*plays assassins creed to study for my ap history exam*
This is actually really funny. In high school my humanities teacher told us a story about one of the Europe trips he had gone on with the school a few summers past. So him and the group of kids were in the middle of Rome and the tour guide had gotten lost. They could figure out how to get to some church they were going to see. All of a sudden one of the students like call attention to himself. He says he knows where to go and just start walking around the streets, taking back roads and side streets and within 20 mins they’re at the church they needed to get to. My teacher asks the kid if he has every been to Italy before. He says no, he just knew where to go because he played Assassins Creed Brotherhood.
forget wanderlust, sonder, all those words for vague dreamy feelings… what I’m asking for is a concise word for the feeling you get when someone makes an assumption about you that’s 100% correct but you really don’t like that anyone was able to make that assumption. for now I’m calling it a fuckor
“he asked me ‘you main junkrat right’ and a wave of fuckor wracked my feeble body”
send me asks. make me tremble with fuckor
Someone walked up to me in Barnes and Noble like 4 years ago and asked me where the Manga section was. I told them where, but I also let them know that i didn’t work there. They kind of shrugged then looked me dead in the eyes and said.
“Idk, you just looked like you might know.”
I changed my complete aesthetic after hearing that come to jesus, god fearing, exposé of a line.
The other day my manager admitted that she still shops at hot topic, and when I told I knew already because she seemed like the type she threatened to fire me
Activate my fuckor in my inbox
I want to experience fuckor too. Send an assumption about me to confirm or deny to the best of my ability
I know this is meant to be a funny but funfact! The lotus set in Magic: The Gathering is bar-none the most expensive set in history, getting a whole set for a 60-card average deck would easily cost more than the car pictured. This card alone is worth nearly 20k, with some others costing several thousand dollars.
someone is absolutely a fuckin rich nerd.
WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL
It’s because of a few factors all coming together!
First, this set was released in 1993. The cards from it are so rarely in good condition anymore that the ones that are in mint condition are disproportionately valuable.
Second, there is, of course, the nostalgia value of this being the first set ever released for the game.
Third, Magic: the Gathering was the very first trading card game. Richard Garfield, the designer, had no idea how popular it would get, and there was literally nobody else on the planet who had experience balancing a type of game that had never existed before. These days, TCGs are a whole industry, and you can look at the past efforts of other designers for your cues. In 1993, this was completely unexplored territory. As a result, the set this came from is completely imbalanced. Cards they thought would rule the game were regarded even then as nearly useless; cards they thought were fairly balanced or that would be rare in a neighborhood due to people just buying a box or two instead snapped the game in half. There’s a really famous combo using only four cards, all of which are in this set, to kill your opponent from full health before they even get a turn. Black Lotus is part of that combo.
As an addendum to the balance issue–Black Lotus, which gives you free “mana”–which you use to play other cards–at a rate better than literally anything else in the game, is considered the single most powerful card ever printed, because things that generate resources are generally more useful than the things that USE those resources.
Fourth–and this is a point of contention even to this day–Black Lotus cannot be reprinted due to legal issues. After the unexpected popularity of the game took off, Wizards of the Coast released a set called Chronicles that reprinted a lot of cards that were hard to find…which tanked the value of their original printings. Collectors threw a petulant hissy fit, and Wizards made the ill-advised decision to publicly commit to a “Reserved List” of cards that they would never reprint.
The Reserved List stopped getting new cards put on it after a couple of years, but the damage was done. Sure, some of these cards can’t be reprinted in certain competitive environments because they’re too powerful, but it’s been so long since they were last printed that they’re extremely hard to find even if you have the money to buy them. They’re so hard to find that officially sanctioned tournaments that allow those cards often allow a certain number of stand-in “proxy” cards just to make it so that people can play the game. Wizards releases anthology sets on a more regular basis, now that the collector’s market no longer has a stranglehold on the game, but they would be sued to oblivion if they abolished the Reserved List, despite the vast majority of players hating it.
So to sum up–Black Lotus was a “rare” card in the three limited-run sets it was printed in, it can’t ever be printed again, it was last printed twenty-five years ago in sets with extreme nostalgia and symbolic value, and it’s the single most powerful card in the entire game.
So, yes, it sells for tens of thousands of dollars.
reblogging this here because mtg has such personal meaning to me and I wrote a whole-ass essay about it
When I got into magic as a kid it had only been a couple years since the first set but Black Lotuses were still the holy grail, worth a “whopping”…….$200.
Good advice on what to do when you find yourself near a racist mouthy twat who is spouting out their crap at some unfortunate person.
NEVER engage the perpetrator. He (and it is usually he) is looking for confrontation. Instead speak to the person he is abusing. Say hello. Introduce yourself. Shake his or her hand. And just stand with them. Keep talking. About anything. Weather. Bus schedules. Football. This kind of bullying never works against a group of people having a conversation. Usually a single person travelling or a mom with a kid or maximum, two women are targeted.
Form a group of people with and around them if you can. Don’t tell them they are not alone. Just don’t let them be alone. I speak from experience. Once, I encountered a young girl wearing a hijab being abused as a terrorist by a drunk man on a train. I just went and sat beside her and started a conversation with her. After a while, the dude lost interest. I had a lovely chat with a young student from Qatar. She wanted to study literature while her dad was only prepared to pay for engineering or commerce as he wanted her to join the family business. It helped her feel safe and it expanded my horizons.
This is known in behavioral psychology as “non-complimentary behavior”; by not fueling the aggression of another person and you can flip the whole script of all their expectations, and without any footholds for their aggression (like direct provocation and confrontation/conflict) to launch into further tirades against, the aggressor can’t continue their angry scene-building. The more people who participate in script-flipping, the more successful it gets, as in this post you see with the advice to form a protective group between the bigot and their target for that very purpose.
There’s an NPR podcast called Invisibilia which goes into detail about how it works and what sort of people rely on it everyday professionally and for survival alike, in their Flipping the Script episode.
Someone: “I want a cat/rabbit/other animal that will be super openly affectionate, go for walks, play fetch, not mind being handled rough, never be shy, and also I don’t want it to claw me or the furniture(so I’ll probably get it declawed) and I don’t want to ever clean a litter box or cage.”
Me: “Hey there’s this great new type of animal you might be interested in:”
Someone: “I want a dog but I don’t ever want to take it for walks or exercise it very much or let it outside and I want it to be fine with being left alone for longer periods of time and also never bark.”
Me:
Someone: “I want a cat or dog but I want to only feed it a vegan diet.”
Me:
Someone: “I want to have a pet but I basically never want to interact with it.”
Me:
Someone: “I want to get my kid a cute pet for Easter/Christmas!”
Me:
Get a pet that fits your needs. Don’t get a pet then try to force it to fit your lifestyle. Just because you saw a person walking a rabbit once doesn’t mean you can expect a rabbit to just be a dog. Just get a dog!
i would like to point out that not only will next year be twenty mineteen, it will also be Minecraft’s 10 year anniversary and i, for one, will be popping the FATTEST bottles o’ enchanting
