Word Wizardry

@wizard-of-docs

Veteran of the fandom wars, queering the world in my quiet retirement. If you ask me about my novel, maybe I'll get more of it written. they/them

12.6K posts

We used to treat Guys Who Think All Romans Lived In Collonaded Temples And Exclusively Built With Stone Because That's What The Ruins Look Like as freakish outliers, but thanks to the rise of AI aesthetic blogs we now know that a. this is actually a widespread belief in certain circles, and b. the "certain circles" in question are Nazis.

We must never treat neonazis as anything other than freakish outliers.

The real reason you need to title your drawings is so that you can stick a little placard in the caption displaying the title of the work, artist's name, year of creation, and medium like your blog is a a fancy art gallery.

The whole "but what about making sure artists receive credit for their work?" objection to copyright reform is especially irritating because treating moral rights (i.e., the right to attribution, etc.) as descending from or strictly subordinate to commercial exploitation rights is a uniquely American perspective. Not only are these two things separable, they are in fact separated in the vast majority of intellectual property regimes – it's basically just the United States that treats attribution rights as a strict subset of commercial rights. Hell, the US schema is arguably worse in terms of ensuring that artists are properly credited than nearly any conceivable alternative, as treating the right to attribution as a subset of commercial rights means that the right to attribution can be signed away. There are lots of places where it's simply inalienable!

If you want to write in the classic high fantasy mould, you don't have to be hung up on food specifically, but there must be some very mundane thing you're prepared to cultivate a sincere interest in and describe in excruciating detail every single time it comes up. Clothing. Furniture. Architecture. It doesn't work without it.

Ngl I watched some joehills videos and he’s not that weird

you know he's already taken that as a challenge, right

Inadvisable writing challenge #137: Write a conversation in which every utterance is tagged (i.e., either prefaced or followed with some variation of "[they] said"). See how long you can keep it going without ever using the same dialogue-tagging verb twice.

As an editor, I can confirm this is inadvisable.

The question is less "how long can you go without repeating a verb," it's "how long can you go before I start throwing things at you."

right-up-my-allie

guys im getting cuteness agression from the next model

right-up-my-allie

KIIIITTTTTTYYYYYYYYYY

APSJDISJISOSPDKDJDK

inthelotlwood

Deltarune Chapter 5 asking the important questions like "what if the floppy-haired kid with the ugly shirt and the worrying preoccupation with knives was just here to have a good time?"

boss-of-armadildos

Well, I'd be concerned what the kid with the worrying preoccupation with knives considers a good time!

Pro gamer tip: combining the boobsock shirt with those porn comic pants that give you an inexplicable perfectly spherical dick bulge grants one of the strongest set bonuses in the early to mid game, but it's not competitive in the postgame unless you're prepared to do a lot of grinding.

unusually, in this game the grinding is the fun part.

One of my personal game design white whales is an OSR game that takes the modern roguelike "core advancement schema is constrained to single runs, plus some sort of auxiliary metaprogression based on rewards for completing runs" and cross-breeds it with the "dungeons are mythic underworlds/fragments of other worlds/living creatures parasitising our reality" conceit that some contemporary OSR games go for to produce a game where the core rules furnish robust character creation procedures but simply have no concept of advancement, incremental or otherwise, and then each individual adventure module has its own context-specific advancement schema which is only effective inside that particular dungeon, and goes away outside of it.

e.g., one dungeon might allow characters to advance by progressively enbodying mythic archetypes to produce something resembling a conventional class-and-level system, save that the "character classes" are specific to that dungeon, and a different dungeon which nominally has the same advancement schema would have a totally different set of playbooks; another might have fully randomised advancement in which player characters acquire weird body-horror mutations that grant mildly game-breaking super powers with no ability to influence which ones they get; and a third might have wholly extrinsic advancement based on acquiring golf-bags full of magic items with oddly specific functions. In each case, progression through the relevant advancement schema would be extremely rapid, such that exploring its full gamut in the span of a single adventure module is feasible, and player characters would "reset to level 1" once that module is complete.

However – and this is the keystone of the entire exercise – we're explicitly not obliging GMs to basically design a whole new game every time they want to roll their own adventure module, because 90% of the text would consist of a long list of modular pieces of advancement schemas which can be plugged together like Lego bricks to produce whatever the dungeon at hand uses, tied together with some sort of monstrous set of Big Stupid Tables which enable advancement schemas to be randomly generated, with the GM's only obligatory responsibility being to invent an aesthetic for the dungeon which justifies these particular elements coming together in this particular configuration.

To pose a particularly silly example, imagine rolling up a new dungeon and getting the schema elements "randomised, non-hierarchical upgrades", "upgrades are intrinsic modifications to the affected character's mind, body, or soul", and "each upgrade is a self-willed NPC and accessing its advanced functions requires persuasion, negotiation, and/or bribery". Is it a biopunk dungeon where characters advance by acquiring talkative parasites with incongruous goofy accents? Is it like a Disco Elysium thing where you advance by learning skills, but the skills are alive? Do you have ghosts in your blood?

Thinking about the kinds of characters who would do that for a living is extremely fun.

The core book's character creation chapter would of course include a Big Stupid Table of potential explanations for why you're doing this to yourself.

I would play this

It's fine to disagree with the IAU about the definition of "planet"; however, if your definition includes Pluto but not Ceres, Orcus, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, Gonggong, Eris or Sedna, you don't actually care what a planet is – you just want the exact list of nine planets you learned in primary school back. Your cute little Pluto-including orbital distance mnemonic ought to be at least seventeen words long, and good fucking luck with the Q!

thefiresontheheight

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Orphic Palaces, Slandering Hungry Quaker Matrons Going Erotically Southward.

