zedecksiew:

STATEMENT REGARDING A THOUSAND THOUSAND ISLANDS

Due to a disagreement over ownership, Munkao and I have severed ties. I have no further involvement with Centaur Games. I consider A Thousand Thousand Islands (ATTI) ended, as a project.

ATTI was built as a collaboration between Munkao and myself. 

I named the project, and was the driving force behind its identity as a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG). In September 2022, following the success of our Kickstarter campaign, I asked that my role be formally recognised as an equal business partner in the project. Munkao disagreed. After multiple rounds of negotiation, we have been unable to come to terms, and my trust has been exhausted.

I assert my moral and artistic rights as co-creator of ATTI. 

I do not agree with any republication of past ATTI works or new works published under the ATTI name. Anything of the kind is done without my involvement.

I have not been remunerated for my contributions to ATTI since April 2023. I will receive nothing from the sales of ATTI works going forward. 

I remain proud of what I did for ATTI—its achievements as a TTRPG setting; its cultural importance as a Malaysian / Southeast Asian work. 

I am heartbroken.

Zedeck Siew
Port Dickson, Malaysia
10 July 2023

+++

To the many, many people who supported ATTI: I sincerely apologise if this dampens your enjoyment of the works. Especially the recently-completed Reach of the Roach God. It has certainly dampened mine.

For the past ten months, I have felt empty and foolish and humiliated. But now it is time to move on. I would like to make new things, new art, new games.

To my friends, colleagues and fellow-travelers in the TTRPG community: from my hearts of hearts, I thank you. I am glad to see you as my people, and am grateful you would continue to have me as one of your own.

birdsocks:

They are studying us in petri dishes

wrdnrd:

switchelsweets:

themythicalcodfish:

pikestaff:

“Stop saying 15 year olds with weird interests are cringe, they’re 15” this is true however you should also stop saying adults with weird interests are cringe because who gives a shit

To wit:

I want to share some wisdom from my high school art teacher.

In my AP Art class, there was a girl who was just starting to experiment with mixed media. At this point she was still playing around, trying to decide what direction she wanted to go with her portfolio. So one critique day, she brought in an abstract canvas with some rhinestone highlights and painted and real peacock feathers. She loved sparkles and peacock feathers so she thought she’d try introducing them a *little*. And after everyone had given some input, the teacher gave her his advice, VERY roughly paraphrased here:

“So here’s the thing… I do not like this style. These are just elements that do not speak to me personally, but I see that you like them, and you’re doing interesting things with them.

“My biggest critique is, I only merely *dislike* this piece. I want you to make me HATE it. Go crazy with the things that you like. Don’t hold back trying to make it palatable to people like me. Because I am NEVER going to like it. And if the audience does not like it, it should drive them crazy seeing how much YOU love it.”

Her portfolio was chock full of neon colors and glitter and rhinestones and splashes of peacock feathers and it was a delight. Our teacher despised every piece lol, but she got great marks and I think even won some awards. And more importantly, she was happy and proud of the results. Because she didn’t limit herself by trying to appeal to people who were never going to enjoy what she enjoyed.

Takeaway here: be as cringe as you want. Don’t limit yourself based on other ppl’s tastes. They’re not you, and you are incredible 💕

“I want you to make me HATE it” is, honest to god, the best fucking advice.

austinramsaygames:

Beam Saber has finished printing! This means that it should start the KS/pre-order fulfillment process through @indiepressrevolution early next week. If you missed the pre-orders, keep an eye on IPR because they will have about 250 copies for sale once fulfillment completes!

#FuckYeahBeamSaber

teethsand:

Nah but let’s talk abt how ppl use disability terms/harmful stereotypes/ derogatory words so casually this disabled pride month (tw ableism below)

The new terms are “sch*zoposting” and “delulu” but shit like this has been around for years and it’s so incredibly frustrating.

Another example is those TikTok POVS about “the weird kid in class” but they are all stereotypes of autistic ppl.

Or the misuse of the word triggered, the misuse of the word OCD, the misuse of gaslighting, of cr*pple, “are you deaf?” “Are you blind?” “Hellen Keller isn’t real.” I could go on and on but I will simply say this.

