Birds of Aotearoa! At the very least, a couple of them!

Bittern at the grocery store

iirc there's some really good stuff in Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't, already a very cool book, history of counterfactual history as a genre, about how wargaming in military colleges really took off after the napoleonic wars because the combo of extensive preplanning of campaigns and exhaustive analysis after the fact meant the 19th century is when you get a well established Discourse in which historical events were treated as variable/iterable with differences, meaning writers can start to riff off that for creative purposes (blanqi and the gang), so not only did roleplaying come from wargaming but speculative fiction and the whole -verse approach to world building (what if X but Y) sorta did too

Honestly it's weird that roleplaying as we know it evolved from historical wargaming.

Like for example DBA rules contain some suggestions for running campaigns with narrative and "propaganda" so I wouldn't say that it's something incompatible, and 0E looks way more like wargames than say PbtA games do, but storytelling games were a feature of artistic salons for way longer and they appear much closer to roleplaying than rulesets for reenacting ancient battles on tabletop.

Salon games didn't have skill checks but neither did wargames and it's strange that nobody came up with simplistic skill checks to add uncertainty and realism to the game

I think the line is a lot clearer when the role of dice and rules in tabletop roleplaying games is correctly understood.

"Uncertainty" and "realism" are, at best, secondary to what the dice are actually doing. Even most tabletop RPGs get it wrong when they try to explain themselves – they'll talk about the rules as something to fall back on to prevent schoolyard arguments (i.e., "yes I did!/no you didn't!") from derailing the story, when in fact it's the exact opposite.

If we look at freeform roleplaying as an illustrative parallel, we see that, while newly formed groups may in fact fall to bickering when a consensus can't be reached about what ought to happen next, mature and well-established groups tend instead to fall prey to excessive consensus-seeking: the impulse to always find an outcome that isn't necessarily one which everybody at the table can be happy with, but at the very least one which everybody at the table can agree is reasonable – and that's a lot more constraining than one might think.

In this sense, the role of picking up the dice isn't to build consensus, but to break it – to allow for the possibility of outcomes which nobody at the table wanted or expected. It's the "well, this is happening now" factor that prevents the table's dynamic from ossifying into endless consensus-seeking about what reasonably ought to happen next.

Looking to the history of wargames, this is precisely the innovation they bring to the table. Early historical wargames tended to be diceless affairs which decided outcomes by deferring to the judgment of a referee or other subject matter expert, but the use of randomisers increasingly came to be favoured because referees would tend to favour the most reasonable course, precluding upsets and rendering the outcomes of entire battles a foregone conclusion. This goes all the way back to the roots of tabletop wargaming – people were literally having "rules versus rulings" arguments two hundred years ago!

(This isn't the only facet of tabletop roleplaying culture which has its roots in wargaming culure, of course. For example, you can draw a direct line from the preoccupation of early tabletop RPGs with punishing the use of out-of-character knowledge to historical wargaming's gentleperson's agreement to refrain from making decisions based on information that one's side's commanders couldn't possibly have possessed when re-creating historical battles.)

To be clear, I don't necessarily disagree that salon games could have yielded something like modern tabletop RPGs. However, first they'd have had to arrive at the paired insights that a. excessive consensus-seeking is poison to building an interesting narrative; and b. randomisers can be used to force the breaking of consensus, and historical wargames had a substantial head start because they'd figured all that out a century earlier.

RIP in advance to Talia's mentions but I think this is spot on for why, even though I technically occupy a quite NB gender position - I touch up my lipstick in the gents, I use any pronouns but I'm on progesterone as well as E because I'm shooting for full on feminisation rather than androgynisation/cessation of age related masculinising, got invited to both my sister's hen and her fiancé's stag - I relate to basically none of the discourse around NBness apart from decolonial transfeminism like this thread https://twitter.com/talia_bhatt/status/1743210476299800867 And this one essay by Alex V Green https://thebaffler.com/latest/gender-blur-green Which is a long way of saying I don't relate to any of it and that's why I never use that identity term, but also people don't really put it on me because I'm hormonally transitioning which is Interesting lol

Had to fight not to instantly book an ill advised tattoo

Slowly reading through Dungeon Meshi and when I tell you I cackled upon seeing these funky lil familiars. I adore them. What do you mean they spin their lil leggies like a propeller??

