Nerdy Revelries

This is the diary of a very nerdy girl. She is an English major hoping to become a writer, a fan of Sailor Moon and Harvest Moon who philosophizes a lot. Kino no Tabi and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Keiichi Sigsawa are her joy. These things and whatever else may catch her nerdy, eclectic interest shall be the subject of this blog. She sometimes likes to speak in third person.

[nerdyrevelries]

Celebrating the Digital Release of Castles in the Air!

This past week, the culmination of five years of work has come together in the digital release of Castles in the Air (CitA), a tabletop RPG designed by me and inspired by the writing of Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) and LM Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables.) Castles in the Air is a collaborative and narrative-heavy game designed to let you tell coming-of-age stories.

Start the game as children with boundless dreams. As the years pass, the relationships and choices of your youth will determine the person you grow up to become. How will the world change you? How will you change the world?

If this sounds exciting to you, you can find the game on the Storybrewers website or on itch.io. There's also a physical release planned for the future, but the exact date is unknown due to the current uncertainty around tariffs.

I'm also running a game jam where people can submit their own takes on the game. This will run through the end of August 2025. I hope to see you there!

[sicklesium-moved-deactivated201]

i dont get offended at white people jokes even though im white because: 

i can recognize white people as a whole have systemically oppressed POC in america, which is where i live 

most people when they make white people jokes only mean the shitty white people and i am not a shitty white person 

im not a pissbaby

[damncommunists-deactivated20180]

my white friends that have reblogged this give me life

[zelda-tempest]

4. Sometimes I am a shitty white person and the jokes remind me to FUCKIN STOP

[lallamariamhabibi]

If ur white and like this post I fux with u

[birdpapi-deactivated20171121]

^absolutely

[verdant-witch]

5. It’s hard to be offended when white people jokes involve bland food/tourist dads in socks and sandals/white girls in yoga pants obsessed with pumpkin spice/suburban PTA moms and other harmless and mostly true stereotypes while jokes about POC involve them being called thugs/criminals/slurs/uneducated/illegal immigrants.

[blackpoeticinjustice]

i fucks with u heavy if ur white and you reblog this

[reggiehyperfixates]

my favorite white joke is about us liking cheese and crackers bc. i do like cheese and crackers :D

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’m blindsided by authors using ai in their works. how can readers and writers tell if the writing is ai generated?

I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.

but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.

I’ve already talked more about this here, here, here. and more on my other blog @writingdose here and here.

[littlepagodatree]

You can notice certain telltale signs in some of the writing, such as short sentence stacking and usage of "not x not y but z" structures. But you have to be familiar with AI writing styles to be able to notice that.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’ve been writing “not x, not y, but z” way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve read works that have “not x, not y, but z” in them, and I’ve read those works way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve also been using em dash way before gen ai became a thing, and I’ve seen em dash used in so many written works way before gen ai became a thing. I know for a fact some human writers actually prefer short sentence stacking too.

every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.

when I say ai witch hunt, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more, “not x, not y, but z” and em dash are one of the main things I’m talking about.

[nerdyrevelries]

The only actual AI tell is if an author leaves in part of the prompt or the introduction to a prompt's response. Everything else is only part of gen AI because it was common in real human writers first. Because AI cannot create anything. It can only imitate. And even calling it imitation is a bit misleading because that implies some sort of understanding on AI's part. There isn't. It's just a fancy text prediction machine that selects the next most likely word or phrase, not so different from when your phone offers word suggestions when you are typing a sentence.

Try putting famous novels from Project Gutenberg through an AI detector. They will flag because they're what AI has been trained on. Gen AI only sounds as human as it does because it's based on human writing.

[nerdyrevelries]

POV: You didn't take the picture fast enough and Ralphie is launching himself at you because he wants to cuddle now.

[jomiddlemarch]

Am I the only person who read Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl? Every once in a while there's post about Little Women or Rose in Bloom or Nine Cousins and a little visual of Polly and her canary pop into my mind.

