Take a drink with ol' Rosin the Beau

Australia. I sew and swordfight.

[targetedknowledge]

[cobstraverse]

In China I bought a bottle of 56% spirits for 3 yuan.

[cobstraverse]

Something I did not expect reading the Faerie Queene is the frequent references to Mortal Slime. Spenser loves describing the body as Mortal Slime.

[st-just]

I would not spend any effort trying to defend the notion it was good, on balance and my vague memories are certainly not enough to actually recommend it. But insofar as this is the 'writing thousands upon thousands of words of apologia for the thematic depth of children's cartoons' website, I occasionally feel like I should plant a flag for the shreds of the Wakfu animated show that started coming out a couple years too late for me to be in the target audience that I recall.

I mean I say show basically the only thing I recall is the villain having a great aesthetic. But also 'Guy consumed by basically-correct guilt over indirectly causing his wife and child's death, so obsessively wrapped up in a story of his own redemption and saving his loves that he invents second-scale time travel and creates a robot army to start draining the world of enough magical energy to take him back early enough to save them. Somewhat guilty about collateral damage, justifies himself with the promise that when he wins none of it will have ever happened anyway,' remains a significantly more compelling character than most of the scenery-chewing supervillains the following decade of pop culture gave us.

[cobstraverse]

Nox was a villain of all time. Such a perfect mix of callous and selfish but with something that keeps him from blind hatred. Also the aesthetic kicks ass to this day.

[northshorewave]

The obsession with empire and colonialism in modern fantasy is interesting to me because I think there's an unspoken sense in a lot of old-school Map Fantasy that every kingdom has its own stock of weaponized magic and mages, and thus they're all basically peers and no one of them could ever really permanently subjugate the other. Even a state called "The Empire" was usually just a very large kingdom, that like its neighbors had ruled its own turf since time immemorial and (up to the events of the plot) hadn't been able to conquer them. When I was younger I definitely had a few made-up countries whose defining characteristic was "Everyone knows not to fuck with them but they also are isolationist and keep to themselves." Realistic, perhaps not, but a good way to keep things coherent.

I think Bad Colonialism Fantasy is the kind that goes "Everyone minded their own business forever until Fake-Britain inexplicably got it in their heads that they were better than everyone and deserved to rule them" and Good Colonialism Fantasy is the kind that focuses on how if you get the right thing (horses, coal, nuclear weapons) at the right time, history will simply unfurl before you.

(And even then, power relations would be different if literal patron gods and archmages and angels and demons and such were able to incinerate anyone who threatened their otherwise-unremarkable homeland. Alternate History where the god of thunder literally, visibly did sink all those Mongol ships.)

[witchofanguish]

The thing is if you want your generic fantasy setting to make sense(tm) you can still have an Adventurer's Guild(tm), you can just make it that it's a temporary state of affairs. There's a lot of situations where I can imagine a king wanting to hire some adventurers to comb through random caves. Maybe they just lost a war and their whole army and now the countryside is teeming with bandits. Real bandits, presumably. And all you have to do for verisimilitude is not say that the institution is 500 years old.

[cobstraverse]

You can definitely do some interesting worldbuilding around having an Adventurer's Guild, especially based on the actual existing medieval institutions of guilds. What does it mean for an organisation to have a monopoly on the employ of small groups of armed mercenaries? Is this a way to direct the attention of would-be kingslayers who otherwise could coup small kingdoms pretty effectively? How do they enforce membership and what are the consequences of illicit adventuring?

Unfortunately the inclusion of an Adventurer's Guild in a story is usually used as a way to avoid doing any more worldbuilding and jump right to the dungeon crawls.

[nohoperadio]

were you the anon that sent summer transgenderer the ulna bump ask or are there more of us

Not me! I never send anons these days, I think it comes across a little craven, no offense. I think the vast majority of people would mourn the bumpy bit of the wrist if it got smoothed out, including I've no doubt summer herself if she would be serious for a moment.

