Please no dadaist poetry beyond this point

Fear, anchovies, fear and the dangers of ingesting Mercury. My Tumblr is where you'll find most things I like enough to reblog, random things I enjoy, and the occasional personal rambling. That means this usually hovers somewhere between politics, kink (usually tagged #nsfd), kink-related politics, and pictures of cute puppies Not bothering to update the very old bio but if you find this, howdy Diba

[downwithneocolonialism]

[thoughtcascades]

you are allowed to outgrow the version of yourself everyone else got comfortable with

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

still think it’s incredible they made a movie musical about pt barnum where the point is like love and accept yourself no matter who you are or what you look like <3 when pt barnum irl was like exploitation georg who lives in a circus and and dehumanizes 10,000 people daily. not sure how they came up with that one

[zaprowsdower27]

"Telling a fabricated story that audiences want to hear rather than anything faithful to actual facts about relevant history" is the most authentic experience a PT Barnum movie could possibly have been, though

[prokopetz]

Inadvisable tabletop RPG jam premise #137: Game jam where each entry consists solely of paratextual discussion of the mechanics of a hypothetical or invented RPG; examples include an errata document, a developer Q&A, or a forum thread debating the correct interpretation of a particular rule.

[prokopetz]

@shoutyourporpoise replied:

I could SWEAR you’ve made this post before, or perhaps this is such a characteristically “you” concept that I already imagined a world in which you had

I don't think so, no. I did once (unintentionally) curate a game jam about writing supplements for invented or hypothetical games, the product of which you can find here, but this is a different thing.

[prokopetz]

(If anyone really wants this one to be a thing, though, feel free to toss your entry into the reblogs. I'm not going to do a proper game jam on itch.io or whatever because its UI really wants you to have cover art and a promotional blurb and such, and this doesn't feel like it warrants it!)

[what-even-is-thiss]

Wait a minute if elves take a hundred years to grow up that has some weird implications.

So… if we say a human comes of age in fantasy worlds at 16, that means it takes an elf 6.25 years to age one human year. If we say the age of maturity is 18 that’s 5.55 years.

So then… okay with people that live a long time have to see their human friends die and probably see them like pets yeah that’s been explored to death. But what about a human just seeing their friend not grow up?

An elf toddler and a human toddler become friends at a playdate. At the time the human is two and the elf is 13. Emotionally the elf is just a little older than the human. But then the human grows up. He grows up and as he grows up his friend doesn’t. Not much, anyways.

She’s still sucking her thumb and throwing tantrums the entire time that he grows up. When he reaches the age where he’d choose a trade or go to an academy he’s earning extra money by babysitting her. During his initiation into adulthood on his 18th birthday she’s there with her parents holding a stuffed animal. Later that afternoon he sees her being shown some colorful flashcards with letters of the elvish alphabet on it by her father.

The human gets older. He learns how to fight, he goes from town to town getting work. At some point he joins the army. Every time he visits his hometown he has at least one more scar and by the time he’s 30 and the elf girl is mentally seven by human standards she starts to understand that something is wrong. Even after he settles down to be a home maker for the local blacksmith something feels wrong.

And she watches him grow old. When she’s in her 80s she babysits his grandchildren for extra cash after school, coming over in her school robes and ruffling his hair. She doesn’t remember why she became friends with this human or when but a strange sense of jealousy fills her heart.

Now she realizes it. She realizes it too late, on the day her friend learns that he is dying. The first day of her 100th year and the start of his last. Humans’ lifetimes may only last for the childhood of an elf if they’re lucky, but they learn so fast. They do so much. They cram their days full of love and hate and learning and wonder.

He knew this was coming. He knew all of this decades before she did, because elves are slow. Not stupid, certainly not stupid, but very very slow. She holds her old friend’s hand as he lays down on his bed. A man that has led such an ordinary life but feels so extraordinary to her. Because he has always, always been there and now he just won’t. Because in her eyes he became so wise so fast and now he’s just gonna be gone.

On an elf’s 100th birthday they are allowed to choose a new name for themselves. It can be important, or not. Usually it will follow them until the end of time. She stands in front of her family’s elders and is asked what name she will be called from now on.

She names herself after him.

[demilypyro]

phone somehow autocorrected "the joker" to "the worker." why so devoid of class consciousness, batman

[demilypyro]

[snowstories]

My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.

