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[avantgarden-er]

ilya voice If you give mouse cookie… The greed… of mister mouse…. but he should get what he wants no? You do need milk…. shaking his head and shane is like Honey. Can you finish the book with the baby. Please

[eugeniedanglars]

i like this show in a cool ironic detached intellectual way btw

[technofeudalism]

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

[technofeudalism]

since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.

corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.

Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.

Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.

Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.

sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.

Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.

Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.

The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.

Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.

The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.

Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.

Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.

The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)

Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.

Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.

EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.

You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.

The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)

Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.

Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.

ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.

PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.

Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.

FarmRPG - simple, mobile-friendly, text-based farming RPG.

Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.

PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike

Tools

Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)

Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.

Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)

Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Non-Games

Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.

Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.

17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.

Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.

The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)

Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)

Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.

r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.

r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.

thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.

[monchursouls]

Reblogging the update too

[mogamoka]

Superman & Batman scene redraw

[bookish-cravings]

No because what do you mean they were best friends as kids and Ekko had a crush on her, and then he tries to ‘rescue’ her from Silco but she doesn’t want to go with him and they end up on opposing sides as enemies and he insists that ‘Powder is gone, only Jinx is left’ but he paints a mural for Powder as one of the people they’ve lost and when he has the chance to kill her he can’t bring himself to do it because he still cares about her and she tries to blow them both up because she views death as mercy and wants to die with him and then he gets sent to another universe where she’s still Powder and he falls in love with her all over again and he goes back to his universe convinced he can save her and he has to watch her kill herself over and over again before managing to convince her to live and join the fight and they do and he wears her paint and then she just… dies anyways and now he’s lost her for like, the NINTH TIME

Arcane writers you will start coughing in 10 days

[apopcornkernel]

listen i love vasya and morozko but guys. guys can we just talk about konstantin and vasya because they are. they are. i dont know how to explain why im so obsessed with their dynamic so i will just show you scenes that make me go crazy insane

[rosiethorns88]

I swear, sketching is the only way to cure these book hangovers. Does anyone else see the potential in the lines from Cardan’s drunken spat for Valentine’s Day cards?

[jewfrogs]

this is so mean but sometimes i see published writing and suddenly no longer feel insecure about my own writing ability. like well okay that got published so im guessing i dont have much to worry about

[naamahdarling]

I have a friend who is an editor, and gets submissions of mostly poetry and short stories.

I have had a glimpse into her slush pile, and let me tell you, the contents were unbelievable and immediately disabused me of the notion that reading through submissions is in any way glamorous. People have the nerve to submit unhinged paranoid ramblings, fetish porn, and a seemingly endless supply of poems about masturbation.

I no longer feel like my fiction is somehow an imposition on the people who read it. It may be forgettable, but at least it isn't typeset to look like sperm.

Do not be afraid to submit your work. Your competition is not only worse than you think, it's worse than you ever imagined.

[silverhand]

Do these three things to get to the top of the slush pile:

The place has a style sheet. Use it. They say they want your MS in 16.5 point Papyrus italic with 0.8 inch margins all around, guess what you're doing before you send it off? Save As, reformat, send it. In the absence of a specific guide: Courier 12 pt (Times New Roman if you must), double spaced, align left, tab 0.5 at each new paragraph.

Check the word count. Don't submit novellas to 2500 word short story venues. BTW, you format the MS in that old style above because the question isn't literal words. Courier 12pt double spaced gives you 250 words per page for typesetting purposes. 2500 words is 10 ms pages, 5000 is 20 pages, etc.

Don't send your romance to Analog or your war story to Harlequin. If it's a cross-genre story, be sure there's enough of what the publication is focused on to interest them, but breaking through is hard if that's not something they usually do.

That's basically what every single editors' panel at every con I've ever been to has boiled down to. And invariably, someone tries to get up and argue with them, not realizing it's not a discussion.

Bonus tip: Don't be in any way cute in your cover letter. Just the facts/Luke Skywalker's message to Jabba the Hut in ROTJ.

Enclosed/attached is my story <Title> for your publication <Magazine>. It is x (rounded to the nearest 500) words. I can be reached at <email> (that you check regularly and isn't likely to dump things into spam) and <phone>.

(If submitting a hard copy: The manuscript is disposable. A SASE is enclosed for your response./A SASE is included for return of the manuscript and your response.)

Thank you for your consideration.

If submitting a novella length piece or greater, a brief and complete summary is appropriate.

