In the dark you will not stray.

the last line of the ethos voicemail in other languages being something closer to "nobody will be able to stop you" is so interesting to me. if we actually get the wol acting on incomplete information and doing The Wrong Thing, doing damage because they literally can't be stopped, theyre too powerful....

after dawntrail being so much about the wol as a mentor, guiding wuk lamat, taking the role of venat in living memory, people have been taking the announcement that evercold will be more wol-focused as an apology, like "sorry for making you do that but our next expansion will be exclusively the wol doing cool things because theyre the most powerful and coolest and thats what you want", but i think it might actually be more interesting than that. from what we got in 7.5 they're really going into the question of what happens when you're personally powerful enough to make anything happen. what if you decide to do something and nobody can stop you

It’s extremely fucked up that some ppl try to make you feel stupid and immature for hoping for a better world. You say you want world peace and mfs think you need a pacifier; dawg, I just don’t want ppl dying from violence. This idea that ppl simply must die as casualties of war is misanthropic to say the least.

science has always been political. what gets studied. what doesnt. who gets to do the studying. on and on and on.

the fact that generative A.I. has created a completely new fundamental doubt in reality (checking to see if an artwork we see is manmade or not) and doubt in the instinct of enjoying art is unforgivable. its sickeningly tragic, and i mean it. NOTHING is worth this price and i hope that everyone will one day realize this.

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.

May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.

I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.

One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.

If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!

growing up sucks because you realize $1000 isn’t a lot of money

If I am isekai'd into a Soulsborne fantasy universe, I will kill myself so fast it will stun everyone around me. UNBELIEVABLE speed. Most people upon waking up in a fantasy universe would be curious. They would want to take a gander around them. NOT I! I pick up a single item and see a window that says some bulled shit like "Rosary of the Putrescence" I am dropping that shit like a hot coal and sprinting with SHINKANSEN VELOCITY to the nearest cliff. Swan diving off that fucker like that scene from Midsommar but sped up like a tiktok movie summary