Pan’s Labyrinth is a rare modern fairytale, in the old sense of the word, not the Disney sense.
Pan’s Labyrinth is a rare modern fairytale, in the old sense of the word, not the Disney sense.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if they didn’t burn everything at the end. I mean, I get that sanitation in that situation was pretty darn important, but it was the author’s choice to choose something that required that outcome. That ending made me sad for a long time. Definitely didn’t know how to handle it. Not sure I can even now.
I once had a session that became infamous amongst my group at the time. There was a magic forest that only the elves knew the way through, but no elves had come through for a while. One of the players was an elf, and I had given him a note explaining that there was a path featuring a sequence of specific species of trees, oak then spruce then elder, that sort of thing. He was supposed to go in the direction moss grew on said trees until seeing the new species, then look for the moss again, and so on and so forth. I expressly noted on the note that if he didn’t see the exact sequence of trees I gave in the note, “something had gone seriously wrong”.
Of course, the idea was that something had gone wrong and the path through the magical maze forest was screwed up, hence no elves arriving recently. My reason for setting it up this way was so that the elf would lead the party into the woods, he’d try to find the path, realize the path was broken, tell the party, and then they’d get down to the business of figuring out what was wrong and fixing it. You know… start the adventure.
Instead, what ensued was an entire multi hour long session of nothing happening. The elf would lead them. I’d tell him the trees they were seeing, out of order. He’d just keep following the moss, the “path” as he always did. I started emphasizing the wrongness of the trees he was seeing. He kept leading the party. I nudged him harder and harder. He just fucking kept going. The party was confused of course, as the whole path thing was supposed to be an elven secret that they didn’t share. And the elf player just kept ramming the entire party’s heads against the stupid wall for real world hours and I couldn’t stop it until I eventually dropped the 4th wall and flat out said this isn’t working, I’ve told you it isn’t working, please do something else! And then we had to end the session and start again next time.
It was incredibly frustrating in the moment, but it actually worked out well for the game as a whole. Became a running gag, a source of a lot of laughs, and it somehow ended up hammering in the point that something was wrong with the world and forest far more effectively than it might have if it had ended quicker. So good times in the end after all…
But MAN was it frustrating in the moment.
I would bet on it being a little bit (well, a lot) of ablism mixed with people wanting only answers that they personally can use. Which circles back on the ableism… people don’t want to believe that they could suddenly join this minority group at any time.
I had to be in a wheelchair for a year. The internalized shame from pervasive background ableism is horrible.
Oh yeah, I fully understand why the stupidity happens/happened. I don’t know how to fix it or if it can be fixed… that’s why I posted it here, in the unsolved problems in your field thread!
How to get supervisors, superintendents, school boards, and even politicians to let teachers teach. It’s understood that overtesting reduces learning. It’s understood that rigid curriculums don’t work, and you really should be tailoring lessons to the capabilities of the class. All kinds of educational philosophy is understood well and in depth… but being permitted to apply any of it?
The only possible word that comes to mind is “anticlockwise” used in (some parts of?) the UK instead of “counterclockwise”… but that doesn’t exactly match “diagonally”. Is it the word though?
A 1-800 number is immune to long distance charges, free to call by anyone in the US— the owner of the 800 number pays any fees associated with the call. Traditionally, 800 numbers are owned by companies in order to sell stuff. (The 1- portion of a 1-800 number means that it’s a long distance call… which was a thing when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, but basically isn’t a thing anymore in the age of cellphones)
The opposite of an 800 number is a 900 number. The person calling a 900 number has to pay, usually by minute, and most of that money goes to the owner of the 900 number. Famously used for phone sex lines.
Nah, it’s fully polymorphed, it just cast the spell after it sat down.
I legitimately had my players pull that one on me once. Door into a secret lab disguised as a closet was beyond their skill, warded by powerful magic, etc etc. They looked at the floor plan and saw that the closet protruded from the main wall a bit. “Why not go in through the side?” I hadn’t thought about it. I figured the villain hadn’t thought about it either. A simple pickax later and they were in.
