I love how d&d sorcerers basically have magic because people just cannot stop having sex with dragons and elementals and rift demons, it’s just an epidemic of monster fucking going on here.
alcohol culture is so wild…people all over fb will be sharing a meme like “i can’t have just one glass of wine, it’s always 2 bottles and 3 people i can never look in the eye again” as if that’s normal? but if a meme like that was going around about cocaine or any other drug, everyone would be like “sounds like a drug problem bruh”
alcoholism is SO normalized and it’s such a toxic environment honestly
It’s crazy !!!
yeah i think a huge issue w alcohol culture is not peer pressure, but peer normalization.
like people just dont realize that binge drinking, or even just having alcohol frequently can constitute as having an alcohol problem bc its viewed as being fun or just part of also party culture when in reality its really not and is super damaging to your body, your relationships, and is a super poor coping mechanism
Based on biological facts.
Also social constructs are an agreement in society by the majority of people. So though its a social construct when you make up a gender that doesn’t make it real.
You know the idea of non-binary third genders appears in dozens and dozens of cultures all the way back through history.
Like, “making up genders” is nothing new? Because all genders are “made up”? That’s what makes it a social construct? The concept of gender is highly contextualized, but culturally and historically.
And insisting that the only genders that are REAL are the ones YOU are familiar with is pretty ahistorical, short sighted, uninformed, and generally shitty.
If your not part of that culture then it doesn’t matter. Not what I am familiar with it’s what the majority of the culture is familiar with. Gender is a social construct based on biological fact. EX: social construct, chivalry EX: biological fact, men are generally stronger than women
So men should take care of women because men are stronger
That is a gender role based on biological fact.
Chivalry is a the medieval code of honor for knights. The Code of Chivalry described in the Song of Roland and an excellent representation of the Knights Codes of Chivalry are as follows:
To fear God and maintain His Church
To serve the liege lord in valour and faith
To protect the weak and defenceless
To give succour to widows and orphans
To refrain from the wanton giving of offence
To live by honour and for glory
To despise pecuniary reward
To fight for the welfare of all
To obey those placed in authority
To guard the honour of fellow knights
To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit
To keep faith
At all times to speak the truth
To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun
To respect the honour of women
Never to refuse a challenge from an equal
Never to turn the back upon a foe
And if you think that even half that shit is based on biology, or is an actual part of modern American culture, I have a rude awakening for you.
And look, I don’t really give a shit which biological sex is generally on average stronger. I don’t need my husband to wrestle a fucking bear or lay siege to a castle. I need him to cook dinner when I get home from work and clean the cat box. It’s a pretty different skill set.
And look, you can’t simultaneously say that third genders in other cultures “don’t count” because they aren’t YOUR culture, AND insist that not only are our genders biologically determined, but the specific gender roles and stereotypes are biologically determined. That doesn’t make sense. It’s not even internally consistent.
And for the record, my culture DOES have the concept of third and non-binary genders. We even have flags and terms and organizations.
Also men tend to be stronger, but women tend to have more endurance in the long term. That said, individual variation is so wide that the differences are fairly menial.
Stop using biology to justify your sexism. You know fuck all about biology.
Oh hey look there’s the point Oh Oh shit. you juuust missed it
Obviously I was talking about chivalry as we use it now.
But let’s put it simply for you Horses and ox’s exist without humans These are biological sex nothing to do with human intervention Humans made carts to fit these animals This is gender
We don’t make carts for Dragons, because Dragons aren’t real
I don’t think I can dumb this down anymore
You know what different cultures have different cart building methods. And carts can be constructed different ways, with different features and designs. And some animals don’t even have carts (they have chariots and buggies, plows or saddles, or nothing at all!) and there’s more animals in the world than just horses and oxen?
So yeah. That’s a good metaphor. It just demonstrates the opposite of what you seem to think it does.
ok your just trying now
let’s go back to what happened (feel free to call me out if you see a straw man)
I say gender roles are made by people based on sex
you say that because some cultures don’t do that that my statement is not true
I say that your culture doesn't have it so it doesn't matter (my mistake) but western cultures don’t. then I explain how my previous statement works in the real world.
you tell me about how old cultures used to work and about your husband
I tell you in a more abstract way how sex and gender work together
you took my metaphor literally
but since you’ll keep missing the point ill ask you. where did gender come from then?
if it wasn’t genetic differences turned into cultural norms how did gender come about?
did we just make it up and go “ok let’s go with this”
unlike everything else in culture that can be explained by biological or geographic forces.
