Eruvadhril

one thing that i love in good historical fiction is well-chosen weird period detail. like subtly weaving in small things that are unexpected or don’t mesh with the audience’s perceptions of a particular time and place (either because they’re contrary to the received cultural narrative about an era or because they’re not often talked about in the period drama zeitgeist etc) just enough to be a little bit jarring, thus increasing the audiences’s sense of strangeness and distance which in turn increases the buy-in? a dedication to and a deftness with historical detail that alienates and fascinates the reader at the same time? i don’t know that it makes or breaks a given piece, i think some authors skip this all together and others go too hard and end up with the “redolent with spices” problem but its a craft thing that i always appreciate when i notice it in histfic

I do tend to be suspicious of art that really lauds and worships the idea of being an artist. Like yes, art is cool, I think it's valuable, there's a reason I make it. But let's not get overly self congratulatory here

I think it's okay to love what you do, and even celebrate that. But there's a line that gets crossed sometimes where the art goes... "unlike all of those stupid people, who just dont get it." And it's like... hey... who are you making this for, exactly?

reminds me of that "artists fuck better because we turn sex into art, mattresses are our canvas" post or however that goes. always makes me laugh

@ralfmaximus

liking a ship but disliking the distinct set of stock fanon that they have been assigned is like one of those punishments dante came up with when he wrote the worldbuilding for hell in inferno

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

RPG rules are bad, this much we know. Whenever you're using the rules that's not roleplaying, that's what I like to call ruleplaying. Or rollplaying if you're nasty. The most important part of roleplaying games is that the rules are bad and the enemy. And that knowing that you have to ignore the rules is the most important part of being a GM. We have to keep buying the rule books though so we can not read them. Just so we know which rules to ignore. There can be no such a thing as a good rule because rules means that you're not roleplaying. Asking for game rules to be good instead of bad and to be ignored is like asking me to roleplay while I am rolling the dice (rollplaying). My favorite game is D&D 5e, a game famous for not having rules.

Ideally whatever you play should have a lot or most of its page count dedicated to rules for something you don't want to do so that you can ignore them harder

The person who tagged this as "Brennan Lee Mulligan:" has seen the light of the truth.