Tsolarprincess - The Solar Princess

As Elon Musk struggles with the concept of round Earth, some people still consider him a tech/science genius

Only people who can solve my three riddles get to date me.

“they were flirting with you” and how was i supposed to know such a thing when everyone speaks in codes and puzzles

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Climb aboard, then!” But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown. “Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.” 

“I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”

___

…But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the frog felt a subtle motion on its back, and in a panic dived deep beneath the rushing waters, leaving the scorpion to drown.

“It was going to sting me anyway,” muttered the frog, emerging on the other side of the river. “It was inevitable. You all knew it. Everyone knows what those scorpions are like. It was self-defense.”

___

…But no sooner had they cast off from the bank, the frog felt the tip of a stinger pressed lightly against the back of its neck. “What do you think you’re doing?” said the frog.

“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

They swam in silence to the other end of the river, where the scorpion climbed off, leaving the frog fuming.

“After the kindness I showed you!” said the frog. “And you threatened to kill me in return?”

“Kindness?” said the scorpion. “To only invite me on your back after you knew I was defenseless, unable to use my tail without killing myself? My dear frog, I only treated you as I was treated. Your kindness was as poisoned as a scorpion’s sting.”

___

…“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

“You have a point,” the frog acknowledged. “But once we get to dry land, couldn’t you sting me then without repercussion?”

“All I want is to cross the river safely,” said the scorpion. “Once I’m on the other side I would gladly let you be.”

“But I would have to trust you on that,” said the frog. “While you’re pressing a stinger to my neck. By ferrying you to land I’d be be giving up the one deterrent I hold over you.”

“But by the same logic, I can’t possibly withdraw my stinger while we’re still over water,” the scorpion protested.

The frog paused in the middle of the river, treading water. “So, I suppose we’re at an impasse.”

The river rushed around them. The scorpion’s stinger twitched against the frog’s unbroken skin. “I suppose so,” the scorpion said.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Absolutely not!” said the frog, and dived beneath the waters, and so none of them learned anything.

___

A scorpion, being unable to swim, asked a turtle (as in the original Persian version of the fable) to carry it across the river. The turtle readily agreed, and allowed the scorpion aboard its shell. Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell. The turtle, swimming placidly, failed to notice.

They reached the other side of the river, and parted ways as friends.

___

…Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell.

The turtle, hearing the tap of the scorpion’s sting, was offended at the scorpion’s ungratefulness. Thankfully, having been granted the powers to both defend itself and to punish evil, the turtle sank beneath the waters and drowned the scorpion out of principle.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” sneered the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back.”

The scorpion pleaded earnestly. “Do you think so little of me? Please, I must cross the river. What would I gain from stinging you? I would only end up drowning myself!”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Even a scorpion knows to look out for its own skin. Climb aboard, then!”

But as they forged through the rushing waters, the scorpion grew worried. This frog thinks me a ruthless killer, it thought. Would it not be justified in throwing me off now and ridding the world of me? Why else would it agree to this? Every jostle made the scorpion more and more anxious, until the frog surged forward with a particularly large splash, and in panic the scorpion lashed out with its stinger.

“I knew it,” snarled the frog, as they both thrashed and drowned. “A scorpion cannot change its nature.”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. The frog agreed, but no sooner than they were halfway across the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown.

“I’ve only myself to blame,” sighed the frog, as they both sank beneath the waters. “You, you’re a scorpion, I couldn’t have expected anything better. But I knew better, and yet I went against my judgement! And now I’ve doomed us both!”

“You couldn’t help it,” said the scorpion mildly. “It’s your nature.” 

___

…“Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”

“Alas, I was of two natures,” said the scorpion. “One said to gratefully ride your back across the river, and the other said to sting you where you stood. And so both fought, and neither won.” It smiled wistfully. “Ah, it would be nice to be just one thing, wouldn’t it? Unadulterated in nature. Without the capacity for conflict or regret.”

