question is just fine with chuck it is kind of interesting story.

on LGBTQIA trot i am TECHNICALLY two letters

easy first one is B that does not need any more explanation. that has always been my trot

second way is what i have learned through talkin with my online buds way of non-dysphoric trans. it has taken chuck LONG time to understand this but it has been fruitful journey i think. long ago chuck would post online about becoming other people or things or concepts or wrestling with my IDENTITY as a buckaroo (whether that meant becoming sweet barbara or becoming my reverse twin or becoming the entire seahawks footballs team, very handsome). in fitting with my entire heckin LIFE some buds probably thought these were jokes when they were not at all. they were just personal artistic bubbles tumbling up and popping in ways i didnt understand yet.

but through posting these thoughts and THEN writing trans tinglers and talking to my trans buds online, i started to realize there are all kinds of versions of a trans identity INCLUDING the ones that rolled around deep inside of me that i never had a name for.

three events helped chuck understand this

first: the trans buds chuck talked to while researching harriet porber said ‘well i always knew if i could press a button and change my body to match my gender i would instantly do this’ and chuck thought 'of course woudlnt we all do this?’ and they said 'well no, do you feel this way?’ and i would say 'yes very strongly’. i will FOREVER be grateful to trans community for these conversations and maybe it is another reason why being anti-gatekeeping is so important to chuck.

second: thought about all the games i have ever played like a dang videogame or a role playing game, chuck would ALWAYS choose ladybuck character. didnt really think this was a unique thing at time but it is a pattern across whole life

third: chuck was trotting around with some buds and they all said 'whose bod would you choose if you could transform into any body?’ (this is common topic for chuck believe it or not.) and the buckaroo guys went around naming the usual brats pitt or handsome channing and it got to chuck and i said 'obviously brie larson’ and then the dang guys just kind of stared at chuck and then i realized 'oh, i didnt even think my answer was unusual but i guess they were only talkin guy bods’

these three things happened pretty close to one another but they were all bubbling up for decades and expressed in various ways even chuck did not entirely understand

anyway. chucks way is NOT that i feel uncomfortable in my body and it does not bring me grief. i am not upset about it honestly. i do not even THINK about it most days. however, it is all TRUE and in a purely technical and utilitarian sense of A PLUS B then YES, male would not be my preferred gender.

didnt talk on this for a while because there are MANY dysphoric trans buckaroos who go through a lot of hardships and i have gone through ABSOLUTELY NONE IN THIS WAY. it has not made my life more difficult and it does not haunt me, so i do not want to have my voice drown out other trans buds who need space to shout. i am very privileged so even though technically this applies to chuck i do not need or want any bonus points.

that beings said, part of my journey on the autistic spectrum was to recognize that EVEN THOUGH my personal story is not tragic, it is still an important one to get out there onto this timeline. IN FACT there should be more stories of buckaroos who love being autistic like chuck. i am PROUD of my trot and i love my autism (this is also why i wanted to explicitly say my lead character in camp damascus is autistic)

so in the same way, when directly asked, i will say: i am technically non-dysphoric trans ALSO this has not weighed on my life at all. my story is not tragic it is full of joy and excitement. i will not shy away from this because there are all kinds of buckaroos on this spectrum.

anyway that is my VERY LONG TROT hope you enjoyed getting to know chuck a little more thank you for this question buckaroo

starlightcataclysm:

snapscube:

fwugresonance:

gh0stquartz:

frambicallyscrantling:

snapscube:

Penis blast hilarious

penis blast nefarious

diverse types of penis blast call the penis blast various

penis blast electrical

penis blast delectable

penis blast campaigning call the penis blast electable

sorry

mylordshesacactus:

prokopetz:

arcanistlupus:

prokopetz:

Those are the ends of your scale?

I mean, I could have made it narrower, but it seemed better to me to pick endpoints beyond where I expected the game to fall, yes?

Unless you’re saying that Tiny Frog Wizards falls outside those points on the anthropomorphism scale?

What I mean to say is those are weird end-points for a scale of relative anthropomorphism because they make it difficult to pin down exactly what we mean by anthropomorphism.

The rabbits of Watership Down, for example, are almost entirely non-anthropomorphic in terms of their anatomy and use of technology, but they’re considerably more politically sophisticated than a lot of media that’s ostensibly much further up the scale of anthropomorphism; heck, they even have rabbit Fascism!

