While We're Here, Pass This With Me

thegoldenlocks

wodneswynn

If any of y'all try to say, “We survived Reagan, we’ll survive this,” expect a fucking earful from me.

Have you ever noticed that young gay men seem to vastly, overwhelmingly outnumber old gay men?

We most certainly did NOT survive Reagan.

penbrydd

As someone who personally survived the Reagan/Thatcher years, I’m gonna second this. The minimal margin by which some extremely fortunate and possibly privileged members of our community crawled out of the smouldering wreckage of that period is not actually a sign that ‘we’ survived. We, as a cultural group, lost so much and so many that modern LGBT+ culture is essentially reinventing the wheel as far as cultural concepts go. We didn’t survive. We started over.

dancinbutterfly

This. Its true for LGBTQ people with Reagan and you know what? It’s true for us and these MOTHERFUCKING NAZIS.

Jews didn’t “survive” the Holocaust. They killed 6 million of us which prevented more than ten million of us from EVER BEING BORN due solely to Nazi exterminations and nothing else. And aside from murdering us like we were on an assembly line, Nazis just like Bannon and Trump’s people systemically destroyed more than a thousand years of European Jewish culture, history, literature, religious teachings, architecture and just general knowledge in about a dozen countries by destroying them (books, records, personal property, businesses and synagogues), or giving away to gentiles (books, art, jewelry, private homes, privately owned businesses, livestock, pets, personal possessions) so we wouldn’t have the resources either to put those communities back together afterwards.

Look around Europe today. Where are the Jews? Find one, go on. You’ll find a few, maybe but not many. We don’t live there anymore because we weren’t just wiped out, we were also driven away. We had to start over in new countries that spoke new languages with dead relatives and a failed world on our backs. We were destroyed and we still haven’t picked up the pieces - not with the stats showing Judaism on a decline all around the world.

So not again, goddamnit. Not to anyone else.

amireal2u

Modern Hebrew as its used today is only about 50 or 60 years old. It had to be RECONSTITUTED from biblical Hebrew. THOUSANDS of modern words had to be created, in fact a system to create the words had to be created (i.e. how nouns and verbs are related, someone runs, they are a runner) so that it was somewhat organic. Because we lost so much. It is possible that without the staggering black hole of history some of the other common dialects would have taken their place as the main language, but the truth is a concerted effort had to be made to recreate Jewish History and Culture.

deadcatwithaflamethrower

The next four years are not just about surviving. They are about fighting back. They are about PROTECTING those under attack.

Never forget. Not any of this.

theotherguysride

Start keeping archives. I mean that.

Buy a terrabyte if you can. As many as you can. Back up your personal data. But more than that, start downloading things. Science papers and books and music and essays and news articles. Letters and fanfic and IM logs.

Ours is the generation that has the most corespondance of any generation before ours. Our artifacts exist in a virtual world, and we have to create spaces to keep that data safe. We’ve got decades of conversations saved to our hard drives and clouds and servers.

We’ve got to look at this coming time as the horror it is. We know this story, as Norcumi said so eloquently. We know this story and we know how it starts. It starts with the rhetoric and the hate and then it ends with people looking upon burning libraries and screaming for it to stop.

The decentralization of our data could save our lives. Keep as many archives as you can. Aggressively hoard information. Check facts and figures, double check, then archive all those things.

Think about what would happen if wikipedia was just gone, one day.

We can’t allow this to happen to us. Save what you can. Save the things it would break your heart to lose. Defy the idea that our online lives are not important. They ARE important.

In fifty years, we’re not going to have the paper copies of these letters, unless we print them out. If we can’t print them out, we’ve got to save them to privately owned hard drives, and then we have to make sure that nobody can ever find them if it comes to that.

deadcatwithaflamethrower

This is a brilliant addition, and something we’re already doing ourselves. Watch Newegg’s daily sales–they often have 8 terrabyte drives for incredibly low prices, and those prices are falling each month as higher capacity drives start to become more common.

8 TB will hold a hell of a lot of stuff.

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spontaneousmusicalnumber

sylvanas-girlkisser

Hi consider this your blessing from a certified forever GM, to please make your TTRPG characters Mary Sues.

Listen if you spend enough time in the hobby you will inevitably get people turning up their nose, saying you need to make your PCs “realistic”. These people are wrong! Especially when it comes to DnD. There’s nothing wrong with tropes but after a while all the human fighters who used to be in the army, and elf wizard trying to live up their family legacy start to blur together.

The same cannot be said for the diamond-skinned demi-goddess cleric who started her prayers with “Hey mom, it’s me”; the self-described “slutty pyromaniac” tiefling sorcerer; the ranger who wanted to domesticate an army of rats and declare herself “queen of the sewers”; or the slightly macabre mushroom druid who became a sheepgirl while trying to cast “trans your gender”.

mylordshesacactus

There is literally only one hard-and-fast rule in D&D character creation, which is one of basic courtesy to the DM and others–you have to create a character who, for literally any reason at all, would join an adventuring party.

(Like I said, this is basic courtesy; nothing is worse than the player who, when the DM introduces a plot hook, responds with “but why would MY character care? why would I get involved in this monster attack? MY character would just let the town guard handle it!”

The answer to “but why would my character want to get involved?” is “Because you’re not the only player at the table, and you’re not the main character in a novel.” Pulling the session to a grinding halt around your character’s…lack of interest in the entire game….is rude and unfair. This is a team-based game, and an understood rule of conduct is that you are going to be playing a character who will–reluctantly perhaps, warily certainly, out of fear or self-interest by all means, but will nevertheless–join forces with the rest of the group and have some form of engagement with the plot)

And get this.

The vast majority of players snottily talking down to the actually interesting and engaging character concepts for not being “realistic” enough? They violate that one rule all the fucking time. A lone-wolf jaded rogue sitting by themself in the corner might be “realistic,” but if they keep no-selling plot hooks and refusing to engage with the plot because “it would be out of character”, then they’re not a good character for D&D and their players should have made a better one.

Literally the only law of character creation is to make a character who will in some way, shape, or form engage with the fucking story.

Make characters who are INTERESTING and ENGAGING and FUN TO PLAY and yes, don’t let assholes ruin your fun, but also: You are probably objectively better at this than they are and you deserve to keep that in mind.

NEVER take character criticism from people who only have one rule they’re expected to follow and still can’t figure it out.