In the midst of an interstellar revolt against an evil galactic Empire, vital weapon plans fall into the hands of a farm boy on the edges of the galaxy. With the help of an aging warrior from the Old Republic, and a smuggler with a dark past and his imposing alien copilot, the four set out to deliver them to the rebel forces but are instead flung into a rescue mission to save the beautiful princess who stole the plans as worlds are destroyed by the might of the Empire's weapon, the Death Star.

Captured by the Death Star on route to deliver the plans, they manage to escape the base with the princess, the old warrior sacrificing himself to make this possible. As the Death Star approaches the rebel base, they use the captured plans to stage a desperate final stand. In a fierce space battle of single-pilot ships over the surface of the moon-sized weapon, the farm boy manages to make the critical shot with an unexpected assist from the smuggler, destroying it.

Never under any circumstance put a cliffhanger into a query letter summary. There is no faster way to get the entire MS binned than doing that.

Happy writing.

PS "Top of the slush pile" means into the top 25% of manuscripts received. Three quarters of the submissions don't take the trouble to do even those three basic steps.

Now, that still means 25/100 submissions or 250/1000 submissions, but it still improves your odds and forms the basis for starting a relationship with the publisher for the next piece you send them.

PPS This is obviously about prose. Poetry certainly has its own submission rules, and I know none of them. If you're writing poetry, find out what they are.

[dduane]

@silverhand's reply is right on.

[roscolux]

[wot-in-the]

i didn't know i wanted to read another historical fiction novel with gentle fantasy leanings that muses on human nature and features writing that dances off the page but the golem and the jinni scratches that itch so hard i guess i did

[nothatsmi]

I don't know what I miss more, having free time to draw or these fellas

The raven cycle!!!!

Oh I love these guys. Everything about these books, I want to draw them soooo much more (I probably will)!!

Guys I'm back-

It has been a nightmare lately this is the only thing I managed to draw in weeks? Finals and uni stuff that's taking all of my time and energy, slowly turning me into a cafeinated slug (worst part is caffeine doesn't even have an effect on me? I only drink coffee for the TASTE can you imagine). Anyway the rush won't be over until end of January but hopefully I'll be able to ignore the stress and draw anyway :)

[charmingpplincardigans]

so I know you've said before you have a lot of feelings about ronan's shame and euphoria, and I was wondering if you have any thoughts about the symbolism in his sex dream? like the meaning of adam tracing the tattoo with his finger vs kavinsky swallowing it, adam's "I know what this is" vs kavinsky's "I know what you are"? maggie called it "metaphor city" in her tdt recap and I'm still not sure I get it tbh

I do indeed, anon. I do indeed have a ton of feelings about Ronan Lynch’s shame and euphoria. I’m going to preface this whole thing by saying that this is obviously my reading of the text and not necessarily what was intended. I’m sure other people read it differently, but I have all of those feelings because I read it the way I do and over-identify with Ronan as a character the way I do. So. Feel free to disagree with my jam, I guess.

…Ronan closed his eyes eyes to be blessed – please God what am I tell me what I am –

I have a ton of feelings about Ronan not knowing what he is. I feel like Ronan questioning what he is instead of who he is is a distinction worth making. Because Ronan thinks of himself as someone who doesn’t lie, and claiming to be truthful implies a certain level of knowledge and understanding of the subject matter which is, in this instance, himself. The truth says, this is who I am and fuck you for your impressions otherwise. Ronan is made of truths and he wears them like barbed wire chain mail. His tattoo, his attitude, his rebellions and reckless behavior, they’re all manifestations of the truth he’s building for himself.

But, there are certain factualities about every person that are not decisions. He’s half human and half dream. That wasn’t his decision. He’s gay. That also wasn’t his decision. For most of The Dream Thieves he feels cast out and homeless. (Not that Gansey isn’t home, but Ronan aches for the home he wanted to keep.) That also wasn’t his decision. There are things coming to bear on him in that book that are changing his relationship with the truth and what it means to not be a liar. There are things he’s been keeping from himself because they’re too much and too close and too likely to change who he thinks of himself as. The tattoo, Adam, and Kavinsky are central to those.

