The Wizard + The Witch + The Wild One
The Children's Campaign + Arc 1 + Arc 2 + Arc 3
certified coolkid moment: finding the rotting corpse of your classmate in the woods
"You have been a bad friend to Riz Gukgak, Adaine..."
It's wild how many people took Kristen's line of questioning as her saying Tracker isn't taking her religion seriously instead of what I heard her asking which was:
How many of these people would be here if it wasn't religious Coachella?
Let Me Put Myself In Your Shoes, As A Puppet Loosely Strung-
Baron, Fabian Seacaster, & Adaine Abernant || Fantasy High: Junior Year
Free Free Palestine!
So what if Lucy frostblade wasn't possessed when she submitted to change her god but what if someone in the rat grinders is a changeling. And what if that's why Ivy wasn't surprised when she saw Lucy at the party because she assumed someone else was pretending to be her. And what if that someone is kipperlily and that's why she's such a good rogue
“spies, tongue, curse” needs to be the name of fig’s sophomore album where she takes a hard turn into a dark folksy sound with samples of a bunch of vulture screams
Some things that you should know about Grant O'Brien and Ally Beardsley's Kickstarted film The Disruptors:
Grant plays a rideshare driver who scams his clients, who ultimately sets his sights on scamming a billionaire into investing in a fake startup.
Ally plays an agoraphobic hacker.
Marc Evan Jackson plays the billionaire, in what is honestly a terrifying performance.
It's extraordinarily well-written and acted, and BEAUTIFULLY shot and edited, especially relative to the budget.
They were unable to find a distributor or get a festival to pick it up, but Dropout fans are legion! We can make this movie a sensation! Please reblog this.
You can buy or rent the whole movie here:
https://www.thedisruptorsmovie.com/?fbclid=IwAR08pC8JwpeYTs2KhI-lBeJXr08FWHMcoe4S52plPaCAbaLQQtnxx7u1GKA
listen. aging into your thirties rocks. yes your joints get a little creaky. yes you can’t sleep in a pretzel on the floor anymore after a concert or a convention. and you lose some friends. but the thing is that you sort out who your real friends are and you sort out who you really are. and you get to see your friends settling into careers they like, and adopt new dogs and cats, and you find a job you can stand, and get really good at arts and crafts, and maybe that book you loved as a kid gets a movie deal and it doesn’t suck, and you learn to like new food and bake your own bread, and you realize that the great portfolio of self harm scars you all used to curate are going white with age and not updated, and half your friends are a different gender now and so much happier and maybe you are too, and you know who you are, and that it’s a journey and not a revelation. it’s a direction you’re headed, and you’re enjoying the trip.
reaching your 30′s rocks. and i’m hearing good things about what comes next, too.
lofi study nights at Seacaster manor
seeing that they’re doing another minis auction and it’s their biggest one yet and for fantasy high so presumably gonna make bank and they’re doing it to help send aid to Palestine rather than make a profit made me weep, i truly think no other streaming service can come close to comparing to dropout
Hi! Below is an actual play mini-essay. These are written as part of a personal writing practice of thinking critically about actual play. I hope you find this reading engaging and know that all I write reflects my own interpretations rather than as an official representation/canonization of these shows.
Ragh Barkrock may be one of the most beloved NPCs in Dimension20. It would be easy for Ragh, a bloodrush player good enough to potentially play professionally, to be presented as hypermasculine. In fact, the freshmen year art for Ragh, when he was antagonist rather than beloved ally, showed him in a muscular, inverted Dorito shaped body typical of a jock.
He's, obviously, built, and his cut jaw and cheekbones only bolster that image. As Ragh comes to terms with being gay at the end of Fantasy High, his countenance changes. When we see him again, the new art reflects a chubbier, happier Ragh.
The show aligning weight gain with acceptance and happiness already works against prevailing stereotypes that use weight loss as a quick metaphor for improving yourself and being the "real you." Moreover, connecting Ragh's acceptance of his sexuality with what seems like a larger comfort in his own body is a strong indictment of hypermasculine gay culture. As Gabriel Arana writes, gay men "must reconcile their sense of masculinity with their failure to conform to its heterosexuality." Not doing so has negative mental health outcomes, as Arana points out, and contributes to a culture that devalues fat queer people (see the popular "no fats, no femmes, no Asians" that often is touted in masculine gay subculture).
All of this, I think, is why Ragh's art for Junior Year was particularly impactful for me as a fat queer person. If being a gay man (or half-Orc, in Ragh's case) means having to situate your life in relationship to failing compulsory masculinity, then it seems there is an inherent queer aspect to embracing, celebrating, and showcasing a beloved NPC in an explicitly fat and happy body.