Disabled people are real people with feelings, emotions and lives. We deserve to use the terms that we need to COMFORTABLY. We deserve to exist without people taking the language used in the context of ourselves and putting it in a negative light.

We deserve to exist.

We deserve happiness.

Check in on your disabled friends.

Don’t assume things about people you don’t know.

egorax:

dduane:

fandomsandfeminism:

dduane:

twimmythebabywitch:

surfs-up-shinji:

northeastartist:

cryoverkiltmilk:

kindaoffkilter:

bemusedlybespectacled:

linkislost:

sighinastorm:

tooiconic:

lafayettelabaguette:

beasti:

clarenecessities:

sapphic-matriarchy:

system-fail-ure:

karinanotcinerina:

retro-geek:

ultrafacts:

gatochick:

ultrafacts:

pizzaismylifepizzaisking:

majikkant:

ultrafacts:

Source

Video of Tama

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

The picture in the background of the second one

Tama is boss

THE TRAINS HAVE CARTOON TAMAS ON THEM

Sad update everyone, Tama recently passed away… An estimated 3,000 people, including railway officials, attended Tama the cat’s funeral on Sunday, days after she died of heart failure aged 16. [x]

For those who haven’t read articles about it, the local shrine elevated her to a god. She’s now the Eternal Stationmaster and patron god of the station.

Beautiful.

Now I’m crying thanks

and a new cat was hired right?

yep! her name is Nitama (essentially ”second tama” or “tama II”) and she served under Tama as an apprentice before being appointed her deputy

she works very hard

Everytime this crosses my dash, I reblog. It is the law.

Law

I’m crying at 11pm over train cats

Nitama, already now a mature cat (born 2010), has a protege named Yontama (fourth Tama, b. 2016).  There is no information available for either the physical befellment or tragic self-disgrace which has removed Santama from contention.

^Nitama majestic, and below with Yontama

Yontama.

a legacy

okay but actually what happened to santama (or sun-tama-tama, which is her name because it’s a pun on santama) was that she was basically sent to train for the position in okayama and they liked her so much they refused to send her back

“Sun-tama-tama” (a pun off of “Santama”, lit. “third Tama”) was a calico cat sent for training in Okayama. Sun-tama-tama was considered as a candidate for Tama’s successor, but the Okayama Public Relations representative who had been caring for Sun-tama-tama refused to give the cat up writing, “I will not let go of this child, she will stay in Okayama.” ^[25]

As of September 2018, Sun-tama-tama is working as the stationmaster in Naka-ku, Okayama and appears occasionally on Tama’s Twitter account.

Every time I see this post there’s new info and it gets better

You are only allowed to scroll pass this after you pay tribute to the great Tama Station masters.

The shrine of Tama Daimyōjin (Great gracious deity Tama), next to the Kishi station where she worked.

Nitama presenting her yearly offerings to Tama Daimyōjin on the anniversary of Tama’s Death, June 23 (The offerings are presented by the company president, as Nitama is a cat and thus can’t hold the offerings herself) (Not pictured, but also present, Yontama)

you cannot pass without reblogging guys. i’m sorry, i don’t make the rules.

You can’t not reblog a goddess. It’s just what’s so. :)

So, fun fact- the manga Noragami has an arc where the main character, Yato (a minor kami/God that is down on his luck but trying to make it big time) goes to a council/conference for all the Gods in Japan.

And they are announcing the winner of the “up and coming god” award, and of course, Yato thinks it’s him.

But no-

ITS TAMA!

Always reblogging this.

I love Tama so much

(via temporalhiccup)

pissvortex:

twitter is going to be shut down. half of reddit is locked or completely unmoderated. the entire first page of google search results are ads. tumblr does not and will never have a functioning search system and their content moderation is 100% automated. youtube only shares ad revenue with people who make snuff films for Youtube Kids. facebook is selling your grandma’s social security number under the table for like $5. web 2.0 is completely dead right

When I was training to be a teacher, a kid in the English class asked me what I thought of the Internet. I knew he was trying to run out the clock on the class, but I humored him anyway because, at that point, I had been on the Internet for several years. This is before Mosaic, so the only browser I knew about was Lynx. This is when Usenet, IRC, and email were the most common means of communicating, and you had to know at least a little bit about a UNIX shell account to do anything. All of the front-end interfaces like mIRC would come later, as would ICQ and other IM clients.