___

“By the way,” said the frog, as they swam, “I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s on the other side of the river?”

“It’s the journey,” said the scorpion. “Not the destination.”

___

…“What’s on the other side of anything?” said the scorpion. “A new beginning.”

___

…”Another scorpion to mate with,” said the scorpion. “And more prey to kill, and more living bodies to poison, and a forthcoming lineage of cruelties that you will be culpable in.”

___

…”Nothing we will live to see, I fear,” said the scorpion. “Already the currents are growing stronger, and the river seems like it shall swallow us both. We surge forward, and the shoreline recedes. But does that mean our striving was in vain?”

___

“I love you,” said the scorpion.

The frog glanced upward. “Do you?”

“Absolutely. Can you imagine the fear of drowning? Of course not. You’re a frog. Might as well be scared of breathing air. And yet here I am, clinging to your back, as the waters rage around us. Isn’t that love? Isn’t that trust? Isn’t that necessity? I could not kill you without killing myself. Are we not inseparable in this?”

The frog swam on, the both of them silent.

___

“I’m so tired,” murmured the frog eventually. “How much further to the other side? I don’t know how long we’ve been swimming. I’ve been treading water. And it’s getting so very dark.”

“Shh,” the scorpion said. “Don’t be afraid.”

The frog’s legs kicked out weakly. “How long has it been? We’re lost. We’re lost! We’re doomed to be cast about the waters forever. There is no land. There’s nothing on the other side, don’t you see!”

“Shh, shh,” said the scorpion. “My venom is a hallucinogenic. Beneath its surface, the river is endlessly deep, its currents carrying many things.” 

“You - You’ve killed us both,” said the frog, and began to laugh deliriously. “Is this - is this what it’s like to drown?” 

“We’ve killed each other,” said the scorpion soothingly. “My venom in my glands now pulsing through your veins, the waters of your birthing pool suffusing my lungs. We are engulfing each other now, drowning in each other. I am breathless. Do you feel it? Do you feel my sting pierced through your heart?”

“What a foolish thing to do,” murmured the frog. “No logic. No logic to it at all.”

“We couldn’t help it,” whispered the scorpion. “It’s our natures. Why else does anything in the world happen? Because we were made for this from birth, darling, every moment inexplicable and inevitable. What a crazy thing it is to fall in love, and yet - It’s all our fault! We are both blameless. We’re together now, darling. It couldn’t have happened any other way.”

___

“It’s funny,” said the frog. “I can’t say that I trust you, really. Or that I even think very much of you and that nasty little stinger of yours to begin with. But I’m doing this for you regardless. It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s strange. Why would I do this? I want to help you, want to go out of my way to help you. I let you climb right onto my back! Now, whyever would I go and do a foolish thing like that?”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”  

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Come aboard, then!” But no sooner had the scorpion mounted the frog’s back than it began to sting, repeatedly, while still safely on the river’s bank.

The frog groaned, thrashing weakly as the venom coursed through its veins, beginning to liquefy its flesh. “Ah,” it muttered. “For some reason I never considered this possibility.”

“Because you were never scared of me,” the scorpion whispered in its ear. “You were never scared of dying. In a past life you wore a shell and sat in judgement. And then you were reborn: soft-skinned, swift, unburdened, as new and vulnerable as a child, moving anew through a world of children. How could anyone ever be cruel, you thought, seeing the precariousness of it all?” The scorpion bowed its head and drank. “How could anyone kill you without killing themselves?”

Modest proposal: Gale from Baldur’s Gate III should eat a magic item every long rest

I like neither the Gale’s arcane hunger system nor the long rest system.

Arcane Hunger is just annoying. First time Gale asked me to eat an item, I was like “sure, no problem, I have some +1 daggers that I don’t care about”, and then it turned out that not all magic items are eligible, and I need to sacrifice an actually useful thing. By the next time he came up I prepared a sacrificial bauble, of course, but I was still a bit salty. Nobody likes this aspect of Gale.