[transgenderer]

It genuinely bothered me when I realized it existed as a child! It felt like it had slipped there under my nose. I actually felt similarly about noses as a child which is crazy because now if anything I'm like. Well I wouldn't say a nose fetishist that's the wrong way to concieve of it but I think prominent noses are appealing and it's weird to me this isn't the default

The ulna still kind of feels like a growth tho....like if there was no ulna no one would be like "there should a bump there". It seems like a kludge from it's ancestry as a fin. You ever seen those diagrams of all the bones in your wrist? It's tterible. Just a pile of bones, loosely organized into a plate

[cobstraverse]

How do you feel about the medial epicondyle? It's less prominent but feels so much more fragile.

[deadgenerations]

I've come to believe there is not greater waste for human time and electricity/petrol than the industry of leafblowing. Why? why I God's name do we need a cunt to operate the noiseundsoundmaken device at ungodly hours to push leaves (leaves!) from off the grass and soil and into, for some reason, the middle of the street? who is this benefiting? it's leaves. they'd decompose mate!!! Why are we clogging our storm drains with this? And why the middle of the street??? its just going to be scattered by the cars driving right over them!!! what are we doing here mate. come on.

[cobstraverse]

I've never seethed more than one morning, in one of the leafiest suburbs, I went out to see why the leafblower convention seemed to be in town and I saw a guy with one of the giant backpack ones shepharding ONE SINGLE LEAF across about 20 metres of grass to blow it into the gutter. Prodding point blank to dislodge it every time it got caught, which was often because it was a tiny leaf in the grass.

[aorish]

odyssey poet is kind of a hack sometimes. another nine bulls to poseidon, another bowl of wine, another feast. if agamemnon did it in the iliad, every male host serving either Odysseus or Telemachus will do it.

[cobstraverse]

More unlimited wine and meats.

[fucca02]

[smoke-in-the-winds]

This is a bad post and you can rightfully criticize its sophomoric pretentious tone and implicit incuriosity, but I’m still gonna make it:

When I’ve read a Great Novel, I often find myself being fully wrapped up into an almost transcendental experience and attaining the ability to articulate emotional attitudes I previously did not have the language to express.

When I watch a Great Film, I often find myself being engrossed by a well-crafted dialogue and artistic scenery all with the aim of revealing a unique perspective I can appreciate.

When I play a Great Videogame, I often find myself being mildly entertained for about half an hour

[cobstraverse]

For me playing a great videogame feels like I've added new forms of proprioception. The divide between me and the character dissolves and I enter a flow state where I am inhabiting the virtual world and my actions come out as easily as thinking.

[cobstraverse]

Every time I'm in a datacentre most of my thoughts are consumed with ranking the best places to take a nap in said datacentre. Sometimes there's a little nook with warm server air blowing into it.

[raginrayguns]

im really fixated on queen sootsleeves as a character right now. Known for ruling a whimsical Oz-type realm that everyone hated. Now just gets fast food drive-through with her "steed" (a convertible) and her "torch" (cigarette)

[cobstraverse]

What if the reward you got for succeeding in your Alice in Wonderland adventure just completely sucked ass and ruined your life

[toasthaste]

oh yeah it's been over a year since i played it, enough percolating time that I'm now confident that in stars and time belongs on my Favorite Games Of All Time list. easy top 5, likely top 3. excellent excellent excellent wonderful game. play In Stars and Time.

[cobstraverse]

I can't help but feel like I must have missed something when I played it, everyone I know who even touched it seemed to get taken over by a Siffrin or Loop shaped mind worm but I thought it was just okay.

[the-real-seebs]

"average wizard who hires cutthroat adventurers has 3.5 eyes" factoid actualy just statistical error.

[st-just]

is there anything of such wildly varying power and force from no apparent cause as energy blasts in a superhero story?

[cobstraverse]

The closest thing would be punches in a superhero story

[transgenderer]

aiui both the trumpet and bagpipe were originally used just to make a loud noise (for war etc) and later became musical instruments in the full sense. but a modern trumpet makes yknow, music, and bagpipes sound like bagpipes. a failure in technological development? surely we could MAKE a bagpipe that sounds good. blind preservationism? idgi, maybe its like spicy food and you get a taste for it?

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

we could also make water that's wet and a sky that's blue

[cobstraverse]

Bagpipes are just the most popular survivor of a long tradition. Uilleann pipes sound lovely for example since they're less optimised to play on battlefields.

[yuujies]