Demonstrating The Rope Dart (繩標; Sheng2biao1)

Your body must be rested and fed if you wish to be a pervert.

loving the ac twists recently usually i’m watching shows all “yes we knew that it’s a zombie you aim for the head get with the program already!”

but in ac, characters are like “ah yes we’ve obviously entered the afterlife this makes perfect sense carry on” and i’m behind the screen losing my mind “but what does this MEAN?!?”

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

The dog went in to be neutered and the vet took a picture of the dog and sent it to his owner as soon as he woke up.

what if there was a show where every character was gay and you had the token straight guy character who acted really stereotypical and was into cars beers and women and everyone was like OH STRAIGHT LARRY YOU’RE SO FUNNY AND STRAIGHT

how to counterspell when you're not a caster

Rogue: That spell that [NPC Sorcerer] is about to cast on me requires concentration, right?

GM: It does.

Rogue: I take off my shirt.

Me, fighting a yoga mom in the organic food market circa 2023: take your hand off that peach or I’ll vaccinate your children against polio

it warms my heart to know that ancient Romans would travel to more-ancient Greece and then get mad that it wasn't like it was in Homer/Plato/Aristotle & complain back home that Greece sucked to visit