morbiditty @morbiditty - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook (2024)

Childhood can be scary.

A collection of some of my hand-drawn horror looping animations!

Creepy Paintings 6 (2 of 4) -Stefan Koidl

*pre act 1, somewhere in the outerplanes or whatever*gods: what the hells are the dead 3 doing now?? what is that?? a netherbrain?? ugh right then, what are we gonna do about it shar: i have a plan SO EVIL AND PERFECT and a chosen locked and loaded she's already on her way to retrieve that stupid githyanki prince and then im going to f*cking destroy that asshole ketheric

mystra: bitch please the only one around here with a shiny red fix it button is me. when i tell you my former chosen is obsessed with me. no way will he deny me, all i gotta do is ask and he'll detonate the problem in one go. ace in the hole.

Jergal [a big fan of the avengers]:i have a plan to bring together a group of of remarkable people to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we need them to, to fight the battles that we never could.

gods: ugh shut the hell up jergal this is basically your fault

Jergal: im stealing all your feral chosen and you can't stop me

silvanus: would you like a bear in this trying time?

i’m your man — berserk

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, to listen to doctors and get my flu vaccine and any shots i could because they remembered Before.

then they started fighting Covid precautions.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that the ozone was disappearing and the earth was dying and we needed to recycle and save the planet.

now my parents think climate change is a myth.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that racism was a plague, that we had to love and accept everyone, that we should never judge before walking a mile in their shoes.

then they told me that protesting for my Black siblings was wrong.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that we needed to give to the poor. working at soup kitchens. making quilts. collecting food and money and supplies. building houses. because it was the christian and just plain right thing to do.

now they look at me, on food stamps with their grandchildren, and lament the "welfare state".

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and that any rich man, especially an immoral one, should never run our country.

you can guess who they voted for.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, so very much.

when did they forget?

Time to bring this back. Again.

Apparently this is evergreen. Dammit.

I remember adults telling me, as a kid that girls can be equal to boys in all fields including athletics. Now, they consider girls to be delicate flowers who could never hope to compete against boys.

star wars, but it’s just the memes

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU

watching Neil's stream and since Bow'ee and Astarion are official now he gets the option to smooch astarion, and he just kept pushing the kiss option and was laughing so much about how f*cking tall bowee is, and then was like, "[astarion voice] I'm a little king!!!!" so cutely and happily ;-;

Clip of the first kiss!

They're so cute 🥺

Frank Paton - Witness my Act and Deed (1882)

Absolutely f*cking dying over the name of this painting. We've had cats figured out since day f*cking one

Original blog post

Le important day in meme history has arrived

And Internet history was made.

Here she is in November 2023 celebrating her 18th birthday and being a very good doge.

Goddamn. Okay

Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn't keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn't playing the game the way it was supposed to be played.

There's hiding and there's finding, we'd say. And he'd say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we'd all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn't play with him anymore if he didn't get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He's probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know.

As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, "GET FOUND, KID!" out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It's real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.

A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn't want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn't need them, didn't trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn't say good-bye.

He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. "I don't want anyone to know." "What will people think?" "I don't want to bother anyone."

Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.

Medieval theologians even described God in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.

"Olly-olly-oxen-free." The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says "Come on in, wherever you are. It's a new game." And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.

— Robert Fulghum, "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten"

in a rare moment of "huh i can maybe contribute to this", i was reminded of this exerpt from Tim Kreider's We Learn Nothing, a collection of his essays.

this one was written about a deceased friend of his, Skelly, who was known to spin tales about his life to hide the shameful parts from others. at his funeral, when all the secrets inevitably started to unfold, Kreider writes:

The worst part, for me, is imagining how alone he was. This is the most poisonous thing that secrets do to us—they isolate us from everyone around us and make us feel even lonelier than we already are. I wish he could’ve somehow brought himself to talk to us. I sometimes fantasize about how I would’ve reacted—what I would’ve said to him, how I would’ve tried to help. As Kevin once complained, “I wish he coulda just told us so we could’ve mocked him for it!” But not everybody gets to be free. Some have to stand guard at their own prisons for life. Some secrets we must take with us, as the melodramatic old idiom has it, to the grave.

I am proud of your generations. The Millenials, the Zers. You’re doing well. I know you feel as if you’re in conflict with reality, but that is because you were built by this reality for the next one. The reality you have yet to make, but are grinding your teeth to build. Be uncooperative. Fight back. Any way you can. Strike. March. Vote. There’s a young lady and her fifteen friends sitting right now outside of the Secretary of State’s house, pouring red liquid on the ground before his armored vehicles, and Blinken had the nerve to say she was scaring his children. Imagine if they were in Gaza.