Nonbinary genders have a physical, biological gender basis. Intersex conditions, where human beings are born with traits of two genders, do exist. So do conditions of “null” gender – women born with X0 chromosome, who never enter puberty, men who are castrated in childhood. These people technically have gender – they appear to have either vaginas or penises – but all of the secondary sex characteristics adults have, such as breasts, facial hair, deep voices, etc, are not present. Finally, there are people in the Dominican Republican born with a condition called “guevedoces” (penis at 12) who are born looking like girls and are often sex-assigned as girls based on appearance, but are actually XY males who grow a penis when the testosterone surge of puberty hits.
So: the gender of “I was assigned female at birth but am actually a male” is a physical reality. The gender of “I am both genders” is a physical reality. The gender of “I don’t really have a gender” is a physical reality. The gender of “I occupy a defined third gender category assigned to males-at-birth who are castrated before puberty and this happens to so many people in my society that we actually think of people like us as a third gender” is a physical reality.
Your statements that socially constructed nonbinary genders don’t exist in the Western world is true but irrelevant, because biological nonbinary genders exist in the Western world and it is a huge flaw in the entire Western concept of gender that our gender structure cannot accomodate them. When all of Asia, most of Native America, India, most of Africa, and a few scattered places in Europe all have a means of handling biological errors of gender assignment, and “Western civilization” doesn’t, it means there is a problem with Western civilization that needs to be addressed, not that Westerners can stick their heads in the sand and go “la la la there are only two human genders.”
The fact that so many people here in the West are willing to demonstrate profound ignorance by saying with confidence “There are only two genders” like people with intersex conditions are literally nonexistent clearly demonstrates that our cultural worldview is wrong on this topic. Wrong, wrong, wrong, like on the level of “all cats have tails” (they don’t) or “all humans have hair” (full-body alopecia is a thing) or “the sky is always blue” (except when it’s gray from clouds, pink/orange from sunset, or black from it being night).
You’re not familiar with extra genders? Tough shit. That’s because you’re wrong. If a thing exists outside your experience that does not mean it doesn’t exist. “Socially constructed” doesn’t mean “my society doesn’t construct that and therefore it doesn’t exist”; the social construct of human sexuality held for centuries was that men seeded women, women contributed nothing to the child except to be an incubator, and sperm contained fully formed homunculi. This was wrong. This was more totally wrong than one can easily imagine being wrong, given the powerful impact of the maternal environment on a fetus created from two sets of genes – mothers have more impact on children before they are born than fathers do. But hey, that was the social construct of the time!
Extra genders are a biological human reality and always have been. They are not hugely common – probably about 1-3% of the population, maybe as high as 6% if you assume being trans is also an intersex condition and add in all the trans people. But they sure as fucking shit exist, and they always have. No one invented them because la la la I feel like being a special gender snowflake today! They came into existence because human sexual biology is insanely complex and the amazing thing is not that trans and intersex people exist but that cis people do, in the numbers we do.
is albino a race?
no because it’s a genetic mishap
is intersex a gender
no because it’s a genetic mishap
Race is also a social construct buddy.
Race isn’t a series of perfectly unique biological boxes. It is a spectrum of traits, and the labels we use to describe race are socially constructed.
are you actually comparing a crushing disappointment with horrible editing, directing and writing, a messy plot and mediocre acting to a movie that is almost undeniably flawless when it comes to filmmaking or are you gonna remember that a movie’s quality is determined by more than how diverse it is
yea i am comparing a crushing disappointment with horrible editing, directing and writing, a messy plot and mediocre acting to suicide squad.
Some stores with deli sections will sell the "butts" of cheeses and deli meats for a huge discount. A butt is basically the end of a block of cheese or piece of meat that's too small to go through the slicer. It's a cheap way to get meats and cheeses for salads, quesadillas, etc. The only down side is you don't really get to choose what you get. Warning: if you go for meats it'll be mostly salami butts 9 times out of 10. Just ask at the deli counter.