I appreciate that you included Salacia but not Charon – really threading the needle pedantry-wise there.

iy think any planetary-mass object should be called a planet. the moon is a planet. so are the galilean moons. ganymede is bigger than mercury, so whiy not? just because it happens to orbit another planet too? a star can orbit another star, so whiy can't a planet orbit another planet?

Sometimes when I'm feeling especially contrary I'll advocate for a definition of "planet" which includes the inner planets, the trans-Neptunians, and all planetary-mass moons, but specifically excludes Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

so then "gas giant" is a subcategory of Something Non-Planetary?

It's always wild to find out that an author of transhuman sci-fi is an outspoken transmisogynist. Like, pump the brakes, buddy – you think personhood is mutable but gender is innate?

"it would be so good if it was good" will haunt you but "it's extremely good, except for the one or two parts which are so bad it's genuinely kind of insulting" will straight up drive you insane

one has you making posts like "okay but if the author UNDERSTOOD the POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS of the story they were telling, and leaned into it, it would actually be a really interesting exploration of..."

the other has you pacing your bedroom at one in the morning going "why. why would you ever in a million years do it like that. genuinely what possible thought process was involved. was the writer possessed by a fucking ghost or something."

I guess the big reason the sunk-cost argument for playing nothing but Dungeons & Dragons rings false to me is that, in my experience, most groups that hack D&D for non-sword-and-sorcery genres never actually get to a functional place. The GM is in permanent scrambling-to-make-just-in-time-fixes mode, and the only reason this flies under the radar is that D&D's culture of play insists this is normal.

Kind of funny to me that do a full blown “fuck it we’ll do it live” would be easier than what’s going on in a lot of dnd right now. Having to improv rules on the spot isn’t an easy skill to learn, but it’s gotta be easier than having to improvisationally build out from an established rule set that you’re also expected to have memorized.

In practice, trying to go that route often just makes things worse. If your experience with the medium is so narrow that you can't imagine what a game that isn't a D&D clone would even look like, inventing rules on the spot may not solve the problem of the experience of play the rules want to produce being askew of the experience of play you want to have – particularly if you've come up through a culture of play that treats that disconnect as expected. It's entirely possible for a rule you invented on the spot to disagree with you about what sort of game you're playing!

Oh yeah definitely. The world we have is one where trying to transition people from the current dnd mindset to a pure improv one would be just about impossible and make everything a lot worse before it got any better, if it ever did. I was more trying to comment that wotc offloading the work onto the DMs threaded the needle into the worst of both worlds, where DMs are expected to be expert improvisers with eidetic memories.

Hasbro's uncanny ability to make marketing decisions which produce the worst of all possible worlds has been something of a theme lately, if I've correctly taken the pulse of the Transformers fandom.

Based on the preview in my RSS reader, I was surprised to find that no, this post was not about the announcement of a D&D Harry Potter sourcebook.

I sometimes joke about folks in my parents' generation who think Scooby-Doo ran for like one season in the 1960s and are shocked to learn that it has like thirty seasons, but it's become increasingly clear that this is basically how a lot folks of my own generation think of any webcomic they read in high school. Any time I bring up a long-running webcomic it's like, okay, I'm glad this is such a Nostalgic Blast from the Past™ for you, but we are discussing an ongoing piece of serialised media that last updated as recently as this morning. Do try to keep up!

@free-hea1th-care replied:

It is bizarre how long they run through

There are comics running new material in the daily newspapers as we speak that have been doing so continuously since the First World War. The sole reason the longest-running webcomics only have archives about thirty years deep is because the medium itself isn't much older.

Like, we need to understand that it's completely normal for an ongoing piece of serialised media to run for multiple decades. It's not typical, but it's also not bizarre. Don't let media optimised for binge consumption skew your frame of reference; people never stopped making long-form serialised media. They're doing it right now.

facultativeactivity

Tbh this is making me feel better about how I've started my long-term online story at the end of 2022 and it still feels like it's in the relatively early stage. Like, this is something good to keep in mind not just as a reader but as an author as well - it's pretty normal to work on the same creative project for years and even decades, and if you do a serialised formula with lots of episodic content and slow background-building (like I'm doing with Enchant) then it's pretty natural that it's going to take a long time before you see most of your idead realized.

There's an actively updating webcomic I'm following right now that took eighteen years to reach the end of chapter one.

oh yeah, my wife keeps telling me I need to get back into Freefall think at this point I'm gonna have to start over to really get into it

Being a registered publishing corporation makes what I do sound nearly respectable, but it's the kind of publishing where a lot of people use their online handles on business paperwork, so in practice, tax season involves a lot of squinting at my records asking questions like "okay, who the fuck is 'Rat Prick', and why do I owe them money?"

@flarebean replied:

if i might ask, how does the online handles on business paperwork. well, work? i was under the impression that business paperwork most often demands the use of legal names and such

I can't speak to how it works everywhere, but in Canada at least, you can put any name you want on a business contract as long as you've represented yourself in writing as doing business under that name. In some cases it's very handy; I work with a lot of trans folks who aren't necessarily in a position to change their legal names, so being able to use a "doing business as" name avoids any need to deadname them on the paperwork. In other cases... well, see above.

This is not the first time you've complained about this. I don't think you gave the same example name though. Feel like it was still rodent adjacent though.

I'd try to search for it, but this blog talks enough about taxes that it would be a task.

Lagomorph, actually.

are lagomorphs NOT rodent-adjacent?

You should never be afraid to ask tabletop RPG authors dumb questions about their games because that's literally how we tell whether or not what we wrote is working.

You'd be surprised how much of effective technical writing boils down to just talking to people and going "okay, that's the daftest thing I've ever heard, but I can see how a very particular interpretation of the text as written would get you there – let's see if I can fix that".

#technical writing

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