KIM KITSURAGI -- "Officer, explain to me why the body has been hanging in the tree for 7 days straight."

HARRY D.B -- "Errrr... I forgor."

[EDIT BELOW:]

@coffinwoodx found this gem:

by cthaeh._ on instagram!

When they don't include the bird side eye in the anime

When it looks like you have perfect pitch because your tinnitus has gotten so bad that you're hearing a high G in your right ear at all times

Slippers are monuments to the hatred of bending down

Finally validated in my belief that my squishy nose is an Asian heritage thing by ffs research, because there are entirely different kinds of rhinoplasty to cope with the fact that East Asian people have less septal cartilage, under which heading I present exhibit A

Who among us

I find it funny that Chilchuck gets hited by rocks one extra time on anime than in manga

They really said: "yea, one more time wouldn't hurt"

Next time a relative asks me if me and carla are saving/planning on buying a house/getting married/having children I'm just going to send them this

!!! More discoursing while everyone processes the Cass report

A tweet that spoke deeply to the part of my internal monologue that was parasitised/marionetted by the Should We Invite Bella Hadid tweet, because you WANT to be kind but also it's like Oh you're highly motivated as long as you're on a pre-established well-structured path but you struggle to know what to do with yourself otherwise? Oh you never take holidays unless it's someone else's idea because you'll just feel the same wherever you go? Oh you never cook nice things for yourself or bother dressing up or cleaning your living space unless it'll have an impact on someone else because ditto? Oh you want to live a more legibly queer life but you don't want to have to talk to your parents about it? Oh you'd like your body to be different but only if you can know the outcome in advance? Oh you're overidentified with clichés about hopeless queer yearning because you get intense crushes but can't imagine actually being with those people with the body you have? Oh you behave with poisonous resentment towards people who actually are transitioning because they give the lie to your foundational myth that Happiness Is Impossible (So I'm Not Stupid For Not Chasing It)? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw you a gender staying the same party? Should we invite Keira Bell? (conscious this is coming out mean but I had two close friends tell me I transitioned wrong by starting on hormones and working out everything else as it became urgent - BOTH have since asked me for help with their HRT plans, so, you know. Maybe all the overeducated queers should actually read the DBT workbook pdf they keep sending to other people and realise that rationalising your despair spirals isn't actually a sign that you're smarter and more insightful than your friends, just that you're identified with your own lack of agency because then at least none of it is your fault.)

“Back before all this gender shit, her body was like a good dog. Maybe it wasn't fully her, but her dog did everything she wanted: she moved so fast, pulled himself up trees, sprinted through forests and across fields, giddy and waggy. She was lucky to have gotten a dog like that. She didn't deserve such a good dog. She'd thought she'd have that dog forever - when they were both old, he would lay at her feet like a canvas duffel, loyal and obliging and charming to the last… When Amy transitioned, she lost her dog. There was just her. She and her body were one and the same. Every sensation simply belonged to her, unmediated. It was supposed to be good. Sometimes it was. She didn't have to guess what was going on from her dog's behavior. But without a dog to hurt for her, on her behalf, her life as a woman arrived with pain; pain that had to be endured, withstood, pain that was the same as being alive, and so was without end. As Jon bats, Ames tries to listen to his body. He has not thought about his dog in a long time. Does he still have a dog? In his detransition, he supposed he'd get his dog back, but he didn't. He has simply lost the vibrancy of both pain and pleasure. The world has receded to a tolerable distance, the colors unsaturated, while the dog stayed dead.” -Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

Which doll parisienne refused to top genet such that he was moved to include this sideswipe in his book on Palestine, also your feet WILL shrink Jean