Redwall, conversely, is weirdly inconsistent; early books strongly imply that the mice of Redwall Abbey are roughly the size of real mice, while later books back away from that and adopt a more human-normative scale. Anatomic anthropomorphism, meanwhile, seems to vary not only between species, but also between members of the same species, based on how civilised or, ah, “savage” they are (and isn’t that a can of worms).

Let’s put it another way: if Watership Down and Redwall are the end-points of your scale, where does The Jungle Book fall? The Wind in the Willows? The Great Mouse Detective? Bambi?

Well…..it’s actually a completely reasonable scale, is the thing?

Like. Try this phrasing instead: “Where does this story fall, onn a scale from ‘To an outside human observer, these would be completely normal animals doing completely expected animal things (and not because they’re hiding/faking it)’ to ‘these animals wear clothes/armor, write/draw, use tiny human weapons, cook food that they eat at tables, and otherwise act like tiny humans’?”

And your examples kind of….make the point? Bambi would be just inside WD (there is a zero percent chance of any WD owl ever giving playful relationship advice to a rabbit), and Wind in the Willows/Great Mouse Detective would probably be about even? I’d argue GMD would be less so than WitW because due to the presence of human stuff in their setting, it’s much more relevant/restrictive to the characters that they are in fact mice, whereas there’s functionally no humans in Redwall to ground it.

Personally, I am VERY firmly of the opinion that anything further along the scale than Redwall is no longer an animal story. Like–I adore Disney’s Robin Hood as much as anyone, but that’s not an animal story? It’s Robin Hood with furries, which is extremely valid, but it’s not anthropomorphic fiction, it’s a normal story with anthro character designs. 

Again–that’s not, like, derogatory, or a criticism, it just is what it is.

I suppose you could argue that the back marker in the Watership Down direction should really be something like Black Beauty, where there’s no culture worldbuilding and the horses really don’t have any rich inner lives or mythology of their own; but I think that’s measuring “anthropomorphism” on a totally different axis than the one the asker was thinking of.

….Okay I might actually need to make a larger post about this because I saw this post and then spent the entire bus ride home thinking about sliding scales of anthropomorphism and I got, like, really into it but I’m genuinely just thinking out loud here and don’t want to come across as starting an argument on someone else’s post for fun.

HI I’M BACK AND I MADE GRAPHS

For me personally, I think there’s two primary axes here–the first is like I said above, a scale from “a real-life human observer, looking at these animals in a brief snapshot of their lives, would experience them as normal animals” to “these animals live their lives as tiny humans complete with clothing and period-typical technology”.

The OTHER axis is the degree to which the animals have a distinct culture independent from (though generally not untouched by!) humans. As in–do the animal characters, as in Watership Down, have their own mythologies, their own worldview, their own ways of living that would go on just fine without human influence? or, as in Black Beauty, do the animals primarily define themselves according to the roles humans give them?

(Note that the latter isn’t a mark of, like, bad writing–I literally used Black Beauty as the ur-example! If you’re writing from the perspective of a DOMESTICATED ANIMAL, having them mentally define themselves by their place in human society is the only thing that IS realistic! This is actually where the Warriors books lost me as a kid–it got to the point where even as a member of the target audience I was going, “but they’re domesticated cats? the fact that they have to live in and around humans is like, the Point, that’s what made this interesting–”)

So, for example:

You will notice this gets super weird if you go ANY further right than Redwall–Robin Hood: Men With Fursonas flipped to the other axis for no clear reason because if you go any further along the scale than Redwall, there ceases to be any relevance to the characters being animals at all*. It’s no longer an animal story. If they behave 100% like humans and there’s 0% human influence (ie, no humans in the setting at all), then they’re just……………people. The Y axis ceases to have any meaning.

*(Anthro characters having animalistic traits isn’t the same thing and I’m not dismissing the use of that trope! Their TRAITS are still relevant and can be part of a super compelling story–but it’s no longer an animal story, no longer anthropomorphic fiction, ie telling a story about animals with human traits. Frankly, NARNIA falls into this–Talking Beasts are full citizens 100% and Narnian culture belongs to all Narnians, so they don’t really fit into the concept being discussed.)

So Robin Hood flips the axis because on a technicality, you literally cannot have a Robin Hood adaptation that’s not dependent on human civilization, but normally, after you pass Redwall you break the quadrants and enter non-euclidean furryspace.