Correct. To be more specific, in Tolkien lore, Bilbo (and later Frodo adding to it, organizing it, and editing it) wrote the “Red Book of Westmarch” which was later translated by the narrator of the books into the Hobbit and Lordnof the Rings. Many (most?) Tolkien fans prefer to frame things this way when discussing the stories, and for good reason— that’s how Tolkien himself viewed the stories. As a translation of something in another language. He was a linguist, after all.
Wikipedia has a good article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch
Hey guys, is it okay if I don’t hate Jewish people, I just hate people who do Jewish things or otherwise associate themselves with Jewish culture or identity? I mean, if they just stop being Jewish then I won’t hate them anymore!
No. No that’s not okay either.
I actually got my players to remember the name of the evil dragon, and the name is by no means easy! “Ildrephu”
It helped that the dragon itself became VERY memorable, having developed a philosophy around how to best torture people based on Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw’s Chzo mythos. And then instead of fighting the party when they came to storm his lair, it invited them in, fed them, gave them nice accommodations, and made a binding magical contract with them for favorable terms… that tricked them into unleashing the Tarrasque back into the world from its divine prison. And then Ildrephu reneged on its half of the contract anyway, trusting he was strong enough to simply tank the magical backlash breaking the contract would do to him. Escaping the tarrasque and returning to Ildrephu to now be able to fight him at all due to being magically weakened was a highlight of the campaign.
They still talk about him, IRL years later. One of my finest quests I’ve given, and the fact that they remember his name when it’s such a non-English name really hammers in how much of an impression I left with him. It makes me so happy!
Don’t you mean Wyoming?
My two year old son is just learning a few words right now. I’m looking forward to the day I can have an honest conversation with him, explain things using words, and get to know what’s going on in his tiny little adorable head.
It’s a failure of properly understanding intersectionality. Intersectionality says that the combination of societal status does not equal the sum of each individual status, but may in fact be its own unique thing. A black woman has unique challenges and experiences even compared with “women” in general, or “black people” in general, even though black women are black, and are women. This is a weird idea and hard for most people to wrap their heads around, so it’s not surprising that this comes up.
Jews (of which I am one) have a particularly troublesome social status intersection that creates a unique combination that leads to some troubling conclusions for modern left leaning Americans.
Consider the following two premises: oppressors, that is, the strong, should be fought against to prevent the weak from harm. And white people have historically been the oppressors.
Hopefully, these two statements are non-controversial and make sense.
Then come Jews, who, apart from their Jewishness, are basically considered white in the modern day. So jews are oppressors and must be fought against to protect the weak, right?
Ah… but there’s a nasty historical coincidence— the oppression against the jews has always been that they are secretly powerful and oppressing others. The elder protocols of Zion and other nonsense permeates the culture. Hundreds of years of jews being the evil bankers (because we were forbidden from having any other job). Constantly given garbage and unfavorable positions, and any success we reap from that is then used as ammo against us.
So the intersection of whiteness and Jewishness creates a self-reinforcing messy cycle of increasing hatred that is really hard to untangle.
That’s literally what it is. It’s people who want humanity to die out, but without suicide, war, or murder, but instead merely by not reproducing. I’ve seen their communities and it pretty much comes back to misanthropy— hating humanity.
I continue working in Japan and have it covered by national insurance.
I was shocked to discover the hatred the old live action Mario movie gets. I enjoyed it when it came out when I was a kid. I rewatched it as an adult to see if my memory was faulty… still enjoyed it. It’s a little campy, but it’s a fun romp! I unironically enjoy it, as a good movie and not as a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie. And yet it gets so much hate…
Many channels I watch have already been mentioned, but one comes to mind that hasn’t been: if you like Stuff Made Here and NileRed, you’ll love The Thought Emporium. Dude is a mad scientist, for real. His current long term project is trying to make a neural net that can play DOOM… except he means real neurons. Biological neurons grown in his self built lab, sourced from rats.