Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@Phorm @xinjinmeng (And I mean, they're still generally pretty shitty, and I DO NOT LIKE their habit of turning political charity stunts into cheap PR theater one bit, 100% with ya there...)

@Phorm @xinjinmeng I'm just saying I don't think they're exactly closet Trump/white nationalist allies. I suppose I can share your qualms about what they're profiting off of, but I'm a little touchy about this subject because I'm a veteran wargamer and a LOT of my hobby depends on recreating Ugly History without necessarily editorializing on it. This is... probably one of those I should just quietly back down on and retreat back into my treehole.

@Phorm @xinjinmeng Counterpoint:

"The Trump Pack, a booster pack for Secret Hitler, which replaces the fascists' cards with Donald Trump and prominent members of his administration at the time (respectively Sean Spicer, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and Mike Pence), was released in June 2017, with all proceeds generated from the pack's sales donated to the American Civil Liberties Union."

Had a pretty boring dream about a car ride with my parents turn into... a thing.

We were on vacation on The West Coast Or Something and they pulled into an abandoned drive-in restaurant lane, then got out of the car to go shopping (even though it was like 11 at night) and left me behind.

I remember something about a huge fake menu board that was covered in weird satirical food descriptions, something that had apparently been a prop. I got out of the car and tried to photograph it, but sirens went off and out of nowhere an EMT crew trying to resuscitate someone started yelling at me to get back in the car.

Their patient had a black hole in them, or some other kind of massive reality-scrambling anomaly. This had apparently become common recently. I stayed out of the car anyhow and watched, as stars winked out of the sky and the horizon started to curve and buckle.

A sweet-natured girly young boy, maybe 9 or 10, led me down an alleyway to a hidden doorway and guided me through it. On the other side was the same city in broad daylight, right next to a busy intersection.

Reality was still falling apart. An eight-spoked fairy castle rolled down the road like a runaway bus. (This is fascinating, since one of my nicknames for @anthracite is "my fairy castle." Long, sweet story for another time.)

I was with some friends, my parents having been safely retconned out of the dream altogether. We were Scooby Ganging it, trying to get to the bottom of the reality warp and repair it. They warned me that while the warp was much safer during the day and reality itself would at least be stable, it would conjure up strange things to try to lure us away from fixing it.

Cue the parade of people in brightly colored inflatable plastic alien teddy bear costumes. Walked straight into that trap with my eyes wide open, I did. I even asked them for help dressing up, and they were just pulling the snug inner lining of the headbulb over my face when I woke up.

I guess my brain's not quite done with this stuff yet. It just needs the little neurochemical kick back out of suppressive, panicky ego to go there. It's gonna be _real_ interesting this August if I can get an MMJ card...

Re LBT: please poke my beloved spouse with pointéd sticks until she republishes Dawn. My brilliant, insightful cardboard girls pester their stepraccoon every day for a baby sister (*mumble mumble that we can sell on the open market
mumble mumble*).

@xinjinmeng I was SO RELIEVED to see articles like that confirm I was not the only one. Cards Against Humanity is one of my prime "guess we're not playing games tonight" games.

To be fair, it's not even the offensive--note the utter lack of scare quotes--humor. It's the kneejerk, brainstemmy nature of it. I hate it for the same reason I hate mid-era Adult Swim cartoons: bring me something *insightfully* offensive.

And the "joke generator" nature of it only makes it more stultifying IMHO. It's so damned easy to make a game that exploits randomness for humor. "Five Card Nancy" comes to mind.

But CAH has this strange accursed power to strip the surreality OUT of randomness and ground it in the most banal sort of "Ha! You sure said something you're not supposed to!" humor.

It's also just such a shitty game qua game. I have a huge pet peeve against "games" with no strategy besides "a bunch of stuff happens and then you win." It actually manages to be less of a game than Fluxx and that's IMPRESSIVE.

@Sig So... my sophomore year of college, I took a Sociology 101 course because it sounded cool and I was still determined to get a goddamn liberal arts education instead of a career.

It was a very popular elective for students in several of the professional degree programs, especially nursing and engineering, because it was "easy." So we had a lot of people in there who were just kinda intellectually along for the ride.

My prof was a big charming pudgy folk who, in retrospect, sets off my gaydar and enbydar fiercely. They had a habit of coming to class wearing things like "Give Me The Chocolate And Nobody Gets Hurt" T-shirts. And six weeks into the course, they assigned us "Body Ritual Among The Nacirema."

The next morning, they got up to the lecture podium with the BIGGEST FOXY GRIN. And they asked us, completely deadpan, "So what did you think of today's reading?"

OH GOD.

Maybe a sixth of the class had gotten it. And we all apparently decided very quickly to keep our mouths shut and enjoy the free entertainment.

One classmate got five minutes into earnestly defending the Nacirema and their strange differences. She observed how similar they are to us, and how the "scraping and lacerating the surface of the face" part could have just been shaving, seen through an unflattering lens.

She was so close I wanted to cry.

Eventually, our prof had mercy and said, "OK, everybody, I want you to take a look at the name 'Nacirema' and read it backwards."

First chorus, ~5/6ths of the class: "OHHHHHHH!"

Second chorus: ~1/12 of the class: "Huh?"

Third, one poor bewildered nursing student: "I don't understand!"

Yeah. That class, as you can imagine, was formative in ways that nobody at that university except our prof probably ever intended.

#WhyRaccoonsCryForHumanity

Sigh, I'd forgotten how enviable this video is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzTgXAQOp_s

@frameacloud And to be fair to your original post, raccoons *are* innately somewhat vaporwave, especially when we get our Lisa Frank on... =(^)_(^)=

approx current sanity level

(image courtesy of cricket arrison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mok11_0nqFM -- do not expect this link to enlighten you)

@frameacloud There's a Crash Pandas one-pager TTRPG, too, which is about... well it's also about stealing cars. What can I say, we're obsessed. ​

@frameacloud It looks adorable but I think I'm still holding out for Wreckoons. If it's got a raccoon in it but you can't steal a car, it's a good raccoon game but it's not the ideal raccoon game. :D Thank you for the link, though! I still need to slog through that bundle one of these days...

@anthracite Our art critic misspelled "embarrassment."

@Sig (I had some trouble digging up a free public copy so here ya go brother <3 : https://usflearn.instructure.com/courses/1058273/files/47476872 )

@Sig Right? I love satire like this, that turns some cultural blind spot right on its face. Ever read "Body Ritual Among The Nacirema?" (If not, go read it and come back -- I have STORIES about that essay. XD )

@catoxis@snouts.online Granted, it was really not outside the realm of possibility. I mean, you're a semi-local--I probably don't even need to explain that, say, the best empanadas and crawfish pies I've ever had down here have come out of gas stations.

In fact, come to think of it, I *have* eaten at a phone reseller! There was a fantastically seedy little food court on Winter Street in downtown Boston, with abysmal pizza and world-class falafel. And for a while the phone shop there had a chest fridge with surprisingly good $2.99 banh mi...

@catoxis@snouts.online There's a Chinese restaurant at the same address. I have a sneaking suspicion Grubhub is doing speculative client dumping again...

*blink*

*blink*

🖼

@Austin_Dern I'm *frightened* by how much I already know about that topic, and how interested I already am in that book. :D

(I think it's Czechia that has the dual numbering system, because they had one that dated back to military conscription...)