kestrel

something that really gets me about fitzchivalry farseer is he is torn between an ordinary life and the noble extraordinary main character life of a traditional fantasy protagonist. his name is keppet. his name is fitzchivalry farseer. he wants to get married and settle down in an ordinary town with an ordinary candlemaker. the great loves of his life are a prophet who’s trying to save the world and a wolf he can telepathically communicate with. he wants to be a scribe. he’s a royal assassin who kills important people to preserve the monarchy. he wants so badly to be ordinary but he cannot be because he is the royal bastard and he is the catalyst and he is responsible for changing the world

The most interesting question you can ask about any character is not what do they want. it's what do they believe they deserve. because those two things are almost never the same and the gap between them is where your entire story lives. a person can want love completely and believe they don't deserve it and that belief will destroy every good thing that comes toward them in ways they won't even notice they're doing. write the gap. the gap is the character.

Real thing that changed how i write: I started asking "what does this character think is wrong with them" and separately "what is actually wrong with them." Those two things are almost never the same. She thinks she's too much. She's actually terrified of being too little. He thinks he's bad at commitment. He's actually just never met someone he trusted enough. The gap between their diagnosis of themselves and the real thing, that's your character arc right there. you don't have to explain it. just write both.

Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.

I'd like to issue a formal apology to Palamedes Sextus, I was unaware of his swag. I always loved him dearly but it took me 3 rereads of GtN to realize this nerd has catastrophic levels of aura. Difficult to notice when Camilla Hect is next to him at all times

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.

#there is so much abandonware just...out there being used and carefully maintained#because nothing quite replicates the functionality

we have the same thing with a computer running Windows XP that we use to record all our electrophysiology data and have to get everything off manually by USB because it can’t be connected to anything otherwise it might stop running the old reliable software

i am some sort of fey creature and my cat is the human who i have arbitrarily decided is my favorite human.