I love how so much of the wizards’s repertoire in D&D implies something awful.
Like, there’s an 8th level spell where you cut out a chunk of somebody’s living flesh and use it to spend the next several months growing a bottled clone that’s bound to their soul, so if they ever die, the soul will transfer to the clone.
This is a standard, core-book piece of wizardry that literally any player’s wizard can choose to learn when they reach the appropriate level.
This is a game that has very specific built-in assumptions about What Wizards Are Like, is what I mean to say.
Tags:
#what do you mean ”awful” #is there some horrible catch not stated in this post? #because as stated that sounds *great* and I *want* one #*fuck* clinging-to-life-with-a-mere-single-body #D&D #death tw #transhumanism #and I suppose I’ll follow OP’s lead by tagging it #body horror
I do seem to have a lot of dreams where the dream is a book as well as a sequence of lived events, and I’m reading it at the same time or faster than I’m experiencing it. Do other people have this as a recurring dream feature?
Yes. Not just books: I once started a post with “So in my dream this morning I was playing a video game (it might have been a VR game, but the way my dreams work all media is VR media, so I’m not sure if it was *meant* to be VR)”
Occasionally I’ll still get the textual layer as well, but often it just goes full immersion with “book” as an abstract framing device.
Tags:
#dreams #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog
Their next performance is an extended monologue where they just wildly misunderstand the role and structure of the Supreme Court; at one point they seem to be under the impression that Chief Justice John Roberts is a werewolf.
For an encore they deliver a lecture about the alleged political career of Ludwig van Beethoven, who they appear to regard as one of America’s Founding Fathers, in spite of his having been six years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed.
(Partway through, the lecture drifts into a rant about the various historical inaccuracies of the stage musical Hamilton. The harshest condemnation is reserved for playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda’s decision to depict the title character’s infidelity as the turning point of his career, entirely omitting the far greater scandal that emerged when it was revealed that Hamilton had received uncredited lyrical assistance from Beethoven in his Congressional rap battles.)
(This is an ask meme where I try to describe a franchise I’ve never seen based on “dashboard osmosis,” i.e. what I’ve learned of it from fandom.)
It’s not too obscure, my dash used to be really into BBC Merlin!
I’m a big Arthuriana fan nerd so I know who the characters are, or who they’re meant to be.
BBC Merlin is a television show about “what would happen if Merlin and Arthur were the same age, and Merlin kind of pined for Arthur in a one-sided and Extra Gay way, in a land where magic exists but is outlawed. Also all the weird incesty dark stuff is sanded over.”
The result is Merlin, as a skinny Welsh kid with enormous ears and a red bandana. A large dragon and his cranky professor are insistent that he be friends with Arthur, because they love jock/nerd friendships.
Arthur’s father, played by Anthony Stewart Head, is outraged about everything. He is also alive. This is okay because all of Arthuriana is fan fiction anyway. I assume his name is Uther, because that’s what Arthur’s father is named in canon, but he might be called Gaius.
I feel like there is definitely a “gaius,” but that might be because Gaius Baltar is a character, or because ASH also played a guy called Giles. I have seen 6 episodes of Buffy and 1 of Battlestar. So I would know. Maybe the Dragon is called Gaius. Anyway, Merlin shakes his fist at the sky a lot, shouting “GAIUS!” , and I don’t think he’s yelling at another franchise.
Magic is illegal. The penalty is probably death. But Merlin is magic. He gets around this by doing lots of magic, and – this is the strange part – nobody ever notices.
Guinevere, or Gwen, is played by the Most Beautiful Girl In the World, but I don’t know if she actually does anything related to the Great Tragic Romance Plot; I think she may just hang out in a smithy, vaguely banging pans together and being sensible. It’s smart of her to stay out of it.
Morgan appears to be a cousin, rather than a sister, and apart from looking fabulous in the distance, she does not appear to menace Arthur. She does magic too but is marginally capable of actually keeping it a secret. I don’t think a Mordred ever happens but I’m okay with that. If there is a Mordred he’s probably a kitten that Arthur found.