Keep reading

[andalitebandit8]

#TRC

[miseria-fortes-viros]

fuck dating apps i want to meet someone the old fashioned way (you’re walking your bike up the last hill into town wearing your school uniform. i’m hanging out the passenger side window of my best friend’s car. your hands are beautiful. we know nothing about each other. you disappear in the rear view mirror. i close my eyes and send up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to god. i say please. i have never said please in my life)

[hexadonis]

one of my fav bits of canon dialogue from book 1

[tendergraphite]

The Secret History: A Theories Guide

Richard Papen: The Master of Illusion

#1 Charles is Innocent: Fucking Damnit!

#2 Okay I Lied, Charles Isn't Innocent

Julian Morrow: ''Honesty Is A Dangerous Virtue''

Henry Winter Wasn't In A Car Accident.

What Led To Henry Winters Death

Bunny Corcoran: Neglect In Plain Sight

When the Hare knows the Devil is out Hunting. [Bunny Analysis]

Francis Is The Worst Character (And Why You Should Think So Too)

Camilla & Henry: A Relationship Analysis ^Character Analysis^

The Mountain Lion: It Isn't A Theory

The Secret History's Dream Sequences.

Why The Books Called ''The Secret History''

The Secret History Isn't purposely Queer. (Richard Is Still Gay though, Here's Why!) ^Extras^ If you have a theory or take or whatever the fuck—comment down bellow! If it's intriguing enough I will see if I can either 1) Disprove it or 2) Prove your theory without a shadow of a doubt (Obviously the commenter will be credited!) [ Links will be added as I post ]

[thebellekeys]

The Ultimate Dark Academia Book Recommendation Guide Ever

The title of this post is clickbait. I, unfortunately, have not read every book ever. Not all of these books are particularly “dark” either. However, these are my recommendations for your dark academia fix. The quality of each of these books varies. I have limited this list to books that are directly linked to the world of academia and/or which have a vaguely academic setting.

Dark Academia staples:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Dead Poets Society by Nancy H. Kleinbaum

Vita Nostra by Maryna Dyachenko

Dark academia litfic or contemporary:

Bunny by Mona Awad

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

White Ivy by Susie Yang

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Black Chalk by Christopher J. Yates

Attribution by Linda Moore

Dark academia thrillers or horror:

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

Ghosts of Harvard by Francesca Serritella

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

The It Girl by Ruth Ware

Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian

Dark academia fantasy/sci-fi:

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Vicious by V.E. Schwab

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

The Betrayals by Bridget Collins

Dark academia romance:

Gothikana by RuNyx

Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

Dark academia YA or MG:

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

Crave by Tracy Wolff

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Dark academia miscellaneous:

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

You’re a psychology professor, right? Do you mind if I ask what exactly your research expertise/discipline is? Whatever it is always seems so fascinating to me whenever bits of it come up here. At the risk of doxxing yourself, would you be willing to talk about your research?

So if you don't mind, I'm going to answer this a little to the left of the ask. Less because I'm worried about Tumblrers doxxing, more because I'm terrified of my students or coworkers stumbling upon this blog.

My top six essays and articles that explain what I research, none of which are authored by me:

Empathy or Division? On the Science and Politics of Storytelling by Claire Corbett opens up with the lines "Writers can’t always be trusted when they talk about the power and importance of story. We have a vested interest and can get sentimental, promoting the immense power of story, of narrative, as inherently benign" — and it only gets better from there. Storytelling is a tool, one that can harm as much as help; anyone who says differently is selling something.

The Enshittification of TikTok by Cory Doctorow (yes, that Cory Doctorow) does an excellent job of explaining how the forces of individual psychology interacting with the forces of economics and society lead to the enshittification (exactly what it sounds like) of mass resources like social media platforms.

Superhero Comics as Moral Pornography by David Pizarro and Roy Baumeister. Although undeniably negative toward aspects of Western superhero stories, this essay also has a pretty forgiving definition of pornography. Like Corbett's, it takes a refreshingly cynical view of the power of storytelling.

The Mythology of Karen by Helen Lewis explains how a meme (in the sense of a sticky, culturally specific idea) can be sexist and antiracist, empowering and ageist, and trying to force it into molds of "good" or "bad" will never work.

What Do We Know When We Know a Person? by Dan McAdams. I've seen this article on many lists of best-written psychological theory reviews, and I fully agree. The science has come a long way since 1995, but this remains one of the best introductions to the psychology of personal narrative.

The Folk Psychology of Souls by Jesse Bering. "When it comes to death, human cognition apparently is not well equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating the recent nonexistence of any one of them." It's a little outside my main research area, but I built an entire special-topics class around this one article because it's one of the truest I've ever read.