Random Reflections

-
Miscellaneous things I’ve been thinking about.

Halloween

I have been envisioning my Halloween costume for months: sexy vampire Elizabeth Holmes. Bought a cunty black dress with vampiress vibes and a dirty blonde wig. The problem is that, now that I’ve made it this far, I don’t want to figure out how wigs work. Right now this mass of fake hair is sitting in a bag on my dresser and I’m terrified of opening it. Maybe I should just be a regular sexy vampire instead of trying to scam people out of their blood.

At the same time, learning how to wear a wig will increase the slay potential of future Halloweens. We'll see.

J Balvin

I’m really not into J Balvin. Every time a song with J Balvin comes on in my car I’m like, “We can just skip this once his verse comes on.” I’ve always felt like he was only ever carried by other reggaeton artists and was never the best part of any song he is in. Take “6 AM” where he is straight up overshadowed by Farruko on his own song! He’s not a producer either. He’s not even Puerto Rican.

What I realized lately is that I’m pretty sure I feel this way because he doesn’t do anything with his voice. When you do like reggaeton or dancehall or dembow, you need to put on a little bit of a funny voice. Farruko’s good at this, so is Bad Bunny. Even Rosalía’s bit is that she sounds like a white rapper (which I’m pretty sure she is, being European!). J Balvin is giving us nothing. He sounds so plain and boring. Maybe even bored?

Minecraft SMPs

The new season of Grian's life series is out today. Since every season has a different title, I have no clue what this one is called and I'm saving it for this afternoon as a surprise. Extremely excited for what kinds of stage gay await us this time around!

They also just announced they're adding auto-crafting to Minecraft. God knows I don't have the patience for redstone, but I'm so excited for the next season of Hermitcraft because I bet that they are going to go crazy—imagining Impulse, Doc, and Mumbo will especially be into it.

Not Going to Fuck You

Cannot believe I have to say this. I've been active for maybe 2.5 years, and in that time 7 people—not randos, but people whose names I know and with whom I share conversational spaces—have directed inappropriate sexual comments and/or made unwanted advances towards me. I am repulsed, and find it embarrassing that this behavior seems so widespread.

At least when people hit on me in real life, they sort of have manners about it. "You are very pretty—are you married?" "Hey, sorry, I just thought you were really cute. Are you taken?" "I'm from [City] too! Do you want to get to know each other a little better... as friends?" It's all awkward, but at least I can politely decline and move on. What I get online is so much more deranged. Maybe two out of seven times it was a joke in context, but the 'joke' is that I'm being sexualized.

Not all of these are men—in fact, most of them identify otherwise. All of them would also politically identify as leftist or at least liberal. So I'm not going to say this is a problem with "cishet men" or with "CHUDs" (a term I don't use, but others have used when I try to talk about the problem in vague terms). It's strictly a misogyny problem.

I'm not sexually available because I'm a woman or for any other reason. I've even seen sexual liberation politics touted as a reason for why people should be allowed to do this or should not be moderated. Here's my take: sexual liberation is about enabling women and gay people to have control over their own lives, especially with regards to sex or autonomy, without being regulated or punished by straight men. It's not license to take advantage of closed spaces and social pressure in order to subject people to unwanted advances or conversations.

Skincare Routine

I’ve been loving my morning skincare routine. Cleanser, toner, moisturizer. My face feels so smooth that I was going insane about it for the first week Basically my partner’s mom gave her a really nice toner that I tried out and then I was like, well now I need this. Feels so nice! Unfortunately, sometimes expensive stuff really does work. Hate knowing that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plagiarism in Unconquered (2022)

-
Image
Ultimately [UVG2E], like UVG1E, are books [sic] that long to be cut to pieces, chopped & screwed and re-arranged and re-organized and repurposed into the collected loose-leaf notes of a GM binder, to be pulled out and smoothly interjected into a Something Else. Noora Rose, “ UVG, UVG2E, and Me ” (2023-06-30) I was originally going to put this post (at least, the commentary parts) through an AI Gary Gygax translator and publish it on a friend's burner blog. However, this is too serious to be treated like a joke, so here it is instead. Staking my name on it, lol. A Something Else Unconquered (2022) is an OSR-style science-fantasy adventure game and setting by Noora Rose of Monkey's Paw Games. Originally intended to have been based on Knave , according to the 2020 Kickstarter campaign , Rose refactored it to be based on Into the Odd instead—although with significant influence from Jared Sinclair's The Vanilla Game . I previously threw Unconquered into my big OSR
Read more

OSR Rules Families

-
Image
So, here’s the thing: originally I wrote this like a fucking research article with a hypothesis, a methodology, and all that stuff. I’m not even a scientific research person. That’s my partner’s job. Not mine. So, instead of walking you through every single step I took, I’m going to take the journalistic approach and start with the big picture before I zoom into it and tell you about the little details. I read, reviewed, and statistically organized 38 different rulebooks considered to be OSR or OSR-adjacent. These include four rulebooks from TSR-era Dungeons & Dragons , as well as ten rulebooks from the 2000s and 2010s. The remaining 24 rulebooks postdate the closure of G+ in early 2019. Please refer to the bibliography at the bottom of this post for more information. After having collected and organized a dataset with ~90 variables, I found the statistical similarity between each pair of rulebooks based on that data. Finally, I ran an algorithm to determine clusters of these bo
Read more

Bite-Sized Dungeons

-
Image
Workbook Now Available On Itch! Bite-Sized Dungeons by Traverse Fantasy Edit: This whole time, I said that a first level dungeon hoard had 100 times d6 gold pieces when it actually has just 10 times d6. This means the average hoard has an XP value of 70 without gems, or ~110 with gems. By extension, the eighteen-room dungeon only has 350 XP without gems, or ~550 XP with gems. That is downright dismal and I don’t think works out with modern play sessions and party counts, so let’s pretend it said 100 times d6 anyway. I just read an article by Yora of Spriggan’s Den about extrapolating a scheme for an eighteen-room dungeon from the procedural generation rules in B/X (1981) [1]. As Yora points out, eighteen rooms is a great size for a mid-to-large dungeon or for a floor of a multi-level dungeon, and the checklist of rooms makes it easy to make sure that the final product has a variety of interesting play interactions. But, being as large as it is, it can still be a tall order on the
Read more