The long rest system is numerically at the spot where it doesn’t really limit you in any way and you can rest whenever you want. Recently, a redditor posted showing him running out of food, and everyone was like “I didn’t know that was even possible”. And I can’t blame Larian – balancing this system so that the limit is real but not suffocating is really hard. And I can understand why they’d rather make in inconsequential – if playing the game required obsessively collecting every 1-sup fish head, it’d be supremely annoying.

The Proposal

Merge those two systems and have them negate each other’s downsides.

1) Make Gale a non-optional follower. He can’t be skipped and he can’t be fired. 2) Make Gale ask for a magic item every long rest, for the entire game. 3) Make more (all?) magic items edible. As far as I can see, there are enough magic items in the world that you could comfortably long rest after every fight if you have all of them; if not, then add more edible items. 4) Remove camp supplies. Now the price of a long rest is one magic item. Don’t remove “free” partial rests for advancing the story.

Upsides

The long rest limit is now a true strategic limit

There is a limited and known number of magic items in the world, and it’s easy for the game designer to assume how many the player will have at any moment. Magic items are more notable and less fungible than foodstuffs, so the price of a long rest feels impactful, but not overwhelming. And if the player wants to rest often and stretch the limit, it will happen gradually.

At first, you sacrifice worthless baubles that have no other purpose to them. When they run out, you have to buy more items from traders; cheap items exist so this isn’t much of a problem, but you notice. And unlike foodstuffs, magic items don’t respawn, so you can’t farm them forever. At this point you can go the interesting route – explore more, do more quests, search more dungeons so they can find more items, which is what we wanted you to do in the first place. If that’s not enough, you might need to lose some potentially useful rings, and then actual gear, and at that point you’d know that you are in danger. And in the worst case scenario, there’s three days from running out to game over, so that’s still not a complete ban on long rests, you have time to think about how to dig yourself out of the ditch.

Less upfront frustration

Nobody likes that one moment when Gale starts asking for items and you need to part with something you like. But in this new system, the first time it happens you can give him a useless bauble that you planned to sell anyway. We can make extra sure that the player has enough worthless +1 daggers by that point in game to have something to give. And in the long run, when the price of a long rest is established as a rule, it won’t feel frustrating – for much the same reason why, in World of Warcraft, the system “after the first few hours of playing each day you get a penalty to XP” was met with uproar, and the mathematically equivalent “for the first few hours of playing each day you get a bonus to XP” was accepted with no complaints. That’s the rule of the game, a ring for a rest, and if you ever need to part with your favorite weapon, that’s your fault and you had been warned.

Less frustration at finding useless loot

I regularly found myself in a sutiation where I complete a difficult quest or infiltrate a treasury or clear a dungeon, and my reward is a magic item… that is weaker than anything I have, or just straight up doesn’t fit my specific party composition. And I have to sell it for boring gold. In the new system, every new item you find is at least one more long rest you can take. Magic items become a gamewise-limited resource, like a mini version of a Mind Flayer Tadpole, and they are always exciting to find. And if you had to take one long rest to clear a dungeon and you looted two items from it – you would know it paid for itself.

Faster and smoother feedback

In the current system, you can take as many rests as you want until you suddenly can’t. Running out of food is the only point of feedback you actually get. Imagine how much worse XCOM would be if losing soldiers meant nothing until at the 15th death you suddenly get a game over?

Here, you can feel how well you play, by how long you can last between rests. “I just dump useless trash straight into Gale’s open mouth”, “I have to spend money to keep going”, “I have to part with a nice but not essential item”, “I have to lose my favorite legendary weapon”, and “I have three days to find something to save myself” are all qualitatively different experiences with different senses of urgency. Phenomenological depth!

