L. Catala on Tumblr

L. Catala (they/them), aspiring writer, fantasy, horror, language, history, movies, music, biology, nihilism, France; speaks EN and FR

[lcatala]

Introduction

Hello, I am L. Catala (they/them)

If you message me in private, state your business upfront and right away. If you just open with "hello" or "how are you?", I'll assume you're a bot or a scammer; I won't answer and I will likely block you.

This is the place I am currently most active at, but you can also find me on: Bluesky Soundcloud Youtube

About me:

I am an aspiring fantasy writer living in France (I write in English), born in the mid 80s, aro/ace, agender, nihilist, suspected ADHD and autism. My interests include linguistics (which I have a BA in), movies, comics, mangas, SFF novels, music — I dabble in digital music production (you can listen to tunes I've made on my Soundcloud) — biology, astronomy, vulcanology, physics, dinosaurs, calligraphy, board games, video games, philosophy, theology, metaphysics…

My first language is French, but I am more or less fluent in English (minus the accent when I speak), have various degrees of limited familiarity with other Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan…) and with German. I am currently studying Persian.

Favorite movies: 2001 A Space Odyssey, The King and the Mockingbird, Harakiri, Alien Favorite writers: Tamsyn Muir, Seth Dickinson, Jeff VanderMeer Favorite webcomics: Aurora, Gunnerkrigg Court, Tiger Tiger, Space Boy, 3rd Voice Favorite video games: Undertale, Hyperlight Drifter, LIMBO, In Stars and Time, Cave Story

Principal music genres I listen to: classical/ancient/traditional/art music (including non-western: iranian art music, hindustani classical music, gamelan…), jazz, new age/ambient, film & video game soundtracks, old rock & pop, death & indus metal, dark synthwave, noise, experimental…

---

Some of my work that I've posted on this site:

A long-winded essay about animation that started as a (negative!) review of The Boy and the Heron

An SCP-like piece of original short fiction

An etymological analysis of the "arithmonyms" in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series

An etymological and historical analysis of the name of the Sun in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series

A diagram showing the morphological evolution of the gender and case system from Latin to Romance

A humorous Venn diagram comparing the characters of Harrowhark Nonagesimus from the Locked Tomb series and Baru Cormorant from the Masquerade series

A calligram based on a text from Harrow the Ninth

Tessellations inspired by the nine Houses of the Locked Tomb series

---

Since 2019, I have been working on a fantasy novel currently under the codename of [Cor Tenebrarum]. It is meant to be a standalone adult dark fantasy novel, as well as xenofiction (non-human protagonists), with experimental prose. It's about a designated hero cursed by an unreliable mentor, rebelling and looking for a way out of a meaningless quest, even if that means seeking the help of the very threat they were supposed to destroy.

It's like the xenofiction of Adrian Tchaikovsky meeting the unhinged realities of Jeff VanderMeer and the formal experimentations and sink-or-swim worldbuilding of Tamsyn Muir.

See also this moodboard I made for it:

After years developing the characters, themes and language of the book, I am now finally in the detailed outline phase, after which I hope to start the first draft soon.

---

Since 2024 I'm also working on a longform essay about the so far unexplored impact of the nature of language on the metaphysics of religion.

[prokopetz]

Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.

[stephenleasheppard]

There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"No, why would it?"

[sabotflask]

One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."

[lcatala]

I keep mishearing "drag-and-drop" as "dragon drop".

[omnia-mors-aequat-nstrwa]

Franz Matsch, Museum of Art History in Vienna (1891)

[sugar-petals]

modern media in a nutshell

[ionomycin]

protect the little one

[tuesdayfreak]

i love you mae borowski

[wordarttmn]

A while back I shared this post about that ancient greek textbook I had as a kid, a fine textbook by itself (the author actually put a lot of effort into explaining the reconstructed pronunciation complete with pitch accent, which is uncommon in France), but the author had an interview where he was saying insanely reactionary shit (I mean, shit that was already reactionary 60+ years ago) and then going "but I swear I’m progressive, look, a naked woman" (Aphrodite btw).

(and I’m not calling that drawing sexual, but that is the implication he was making in that interview)

And idk if it sounds weird to you but it’s such a standard attitude in France. Reactionary celebrities writing seething editorials about their right to be perverts amount in the hundreds. Reactionary "sex-positivity" is not hard to come by, you just have to turn on any radio station or TV channel owned by far-right billionaires (which is a lot of channels).

Anyways where I’m getting at with this is that no amount of sex(ualization) is a proxy for progressivism.

There is a tendency in the asexual community to assume that if sex is made to be less of a taboo, everyone will automatically become more normal about us. That those are the same fight.

And I can’t stress this enough: they are NOT he same fight, not inherently. They are not opposed, just separate. You need to be vocal about ace issues explicitly because they won’t solve themselves automatically if you solve "allo issues" first. This will literally never happen.

I know this because I have a tumblr account.