[nerdyrevelries]

You are not! I've read it multiple times and even convinced some of my friends to read it with me.

Have you seen the movie adaptation? It's from 1949, and I have no idea who this movie was made for because it only adapts the second half of the book, which I have to imagine is confusing for people not familiar with the source material. It has a special place in my heart, though, as it's fairly loyal to the parts of the story it does adapt, and it's so novel to see an Alcott adaptation that isn't Little Women or Little Men. I can only think of two other examples, and neither of them are particularly good.

[dorothea-inthegarret]

Me, a Louisa May Alcott fangirl, always appreciating the beauty that each of my favorite artists create, getting offended at my lack of language knowledge when finding out that the concept of 'building castles in the air' wasn't something poetic created by her, nor even a biblical quote due to Little Women being a Christian-themed story, but it was already an idiom commonly known in ancient times...

This revelation came in when I saw a pinterest post with this quote from Dracula: "I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air." Which made me gasp: "DID LOUISA READ DRACULA AND TOOK INSPIRATION FROM THERE?"

But after googling, it turned out that Dracula was published 29 years later. (Why did I assume it was older?) Which made me gasp even louder: "DID BRAM STOKER BY ANY CHANCE READ LITTLE WOMEN?" It was an hilarious idea for some reason, but I couldn't find information stating that he had done so.

Then I had to google about castles in the air itself, and what happens is simple. As I said, it was just an idiom. The concept of building castles in the air even appeared in Don Quixote, published between 1605 and 1615. (Around 300 years before LW and Dracula)

Besides, since realizing that fact, I've been thinking it was just a mistake of my non-Native English brain. Like when I used to think the line "all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put me back together again" was only from the modern song "All The King's Horses" by Karmina, but after hearing it also in Taylor Swift's "The Archer", I obviously had to google about it too and I discovered it's actually a quote from an old English nursery rhyme. Or like when I thought the line "blood is thicker than water" was just from the song "The Water Is Fine" by Chloe Ament but it's an English idiom too. HAHA IT'S AMAZING. Anyway, as I was saying, I thought it was my English level what made me not know this, just like it happened during those two examples. But now, after randomly realizing that if Don Quixote is Spaniard then 'to build castles in the air' can't be only an English idiom and googling about that, I'm finding out that it's a Spanish idiom too. So this time it was my lack of knowledge on my own language also🤭

[nerdyrevelries]

Something kinda interesting about castles in the air as a phrase is that I think the meaning has shifted subtly sometime in the past 150 years or so. When I see castles in the air being used in modern English, it frequently has the same connotation as "pie in the sky" or "when pigs fly." There's an understanding that the dream or ambition in question is explicitly unrealistic and unobtainable. (The most common context I see for it in the modern day is talking about a political party or figure who you don't like and think is naive at best and an outright liar utterly divorced from reality at worst, for instance.)

When I read Dracula, Louisa May Alcott (she was very fond of the phrase and used it outside of Little Women though Little Women is notable for having a whole chapter with that name), or other literature from the period that uses it, the phrase comes across as much more neutral. It's still something you are dreaming of that doesn't currently exist, but obtaining it is not outside the realm of possibility. Henry David Thoreau even has a quote from his book Walden that reads, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them," which explicitly states that castles in the air can be achieved as long as we are willing to put in the work to make them a reality (as a side note, Thoreau and Alcott were part of the same social and intellectual circles.)

It's a small nuance, but I am convinced that this is a very real example of a language shift, nonetheless. There are also alternate versions of the phrase that you see historically such as air castles, castles in Spain, or palace of dreams (multiple of which show up in the writing of LM Montgomery even though I haven't found an example of her using "castles in the air" verbatim) that I don't see in the modern day at all.

I'm not sure how the "castles in Spain" alternative version is related to castles in the air apparently also being used in Spanish since it shows up in Don Quixote. Most countries don't use their own country name in phrases for concepts because from their viewpoint, they are the default and you need to specify if it's from somewhere else, not from them. (For example, the cut of pork known as Canadian bacon in the US is just called back bacon in Canada.)