Ragh is still strong and he is still fat. His body radiates a commitment to the power of fat bodies to exist in spaces they are often violently unwelcome in, such as gyms. Existing in gyms and sports spaces as fat people means dealing the "impossible standard that rejects nearly all of us" and upholds a diet culture rooted in impossible, Eurocentric and colonial body standards. In TTRPGS or actual plays, there is a unique opportunity to think about how bodies might exist in worlds different from ours, to imagine bodyminds as otherwise. However, as queer critics like Paul Preciado have noted, sci-fi and fantasy representations of cyborgs and other transformative bodies often lean into "fixing" disabled people or moving gender nonconforming bodies more easily towards technologies upholding a normative standard rather than questioning the standard all together.
Spyre is a world that deals with similar issues to ours, even without direct one-to-one correlations, so it, too, is a place where the narrative and artistic choices should be examined in how it helps us interpolate the world the audience resides in. From the Applebees cultish adherence to a deity-based nationalism to the various representations of parental neglect and abuse and every side story in-between, Dimension20's flagship show does not shy away from difficult realities even when recasting them through fantasy. Ragh, as a half-orc gay son of a disabled single mother, then, I see the arc his fat body goes through as meaningful and intertwined with his self-acceptance and queerness. He moves away from the toxic masculinity engineered into his blood rush team to instead pursue coalition comraderie with his friends to the point that he and his mother end up joining a communal living situation with those friends and their parents. Ragh's body expands as his family does, as his ties to community do, and to me, the gift of his fatness is the invitation to expansion that it holds out to us as viewers.
SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 22 of @worldsbeyondpod's "The Wizard The Witch and the Wild One"
I noticed another parallel to the Children's Adventure in the latest WBN episode, and I decided to put far too much effort into making it everybody else's problem.
Something so profoundly fucked up between the inverse ratio of shrinking middle class and ever increasing aggression of advertisement
i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year
This is a good thing to bring up. For example, where I live (Southern State plus a small town with less than 1000 for the population) we lost our tiny (volunteer) local library due to water damage of the building and it never recovered. I would have to go to one of the next towns over, which is at least a 20 minute drive, for which I don't have the means of going to as I am unable to drive. So, please be aware as much public libraries are nessacery and need support from the community more than ever- not everyone can get to a library unfortunately.
as a fellow Public Library Enthusiast i am begging people to consider the fact that not everywhere has an accessible public library or indeed public libraries at all. just saying “get a library card” at strangers when you have no idea about their background or their life isn’t very helpful. let them pirate in peace
As always, the Irish speak nothing but facts.
How many more innocent civilians have to be killed by Israel before you condemn that for it?
That is a genocide.
That this is a crime on all accounts.
And deserves to be punished to the full extent off the law.
“Ygraine, is our honored friend still where he was before?”
Sir Curran of the Hawthorn, inspired by Brennan’s Dungeons and Drag Queens look & visionary Aabria “the knight is Brennan” Iyengar.
I love the library
Why do people stop commenting on fics if they’re more than a week or two old? Please comment on old fics. Tell me you like my one shot from 2014. Tell me you like my old multi-chap I finished in 2016 that I spent a year writing. I will be fucking thrilled.
"No Pride for some of us without liberation for all of us." -Marsha P. Johnson
I don't live in Missouri anymore (I went to college in the state) but I saw this and had to reblog. Public libraries are so important for so many people. Students, parents, kids, the elderly, and anyone who needs a computer but can't afford one. Please please please do your part in helping.
A post I made a few days ago about the Missouri Legislature’s proposal to defund public libraries really blew up.
I’m happy to have helped spread the word about this issue as it’s not getting enough mainstream attention. But frustrated at the tone of the original post and the thought that it’s become a part of many people’s daily doomscroll.
This is bad, but there are things we all can and should do to make it better.
If you are a Missouri citizen, please go here and fill out the short form. It will use your address to contact your state senator about reinstating the full State Aid funding to Missouri’s libraries. You can also customize the message and I encourage you to do so.
If you have time and energy, consider calling your senator’s office as well. You can find out who your representatives are and find their contact information here. A short phone call letting them know you are a constituent and this issue is important to you can do a lot of good.
Ignore the naysayers who claim that contacting your representatives is a waste of time. I know people who intern in these offices and collect information on what the public contacts their representatives about. If enough people call about the same issue, it raises the profile of that issue on their agenda. It can make a difference, especially in a case like this where the mainstream media is not focusing on the story.