In a recent post about mechanical incentives in tabletop roleplaying games, there was some chatter in the notes about whether it’s possible for game rules to incentivise “telling a story”. Rather than address it there, I’m going to branch off a separate post, because I think there’s a more basic question in play: before we can talk about how rules interface with story, we’ve gotta be clear about what sort of player-versus-character relationship we’re talking about.
In the past, I’ve talked about how expectations regarding the procedure of play can differ wildly even within a narrow context like “enter dungeon, kill dragon, get treasure”, and about some of the assumptions that game designers can bake into their rules without necessarily realising they’re doing so. One set of assumptions that I didn’t touch on in the latter post - because it’s basically a whole discussion on its own - are those that pertain to the fundamental relationship between you, the player, and your character.
There are as many opinions about how players ought to relate to their characters as there are games, but for discussion purposes, I like to break them down into four broad categories:
A. I am my character. I’ll do whatever I myself would do, if I happened to be a mighty wizard/deadly warrior/etc.
B. I’m an actor, and my character is my role. I’ll do whatever I think my character would do.
C. My character is the protagonist of a story I’m telling. I’ll do whatever makes for the most interesting narrative.
D. I’m playing a game, and my character is my playing-piece. I’ll do whatever scores the most points.
(Incidentally, A and B up there are where a lot of folks end up talking past each other. The term “immersion” gets bandied about a fair bit in online discussion of tabletop RPGs, but folks rarely bother to define it - which is a problem, because when they say “immersion”, half of them mean A and half of them mean B!)
The stance that a game adopts can make a big difference with respect to how certain things are implemented in the rules. For example, games where social and mental influence takes control of your character away from you and hands it to the GM are generally of type A; when the player is identified directly with the character, it simply doesn’t make sense to demand that she play her character against her own best interests.
Of course, few games stick narrowly to just one stance. While it’s possible to pair these approaches up in any combination, the most common pairings are those that lie adjacent on the preceding list. For example, it’s not unusual for games to straddle the line between “I am my character” and “my character is my role”. Likewise, there are a number of popular games that split the difference between “my character is the protagonist of a story I’m telling” and “my character is my playing piece” - there’s a fine line between playing author and playing God!
The really interesting thing, though, is that these stances don’t form a spectrum: they form a loop. In terms of which approaches are most closely compatible, “my character is my playing piece” loops right back around to “I am my character” - and that particular boundary is where a lot of the oldest tabletop RPGs, including old-school Dungeons & Dragons itself, tend to live.
Where does your favoured player-versus-character stance fall?
(I tend to be an A/D, myself, though I can do C/D in a pinch.)
weirdly enough i often find myself at B/D, i find that it can be a lot of fun working backwards from “what will score the most points” until you have a fully realized person who just so happens to be perfectly optimized
Oh, sure - A/C and B/D are by no means unheard of. They’re merely a bit tricky to handle because you end up with two sets of potentially conflicting priorities that need to be reconciled.
A/C obliges you to negotiate two very different perspectives on the same story simultaneously, at once personal and disinterested.
B/D, meanwhile, has a tension between B’s demand that you not directly acknowledge how the game’s rules are influencing your decisions (unless you’re playing a really high-concept game where your role is aware that she’s a character in a game, anyway), versus D’s demand that you constantly rummage around in the rules’ guts.
You can totally do it, but there are pitfalls there that don’t exist when you adopt approaches that flow into each other more organically.
I think you could make a pretty solid argument that C isn’t it’s own point, it’s a subset of B where your role is “protagonist”
You’d have your work cut out for you. There are some pretty fundamental differences in terms of how the player-character interface works there; arguing that C is strictly a subset of B is roughly equivalent to arguing that - for example - being a writer is strictly a subset of being an actor. I mean, you can argue that, and certainly there are a lot of shared skills between the two pursuits, but it’s an extraordinary claim.
(As an aside, I’d also like to address the suggestion that’s been raised several times in the notes that all games really fall into type D because rules-based character creation exists. That’s only true if you buy into the old roleplaying-versus-rollplaying fallacy whereby engaging with the game mechanics in any way whatsoever is equivalent to treating your character as a playing-piece. Relatively few games are written with the assumption that you’ll “play to win” during character creation, and a great many will break hilariously if you try.)
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