I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL
“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”
My mom learned it because she figured she’ll go deaf when she gets old
My family went holiday SCUBA diving once, and a couple of Deaf guys were in the group. I was really little and I spent most of the briefing overcome with the realization that while the rest of us were going to have regulators in our mouths and be underwater fairly soon, they were going to be able to do all the same stuff and keep talking.
The only reason some form of sign language is not a standard skill is ableism, as far as I can tell.
For anyone interested in learning, Bill Vicars has full lessons of ASL on youtube that were used in my college level classes.
Update: you guys this is an amazing resource for learning asl. Bill Vicars is an incredible teacher. His videos are of him teaching a student in a classroom, using the learned vocabulary to have conversations.
Not only is the conversation format immersive and helpful for learning the grammar, but the students make common mistakes which he corrects, mistakes I wouldn’t have otherwise know I was making.
He also emphasizes learning ASL in the way it’s actually used by the Deaf community and not the rigid structure that some ASL teachers impose in their classrooms
His lesson plans include learning about the Deaf community, which is an important aspect of learning ASL. Knowing how to communicate in ASL without the knowledge of the culture behind it leaves out a lot of nuances and explanations for the way ASL is.
Lastly, his lessons are just a lot of fun to watch. He is patient, entertaining, and funny. This good natured enthusiasm is contagious and learning feels like a privilege and not a chore
And it’s all FREE. Seriously. If you’ve ever wanted to learn ASL
I think about Azula shooters often and their common refrain of “if Azula hadn’t had a mental breakdown, she would’ve won” and I’m here to tell you that no, she wouldn’t have.
There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).
Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.
Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko’s not that impressive a firebender. He’s not bad by any stretch, and he’s able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:
People have attributed this to the fact that no one’s fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it’s also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks “okay, I’ll attack back”, the fight’s over.
Zuko’s got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he’s already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he’s on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show–he just can’t match wits with him.
Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack…which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang’s defenses.
Zuko advances so quickly that it’s scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn’t come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.
All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko’s firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He’s hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he’s applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he’s got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight–before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There’s no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka’s presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn’t look remotely worried and he counters Azula’s every attack perfectly.
All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she’s still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she’s got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she’s just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.
Zuko’s victory was a given considering Azula’s complete loss of control by the time of Sozin’s comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she’d have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.
In all seriousness, how do y’all watch Buffy? I’ve tried but the misogyny was so painful and also … didn’t Spike try to rape Buffy? Like I know that it fucked James Masters up and probably wasn’t something the character would actually do (knowing Joss Whedon) but like … how do you reconcile shipping them when in canon, Spike sexually assaulted her?
I will take this at its word that it is a good-faith ask. There are a lot of factors that go into why I can ship Spuffy as religiously as I do. I also went through to link to other places where I’ve discussed it on Tumblr. Kept me from repeating myself too much (hopefully).
In my opinion, Spike is the best aged of all the male characters on Buffy, and it is specifically because he accepts responsibility and assumes accountability for his crimes. This is aided in part by the fact that he was a divisive character in the writer’s room, and JM’s portrayal of him made even his lowest moments incredibly nuanced. The male writers viewed Spike the way r/buffy views him, and dismissed Spike’s large and primarily female fanbase as being thirsty housewives. He was the obvious bad decision when pitted against the male characters they viewed as good and honorable, such as Angel, Riley, and Xander. This made them completely ignorant of the overt flaws of those characters, specifically how they all knew better than Buffy and felt comfortable telling her so. In Angel and Riley’s cases, this includes making decisions that impact her without discussing them beforehand, and the narrative routinely endorses this behavior through Buffy’s eventual acceptance that these were the right decisions without further examination.
About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.
His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.
One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.
People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.
Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)
It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.
The galaxy moved on.
Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.
Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.
Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.
Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.
“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”
After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.
“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”
The Admiral said “Who?”
What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.
Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.
We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.
That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts - acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets - was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.
Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.
This makes me cry
It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.
Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five,
A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field.
Waiting.
When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”. The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace.
Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.
We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice. In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off. It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.
Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.
Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.
We find it terrifying.
I love this one. Reblogging for something new.
Humans had been part of the intergalactic alliance now for longer than most could remember. New member systems were typically bemused by the Dracs semi-reverence of these fragile, hairless beings, and the Hives’ blend of respect and fear.
Until the moment when their ambassadors were shown The Film.
That’s all it was called, because the contents weren’t comprehensible.
Over time, the Vandals had reorganized and rebuilt; they’d formed alliances, created new weapons technologies, and were completely ready to take on the Drac galactic navy.
They were utterly unprepared for the humans.
The command ship of the Vandal fleet was unassailable. Ion weapons were turned aside, the most powerful laser arrays were useless. Physical projectiles did work, but the mass of even a missile next to the ship was insignificant.
