Rewrites and Cul-de-Sacs

Every time I grump about Twitter clone character limits I get some dipshit in the notes being all "well, maybe if you didn't use so many big words" like, buddy: the big words save characters. Each piece of jargon I use would be a full sentence in plain language; the vocabulary is not the issue.

It's why we say 'laser beam' and not 'diffraction-limited transverse coherence of light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.'

probably speaks to something unwell in the collective tumblr psyche that those absurdly bleak bad luck brian memes are the only survivors of, like, an entire genre of different advice animal image macros.

Oh hey I had that one.

remember when éowyn first met faramir and immediately thought "ah yes. this is a guy who could wipe the floor with any soldier of rohan." bc I think about it a lot

No no, you misunderstand: she sees him and instantly clocks that he can totally outrun a horse.

I've seen kink scenarios where one party to a relationship really wants to be the princess in some sort princess/knight dynamic and the other is too normie to properly play their part, and I agree that's funny as hell, but I think the converse scenario where the "princess" is the one who's trying to be normal about it also has legs.

Like, I'm not specifically proposing a Don Quixote inflected kink scenario, but I'm not not proposing that, either.

(No, this is not just straight people. When straight people gesture in this direction they almost invariably cast the knight as a dominant party who merely pretends at submission. To go full Quixote, the knight needs to earnestly be trying to sub to someone who lacks the temperament to be an effective dom.)

To be pedantic, to go full Quixote the knight needs to earnestly be trying to sub to someone who does not exist.

Ending-up a tick eradication advocate because after spending three days vaccinating one small wooded lot's worth of ticks by hand with really tiny syringes you're ready to asphalt the entire surface of the earth and be done with it.

Please watch the Gamers Nexus video on LG Smart TV's and monitors! It's basically malware at this point.

editing is so funny because it's like "damn, i wrote 'before' two times within three paragraphs. they are going to stone me in the town square for this"

And they'd be right to do so!

A big thing about me and RPGs is that I do not need or even want the game to constantly reassure me that my player character is the specialest and most important person who ever lived. Yes, they are the hero and most of the time the main character, and the power fantasy that comes with being level 100 in a video game and eating monsters for breakfast is fun. But for me that power fantasy needs to be balanced with the verisimilitude of a world that doesn't feel like it revolves around one character 100% of the time. I want NPCs that are rude to my OC. I want NPCs who don't like them. I want NPCs who don't know who the fuck they are and don't care. I want to feel like they can lose sometimes, not because they found the One Other Character who is as badass as they are but just because they are a person and sometimes people lose. I want them to sometimes participate in stories that are about other people. Because for me, if they are too special and too perfect and too powerful, it's not just the character that stops feeling believable and engaging; the entire world stops feeling real and inhabited, and starts to feel like just a flattened tableau to pose in front of. And that's not what I want out of a game. I want a world to play in that feels vaster and fuller than one character could ever know. And it's infinitely possible to make a world feel like that if you just make parts of the world indifferent to and even casually hostile to the player character without being villains. They aren't your archnemesis. They just don't know you. Ma'am, this is Fantasy Wendy's. It is good worldbuilding for a world to not fawn over your player character all the time and this is a hill I will die on.

@apocrypals

I know that “fwiw” means “for what it’s worth.” I know that. But every time I read it, my brain translates it to “fwom what I wemembew”

I read it as 'fwirrwrrr,' that angry growl cats make.