Happy Yuri Night Everybody

I'm reminded that one of the first lessons I learned as a forum moderator in the early 00's was "some people only want to know who the targets are". Doesn't matter if the rules are "don't be a dick", seventeen pages of legalese, or anything inbetween: there are always folk who really, really want to hurt someone. When told to stop they just want to know "if I can't hurt them, then who am I allowed to hurt? Must be someone, surely."

Sometimes I stumble across a particular species of queer discourse post on this site and I get a vivid mental image of the OP paging through an enormous rulebook with furrowed brow muttering "come on, there must be someone I'm allowed to be homophobic to".

I love her.

Was reminded (because I am kinda terrible at social media) that I ought to let people know I made an art history video about the cave art in Lascaux: How it was made; what pigments and what ingenious art tools were used (Paleolithic mouth-powered airbrushes!); and the historical development of ideas of the Paleolithic and how they were shaped by prejudices of the time.

And I bust some myths:

The cave paintings and engravings had nothing to do with hunting. The animals that people of the time hunted don't show up in the cave art.

It is very unlikely that men made that art. There has not yet been found any physical evidence of adult men in any of the decorated caves of France and Spain -- but there are numerous examples of footprints and finger-marks of smaller people, from woman-sized down to baby-sized, and groups of children alongide woman-sized footprints.

For some weird reason most of the scholarship on Lascaux identifies these smaller footprints as "adolescent boys" for no apparent reason apart from, well, sexism. The increasingly unlikely and awkward contortions made to rationalize how half-grown boy children made this magnificent art, rather than any acknowledgement that perhaps experienced adult women artists had a hand in it, feel kinda bizarre to me.

Anyway, here's my art history video. It's educational!

To horribly over-simplify my current tabletop game, it's set in a single city, currently being taken over by a lawful-evil Wizard who has outmanuevered the lawful-good (but distant) monarch. The Wizard is evil because he wants total control over the lives of others. His DNA isn't relevant. One of the few remaining resistance groups are 'the goblins'. They're not all goblins. They don't resist because they have green skin. The farmer's union leaders were put on charges of treason, arrested and executed. The business leaders were bought off or threatened. the doctors have been "relocated for their safety" to a fortified 'hospital' that now functions to weed out undesirables if they come looking for help. The sewer worker's guilds were already underground. And that's where half the city's goblins (and about a tenth of the dwarves, and a bunch of others besides) were employed. Most of them were refugees or veterans from deep-wars to the west, took any jobs they could get, were comfortable underground, and familiar with the needs of functional sanitation in cave systems. So when the harvest riots ended in bloody repression, the goblins went underground, and started looking for the Wizard's secrets.

Putting all tabletop players into a college level ethics class and forcing them to turn in a paper on moral philosophy before buying a new book

it's always a good day to complain about English speakers

feeling a profound urge to wander around those forests they had in old video games where they're made up exclusively of screen after screen of picturesque pixel art glades as far as the eye can see and maybe one of them has like a forlorn well or a pedestal with a gem on it or something but essentially they're all the same

This might be Derek Guy's greatest masterpiece.

(The Twitter thread is probably easier to read and easier to look at the images, but I wanted to make sure it got preserved. Images are the tweets.)

(Continued in reblog)

“Why is snoop dogg at the Olympics-“

WRONG QUESTION!

WHY ISNT MARTHA STEWART THERE WITH HIM?

I mentioned this to my dad and he's been ranting for ten minutes about how it wasn't accurate to the books, mostly because Derek Jacobi can't speak Welsh or pronounce the place names.

I thought today - the TV show I'd really like to see is one about a medieval monastery.

You could have all kinds of characters: the pious guy who joined because he wanted to serve God, the son born out of wedlock sent there to cover up his parents' shame, the geek who wanted to study Latin but couldn't afford to go into university, the former knight sick of violence and afraid for his soul... Plus monasteries were centres of pilgrimage and places where criminals could take refuge, so we can have a lot of characters who crop up for a few episodes and leave.

Some plotlines I thought of:

Our relics aren't bringing in the pilgrims the way they used to - what do we do?

A women fleeing an abusive marriage has taken shelter in the monastery - how will the brothers respond to having a women in their midst?

One of the monks wants to leave - will the abbot accept or not?

A murderer has taken refuge in the abbey, and the abbot decides to try and save his soul - what will happen?

People are coming to the monastery for food during the famine, but the monastery is itself short of food - how will this be dealt with?

War has broken out between two local lords, and the monks attempt to broker a treaty - will it work?

I've already mentioned some reasons why I think this setting would lend itself to television, but I'd also love to make it for two other reasons:

Get people to understand how weird medieval religion could get, but also that, within its own frame of reference, it was a reasonable and consistent belief system.

Show people that the Middle Ages consisted of more than just muddy people stabbing each other and burning scientists at the stake.