Please take a few minutes of your time if you are a Missourian to make your voice heard on the importance of libraries. And please reblog and spread the word even if you’re not a Missourian. With your help, maybe we won’t have to fight this fight in your homestate as well. Thank you.
Had some thoughts about the themes emerging in Neverafter so far in another post’s notes that I may as else clarify in my own.
(BBEG is Capitalism truthers beware ig, there’s a lot of me talking about why I don’t like that theory and find it reductive.)
Ok. So. I guess I’d like to start saying that I get why people enjoy a good “haha bad guy is capitalism” joke, because everyone who plays dnd hates capitalism—especially right now, considering current controversies. BUT, I find the common posts of “OMG Neverafter’s bad guy has GOT to be capitalism/Disney” very irritating because it feels less like people picking up on the clues the narrative is putting down and more hammering their own biases of what they want the series to be about into the narrative.
Like, some people keep saying the moral is that Disney sanitizing everything is bad but like… literally nothing about the setting (aside from some fairy tales Disney used appearing) suggests that. The stories are getting worse, darker, closer to their older versions. And the characters don’t want that! Non-Disney versions of the stories aren’t framed as better like you’d think a “Disney Bad” narrative would—in fact, several characters would much prefer to be in their Disney versions right now, whether or not they should be. That kinder versions of the story—which would include the Disney movies—are vanishing due to the carelessness of a select few is presented as a bad thing.
If the theme of the story was that sanitation of fairy tales is bad, don’t you think we’d start off in more “Disney” style versions of the stories? You could easily make a horror story about the dread of being trapped in a “perfect” world. But that’s not what’s happening.
One of the horrors of the Neverafter, courtesy of Cinderella’s visit, is that bad things keep happening no matter what you do. Cinderella’s mother always dies. She always becomes a servant to her Stepmother. Over and over again. Why? What is making this so?
It’s the horror of predestination, of bad things happening to you because someone has decided they should no matter what you want. It’s a much bigger and baser concept than Historic Versions vs Disney Versions, or even Characters vs Disney.
As the conversation with the Librarians and Mother Goose’s encounter with the Inkwell seem to suggest, the conflict is moreso Characters vs Authors.
The question Brennan seems to be posing through Neverafter’s world and story isn’t “Isn’t Disney So Awful?”, it’s “In a reality where storybook characters are real people, is it moral or ethical to make those characters suffer for a good story?”
Or, removed from the trappings of the setting, the question is: “Is it moral or ethical to make real people suffer to make a good thing?”
Good children, good spouses, good futures, good ideals, good communities—and, in a Capitalist society, good profits. But what is good enough to sacrifice people for? And what is “Good” at all?
This was such a funny campaign to watch. There was so much chaos and just fun little bits. I really loved it so much. Plus I love the sci-fi genre especially when it's fun and creative like this. And I think it was great that this was based on Brennan's mom's comics and universe she had built. Getting to hear little bits about the world outside of the context of their campaign really helped fill out the worlds even more.
I definitely think that Skip was one of my favorites. Him and Sundry Sidney. I loved everyone but I think their two stories I liked the most. One running away and finding himself since he lost all of that time to do so. The other redefining what she was thought to have been. Everything but turning into anything. It was so interesting watching their interactions with the NPCs that pertained to their stories.
I think my favorite scene was actually the Junkmother scene. The way Brennan portrayed this being that found beauty in the thrown side and outcasted bits and androids. Connecting with Sid on the want of bringing these thrown-out droids back into the light. And the art of her was really cool. Plus I always love when the editing has those multiple voices overlaying each other. It's such a small detail but I think that it really polishes off characters that are greater than average beings.
The sense of urgency stuck through the entire way through, mainly due to the credits but I think that really worked. It kept the story and the characters moving forward. I feel like sometimes there are lull moments, which aren't bad but depending on the campaign they may not work as well. Even during downtimes, the characters were working on things or banking in Margret's case. Which kept everything moving forward and I think it helped immensely.
Overall, I think this campaign is in my top favorites because of just how silly it all was. The giant "dog" and all the different factions coming after our spacers, just all of it tied up so beautifully. It was so much fun and I can't wait to watch more.
I'm not quite sure what campaign I'm gonna watch next. I started the first episode of Coffin Run but we will see. I have one more post about the last two episodes of Neverafter coming soon. I want to get that out before this upcoming Wednesday. So, until then, I'll talk to you guys later.
stupid leftists and their belief in *checks notes* the intrinsic value of human life