Did a quick thing on Twitter maybe I’ll cross post it after a shower but honestly rpg Twitter isn’t ready to hear
“The ability to say ‘yo what the FUCK, that’s not cool, knock it off’ is itself a safety tool, and one that a lot of marginalized people are prohibited from accessing, so yeah safety tools ARE important in your friendly game”
The Big Yin used to regularly appear on stage wearing, and make regular reference to, his arsehole detectors.
They were bright, flamboyant trousers with clashing patterns and eye-scalding colours that looked like a riot took place in a flag factory. They were ugly as sin, but they were glorious. They were the kind of trousers that you'd see not just from across the street, but on Google Earth. They were, in no uncertain terms, a Statement and also a Challenge. They were functional as well as decorative, and their function was every bit as simple as you'd imagine.
They were trousers so remarkably bold and strident that arseholes absolutely couldn't resist them. They were the glowing lure of an anglerfish's deely bopper. An arsehole would take a deep breath, raise a finger to the offending item of menswear, and spew forth to all and sundry a brief diatribe on why those trousers were rubbish, why anybody wearing them was obviously a mental defective, so on and so forth. I'm sure that many of us have been present to witness a similar invitation to bask in an arsehole's magnificent powers of observation, but you'll no doubt have realised far ahead of the arsehole's powers of deduction that they'd swallowed the bait so deep it was glowing between their cheeks (and you, dear reader, can choose which ones).
"fkscnkm... FUCKN... ARSEHOLE! zzzZZP! And ya never have to hear a word oot their fuckn mouth again. They're deid to ya!"
Just mentioning safety tools at your table serves as a magnificent arsehole detector. You'll hear them coming, bawling over the horizon, raving and spraying and hissing and crowing that they'd never take a seat at a game they wusnae fuckn invited to in the first place. 'No Snowflakes' in their bios; you know them by now.
Safety tools are a brilliant addition to a table for reasons first and foremost of player comfort, inclusion, and so forth. They're also a wonderful tool for weeding out the arseholes if you advertise the fact you've got an X card system or anything similar. They're wonderful!
If there is no other reason to 3D print in another color, I pick bright pink. It looks especially funny in enterprise equipment, is immediately visible and most importantly weeds out the arseholes when posting on social media.
Case in point, the big IBM in my server stack. Somebody on Twitter was being an arsehole about masculinity and stuff. He got blocked.
I also got a nice comment from somebody who worked at IBM and was advocating for LGBT rights there, who thought it was awesome that I put some color in a normally boring machine.
