are where vampires live, and the countryside between them is dangerous for a variety of reasons. Further, communication between cities is extremely limited, as business can't be easily conducted by electronic means (phone, email, etc) for risk of hunter organisations - some of which are embedded in government intelligence agencies - discovering you.

So. Communication between cities is done by sending actual messengers through the dangerous territory between them. A vampire who can travel between cities more-or-less safely on a regular basis has a unique skillset, that various princes and other powerful vampires will need to call on.

So instead of space-truckers carrying cargo (spice, technology, etc) between planets through deep space, you're vampire-truckers carrying cargo (secret messages, torpid elders, blood dolls) between domains through the dangerous wilderness. You can do the standard Traveller 'planet of the week' set-up when the vampires visit a new domain, and instead of gribbly aliens, there's gribbly sabbat monsters, werewolves, hunters or Wierder Shit instead.

It's actually not that difficult a translation, so long as you don't insist on being Literally In Space.

If you do want to be Literally In Space, there's probably stuff for that in Dirty Secrets Of The Black Hand, or else you just branch out to Mage.

The much sillier option is to go with the suggestion in the back of Clanbook: Lasombra and have rival packs of Lasombra of various affiliations charging around the atlantic doing abyss-mysticism-powered swashbuckling adventures to each other in stolen nuclear submarines.

Like I cannot stress enough that "Radioactive abyssal vampire submarine pirate" is a character type that official VtM books have suggested you might like to play.

This is a canon thing that happens in the VtM setting, I can only assume because white wolf used the money they saved on editors to buy mountains of cocaine.

Lets not forget that time they did an official crossover with Cyberpunk 2020! Vampire does have it all

fucking hell they did what now

"Official" is doing some heavy lifting there. "World of Future Darkness" was a series of articles in White Wolf's magazine by staff writer Deirdre Brooks about crossing over the two games, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a collab between White Wolf and R Talsorian

JESUS?? 

JESUS????

i had no idea they were so frickin huge

I love them so much because they’re about as sharp as a baseball and their anatomy is ridiculous to the point of them literally being classified as plankton for years because they just sort of get blown around by the ocean and look confused, but because they lay more eggs than ANY OTHER VERTEBRATE IN EXISTENCE, evolution can’t stop them

Why is no big predator coming and gnawing on them?

Their biggest defense is that they’re massive and have super tough skin, but they do get hunted by sharks or sea lions sometimes and they just sort of float there like ‘oh bother’ as it happens

Even funnier, because they eat nothing but jellyfish they’re really low in nutritional value anyway, so they basically survive by being not worth eating because they’re like a big floating rice cracker wrapped in leather.

So basically the only reason natural selection hasn’t taken care if them is because they are the most useless fish

yes, they’ve perfected uselessness to the point of being unstoppable

a true inspiration

Evolution didn’t care about fittest or best, it cares about the CARE MINIMUM.

Which is a being a giant leather rice cake.

AUTO REBLOG OF PACIFIC SUNFISH. MOTHER NATURE AT HER MOST WHIMSICAL. THE FARTHEST YOU GET FROM FISH DESIGN AND STILL CALL IT A FISH. AKA FLOATING CARDBOARD IN FISH FORM.

They aren’t useless, you monsters! The fact that they eat so many jellyfish is their exact ecological purpose. They are a key part of controlling jellyfish blooms. Sunfish keep jellyfish from taking up all the available space

All hail these jellyfish vacuums who make sure the other delicate creatures of the deep are not accidentally murdered by the jellyfish

Sea Roomba, you say?

After being in Japan for one of the Jellyfish blooms these giant floating rice cakes might be in my top three favorite fish now since they eat the damn things.

just so you understand how important it is for things to eat jellyfish, this is what jellyfish “blooms” look like

if anything we wish sunfish were twice as big. We used to think almost nothing eats jellyfish, but thank goodness we’re finding several other creatures snack on them, but very few specialize in them as much as sunfish do

This is the level of hyperanalystic bullshit I live for

not so fast, in the review of gusteau’s anton ego compares gusteau to chef boyardee or hector boiardi with a tone implying that boyardee is dead and in history

given that gusteau died shortly after this and the will takes 2 years after death

assuming that ego’s review was the same year that boiardi died then the absolute EARLIEST the movie can take place is 1987

and about the incredibles, when looking for the scene with the newspaper i stumbled across this

a headline from 2002, and given that lawsuits generally take a while and september to december is really quick for the banning of supers so let’s say they were banned in mid 2003, at the EARLIEST incredibles can take place in 2018, with ratatouille taking place sometime in between 2003 and 2018

assuming that was a mistake, thunderhead died november 15 1958, a date where superheroes would’ve been illegal if incredibles 1 took place in 1962

and adding onto the impossibility of the date being 1962 his death is included in the shutdown reports of the national supers agency

so the year in which the movies take place is impossible to find because the staff of the incredibles couldn’t chose a date and commit to it

I take it back

This is the level of hyperanalystic bullshit I live for

IS NO ONE GONNA MENTION THAT THUNDERHEAD IS GAY?!?!

OMG OMG OMG

“loves kids, adopted single father of 5 children, raising them with help of his roommate, Scott” 

oh my god, they were roommates

That’s not how slurs work but not like genocide supporters give a shit.

this is almost entirely due to racist losers falsely reporting and brigading streamers like Hasan and frogan btw. whatever you may think of them individually, this is the result of a weeks long campaign to get rid of prominent pro-Palestinian voices on the platform, especially Arab and Muslim streamers. it's not an accident that both creators have been called antisemitic terrorist supporters, while right-wing and far-right streamers that actually do promote antisemitic tropes and conspiracies are facing zero backlash. it's just racism and Islamophobia being dressed up as concerns about antisemitism.

do you ever start writing a comment on the internet and then think “oh what the fuck am i going on about” and delete it

Mr. Business and The Heavy have claimed the role of Luigi's giant goth girlfriends.

sorry i had toooooo draw them

but not like you do i fear

How does superglue REFUSE to come out of the tube when you're actively trying to get some out, but as soon as you give up and put it down, the damn thing decides it's time to do world's best pineapple-with-a-werewolf-boyfriend -impression?

This website makes it impossible to communicate with normal people.

I don't think you understand how much self-control it takes not to reply to literally every post about a hypothetical scenario involving dragons with this image: