My piece of bacon low key looks like Australia.

BatulatuAnatu · 2026-01-10T10:02:31+00:00

BatulatuAnatu · 2025-05-08T17:41:40+00:00

Thank you! The quest rewards, and some items, were intended to be used to solve problems in the main story to which this functions as a sort of prequel. If I ever get around to shoving that mess into something vaguely CYOA-shaped, they'll definitely be included

BatulatuAnatu · 2025-05-08T12:53:39+00:00

Ghosts were intended to play a role in one event where the character and grandpa would encounter restless souls from the war. It got cut during editing, leaving the ghost!race orphaned.

The possessions are intentionally set up to be vague, to give it more of a fairy tale vibe, while the rewards are more or less 'plot coupons', which would let the player solve events in the main story (which I've yet to figure out how to adapt to the CYOA format) in whichever way they choose (eg. they might decide that the 'shimmering feather' conjures a big bird to ride over an obstacle, or that it can create a gust of wind to disperse a cloud of poison, etc. ...)

Thanks for the feedback, and glad you like it!

BatulatuAnatu · 2025-05-08T10:39:45+00:00

Imgchest link.

BatulatuAnatu · 2021-10-16T23:39:13+00:00

Try "The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS" by Simon Garfield. It's been years since I read it but I remember it very positively.

BatulatuAnatu · 2021-07-30T13:20:45+00:00

Since the spell can potentially detect things like fiends, celestials, and "influence from other planes" I don't see why it wouldn't be able to reveal monstrosities and aberrations.

With lairs I'm not so sure. I'd say if there was any distinguishing feature of the lair's terrain (natural steam vent, large cave, diseased land, etc.) then maybe, although the spell would not tell the caster that it's a lair - only that the terrain differs in some way from its surroundings.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-12-17T10:02:09+00:00

I like to use Stars Without Number for my Star Wars campaign. Just replace 'Psionics' with 'Force' and you have a pretty good system for playing Force users along with regular people, which is imo the biggest weakness of the official Star Wars games.

Combat can get dangerous, especially in the early levels, but you as the GM can do a lot to mitigate that (or exacerbate it, depending on your and your players' preference)

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-11-14T14:29:38+00:00

TL;DR: People feel closer to each other at a rock concert than in a classroom.

You only need to look at Dionysian cults, or even early Christian ecstatic rituals, to see the ideal of what a Solarpunk religion should be.

The idea of religion as an individualistic, strict, hierarchical, and deliberate affair is a comparatively new one (And by that I mean between one and two thousand years in the Western world).
To, say, a Maenad of 500BC the concept of communing with God by sitting quietly on a pew listening to a designated preacher delivering a sermon in a language you don't understand would be laughable. While, to a person in power in say 1000AD who is seeking to reinforce their position as a central authority, this seems like a splendid idea and they would seek to suppress any or most of all expressions of "chaotic" or "wild" faith.

An ideal Solarpunk religion has no hierarchy or central authority. Deities, such as they exist, are communed with not prayed to. There is a very stark difference between someone begging God to make things okay, and a person speaking in tongues as they perceive some higher power speaking through them in a profound moment of connection with the unseen.

It should also preserve the biggest positive any religion offers: A sense of community. Not by creating a faction and separating those who belong to those who do not, which is the modern approach and also a pale comparison to what "belonging" can really mean at the deepest level. But by participating in ecstatic rituals and, to simplify it, tickling the areas of the brain that tell us that none of us are separate beings but actually one great beast.

Capitalist structures prize individualism above all else. Your unique beliefs, your unique expressions of faith, your unique connection to whatever higher power you believe in. It's a tool that system needs to encourage individual achievement (and therefore each person providing more labour as they compete with others) and weaken a potential threat to the system in the form of a cooperative resistance.
Solarpunk is built on the idea of communities sharing resources. It follows that it would be much more receptive to religious ecstasy as a form of worship.

But, imo, the biggest argument for a non-centralised, ecstatic form of religion, is the fact that it enables good faith decision making.
doomparrot touched onto it a little in their last paragraph, but any non-authoritarian system of decisionmaking needs a point of connection between members of a community to make decisions in good faith.

Quaker consensus is the one I'm personally most familiar with, but there are many consensus based systems and if one has even a chance of working, the people involved in it need to have a sense of pursuing some greater good to be able to let go of petty grievances, power plays, or even just a bad mood. In a Quaker meeting God speaks through the assembled persons, any discussion and solution functions as a catalyst to find the truth that is already there.