[nerdyrevelries]

It's been about a year since the release of Castles in the Air, my tabletop RPG based on the novels of Louisa May Alcott and LM Montgomery, like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. That means I am far enough out from the design process to want to go back to it, so I have started to give some thought to the expansions. All my expansion ideas are inspired by other classics in children's literature like the Wizard of Oz and Chronicles of Narnia (portal fantasy), Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series and Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series (magic apprenticeship systems; this is going to be my answer to the magic school genre as I was never really into Harry Potter even as a kid and I also think that magic boarding schools feel very British in a way that I don't think fits with the North American setting of CitA), and the Borrowers (secret societies of tiny people separate from our own.)

If any of this sounds interesting to you, you can help shape the future of CitA by filling out a survey to let me know what you would like from the expansions. You don't have to have played the game previously to fill out the survey as long as you are interested in playing at least one of the expansions in the future. You can find it here:

Castles in the Air Expansion Survey

In this survey, we will be dealing with what you want out of some planned CitA expansions. Like CitA itself, these expansions take inspirati

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Can you change "Louisa May Alcott" to "Lou Alcott"? Based on everything we have left from their writings, they much preferred to be called Lou Alcott

I knew about Alcott's struggles with gender norms but not about the author's preferred name. I'll dive into it but that's going to take me some time (my work isn't a phone-friendly place and research always takes time).

If anyone has sources, though, I'd love to read them.

Coming back to you whenever I'll be able to

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Okay, so I got to read some press articles. I quite liked the NYT one, here are some interesting quotes they've used:

“I am certain that Alcott never fit a binary sex-gender model,” said Gregory Eiselein, a professor at Kansas State University and the president of the Louisa May Alcott Society.

“I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body.” (this one is from Alcott)

Anyway, they do point out that Alcott didn't like being referred to as a girl/woman, didn't use their birthname much and was called Lou by family and friends.

I'll stay prudent with my conclusions since Alcott was from the 19th century and didn't have access to the terminology we have now (hence why I'm using a neutral "them" and not a "he" here since I can't be certain it would have been their preference) but I'd tend to agree with the professor: Lou didn't seem to fit the binary and didn't like using their birthname.

I can't change parts of a poll but I can indicate that the poll should have stated "Lou' as a first name on a note in the ongoing polls with Alcott's works and use Lou as their first name in the next ones.

I'll tag all these posts under both Alcott's publishing name to reach their unknowing readers and their favored name.

Well, thank you for teaching me something and contributing to Alcott's legacy!

[nerdyrevelries]

Hey, so, I just wanted to add some further context. The full quote is "I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man." To me, it's ambiguous about whether this quote is about Alcott identifying as a man or being romantically interested in women or both! I would not hesitate to say that Alcott was gender non-conforming, but I think it's hard to say for sure whether or not they were trans, especially since Anna, Alcott's older sister, destroyed a lot of LMA's correspondence at Alcott's request after their death.

There are a few different ways I try to handle this ambiguity. The first is that I acknowledge it. I would never say with certainty that Alcott wasn't trans or even that it's unlikely, but I do still use feminine pronouns for her because, to me, using what she used during her own lifetime feels the most respectful since we can't ask her how she wants to identify. I also don't think there's any contradiction between those pronouns and a trans identity. I know she/her nonbinaries, there are he/him lesbians, why can't there also be she/her trans men?

As for the Lou vs Louisa debate, I have less of a horse in this race. As a cis woman who sometimes uses a non-gendered shortening of my name, I don't think that going by Lou among family is proof positive that Louisa was a deadname and Lou was a chosen name. It could just as easily be a nickname. But I am going to be honest, 90% of the time I am either using LMA or Alcott when I am talking about her.