There are small ways you can fight back. Find them. Disobey. Their laws weren’t built for your world. Burn bridges. Cut ties.

Be petty.

They built you for this. It’s all physics.

I’m proud of you. Keep learning. Don’t fall into narcissism. Strive to be smarter and more worldly than your predecessors.

Avoid faulty logic. Validate experiences. You have more emotional intelligence than any previous era. I promise you. It went from indifference to fascism, to narcissism, to you—the generation of poise and ferocity.

Keep going. You’ll do it.

Saw a really long post today where someone was talking about D&D vampire lore, compiling what different sources say about it (including the Baldur's Gate games) and, y'know, for the most part it was a good post, it's a useful and good quick reference on what the different sources have said about vampires.

(readmore because this turned out long oops)

But then at the end, and in an addition to the post replying to a tag someone had put, the post began talking about applying all this lore to BG3 specifically, and it made me think. Because the takeaway that post had seemed to be that the things about vampire lore which are consistent to the rest of D&D do apply to BG3 as well, and that Astarion is simply an exception due to his extremely strong willpower and sense of self. And that just doesn't seem right to me at all. It feels like missing the point.

BG3 did some very specific, very interesting things with the lore of D&D. In terms of vampires, yes, but also more generally, BG3 pretty consistently gives the message that the things that are said in the rulebooks are not necessarily true, but are oversimplifications and generalizations that are believed to be true in universe.

BG3 got rid of racial ability scores, giving every race the same "choose a +2 and a +1" that variant humans can have in D&D. BG3 not only got rid of racial alignments, but got rid of alignments entirely - there is no detect evil and good, protection against evil and good has been replaced with a spell that mechanically protects against outsiders of various kinds, there is no alignment selection for player characters, no alignment showing up on inspection despite pretty much entire stat blocks being visible, and the companion characters all have complex morality that doesn't fit neatly into any alignment box. BG3 establishes and many times repeats that Volo, the in-universe author of a lot of the texts we have access to about Faerûn, is an incredibly unreliable source. BG3 has Halsin, a large-built and hairy elf (something which the rulebooks claim is impossible as elves are slender and graceful and have no body hair), say that "sometimes I think conventional wisdom is too narrow about what someone can or cannot be".

On the topic of vampirism specifically, BG3 has Jaheira (who is established to be wise and knowledgeable due to being an experienced and well travelled adventurer) say "They say that the only thing a vampire can feel is hunger. Nothing else touches them - not grief, or mercy. Or any sense of what is just. Who knows. There is often more ignorance than insight in what 'they' say", in response to Astarion remaining a spawn. And, on an Astarion origin run, it is established that at least half of his siblings can be convinced to want to oppose Cazador (it's just that non-origin Astarion chooses to antagonize them instead), and they can be persuaded not to feed off of people, and even without Astarion suggesting it Dalyria will take the initiative to help and take care of the other spawn. And, and this I think is crucial, every vampire we see in BG3 aside from possibly Vellioth is established to have been through circ*mstances which could easily twist someone and turn them horrible, no magical twisting of emotions or inherent existential evil required.

To play Baldur's Gate 3 and take away from it that the things which D&D lore has previously said about vampires apply to this game, and that Astarion is just somehow Special because of his Extremely Strong Willpower and Sense of Self feels like completely missing the point. Vampires in BG3 are evil because they're stuck in a cycle of violence and suffering and aren't able to escape, and when they are given an escape from that cycle they are able to heal and recover and be more than what they were made. Astarion does not have exceptional willpower, Astarion got lucky. He got out, he made some connections, he got a chance to heal and unlearn the things he'd been taught before being thrust back into Cazador's presence, and that's why he's able to break the cycle. Or, alternately, if the people he finds when he gets out don't push him to unlearn the things Cazador taught him and instead reinforce those beliefs, he becomes just like him. Again, no magical twisting of emotions required.

THIS. I love how Larian chose to differentiate from typical D&D games. The same template is applied to so many games, and limits storytelling. Breaking those limitations made it possible to make a morally gray, freedom-empowered game which gives the player so much variability! They use that to their advantage too. Can't tell you how many times my expectations were turned on their head, especially when it comes to Astarion.

When I first saw him in promos I thought to myself, "here we go, another appeal to the 'Twilight' crowd," and then the first few days you know him he really does seem to be that way. He's witty, charming, assertive, and very into you—the "vampire seduction" archetype. Then you come to find out (minor spoilers ahead) he's just a traumatized young [elf] man escaping from an abusive home. He doesn't want to seduce you, or even like offering sexual favors... He feels he has to. (Your blood is delicious, though.)