I also know this because I live in France. Supposedly a "much less puritanical" society, yet one with a special derogatory version of the word "virgin" that I can’t even translate into english.

[sparrowlucero]

adding to the pile of little colorful dragons i've been drawing lately

(also available on my kofi as adoptables!)

[lcatala]

A short overview and discussion of the Hays Code, notably getting into the motivation and reasoning behind the code and how a lot of it is still in vogue today and influencing how major movies get made.

[manorinthewoods]

Something that occurred to me about Hays Code-esque moralisation is the 'moralisation' part. There's a sneaky little narrative there. We agree that the censorship is bad, that the loss of all the dirty parts is bad. But have we gone far enough? Are we agreeing that the result of the censorship is moral?

Let's say we believe there's such a thing as Good and Evil, for simplicity. And we look at a censored artwork. There's things we consider Good that were removed; that action is Evil. But if we're not careful, we might still judge the censored artwork as being Good. It was Evil that it lost Good elements, but this censored work is still morally clean, we might subconsciously think.

But if you do that, you concede to the censors that they achieved Purity. We don't think Purity is Good, but we think that this work Is Pure.

Is it? Is it really? Are we sure? Are we going to accept this propaganda piece as Pure?

[prokopetz]

It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.

[prokopetz]

Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!

[prokopetz]

@lunchm34t replied:

what adventure games softlock you like that?

I'm usually loathe to suggest TV Tropes as a resource, but given that only a person who's entirely unacquainted with the genre would be asking that question, a primer is probably warranted. Check out the Unwinnable By Design article and read the preamble for context on the types of softlocks we're discussing, then hit either the "Sierra" or "Infocom" links (yes, those two publishers each have their own dedicated sections!), pop open the "Cruel" tab, and get ready to read some stuff that makes you mad.

[sd-d0-l1y]

There really is only one correct way to play some of these games huh.

[prokopetz]

A critical piece of context that a lot of modern gamers completely miss is that Douglas Adams' adventure games are works of parody not only in terms of their narratives, but also in the sense that they're rather vicious parodies of adventure games as a genre. Each of their absurdly obtuse puzzles is lampooning some puzzle design trope or set of tropes that was legitimately commonplace at the time they were made, and many of the really nasty bits are crafted specifically to piss off experienced adventure game fans who otherwise wouldn't get caught out by that sort of thing. They're outliers in the genre only in the sense that they're putting forth extra effort to be annoying about it – most games of the type pull the exact same shit entirely without remark!

[prokopetz]

(Honestly, the player-hostility of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to be tremendously overstated owing to a combination of effective marketing and the fact that it's the only adventure game from that era that any significant number of current-gen gamers have ever actually played. In terms of sheer fuckery it's considerably friendlier than stuff like, say, Codename: ICEMAN.)

[dana-ategina]

were these like, rented out blockbuster-style and the devs got a cut out of said rent, or

[prokopetz]

It helps to understand that point and click adventure games are one of the first genres the Git Gud really fixated on, and a lot of these early design trends revolved around catering to that crowd. It only got reframed as a genre for filthy casuals in the wake of a demographic shift in the mid 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing strongly female; it's practically the only example of a video game genre's reputation flipping directly from "hardcore" to "casual", and one of the most striking illustrations of the fact that which kinds of games are considered "real" games is more about identity politics than mechanics.

[mortalityplays]

periodically I'll get a bunch of outspoken white supremacists and self identified nazis frothing themselves up into a rage in my notes, and every single time I trace the reblog chain back to block them at the point of origin I find that they showed up via some clutch of terfs. EVERY time. and these people always present themselves as 'pro woman' just asking brave questions left wing radicals. whose followers and mutuals are at best one step removed from white pride Q guys calling immigrants filthy degenerates and calling for the global slaughter of arabs. I can't stress this enough: every time.

[yuumei-art]

Last Witch Hat Monday I drew Biblically Accurate Brushbuddy, this Monday I bring you Biblically Accurate Brushbully!!!

I can't wait to see this angry void noodle animated in a future episode one day!

#witchhatatelier #Δ帽子 #WHA The other half

Painting process

[lcatala]

I have a lot of "story" ideas but they're usually like "The Locked Tomb x The Vision of Escaflowne x Hellraiser-4-if-it-was-good". Like it's really just a set of vibe and if I decide to write that thing I actually have to come up with the story from scratch, and coming up with the story is the thing I'm the least good at. Practice-makes-perfect and all, but in the meantime I've got so many ideas that obsesses me and that I don't have time to work on yet.

[doodledrawsthings]

been thinking about this game alot so im replaying it with my friends

[dumgumgum]

* right, this is where we draw pictures, and don’t kill each other!

[xiaq]

One of the best things about being a writer is thinking of something small you can add to your work that’s just. Devastating. Like you’re sitting there going. Oh. That would be diabolical. People would get really riled up about that. Exquisite. Let’s do it.