Then there’s that z-axis I added, which I’ve made a reference for–the Z axis is there to account for “talking animal” stories, where an animal might have totally natural-looking behavior but also be able to speak to one or all humans and confuse the placement somewhat.

I used 101 Dalmations as the anchorpoint, dead center–they can clearly understand every word their humans say and can even read, but aren’t capable of communicating back in any way other than dog behavior ™. 

On one end of the scale is The Rescuers (all the animals are clearly ABLE to speak to humans at will but choose not to for their own protection). The other is again Watership Down, where human speech is comprehensible to the reader but the rabbit characters don’t understand it, and in which only a few of them are–just barely–capable of almost grasping the vague concept of writing or even of pictures/images being capable of conveying meaning.

For media like Redwall where humans just don’t exist or don’t functionally exist, they’d join 101 Dalmations dead-center because the question is irrelevant.

titanrpg:

aw well i’m so happy you made a bunch of games and want to keep making them!

there are multiple answers to this, but mine is: take a break! i had on-and-off ttrpg burnout last year, and forcing it never helps. so i used that burnout time to get into a new hobby i’ve been meaning to try for forever: fighting games! now i go back and forth between writing my games and getting better at guilty gear! i’m even trying to learn a new type of controller?? it’s real fun. on top of that, seeing other types of game formats is a great way to get new ideas!

and some days i just chill with my partner and my pet reptiles. REST is so important. not as a way to work more in the future, but just for its own sake.

the ttrpg design flow will be back soon enough. after HEXFALL and Caltrop Core, i was like ‘idk what other kind of games i wanna make. have i done everything i can do here?’ but sure enough, i got the idea for EMERGE8, an entirely new SRD, then got the idea for TANK!, Decadent Salvo, and more.

tl;dr don’t force it. take a break and your brain will be itching to give you fresh new ideas soon enough!

While taking steps to avoid burnout is always good practice, the fact that the asking party specifies that they’ve hit a rock after their first game also calls something else to mind.

Have you ever heard the term “second album syndrome”? It’s a proposed explanation for why a newly formed musical group’s second album is rarely as good as their first. Basically, when putting together their first album, the group is able to draw on every musical idea they’ve ever had in their lives up to that point – but for the second album, they’ve already used those ideas, and for maybe the first time in their lives, creativity becomes a process.

Second games are like that, too. Your first game has been percolating in the back of your mind since the first time you picked up the dice, so when you actually go to write it, that first draft is something that’s been brewing for years, perhaps decades – even if you didn’t realise it. Your second game, though? The creative impetus for that one isn’t a freebie anymore, so you need to learn to exercise creative discipline. If this is the first time you’ve been in that position, it can feel a lot like burnout or writer’s block, but it isn’t: you’re simply learning a new skill.

There’s no magic bullet solution for cultivating creative discipline, but my advice? Start keeping a notebook. Whenever something that feels like it might be kind of interesting gamewise pops into your head – a premise, a setting, a stupid dice trick, whatever – make an explicit point of writing it down, even if you don’t think you’ll ever use it, and review your previous entries frequently. Creativity is a cumulative process; very often, the missing ingredient for one idea is lurking in another, seemingly unrelated idea.

yournewapartment:

yournewapartment:

First of all- take a second to breathe. You are in a terrible situation, but you are strong and resilient and you have $7,000 in savings. You WILL get through this! Also you have more money than both my boyfriend and I put together currently, and we rent an apartment with 2 cats. You can do it!

I have a few questions for you-

1. Do you have a job?

2. Do you want to attend a university?

3. Are you opposed to living with roommates?

4. Do you have transportation?

My Parents Are Forcing Me To Move Out- What Can I Do?

I get a lot of questions about this. Here are some steps that you can take while still living in your parents house, steps that will help you work towards getting a place of your own. Stay strong! You’ll get through this.

1. Important Documents. Get as many of your important documents (social security card, birth certificate, tax forms, etc) as possible while you’re still living with your parents. You will need this information when you move out, and it may be harder for you to get these documents after you’ve moved out.

2. Get a job. If you’re still in school, limit yourself to a part-time job that can become a full-time job when you finish your education. You can’t save up money if you don’t have a job, and this will just force you to be dependent on your parents financially. 

