"Congratulations On Level 5, [Wizard]! You've Officially Been Upgraded From 'liability' To 'glass Cannon'!"

only thing that comes to mind today.

humans are a subspecies of elf known for dying really quickly and being stressed the whole time

drdevonprice.substack.com

How Do I Become Less Obedient?

Autistic Advice#12: Noncompliance is a liberating social skill - but it must be developed.

If you’ve never been all that disobedient before, you can and should start really, really small. For example, you can wear the slightly revealing or gloriously trashy-looking garment that makes your mom roll her eyes and sigh despondently every time she sees you put it on. You will feel judged and disapproved of when you put it on, but that is fine. Your goal is to sit with the uncomfortable feelings and continue with your desired behavior anyway.  Saunter down the steps in that highlighter-yellow Garfield crop top with your chest hair flowing over the neckline, and harness as much courage as you can muster. It’s okay if you feel like a beacon of sin. Just keep it moving. Your emotions are not the target here. Your behavior is. You can feel however you are feeling in the moment so long as you keep acting like you’re free.  Do you have a favorite TV show that a partner or roommate vocally hates? Try watching that show around them without apologizing or defensively joining them in mocking the program. At first, you probably won’t be able to enjoy the show while in their presence. You’ll feel self-conscious about everything they find annoying or cringe-inducing about the show, and so focused on their reactions that you can’t relax. That’s okay. Allow those feelings of embarrassment and guilt to exist and pass through you without giving up. In time, you will be able to ignore these reactions more, and enjoy the activity.  You want to see the needle of discomfort moving down just a little, like Link’s body temperature meter in Tears of the Kingdom when he puts on a breathable outfit in a hot climate. You’re not gonna go from roiling hot to frosty cold in an instant. But after a certain point, you won’t be actively in pain anymore. Things are just gonna slowly suck less, bit by bit, until they are finally okay. That’s true of most major life adjustments, I find.  Probably the best way to develop self-advocacy skills while growing in your distress tolerance is simply by telling other people no. Do this without explanation or hedging. Nitpicky aunt wants to hear all about your dating life? “No, I don’t want to talk about that.” Unreliable ex-friend wants you to do them the tiny favor of moving their entire home gymnasium into a new third story walk-up? “No, I’m not available.” Manipulative shift supervisor wants to cajole you into sticking around for another three hours to close? “No.”  As many advice columnists smarter than me have already intoned, “no” is a complete sentence. “No” requires no explanation. “No” is not subject to debate. “No” can be repeated over and over like a broken record if a disrespectful person acts like they can’t hear it. And you can walk away at any time to make your “no” physical and impossible to argue with, when someone has proven they don’t respect your boundaries. 

you can read or listen to the full piece for free here

i made a character sheet. free to use as you wish, feel free to change whatever you want XD open source ass thing. spent all of ~maybe an hour on it.

Credit: the text in the insert-image box comes from this video, and the text for the top three lines (intense, complex, fruity) comes from this post. The actual image was made with the free NBOS character sheet creator, which is a sort of dated but free and solid text-layout sheet maker intended for ttrpg style character sheet creation.

Congratulations to Tom Hardy on being the only man in Hollywood to figure out that if he makes us our gay little content, we're gonna give him our gay little money.

A while ago, some people asked me to explain D&D and other RPGs… so of course I had to make it into an infographic!

This is by no means a comprehensive guide. The game can be as simple or complex as you want, but there ARE some pre-established basics you should know about - and those are best discovered on your own terms!

Some resources to help you get started: 

Watch/listen:

★ Rusty Quill Gaming Podcast - a ttrpg game in the Pathfinder system. Beginner friendly! Learn how to play along with the players!

★ Critical Role - a D&D game played by voice actors - Incredibly famous! Highly praised! Both videos and podcasts available.

★ The Adventure Zone - a TTRPG podcast by the McElroy brothers

Read/learn the rules:

📚 D&D 5e Player’s Handbook - pdf

📚 Basic Introduction to Character Races - website

📚 Overview of Character Classes - website

How-to and Tutorials:

🎲 Rolling a character - YouTube video

🎲 How combat works - YouTube video

🎲 Being a good player - YouTube video

And last but not least…

How To Play D&D Online! - YouTube Video

***

Of course, there are tons of other resources - endless writeups, dozens of YouTube videos and blogposts, and entire subreddits dedicated to this information. The important thing is to take things one at a time. Or not - just dive right in! Most seasoned D&D players are thrilled when others want to join them on their adventures and will be happy to help a new player find their tabletop legs. 

ADHD is such nonsense sometimes. I was worried my PMDD had escalated and was continuing into my cycle and that I’d never know the warmth of sunshine on my skin or the fresh taste of strawberries.

And then I decluttered the bedroom and removed something I’d been meaning to tackle for weeks and ah, I see. I am not in actual fact on the brink of a nervous breakdown, I was just visually overstimulated and my ADHD was doing the nervous system equivalent of a chihuahua shaking itself to death out of sheer nervous existence. As though I don’t have actual Horrors to be overwhelmed by but no, the chair in the corner that had become a dumping ground for all my stuff was my mental limit.

One of the funny things about LotR is that almost every people in it professes to disbelieve in the supernatural, but because they live in a fantasy world their baseline for "natural" is so jacked up. The Rohirrim are like, yeah, there's a wizard in this tower and ancient tradition that we have no reason to doubt says this mountain is full of ghosts, but walking trees? Short people? I don't think so. Galadriel is like, "Listen I heard you describe what I do as magic and look I just gotta clear some things up, okay." Gondorians are like, yeah, of course the Enemy has spectres of men who lived long ago and never died and can now fly above us and incapacitate us with just their voices. This is just a fact of life, okay? But shut up about this magic weed that makes comatose people better. That's an old wives' tale. Royalty? Press X to doubt.

The people group in Tolkien's work who seem most receptive to magic and least restricted by their own notions of what it can do actually seem to be the hobbits. And they use it to avoid meeting people they don't want to talk to

giving birth sucks tbh. not only do you and the baby you’re birthing almost die, usually you shit yourself and often you tear your taint. then you have to push an organ out of your body (placenta) and if even a little of that remains in your body, you can hemorrhage to death or develop an infection that essentially rots your body from the inside out. even if you had a relatively “easy birth”, you bleed for weeks on end. even after that stops, your body and brain is changed for the rest of your life, the pregnancy leeched minerals from your bones, that can cause osteoporosis later. minor urinary incontinence is not uncommon, brain scans of people who gave birth show permanent changes in their brain, you’re never quite the same.

I say all of this not to say giving birth is disgusting but it is a harrowing and visceral experience. society downplays how fucking awful it is and makes it out to be a ~magical~ experience but it isn’t a magical transformative experience for everyone. it can be an extremely traumatic experience for someone who wanted to carry a pregnancy to term, much more so for someone who did not want to be pregnant in the first place or someone who knows their baby won’t survive the birth. anyway, abortion is a right. pregnancy and birth aren’t just inconvenient, it’s fucking awful.