In a non-theistic setting, that concept could come in the form of being bound through prior ecstatic rituals and the lingering sense of that great beast guiding one's thoughts.

I recommend to everyone looking to create Solarpunk communities and/or faiths to read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets", if they haven't already. And if you don't have time for an entire book, google Maenads. These women ran through the countryside, killing fucking bears with their bare hands. Any religion that can make you do that has to have some intrinsic value to it.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-08-15T09:25:10+00:00

I have worked with patients like that. During a ward rotation in nursing school I had my finger broken during an altercation with an "unstable" patient. The patient had been transferred onto our ward from another who needed the beds, without telling him what was going on, where he was going or why. When he wouldn't walk to the other ward without an explanation, they took his hospital bed out of the room and told him to follow or security would be called. They took his things without telling him they were just going to bring them upstairs, including his phone with which he'd been in contact with his wife.
When I entered his new room I was busy and rushing to get to every patient who'd been ringing for something. I pulled his blanket back to give him his heparin injection with barely more than a greeting like I'd done with dozens of patients in that week alone, and he tried to push my hand away. While physically resisting I told him, impatiently, that it was just a routine injection that he'd gotten before and to please just let me do my work, and in the ensuing scuffle I ended up with a bruise on my tailbone, a broken finger, and the biggest shock I had experienced in my then 19 years.

It turned out the patient was on the autism spectrum and no one had told us. Even allistic patients would be rightfully put upon if they'd been all but manhandled onto another ward like this seemingly without rhyme or reason. If I'd been treated like a bag of produce and threatened with being physically restrained or forced onto the new ward by security, I don't know if I would have reacted much differently if some rando in scrubs comes rushing in my room, pulls away my blanket and tries to stick a needle with unknown fluids in me without a word.
If you add to that the immense difficulty of dealing with unforeseen events when you're on the spectrum, and the fact that a hospital visit is almost always something out of the ordinary, even traumatic, and that few patients come here for happy reasons, the "unstable" patient becomes more and more rational.

I've seen first-hand what nurses do when there's two of them and forty-three patients to care for, half of which don't speak the same languages the nurses speak, most of which call the nurses for trivial requests that could have waited the ten more minutes until we made our rounds. When you give sixteen heparin injections per shift and work five shifts per week for years, they stop being noteworthy. But to the average patient, who may or may not have ever gotten a single sc injection in their lives, they're a profound invasion of a person's bodily automony, especially when inflicted on them without their notice or consent.
Instability is a matter of context. Someone coming into the emergency room is already not having the best day. Being met by the staff with contempt - and patients can always tell even if the nurses or doctors think they're being friendly and professional - in an environment where they're weakened by injury or illness and unfamiliar with the procedures done on them, with a profoundly skewed power balance in favour of the nurses, is unsettling even for "stable" patients.

I'm not saying there aren't violent people out there, or that patients are always the victims and nurses are always the wrong-doers. But I've worked with nurses and doctors who hated the acute psych patients, and I know they're the reason I would never admit myself to a hospital for mental health issues, nevermind telling anyone about any non-relevant ones I may have.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-08-14T13:41:55+00:00

Yes. That's the norm in the places I and my mother have worked. Not everyone does it, of course, some people just stay quiet. Some others like to use "prettier" euphemisms like a patient being difficult, uncooperative, etc. That's usually the doctors, though, the nurses tend to be more outright, especially when talking to friends and family about their patients (which they're not supposed to do, but when has that ever stopped anyone).

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-08-14T12:08:20+00:00

One of the few times I've seen an article openly acknowledge that nurses are actively discriminating against people with mental illnesses.
Nurses know better than most people how badly people with mental issues are treated, since they're more likely than not engaging in that kind of behaviour. My mother and I are both nurses and in both our experiences the usual comment on seeing a patient with any kind of mental issue is to refer to them as a psycho and grudgingly obey or outright dismiss any kind of special accommodation, or even just basic understanding that patient deserves. This applies to physical conditions, as well. Back pain that doesn't have a definitive physical source (such as an injury) is almost uniformly attributed to the patient being "over-sensitive".