Magic items become mutually fungible with consumables

Potions, elixirs, arrows, bombs, and scrolls suffer from the classic RPG problem of “I never use them until the last fight because I might need them in the future”. Now, consumables can be used to save on magic items! If those ten potions let you take on twice as many fights before you had to rest, then you essentially exchanged those potions for a (unique and named!) magic item, which feels meaningful and makes it worth it to not hoard consumables.

Easier to adapt for hardcore difficulty

For Honor Mode difficulty you add the condition “now Gale is more picky and only eats stronger magic items”. Boom, this adds real strategic difficulty when increasing food cost from 40 to 80 didn’t.

Downsides

A non-optional companion might sort of violate freedom of choice in this kind of an RPG?

Gale is now even more of an omni-important Mary Sue?

Mostly-resourceless classes like Rogue might need a comparative nerf?

What do you think?

I come from a culture that has no nudity taboo - nudity is not considered inherently sexual, or somehow traumatising to witness. What that means in practice is that there is a clearly drawn line between sexual and non-sexual nudity. There is nothing wrong or inappropriate about nudity in a sexual context, and nothing wrong or inappropriate about nudity in a non-sexual context. However, it is 100% inappropriate to be nude in a situation where it is not obvious from context whether this is sexual or not.

I've seen random kids who briefly escaped from their parents bolt across a public park buck-ass naked after they were playing in the water fountain and their parents were in the middle of changing their kid from wet clothes to dry clothes when the small nudist escaped. Changing your small kid's clothes right there in public is ok because there is obviously nothing sexual about a child whose clothes got wet. But although people will have baby pictures of their kids in the bath or just running around the house like that because sometimes little apes hate clothes for some reason, it's considered common sense to not share those pictures on facebook mom groups and such, because you have no way of knowing who's seeing them, and that blurs the line of context.

It all boils down to the clearly defined context. Bathing nude in the same sauna with five of your co-workers at the office christmas party? Clearly nonsexual, therefore completely fine. Your friend-with-benefits inviting you to come over and opening the door in nothing but a doggy collar and the most porn-scented perfume? Clearly sexual, therefore completely fine. A woman checking her breasts for lumps in the gym lockers just before or after a shower? Clearly non-sexual, therefore completely fine.

But if you went to the bank today and there's some guy who walks in and immediately strips naked, doing his banking business wearing nothing but a deep smile and being clearly very content with this situation, you have no way of telling whether he's getting kicks out of this or not. There is no contextual reason for him to be nude. Therefore, that is inappropriate.

Then you go home and post on tumblr - as one does - going like "there was some dude completely fucking buck-ass naked in the bank today. That was fucking weird and I wish he had not done that." And someone immediately swoops into inform you that actually nudity is not inherently sexual or inappropriate, and there are cultures out there that have no nudity taboo. It's not fair to call somebody a freak for something like that, maybe that guy was just finnish.

Looks more like malicious compliance, leaving obvious traces of censorship, than a hack job

This is literally the obedience training that molds us into capitalism. And capitalists think it's human nature

There's this interesting phenomenon where when you're a child, or some other vulnerable minority dependent on a job for shelter, you are actually under duress almost constantly. You can't say "I don't want to work today," you cannot say "I don't want to do the dishes, actually," you cannot choose not to participate. In a lot of cases, the punishment is explicit. Your parents might yell at you. Your boss might fire you. But in other cases, it's implicit. The mood will sour. You lose leeway. People get mad at you. And that creates a really shitty environment where you're constantly being coerced to do things!

And here's the kicker; you're not allowed to acknowledge that. You cannot acknowledge that you are being coerced, you cannot acknowledge that your free will is not being respected, because that's punished too. Your boss insists that you act excited. Your parents punish you for acting surly. You are forced to fake enthusiastic consent, constantly. It's a fucking nightmare. Your hand is being forced, you do not have the option to say "no," and if you ever, for a second, try to acknowledge that, everyone acts like you're the aggressor.

What the media won't show

The target audience