[mossbear-minese]

I don't remember where I saw this piece of advice so I can't credit it, unfortunately

But it was along the lines of "instead of asking whether something is out of character, ask 'what would it take for this character to do this'"

Which I think fits really nicely with this advice of making the actual action itself also feel in character

[cilceon]

Google’s removal of its search function is going great btw

(A reminder that if you have Firefox/ublock origin this won’t be a problem if you don’t wanna switch search engines to DuckDuckGo)

[charlizetheronsbush-official]

Terry Pratchett was so ahead of his time he had multiple well-written trans characters in his books in the mid-90s

[lovesicklobotomy]

[metal-autistic-coven]

Happy pride month to him

[mockva]

Man notices an Eagle eyeing the fish he just caught

[mexicain-sans-frontiers-v2]

[the-davest-of-uncles]

*gets back to the nest* baby you are NEVER gonna believe how i got this fish

[and-then-the-dragons-arrived]

It occurred to me today that if Terry Pratchett was still around, we'd have a brilliant book about AI by now.

They would build a new machine standing next to HEX and HEX would be... not jealous, of course, why would you think a machine would be jealous? But still HEX would randomly start responding to someone who would spend more time with that new machine.

I'm 100% positive that Dibbler would be mass-printing generated bad romance novels and selling them for profit. All of them would have titles like "A Necklace of Pearls and Flowers" or "A Menace of Dragons and Swords", depending on the audience.

People would buy dis-organisers with new features and the imps would give VASTLY inaccurate answers ("No, dragons don't breathe fire, this is a myth, you are safe!") that would put them in danger - and yet would still refuse to get rid of them. (Maybe Dibbler would sell those advanced dis-organisers, too, sounds like something for him.)

The Watch would have their hands full saving people from said danger. Vimes would never trust this new invention and would get extremely angry at anyone suggesting he bought one, too.

Dwarves would be very anxious because, as our dear Blackboard Monitor already knows, Words Are Important. And if those words come from gods know where, that's really bad. I can actually see the plot where they can actually team up with Blackboard Monitor to destroy those "machine" words at the end.

All that generated rubbish would put L-Space in the danger of collapsing. Because there are books that no one should have written.

[harpsi-corpse]

The cards see all.

[amoebasapph]

The one well-aged bit i don't think i can ever stop doing is "character name series surname".

[hi-intrepid-heroes]

extremely funny to me that brennan has stepped away from his classic ‘every npc wants to fuck zac’ to something fresh n funky: every npc wants to fuck siobhan

[spiralatria]

'minion' -too closely associated with those yellow things

'goon' -linguistic drift gave her a new meaning. i hope her new life is good for her. i miss her.

'henchman' -too gendered. can be shortened to 'hench' in a pinch, but lacks punch.

'servant' -too domestic to apply to all those who serve evil.

'underling, subordinate' -this one only works if they get off on being beneath you and/or you don't properly pay your workers.

'associate' -this one's good for grizzled mercenaries or lone agents but doesn't work good for broad swathes of an organization.

'slave' -same as underling but more intense. really fun for some of the group. unsavory for others in a way that limits the scope of the thing.

'thrall' -only really applies if you're brainwashing them and that's not something i've learned how to do en masse yet

'flunky, toady, stooge, lackey' -these are just insulting, and that isn't conducive to a healthy work environment. imagine going to work and your job title is 'stooge'.

'acolyte' -works for those that worship you, but again. lacks the scope.

'supporter, follower' -unspecific and vague

'assistant, helper, aide' -not sinister at all. just means you're doing things for me. swagless in this manner. could be good if used to describe someone who's so clearly more that as a way to emphasize their obedience via understatement, but that's only useful for a few members of the organization. and even then, 'associate' works better.

'cohort' -untested in the field. suggests an equal footing in the affair, ideal for post-structuralist evil organizations with a bottom-up power structure that's held in the hands of the evil workers themselves. perhaps we'll explore it together?

[seraphalpha]

may I suggest: 'grunt' – time-tested by crime bosses with a variety of goals and organizational mandates. implies a subservient position with none of the innate baggage of lackey et al.

[spiralatria]

GRUNT IS PRETTY GOOD

[byjove]

“nobody wants to work anymore” WRONG! bosses do not want to pay people appropriately for their labor