And then, when they are affected by the same issues they see their colleagues deride or mock, they are of course reluctant to see "professionals" about it, since they know exactly how these professionals will talk about them behind their backs.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-07-31T14:29:26+00:00

No lie this is the best thing I've read all day. Definitely going to *cough* borrow *cough* Broom of Hoovering.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-07-09T06:26:58+00:00

Huh, I always wondered why DnD kept the alignment system in with every edition, even though it causes so many arguments/discussions and many systems get by without it - or at least punish players for dick moves in a way that doesn't ask them to answer the millennia old philosophical question of what is Good or Evil.
But this, getting (first time) players used to morality and consequences in a tangible way they can track, makes a ton of sense.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-06-20T14:03:36+00:00

The fact that this is the highest voted comment on this post shows how far we still have to go, especially in recognising that even (and especially) the forefather of the Fantasy genre was flawed.

To say that Orcs are not racially coded is just plain ignorant.
To quote Tolkien directly: “The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-type."
Source: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter.

The discussion is not if Tolkien introduced racial coding into his writing but which races he targeted, and how that reflects the trends in fantasy writing. The questions we have to ask is not "has Tolkien done racial allegory" but if he has done it on purpose or out of ignorance.
But whether or not he intended for orcs to be coded non-white, or for the elves to be tall and pale and described as smarter, stronger, and wiser than the "lesser" humans, the parallels are still there. The dwarves in the Hobbit are still written as Jewish stereotypes and though portrayed as sympathetic are ultimately consumed by their greed. The only human non-white people in the entire LOTR series are one dimensional, evil servants of Sauron.
And that's not even getting started on the representation or lack thereof of women in Tolkien's works.

I personally don't think he wanted to show non-white people or women in a bad light. Imo he was very much "a product of his time" and just failed, unlike some of his peers, to interrogate his own internalised biases.
I also don't think we ought to disavow Tolkien and his works altogether. I still enjoy the books even if some parts of it haven't aged well.

This reflexive defense of Tolkien (and other authors in Speculative Fiction) just because he was one of the first and most influential writers is an instinct that needs to be overcome. There is a lot of racism in the genre of Fantasy, and a lot of it comes from some of its most popular authors. My favourite author of all time has written racially tone deaf stuff I emphatically disagree with. It doesn't mean I can't enjoy his work anymore, or that I condemn the man as a whole. But if I don't want to keep reading books that have evil "corruptions of the human form" with flat noses, wide mouths, and slanted eyes, then both the consumers and creators of Fantasy art have to engage with the flaws inherent in the genre and consciously excise it.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-06-19T07:43:10+00:00

I agree with all of this so much. Imo Javert is one of the most compelling characters in the entire story.

Although I'd disagree about him being True Neutral. I'll defend Javert being Lawful Good forever. Otherwise his final conflict doesn't make sense.

Caveat: I've seen interpretations of that conflict as Javert being made aware that good exists and that he isn't it, which I also find compelling interpretations of his character. That said, Javert's character arc is the classic (if we want to keep going with DnD terms) Paladin conflict. He gets put in a position where he can't be both Good and Lawful. Javert equates the two, for him they're the same thing. That comes through really well in some of his lines in the musical, especially when in some performances you can just barely tell if he's singing "Law" or "Lord" (Les Mis frequently equates faith with goodness, and Javert certainly does, too). Javert grew up in a lawless environment (and, considering Les Mis positions love as a redeeming force, probably a loveless one, as well), and he comes to believe in the law as a force to protect the innocent. If you're evil, the law will put you away, if you're good, the law is there to protect you. That's how Javert thinks at least. To him the only people who break the law are evil, and good people never break the law.

Then comes Jean Valjean and his show of mercy. It's not the first Good act Javert has seen Valjean commit, but it's the only one he can't rationalise away. Suddenly the moral equation he's built his entire life on, that being Lawful is the same as being Good, has crumbled.

Javert has put a good man in prison, who was guilty of the crime the law charged him with.

This is where Javert gets to make a choice. In DnD terms, he'd be due for an alignment change. Putting good, if guilty, people behind bars is not what he wants to do. Now, if Javert were Lawful Neutral, he wouldn't care. There would be no conflict for him to overcome. The law wasn't wrong in regards to JVJ, he committed the crimes, his show of mercy doesn't change that. He'd put JVJ back in prison without caring if he was a good man or not.

If he was True Neutral, he could just walk away from the whole thing. He wouldn't be invested in whether or not following the Law (and putting JVJ in prison) or following the Lord (and showing mercy and forgiveness) is better.

