tumblr please stop telling me to wd40 a mouse

Good fishing

There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...

Wolf Guard Terminator

by Frost Llamzon

Santiago Caruso (Argentine, b. 1982, Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina) - Alta Cocina (Haute Cuisine) from El Huésped Y Otros Relatos Siniestros (The Guest and Other Sinister Tales) by Mexican author Amparo Dávila (Mexican, 1928-2020, b. Pinos, Zacatecas, Mexico, d. Zacatecas, Mexico), Paintings: Watercolor

Random Comic Book Thought

Guys guys guys!

Y'gotta listen! Fascinating news!

So, my local library has been closed for renovations for about a month now, and is expected to be so for up to a year. I therefore have been making use of the library in the neighboring town (which thanks to suburban sprawl is actually closer to my house than our usual library is).

Anyways, I am slowly exploring the place and found the part of their non-fiction section where they keep the comic-related books. And guys.

They have a copy of Seduction of the Innocent!

So tempted to give it a look.

Be aware that it is sitting on a throne of lies.

Oh, I am WELL aware, although my understanding is that people are a tad unfair to Dr. Wertham; he was Wrong, and massaged the data something fierce, but by all accounts he wasn't some "Think Of The Children" pearl-clutcher, he was in the metaphorical trenches doing real work to help damaged kids, about whom he was genuinely concerned, and trying to help. It's just that he was overwhelmed by the tides of misery and went clutching for anything that looked like a raft.

And even then, he went on record as saying that he wasn't calling for censorship, nor was he against comic books per se (one of his last works was arguing for the educational value of fanzines!), he just thought that most of what was on the stands being sold to children was inappropriate for children, and TBH they really shouldn't have been selling some of the stuff in the crime and horror comics to kids.

Also, the man's research was cited by the plaintiffs in Brown v Board of Education.

There's a good book on the history of censorship in comics called 'The Ten-Cent Plague' by David Hajdu that I'd recommend to anyone more interested in the intricacies.

From what I recall you're broadly accurate, Wertham was far less to blame for what ended up being imposed than the people who took his dodgy research and ran with it.

Also worth mentioning that citing Brown here is a touch misleading, that research was concerned with the harmful effects of segregation and has very little to do with anything in Seduction of the Innocent.

d:os2 is so funny because you just kinda assume you'll figure out what to do by the end, and then it turns out it's a little more complicated than that, and then you probably aren't entirely sure what to do actually

step aside lemme take a crack at it [looks at the problem and immediately sucks air through my teeth for like two minutes]

i'm fucking choking

I feel like this tweet matches up well with this one

EPITAPHS FROM THE ABYSS #7

Cover art by Lee Bermejo

Gonna make this post as many times as it takes, but a lot of "funny" D&D "humor" just has the exact same vibes as those really unfunny "what if you actually had to use the right stick to look around in real life?" gamer webcomics, often worse

In general I'm not a fan of many aspects of tabletop RPG "fandom." The whole dice collecting thing, calling them "math rocks." Same reason I would never call myself a "gamer" in spite of loving video games and loving to talk about them. I don't want to be part of the fandom, I wanna be one of the annoying blowhards who thinks too hard about this shit.

Posting a clip from a move with a caption like "This is literally what rolling a natural 20 on Deception looks like 🤣" it looks nothing like that. First of all, there are no dice in that video, second of all if you actually think Leverage runs on the same system as D&D you leave me no choice but to kill you,

Actually, let me articulate this better:

A lot of "funny" D&D stories boil down to someone rolling a high number and then the DM and the rest of the group extrapolating a silly improv bit completely divorced from the rules based on that single roll. Which I guess is basically a lot of D&D play culture in a nutshell (everyone laughs and high-fives me for this cool and fun observation)

But like, RPGs often have multiple interconnected systems which when they come into contact can produce unpredictable interactions which can often be really funny! The former type of humor is rarely an expression of RPGs in any way, it's using an RPG as a springboard to do a completely unrelated bit, but the way RPG systems sometimes produce inherently funny results requires interacting with their systems deeply.

Star Wars clone OCs are one of the funniest intersections of the “built-in sona-friendly OC framework” phenomenon with the not-necessarily-fully-examined fucked up circumstances of the source text. Here’s my twee individualized helot from the genetically engineered slave army. Here are his hobbies

guy sitting in front of me in class was vandalizing wikipedia and i kept reverting his edits as soon as he made them and he couldn't figure out why it was happening

absolutely

this is literally the most terrifying popup ive ever gotten in webkinz i didnt even do anythING

I'm so glad the word "twee" exists. I really needed a way to say "cute (derogatory)"