The one real reason I use Louisa May Alcott sometimes is that no one knows who you are talking about when you say Lou Alcott. And the thing is I love Alcott! I adore her writing (I wrote a whole tabletop RPG inspired by her writing, even), and I want to be able to talk to people about it. And it's really hard to do so if you don't use the only name people maybe know her by, and let's be honest, even by that name, a lot of people are still going to go "who?" Because she doesn't have a place in the cultural zeitgeist outside of Little Women the way that people like Jane Austen or the Brönte sisters do. When I marketed my tabletop RPG, I had to say that it was based on Little Women because no one would know what I meant if I just said Louisa May Alcott. One of the articles about my game even said that it let you play out Greta Gerwig's Little Women! Greta Gerwig! I just want to share how much I love this author with the world, and I am honestly not sure if you can do that as Lou Alcott because people barely talk about her as is.

[nerdyrevelries]

I was watching one of Babity Kate's video essays on what she termed the Belle problem about how Belle from Beauty and the Beast is not as cohesive of a character as some of the other Disney princesses. One of her main points was that Belle's I Want song is incredibly vague and what concrete things she does say she wants in it, are not the things she actually gets at the end of the movie, and therefore her ending is less happy than some of the other princesses who go everything they wanted and more. I thought the video was very well argued and brought up some interesting points, but respectfully, I'm going to have to disagree. Bear with me for a second because I am going to go off on something that is going to seem like a bit of a tangent.

In some ways, Belle reminds me a lot of Jo March from Little Women. They are both ride or die for their family and they feel awkward and like they don't fit with the people around them and are uncomfortable with the role that society expects them to play. They both have dreams that feel grandiose but somewhat nebulous. When Meg and Amy tell us their dreams in the chapter Castles in the Air, they say them directly. Meg wants to be rich and rule over a grand house. Amy wants to go to Rome and be the best artist in the world. But while Jo is closely associated with wanting to be a famous writer, what she actually says is, "I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle,—something heroic, or wonderful,—that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all, some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous." Her first thought is not to writing a great book but the idea that writing a great book can be the heroic or wonderful thing that creates a legacy for her after she is gone.

Another thing that I think connects Jo and Belle is that they have a deep well of loneliness in them, and their happy ending involves finding the thing that fills it. For Jo, this is marriage to a man who shares her interests and has strengths that help her overcome her weaknesses, as well as a school where she can help teach and raise boys as she did with Teddy Laurence previously. She's surrounded by love and laughter and understanding. For Belle, this is marriage to a man who understands what it is to feel lonely and ostracized, who may not always know exactly what she is thinking but who cares deeply about learning what those things are and helping her get the things that are important to her like her father's well-being and continued learning, as a castle full of people who love and appreciate her and don't just see her as that weird girl who could be a real catch if she'd just give up those silly notions of hers.

The important aspects of what Belle wanted were the love and acceptance, and while I do think that she absolutely got her big adventure because come on, the whole movie could easily be turned into a gothic novel where she's the heroine, and she certainly got out of her small town, I think the exact details of the rest of what she wanted were never the important parts, and that's why they were so nebulous.

At the end of Little Women, you have the following exchange between Jo and Amy that I have very slightly paraphrased:

"I don't think I ever ought to call myself 'Unlucky Jo' again, when my greatest wish has been so beautifully granted."

"And yet your life is very different from the one you pictured so long ago."

"The life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now. I haven't given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait, and I'm sure it will be all the better for such experiences and illustrations as these."

Jo's life looks very different from the exact details of what she said she wanted, but it fulfills the most important parts of the brief. She's no longer deeply lonely like she was after Beth's death, and she is creating a legacy for herself in the boys whose lives she influences. (She also gets to write her famous novel in the later book Jo's Boys, which I only mention to silence the haters and not because I think that Jo's ending wouldn't have still been a happy one even if no more books followed it.) But while it looks different, Jo also explicitly says that what her life looks like makes her happier than the things she dreamed for herself as a child, which now look shallow in comparison.