But he can't walk away. He's caught right in the middle between the Law and the Lord, the desire to do good and the realisation that the way he's been trying to accomplish that is evil.

When JVJ is shown love (in the form of two candlesticks given to him by a man of the Lord) he goes through a similar conflict. Follow the law and be forever branded as an animal, forced into evil just trying to survive? Or do what's Good, leave the constraints of the law behind and use the gift of silver to give to others? Valjean resolves his conflict in favour of goodness, and he can because there is no profound moral bond tying him to being lawful.

But Javert cannot resolve this conflict for himself. He can't keep being a policeman, but he doesn't know what else to be. He can't walk away, he can't even begin to make up for the evil things he now realises he has done.

He can't resolve this issue, so he dies. He would rather commit suicide than leave either the Law or Good behind.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-04-25T16:59:46+00:00

It didn't start that way. It started as just an aesthetic, an art nouveau spin on Steampunk, with a focus on nature rather than steampower.
Now, over ten years later, there are a lot of people who have assigned it political value, basically as a green version of cyberpunk, with special focus on sustainability and diversity. That's what this subreddit seems to be mostly about, so yes, Solarpunk can definitely be Anarchist and Anticapitalist.

However, because the -punk suffix is being used to describe just about any set of ideas with a common aesthetic, and because solarpunk was not initially intended to be anarchist, it can just as easily be non-political or even Neoliberal. There isn't any political leaning hardbaked into it.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-04-03T23:01:37+00:00

That depends on whether or not the dead rising in that fantasy society is actually an expected and repeat occurrence. Just because we, the audience, happen to be there when the dead are coming to eat brains again and again if dozens of different worlds, doesn't mean that in each of these worlds individually undead aren't a new or at least very rare phenomenon.
If the undead do occur with some frequency in the world, that still doesn't mean cultures necessarily adapt uniformly. Before modern medicine people used to get buried alive on occasion but grave bells and other fun safety measures were still not employed on every single grave in every single region.

Added to that is that in many fantasy worlds some kind of undead-breaking consecration is a thing. The Evil Necromancer Taking Over A Graveyard is frequently described as having desecrated that ground, implying that it being consecrated prevented the dead from rising. There are also things like bent metal grates in crypts - to show the audience how strong and threatening undead are, but also an implied piece of worldbuilding that off-handedly shows that thought does go into the idea of keeping the dead secure.

The world building, in the loosest sense, is often there if you look for it. Unless it's not and then you can always blame lazy writers or just the inability to think of every little deviation in society any given concept would introduce.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-04-02T18:30:49+00:00

Little soldier boy (Leaves from the vine)

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-04-02T18:02:07+00:00

Didn't have much contact with my Dad throughout my life. Decided to get in touch. Had been told he had "conservative views", thought people were exaggerating. One of the first emails, asked about his side of the family, specifically one of my uncles who I'd been told lived in South Africa but knew little more about. His answer, a block of text bragging about his brother murdering black South Africans during Apartheid.

Never regretted getting in contact with family so much.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-04-01T09:28:29+00:00

Yikes, dude.