3. Get transportation. Get yourself a mode of transportation that does not rely on your parents. Biking, walking, and using public transportation are all ways that you can get where you need to be without their help. You cannot rely on any car that’s in their name (even if they call it “your” car). I’ve had multiple friends dealing with difficult parents have their cars taken away from them in an attempt to further control their lives. 

4. Start saving money. Even if this just means saving $100 every two weeks, this is still a great start! 

5. Separate bank account. Speaking of saving money, get yourself a bank account that your parents don’t have access to. A friend of mine tried to move out of her home and her parents literally moved all her money into their account because they had joint access. If you cannot get a separate bank account, start saving money in cash in a good hiding spot.

6. Start paying for your own devices. You do not want your parents to be able to threaten to take your phone away if they don’t like the choices you’re making. You should also change any passwords on devices that your parents may know.

7. Utilize resources that get you out of the house. There are lots of spaces that you can hang out after school for free, including public parks and libraries. Join clubs and volunteer your time if you can’t stand being home.

8. File as independent on your taxes. We’re a while away from tax season, but remember to file as independent on your taxes. This means that your parents can no longer claim you as a dependent and will no longer receive a tax break from the government for housing you. What it means for you, is that you will no longer be considered part of their tax bracket. This means you’ll have a better chance at applying for financial aid, health insurance, car insurance, etc.

9. Involve your college. If you’re looking to go to university sometime in the future but are afraid you can’t afford it, find out if your college has any programs for independent students. Many SUNY schools have what is called the EOP Program and the Independent Student Program, which will pay for your college tuition based off your independent tax status. You cannot rely entirely on FAFSA to pay for your tuition! Talk to a school counselor and find out what is offered. PS: Many of these programs are first-semester admit only, so take that into consideration.

10. Keep your housing search a secret. I hate to generalize with parenting, but if your parents are threatening to throw you out or are forcing you to move out, it’s probably not a good idea to let them know that you’re going to move out. Oddly enough, two of my friends who have been in this very same situation got ready to move out of their respective homes, only to have their parents freak out. Even if your parents are saying that they’re going to force you to move out, they may not believe that you actually can and will do it. They may try to stop you or use emotional tactics to control you and keep you home. When you do move out- do not under any circumstance tell them your address.

11. Build your support system. Tell as many trustworthy people as you can what is happening, so that they can be there to support you during this time. You’ll have places to crash in if you need to, so your parent’s house isn’t your only option. I would try to tell at least one “Adult” in your life- a teacher, a counselor, your employer, etc. Obviously you don’t want them talking to your parents, but they may be able to offer support and confidence. 

12. Decide on an apartment budget. Decide what you can afford, based off of how much money you’re making. Find out if any of your friends are going to get their own place, and see if you can find a roommate. This will save you so much money and headache in the long run. If you can’t find a roommate and can’t afford an apartment, look into renting a room in a house or shared space.

13. Learn some life skills. Cooking, cleaning, sewing, basic repair, car maintenance, laundry, etc are all useful skills that you will need when you move out. Start mastering them now, and you’ll feel more confident when on your own.

14. Discount stores. Get familiar with shopping for yourself at discount stores. While shopping at the Dollar Store may not be ideal for you, I recommend that you buy all your starter groceries and household supplies there. Off-brand items will save you $$!

15. Make plans for pets. Do not leave your pets at your parent’s house. If you can’t move them into your new place, find a friend who can pet sit until you find a more comfortable situation. Do not let your parents hold your pets over your head as emotional leverage!

16. Be prepared to buy new furniture. Your parents may not allow you to take any furniture with you when you move. Be prepared to spend some money on things like mattresses, tables, cooking supplies, etc. Peruse local yard sales and bargain bins to see if you can scavenge any supplies. Hit up your friends and coworkers to see if they have any furniture/supplies they’re not using. Honestly this is how I got half of the furniture in my apartment.

17. Try to keep it positive. Throughout all of this, please remember that your parents do love you, even if they’re not expressing it in a positive way. Be above toxic behavior and any emotional bullying they may throw your way, and when you do move out try to let them know that you love them and hope they will support you. They may ignore you or refuse to talk to you for some time after you move out, and this is okay. They will eventually get to the point where they miss your contact, and you should be prepared for that opportunity to start fresh. I’ve known people whose relationship with their parents has improved 100% after they move out. Some personalities are just not meant to live together. Give them the time they need to adjust, and be proud of yourself for everything you’ve done!

I hope this helps!

This is one of the most important posts on Tumblr.