The other knights might be around, but I don’t think they do much except go “oooh!” And “aaaah!” In unison when something happens. This is definitely not a Round Table show, the subject of the show is the eponymous Merlin and his pining, so there don’t appear to be any questing beasts or mysterious maidens imprisoned in bowers, or random digressions into the state of the ruling family in Nubia, or strange backwater incest plots, or even Mads Mikkelsen in a fur coat for no reason. So that’s kind of refreshing, although I do think the ensemble nature of Arthuriana is part of its charm, much like how the world of Harry Potter is larger than the central character. I also think the “king who invents chivalry and unites England” plot doesn’t happen.This is Arthuriana Lite, a college-AU.
“Now elodie,” you may say, “there’s like 15 seasons of this show. where is the drama and conflict, if there are no weird quests or politics and no incest?”
Ahh, you see, this is a romantic comedy show. The drama and conflict comes from Merlin, who is Gay AF, trying to win his prospective boyfriend’s father over. Arthur is oblivious and does not know he’s being courted. Uther is outraged and constantly being attacked by falling chandeliers or strange demands from the peasantry, all of which put him in a worse mood. Merlin does magic to rescue or impress Uther, then remembers that magic is illegal, so he panics and pretends it was a sudden gust of wind or an invisible badger or ergot-induced hysteria. Uther eyes him suspiciously and still doesn’t like him. Merlin tries even more desperately for Uther’s approval, and then goes to Puzzlewood and cries on a dragon about it.
“Have you told Arthur that you value his friendship yet,” the dragon says.
“Why would I do that?” Merlin says.
Then he looks sad, in the rain, with his enormous ears.
Arthur is beautiful, but utterly oblivious.
Tags:
#BBC Merlin #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #unreality cw?
As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.
“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”
That’s ridiculous. In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters. Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level.
In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:
1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”
2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.
3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.
4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)
The Vulcans in Starfleet (and Data), of course, remain baffled by this human insistence that “replicator food isn’t as good as ‘real’ food”, as it defies all known forms of logic.
Hmm. This is a fair point. It occurs to me that I once met a Texan who commented that the chili in a restaurant I worked at was not as good as what they made in Texas, and when I pointed out that the cook was a Texan and the chili was his personal recipe, for which he had won awards in Texas, just said “Doesn’t matter. Wasn’t made in Texas.”
I gotta be honest, Replicator technology is one of the things I am SUPREMELY jealous of, and I’m… okay, I’m not a great cook, but I can cook and there are several dishes I do very well. I think if I had access to the technology I would cook a lot less, though, and I would for sure use replicated ingredients.
« Nonsense can be made to make sense by supposing some alternative context for it. At the start of his revolutionary work Syntactic Structures (1957), Noam Chomsky cooked up a nonsense sentence in order to explain what he saw as the fundamental difference between a meaningful sentence and a grammatical one. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was proposed as a fully grammatical sentence that had no possible meaning at all.
Within a few months, witty students devised ways of proving Chomsky wrong, and at Stanford they were soon running competitions for texts in which “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” would be not just a grammatical sentence, but a meaningful expression as well. Here’s one of the prize-winning entries:
It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously. »
— David Bellos, Translation and the Meaning of Everything
The Runalongs are rare in worlds without fast transportation. It seems they are brought into being when someone, bored by a journey, looks out to watch the countryside go by. They daydream of a creature that follows their path (guarding? Or hunting?) and suddenly, without fanfare, it appears.
Runalongs have little in the way of ecology, but they are known to eat other dreams. Sometimes if the one who called them is particularly lonely or afraid they will get closer and even speak in humming voices without opening their mouths. But the second you stop moving, the creatures turn and vanish behind themselves, disappearing to wherever fantasies come from.
A Runalong can also have other forms; a humanoid figure (without distinct features) is common, and these may also ride things that are supposed to be horses. If only we were better at imagining, then they might not look so terrifying.
Please, I’m nearly 30 and I still have Runalongs join me on long, boring car journeys. They must be able to sense people who are in need of their presence, for company, for entertainment, or are just so used to them being there.
when you put your hand palm down out the window and it jumps and sways in the speed, the pressure you feel, not quite solid but not quite air is the ghostly backs of the runalongs arching up for a pat.
The one I remember from when I was young used to run ahead of the car on long car trips at night, in that sort of V-shaped gap where the pools of light from the headlamps start diverging.
The impression I had was that it was something like a fox.
Tags:
#art #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #my childhood #(Eyries) #(aliens on rollerblades)
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