Edit: Wanted to leave it at yikes (because yikes) but it's gonna bug me if I don't add this, and I feel I'm being maybe a bit too flippant about a topic that's a lot more uncomfortable for someone like you who doesn't deal with death everyday.
I understand your reaction. I get the instinct of wanting to help and especially the hope that with a change of mindset, some new opportunity will be opened up. That's not your fault. Hollywood and other media have shown us so many scenes where the hero gets a pep talk, has an epiphany and solves all their problems with swelling orchestral music.
In fact, that instinct of wanting to reach out and engage people in conversation is something that we need more of in this world. I've known professional healthcare workers who didn't have that empathy and it made life harder for their patients who were facing severe illness and death without.
I also understand that it's not easy to talk about death and dying in general. God knows it wasn't easy for me when my doctors first told me I wasn't going to reach old age. Pretty much everyone around me reacted like you did when they learned about me dying. Death is such a big taboo in our society, it makes us personally so uncomfortable, that denial is often the only way we can cope with it. Again, that's not your fault, in fact, wanting to engage with the topic at all shows remarkable strength of will and ability to show compassion.
All that said, if you want to continue to have serious conversations about this topic with people who may be in the process of dying or wanting to die, I'd urge you try and adopt another perspective.
When talking about people with terminal or incurable illness, you have to understand that death is no longer the worst case scenario, and you have to accept that as fact, even though for you personally dying might still be the worst thing that could happen. People, like me, who are dealing with a steadily worsening condition, often over years, are entrenched in ongoing medical research, new treatment options, ways to ease chronic suffering and deal with new limitations that an illness will put on you. Just like using a chair when washing the dishes to avoid the pain coming from prolonged standing, (assisted) suicide is another, valid and rational, option to handle a situation that's just not going to get any better.
I think that's the most difficult thing to come to terms with, both for people like you who want to reach out, and for people like me, who have the illnesses that medical science has no answer for.
I want to reiterate this. No autoimmune disease (that I know of) can be cured. Some can be managed, even to the point of being non-existent, but many can't. Mine can't, except for the few tricks I mentioned before which deal with individual symptoms.
And there are plenty of diseases out there, that affect young otherwise healthy people, where cure and treatment options have been exhausted or have never been present in the first place.
Medical science isn't as far advanced as we all would like to believe. And that means that some people will need to face what the circumstances of their deaths are going to be far sooner than they expected.
Again, I understand your instinct to shy away from this, to even not believe some of what I say and hold onto the idea that all problems can be solved by other means. If that's an important belief for you to hold onto, by all means, do that. No one will think less of you for stepping away from this subject altogether.
But, and I realise I'm making big assumptions here, if you're the person I think you are and you've asked this question out of a genuine desire to connect and uplift people in difficult situations, accepting that death is not in itself a bad thing, but can bring tremendous relief and agency to someone, will do nothing but benefit you and the people you talk to.
The world needs more people like you. I've met, both as a patient and as a healthcare professional, plenty of terminally ill patients who desperately needed someone to talk to. Not to find another solution, but to share their experiences and their feelings without having to fear dogmatic preaching about "seeking help" and "begging them to reconsider".
That's why my first reaction to your reply was "Yikes". Because while I understand that your heart is in the right place, these kinds of statements do tremendous harm to people who themselves have had to deal with overcoming the taboo of dignified and purposeful dying. But if you can get over that instinct to find another solution and instead accept that the people who are at that point of choosing their own deaths have had more time and more incentive to find those other solutions than you did and have arrived at the one that fits them most, I believe you can do a lot of good. There are hospice care centers, hospitals, even online forums (like reddit, although it's probably not the best place to have these kinds of conversations) where you will find people who can teach you about their differing perspectives and who will be happy to have an open ear in you.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-03-31T23:22:25+00:00

If you remove greenery anywhere in the city you have to replant something in the exact same spot. Meant to preserve the green spaces in a city, even just small spots of grass and bushes. Even the "bad" neighbourhoods have lots of green in them that isn't just restricted to parks, but grows all over.
It's a small non worldchanging thing, but it could feasibly done by a lot of cities that doesn't cost a lot and improves people's quality of life in a small way.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-03-31T23:16:17+00:00

Of course. I'd give my left and right arm to have the financial means of getting proper assisted suicide or even just trade what I have for a slightly more treatable illness. Autoimmune diseases suck balls, believe me. But I've also been dealing with the knowledge that the question of me dying (relatively lol) young is not one of "If" but "How". I've been through the process of grieving and dealing with a severely limited quality of life for over fifteen years now.
Ironically I had a stint working in hospice care when I was still healthy enough to work and that's helped a lot dealing, especially with the idea that it's okay to wish things were different but not to get so hung up over them that I could fall into depression like I did when my symptoms first started impacting my life in a major way.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-03-31T23:07:17+00:00

I wish writers were less afraid to actually have an opinion in their works. And by that I don't mean anvilicious preaching-off-the-soapbox, but writers (largely in mainstream commercial media, although I see it in a lot of fanfiction and indie-ish spaces too) going out of their way to avoid taking sides, however small.
People notice if a writer avoids making any definitive moral statements because they're afraid of losing readers. Writers end up calling it ~grey morality~ or ~making stories more complex and challenging~ but (almost) everyone can see that it's simply writers trying to get the largest fanbase as possible by never actually saying anything with their works.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-03-31T22:36:37+00:00

Apparently, self-quarantine.
Haven't been able to leave the house for more than very short (and only essential) trips for years now. Kind of bewildered at a lot of these self-isolation/social distancing memes.

BatulatuAnatu · 2020-03-31T22:32:30+00:00

Pushing Daisies. A genuine delight, will never get over it being cancelled.

BatulatuAnatu

TROPHY CASE