Assorted Curiosities

dishonored 1 is literally 2 dollars on steam right now blease do yourself a favor and acquire/play it if you haven't already

Thaisha: "you're so pretty"

Tsul'rekshi: "what about you, pretty boy?"

Talcydimir: "the pretty boy, the one with the rapier, kind of like this one"

Characters must make choices.

Characters should often make bad choices before they make good choices.

Character choices should drive the vast majority of the plot. Characters reacting to having random stuff thrown at them is far less interesting than characters reacting to the stuff they've thrown after it's ricocheted around and comes bouncing back toward them.

If a character refuses to make a choice, there better be consequences for that too, and you better have a damn clear way of showing those consequences to the reader and the character.

The four hours of sleep and two packs of crackers that consist of all I've eaten of today:

the courts were only a small element of the party and the basement is where a lot of the furniture is so at all times there were also people around the general area doing their own scenes and having sex which is pretty much par for the course, we didn't really pay attention to any of it, UNTIL one guy (fully clothed in a sort of medieval rogue style getup) started yelling about how he had the orb. the orb of power. it quickly became apparent, from the other side of the room where the court was, that he had used it to capture two (unaffiliated) fairies, and that this was the premise for a remarkably well plotted out BDSM scene that the entire basement was now lowkey invested in, because it was impossible Not to know what was happening given the theatrics and relatively small space.

and like. we were still doing our thing with adventurers who came through for the LARP, but the whole winter court was now just going 👀👀👀👀👀 at these three and their scene whenever it got plot-heavy. we were having so much fun watching this shit.

eventually, after a lot of the kind of stuff you'd expect in a captured fairy scene, the fairies actually turned the tables on the man, escaped, and "killed" him to I assume reclaim the orb, and this actually was one of those rare situations where the whole room did in fact applaud, including the winter court (with a few added cheers of "yaaay murder!!" from the unseelie court fairies).

even though it's so very late and they have to report to their jobs in a few hours, they both get in the car, one driving, one shotgun, you in the back like a child needing a drive to settle into sleep, even though one could drive and the other sleep, because they can't sleep without each other, they'd rather drive you across the city rather than be apart for half an hour, the office buildings lit pointlessly beautiful for nobody except you to admire their reflections in the water, the lovers too busy talking about that colleague they don't like, tomorrow's dinner plans, how once they bought peaches on a road trip and ate and ate until they could taste it in each other's pores, they get out of car together to kiss you goodnight, you who have perfected the ghost goodbye, exiting gatherings noiselessly, leaving only a dahlia-scented perfume, your ribcage compressing to slide through doors ajar and untouched, yesterday you were a flash of white in a pigeon's blinking eye, in the day few hours old you stand solid and full of other people's love for each other spilling over, warm leftovers.