Beauty and the Beast doesn't come right out and say it, but I think this is true for Belle as well. She's found a place and a community where she's happy. She doesn't need to go out and search for that anymore.

And I think that's really beautiful. I love that dreams can change and we can still find happiness and fulfillment in those new dreams. Because if we're going to be honest, how many of us really get the things we wanted when we were little? The world would have a lot more fairy princesses and astronauts and pro baseball players in it if we did. But maybe, just maybe, we don't have to get our first dream or even or second or third or fifth, and we can still live a life we love that brings us a sense of fulfillment. Maybe our vague wants can crystalize into beautiful sculptures we never expected.

[nerdyrevelries]

Jacob and Julia were playing a game about running a book store on Secret Sleepover Society, and it had Bland Name Products for its books, and I saw one of the books you could get was Tiny Women, so I said in chat, "As someone who wrote a tabletop RPG based on Louisa May Alcott books like Little Women, can I request you buy Tiny Women?" And Jacob and Julia said that it was cool that I wrote that and people in the chat asked me to drop the name, so I did. I feel very cool this evening. 😤

For those who were not in the chat and are interested, the name is Castles in the Air, and it was published by Storybrewers Roleplaying. You can find out more about it on my Tumblr.

[pinkprettycure]

thought about how if val tried doing sexy roleplay with any of her LIs it would end up like the grown-up version of baby Val's lemonade stand where every single LI pisses her off 😭

Alex isn't winning this one I fear, he starts fucking with her. She tries being a sexy nurse and he starts faking being in critical condition and fake dying just to be funny. She does sexy police officer and he (still playing) goes "ACAB includes my wife, bro 😐 removes her from the room"

Ethan wins this one. he would actually play along lmao.

Clover is unfortunately a bossy4bossy nightmare.

Liam would try but he's bad at it. he's reading lines off an index card in monotone like "Oh Yes. Um… whispering I-Isn't this script a bit vulgar…?" and then it don't even be any cussing anyways

you probably think Sophie is disqualified because she's asexual but the reality is she DOES participate for some reason, and she pisses Val off by asking her to dress up like a legally distinct sexy lizard

[pinkprettycure]

[nerdyrevelries]

I feel like Zacharie would actually be really good at this except for potentially getting distracted because of the AuDHD.

[nerdyrevelries]

The Victorian ideas of separate spheres and the angel of the home were as much about class as they were about gender. This was an era in which the middle class was establishing itself and gaining its own identity. This was one of the ways it set itself apart and claimed a supposed moral superiority over both the lower and upper classes.

"Look, our women can afford to not hold jobs outside the home, just like upper class women. But we are also superior to the upper class because our women still have a work ethic and make the home a comfortable place to live and raise their children themselves rather than leaving everything to nannies."

You cannot separate class from gender when talking about the role of women throughout history.

[nerdyrevelries]

I'm going to be running an actual play of the game I designed, Castles in the Air, at 12pm PDT/3pm EDT starting today. That's in about half an hour from the time of this post. Please join us! It's going to be a good time. You can find it at https://www.twitch.tv/thestorytoldpodcast

[autistichalsin]

"(Historical author there was a lot of evidence for being transmasc) didn't transition, and some people in the 1800s actually did manage to transition, so we can't actually say this person was transmasc. She was definitely a woman."

Like buddy, just admit you're denying this because you don't want to admit Lou Alcott was trans because then you wouldn't be able to enjoy Little Women anymore. At least that would be HONEST.

[nerdyrevelries]

I think you can fall in the middle of this argument where you acknowledge that both are possibilities and use the pronouns LMA used during life as acknowledgement of this ambiguity.

One of the biggest things for me is that a lot of people take the quote about being half convinced she's a man in a woman's body out of context by omitting the end of the quote that says "because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man." To me, that could just as easily be about being a lesbian as it could be about being trans.