When the human destroyer Athena began to accelerate towards it, all shields to front, full power to thrusters, the Dracs made contact immediately, demanding to know what they intended to do.
The comm channel came back with a medley of humans singing, chanting, praying, and the captain simply said, “Ending this damn war.”
And disconnected.
The Drac central command watched the remote readouts of the human ship as it soared past the Vandal fighter vanguard. The Athena wasn’t firing, and the Vandal command didn’t have a protocol to deal with this, so they directed no resources towards the destroyer.
The reactor on board the destroyer began to systematically overload. Command patched through directly to the engineering room, and were met with the chief engineer saying with a smile, “No time to explain, I’ve got to say my last words to my creator.”
And he disconnected.
The Athena was traveling at an unsafe speed when it collided with the Vandal command ship, tearing through the armor.
When the Athena’s reactors then went critical and destroyed the entire Vandal command, the human admiral aboard the Drac command vessel bowed his head and said, “May their memories be a blessing,” and proceeded to help plan the final assault on the remaining, disorganized Vandal fleet. The remaining human ships were heard chanting “For the Athena!” as they went into battle with little regard for their own safety, and less for the Vandals.
Ambassadors were always pale by the end of The Film, but none of them questioned humanity’s place in the alliance again.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is that the setting of Aramán is indicated to have separate deities by ancestry and a big motivation for the Shapers’ War was that orcs got a very raw deal. We learn in episode 1 that elves meanwhile were heavily favored, and were granted not just immortality, but passage to a pleasant afterlife in the event of their demise through violence without having to mingle with all the other souls in the dangerous Tenebrous Reaches.
If I may, I think that Matt’s very understandable, and even laudable desire to avoid a number of the racially essentialist (and often simply racist) tropes of D&D/Pathfinder, including a lot of lore inherited from Forgotten Realms, made for a world that was a fantastic setting for Campaigns 1 and 2 both in terms of story and player comfort, but as a result unintentionally limited itself quite badly in telling the story of Campaign 3 in a way where there was no correct answer. By removing a great deal of systems of oppression in order to make a world more welcoming for the players, it also removed the ability to tell meaningful stories about those systems. This is not a bad thing, until you try to tell a meaningful story about those systems. The idea that the gods should be destroyed in Campaign 3, despite being popular with several party members and something they seriously put forth as an option, never really felt believable nor justified. This was further exacerbated by the depiction of the Ruby Vanguard as pretty one-note evil, the opposition to destroying the gods being represented by pretty much every beloved NPC or former PC of the past ten years, and party’s lack of interest in considering the implications of destroying the gods - implications I’ll discuss in the next paragraph as we see them in Aramán. And so the choices that remained were whether to leave the situation entirely as is, with Predathos still available, or to eliminate Predathos in some way. As the party fixated on a false dichotomy - to kill or not to kill - and did not explore the removal or pacification of Predathos until extremely late, this led to an outcome that was understandable and even interesting in the abstract, but which felt rushed, under-explored, and unearned.
Aramán has a crucial advantage that was, ultimately, impossible for Exandria to create: it manages to have its cake and eat it too. By setting the story just as those orcs and humans who were children during the Shapers’ War enter their twilight years, with a cast that was mostly born into this new world and not the old one, it can invoke an unpleasant and more hateful past without making players actually have to play through a multi-year game in a world where their character is treated horribly at every turn.
The other thing it can do is look at the unanswered questions from Exandria and the path not taken there, and answer them in depth. We see that many of the concerns characters such as Keyleth, Orym, and Chetney brought up but which went largely unexplored have indeed come to pass in this world. We do have complications of the afterlife. We do see a rise in cults; in potential extraplanar instability; and political upheaval. Perhaps the simplest and most elegant demonstration of this exploration is the inciting incident of the Campaign. Dol-Makjar was the seat of the Shapers’ War. Its government is still referred to as the Revolutionary Council. And what does the Council do when someone seems too powerful and a threat to them? They do what they did 70 years prior, and execute them.
I already said this in an earlier post, but intent truly does make or break an improvised story, and I must admit I feel an immense vindication that while we have only seen one episode of Campaign 4, my longtime claim that Campaign 3 could have been something much better than it was had there been a single several-hour session zero discussing the premise and goals of it as a narrative seems entirely correct. But I also think it did, inevitably, have to be a narrative in which the gods were not destroyed; or one in which, were the gods destroyed, it was a choice with consequences graver and darker than we see in either Exandria or Aramán.
Aro/Ace. Queer. Huge Nerd.
ALT
![shulabear:
“ theotherguysride:
“ stephendann:
“ fattyatomicmutant:
“ space-australians:
“ the-real-seebs:
“ madddscience:
“ An interesting sci-fi short story from 4chan.
[Imgur]
”
That is some fine writing.
”
The Imgur link is broken so:
[Series of...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c926250ea0fa5af724048f1813ed7dc2/tumblr_nhetbcEijo1tcuhpfo1_1280.jpg)