:> other bird comics about tumblr posts are on my blog under #omagpies

original post by @cauchys-special-boy here:

Do you ever forget that you have a gender to most people….. meaning that random people at the grocery store see me as a woman and not just a little internet guy

i love how quickly the collective pining begins whenever AO3 goes down. Less than ten minutes and there's already mournful posts

@nathanwpyle

I literally love this.

I couldn't stop laughing for 20 minutes.

No joke.

that take-out is going to be freezing by the time it gets home.

me, quietly whispering to the ao3 page of an author who doesn’t even know I exist: I am obsessed with you

"This fic was ai generated—" Cool, so lemme block you real quick

this is my cursed jug i have that bleeds when you pour water in it. 

we’ve done this ten, twenty times now to no apparent change?

i had never actually done a spit-take before. And then.

hey guys

Level 1: But is it canon?

Level 2: I can fix the canon.

Level 3: I can make the canon worse.

Level 4: I can fill the canon with small, brightly coloured frogs.

{Words by José Olivarez from Citizen Illegal /@fatimaamerbilal , from even flesh eaters don't want me.}

worst part about getting angry is how much it makes you want to be mean

Hi stephanie,

I hope this email finds you, as the search and rescue team is otherwise completely out of ideas

If you’re wondering what the whole drama regarding tieflings is in the Dungeons & Dragons fandom: basically, capitalism ruined tieflings, and for once that’s not even slightly a joke.

Tieflings were first introduced as a playable species in Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, via the Planescape campaign in 1994. At the time, there were no particular rules regarding what a tiefling was supposed to look like. The text explicitly stated that their basic physiology could vary wildly depending on what their fiendish ancestor was, and one of the first major Planescape supplements even included a table for randomly generating your tiefling’s appearance, if you were into that sort of thing.

This continued to be the case up through the game’s Third Edition. However, when the Fourth Edition rolled around in 2008, the game’s text suddenly became very particular about insisting that all tieflings looked pretty much the same. Some campaign settings even provided iin-character explanations for why all tieflings now had a standardised appearance. Understandably, this made a lot of people very annoyed.

There was naturally a great deal of speculation concerning what had motivated this change. It was widely cited as “proof” that Dungeons & Dragons was trying to appeal to the World of Warcraft fanbase – which was nonsense, of course; nearly all of the Fourth Edition’s allegedly MMO-like features were things that popular MMOs had borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons in the first place, and to the extent that tieflings’ new look resembled a particular WoW race, it was in that they were both extraordinarily generic.

In reality, it was a change that had been lurking for some time. Though Dungeons & Dragons is directly published by Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast is in turn owned by Hasbro, and Hasbro has long regarded the D&D core rulebooks as a vehicle for promoting D&D-branded merch – in particular, licensed miniature figures.

This was a bugbear that had reared its head before. When the Third Edition received major revisions in 2003, Hasbro corporate had ordered the game’s editors to completely remove any discussion of how to improvise minifigs for large battles, and replace it with an advertisement for the then-current Dungeons & Dragons Heroes product line. Implying that purchasing licensed minis wasn’t 100% mandatory simply would not do.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably already guessed where this is going: tieflings having no standard appearance made it difficult to sell tiefling minifigs, as any given minifig design would only be suitable for a small subset of tiefling characters. In the brutally reductive logic of the corporate mind, Hasbro reasoned: well, if we tell tiefling players that all of their characters now look the same, we can sell them all the same minifigs. So that’s what the game did, going so far as to write justifications into several published settings for magically transforming all existing tiefling characters to fit the new mould!

This worked about as well as anyone who isn’t a corporate drone would naturally anticipate – and that’s the story of how capitalism ruined tieflings.

I love in fics when the Gotham vigilantes call Oracle “O” because if you’d never heard of Oracle, wouldn’t you think that her name would be bird related like all the other Gotham heroes?

I want a fic where a superhero is introduced to Barbara for the first time and they’re like, “Awe, yes. This must be the Ostrich.”