I honestly don't think it's disrespectful to use the name Alcott published books under and the pronouns Alcott used during her lifetime to discuss her. Nor do I think that everyone who does so is denying the possibility that she was trans. You don't need to use male pronouns to be a trans man. I have plenty of friends who are she/her nonbinaries, so I don't see how this would be any different. Moreover, what if she is a lesbian or just GNC rather than trans? Wouldn't it be equally disrespectful to pick a new identity for her?

The long and the short of it is that she has quotes that can be interpreted multiple ways, and we can't ask her for clarification. I don't think anyone who thinks she was trans is wrong in thinking so, but I also don't think that anyone who thinks you can't be sure (as long as they aren't saying there's no possibility that she was trans) is wrong or disrespectful either.

[nerdyrevelries]

Just finished reading the main books for Cécile Rey and Marie-Grace Gardner for the first time, and my mind is going absolutely wild thinking about what the future is going to be like for these girls.

First of all, personal ambition: The looking back sections do not mention this at all (a huge oversight, really), but Marie-Grace is actually living at the perfect time to become a doctor. This was the period in American history where medical education was starting to move to schools rather than apprenticeships but before it had become super standardized. In 1850, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania or the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania was founded in Philadelphia. This was the first school of its kind dedicated to teaching women medicine and letting them earn their Doctor of Medicine degree. The school was hugely influential and both white women and women of color earned degrees. Women from as far away as Japan went there to study and then return with their new knowledge and skills to serve their original communities.

Later, the school faced new struggles as medical education became more standardized. While I think we would generally agree that it's a good thing for doctors to do things like a residency in order to actually be able to practice their skills among more experienced doctors before they are let loose on the world, the downside was that the requirements were often used as a way to push women and other minorities out as most hospitals were not open to them. The college did have some connections that allowed students and graduates to get clinical training, but this still decreased the amount of female doctors the school produced by around the 1880s.

However, this wouldn't be an issue for Marie-Grace. The college would be well-established by the time she was ready to attend, and she would already have graduated by the time there started to be issues with women being unable to get clinical training required for a degree. Sure, Marie-Grace loves singing, but we also see her involved a lot in medicine both with nursing and assisting her father. Moreover, America gets its first school for women doctors before it gets its first school for nurses using the methods of Florence Nightingale, which doesn't happen until 1873, when Marie-Grace would be 29 or 30. It feels much more realistic to me that she would go to school to become a doctor than a nurse.

But enough about that because we also have to talk about some other stuff. Namely that the Civil War happens less than 8 years after the end of the book. I need to know what happens to these girls and their families during and after the Civil War. Because New Orleans is still part of the Confederacy, and there were free people of color who joined the Confederate army. I have only done a very small amount of reading about this, but it looks like Louisiana and New Orleans had their own organization for free black soldiers called the Louisiana Native Guard. It seems like they were more used to defend entrenchments rather than fight in battles (if anyone knows more about this stuff, feel free to correct me or elaborate; I am not super into military history, so I feel like I am on very shaky ground here) and were eventually disbanded after the Union capture of New Orleans and about 10% of its members went onto join the Union's 1st Louisiana Native Guard.

Now, we know that the Reys are against slavery, so I don't think that any of them would be likely to join the Confederate Army as some did, perhaps in hopes of retaining their position of relative privilege or because they actually believed in the cause since some of them were slave owners. But what do they do instead? Do they stay in New Orleans and hope they don't lose their property, fortune, and livelihood? Does the entire family move up North to join the Union? Maybe they stay but Armand joins the Union Army early in the war? Or maybe he only joins after the Union takes New Orleans?

I'm so curious, and I hope Babity Kate gets into this when she does her deep dive on these two in like 2050 or something.

[every-kind-of-cat]

The comments of Denis Ten's last instagram post are flooded, mostly in Kazakh, with people telling him "we won" and "we miss you" and "you would be so proud" and THAT has me crying.

[filthyjanuary]

denis ten (kaz) 2014 olympic bronze medallist x mikhail shaidorov (kaz) 2026 olympic gold medallist x denis ten memorial, almaty x the world was wide enough (hamilton, 2015)