Anyway, being a veteran of flame wars and zine trades, realizing how easy it was to start crushing on and falling in love with people in a text-based medium because you could see how they think and feel, surviving the Canter-Siegel green card lottery spam, and ESPECIALLY having seen what happened when AOL dumped its subscribers into Usenet, I felt pretty secure in telling him that the Internet would change everything he knew.

I was right. And I will probably desperately wish I had been wrong until I die. The Internet has been an amazing way for marginalized people to find community and support, but I’m not sure it could EVER do enough good to outweigh the harm that has resulted from it to date, and the dominant trend seems to be that it’s getting worse every day.

I saw its potential then. I thought it would make all of us smarter, kinder, better - we could talk to people literally anywhere and see what we share in common and where we differ. Instead, we got *flails in every direction* this.

To me, it was a beautiful dream that turned into a horrifying nightmare that I can’t wake up from. ‘Nuff said.

(via temporalhiccup)

Anonymous asked: Can you tell me why Frodo is so important in lotr? Why can't someone else, anyone else, carry the ring to mordor?

mushfromnewsies:

notbecauseofvictories:

but someone else could.

that’s the whole point of frodo—there is nothing special about him, he’s a hobbit, he’s short and likes stories, smokes pipeweed and makes mischief, he’s a young man like other young men, except for the singularly important fact that he is the one who volunteers. there is this terrible thing that must be done, the magnitude of which no one fully understands and can never understand before it is done, but frodo says me and frodo says I will.

(when boromir is thinking of how he can use the ring to defend gondor, when aragorn is thinking of how it brought down proud isildur, when elrond is holding council and gandalf is thinking of how twisted he would become, if he ever dared—)

but then there’s frodo, who desires nothing except what he has already left behind him, and says, I will take the Ring.

it is an offer made out of absolute innocence, utter sincerity. It is made without knowing what it will make of him—and frodo loses everything to the ring, he loses peace and himself and the shire, he loses the ability to be in the world. It’s cruel, the ring is cruel, it searches out every weakness you have and feeds on it, drinks you dry and fills you with its poison instead, the ring is so cruel.

and frodo picks it up willingly. for no other reason except that it has to be done.

(the ring warps boromir into a hopeless grasping dead thing, the power of the palantir turns denethor into an old man, jealous and suspicious, it bends even saruman, once the proudest of the istari, into a mechanised warlord, sitting in his fortress and bent over his perverse creations—all the best of intentions, laid waste)

but there’s a reason gollum exists in the narrative, which is to show—well, to show what frodo might have been. because even as frodo grows mistrustful and wearied, as the burden of this ring grows heavier and heavier, he is never gollum. he is gentle to gollum. he is afraid—god frodo is so afraid for 2/3 of these books he is so tired and afraid, but he keeps moving, he walks though it would pull him into the ground, because he asked for this, he said he would.

someone else could have carried the ring to mordor, I suppose. the idea of a martyr is not dependent on the particular flesh and blood person dying for some greater purpose. but such a thing has to be chosen, lifted onto your shoulders for the right reason, the truest reasons, and followed into the dark, though it would see you burnt through and bled out.

I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.

y'know say what you want about tumblr (and I have), but this is still probably the simplest and most powerful distillation of the heart of the Lord of the Rings I’ve ever read. I think back to it all the time

maeamian:

maeamian:

BTW, the high five was invented in 1977 which means your parents probably didn’t grow up with it.

For real though Glenn Burke, inventor of the high five was a gay black player in the 70s, and the Dodgers tried to get him to marry a beard and their manager got mad when he befriended the manager’s gay son before being traded to the Athletics, probably for being gay. In Oakland, the rumors of homosexuality followed him and manager Billy Martin started using homophobic slurs in the clubhouse and homophobic behavior from other players lead to an early retirement for the promising young star at 27.  After retiring from baseball he introduced the high five to the Castro district of San Franscio where the high five became a symbol of gay pride and identification. ESPN wrote a long form piece about it which I recommend reading, it’s got some homophobic slurs in it although not presented positively.

strangeharpy:

“Seventeen things you have to learn for yourself as a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual or otherwise Queer youth by the time you are seventeen. One is that the first Pride was a riot I don’t mean that it was full of laughter, or that it was some grand party where everyone spiraled up to dance among the stars because the only glittering that night was broken glass on cobblestones. The first Pride was a riot on the backstreets of New York and they never tell us that night we won. The only protest in a decade full of turmoil where the cops had to hide out in the bar they raided and run from shouting rioters who fought to reclaim the only patch of ground they had ever claimed as theirs the first Pride was a riot, and two, around the same time it took place it was a debated topic in the gay community whether or not they should say that they weren’t mentally ill which, three, homosexuality was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental illnesses in 1974 congratulations all it took was a vote to declare that, whoops, we were never mentally ill except, four, there are still teenagers being tortured today in what some dare blaspheme as “therapy” used to destroy their self-identity in the hopes of making them normal. except, four, the queer community still carries overwhelmingly high rates for poverty and homelessness and depression. Did you know that, five, over half the children forced into conversion therapy commit suicide? And six, that lesbians were regarded as “hangers-on” of the movement by much of the gay community before the AIDS crisis? Because it turns out, seven can wear a rainbow on your shirt and still be a bigot. There are people who stick rainbows in their ears or wear them on their fingers or slap them across their cheeks in badges of defiance and will still hate you for the color of your skin or the size of your thighs or your gender or the way you like to kiss two or more genders or none of the above. Don’t ask me why this happens it just does I think it might be that we’ve all been taught to hate ourselves for so damn long that we don’t understand what to do in a space with no hate. Or maybe it’s that the space seems too small, because eight, there are people who will tell you that you are not enough that you do not reach the magical benchmark of “gay enough” to pass through the gate even especially when you are some flavor of the rainbow other than straight-out gay. eight, this is bullshit eight, those people are bullshit. eight, you are enough. eight, there is always enough room. nine, there is no overarching “homosexual agenda” sorry we’re all kind of flailing along in here trying to figure out some way to make it work when most of us have nothing in common except that society looked at us in different ways and decided we didn’t fit so we could all go be misfits together under one big rainbow flag but just so you know, ten, there are plenty of other flags there is one for you, I promise and eleven, misfits may not all need the same things but we need to stick together, especially in a world where twelve—refer to point seven—there are lesbians who hate other lesbians for having the audacity to be born in a body that everyone looked at and saw “boy” which brings me to thirteen, there is so much to understand. fourteen, you need to understand because we need to stick together and to stick together we do not have to be the same but we do have to understand and it will be hard because you were probably thrown into this world with no warning because fifteen, being queer is not genetic and we are not unique among minorities in that we collect our heritage through broken bits of history and research in a world constantly working to make those misfit bits go away but we are unique in that when we try to prove our legacy we can be laughed down or re-erased or flat out ignored but I swear to you you have a history as old as Alexander the Great as beautiful as Sappho as dignified as Abraham Lincoln and as proud as Eleanor Roosevelt. But even with that behind us sixteen, they have always watched us die. because even though the bystander effect is bullshit, sixteen Kitty Genovese was a lesbian, sixteen Ronald Reagan is a mass murderer, sixteen our children, your brothers and sisters and siblings of all stripes and all colors and sexualities and genders are being murdered through neglect and rejection and hate. Sixteen, there is an entire generation of gay and bisexual men missing from history because the government chose to do nothing when they were dying by the thousands. sixteen, we died from the disease and died from going back into the closet and died for staying there and died for coming out, sixteen, they laughed at us because they believed god was punishing us for daring to love, sixteen, ashes of your forerunners rest on the lawn of the White House because SIXTEEN, THEY HAVE ALWAYS WATCHED US DIE. SEVENTEEN you are allowed to be angry. You do not have to be one of the nice gays or one of the nice trans people or sweet or kind or educate the rest of the world in something less than a yell you are allowed to be so furious it scalds your bones at the way we are forgotten and passed over at the way, as soon as June becomes July we are expected to go back to dying in silence and mourning our dead and kissing all alone when no one can be offended at the sight of us. You are allowed to be angry and scream down the stars to shatter like broken glass at your feet because you know what? The first Pride was a riot.”

— October 11 (via spondee-soliloquy)

(via strangeharpy)