Word Wizardry

Inadvisable writing challenge #137: Write a conversation in which every utterance is tagged (i.e., either prefaced or followed with some variation of "[they] said"). See how long you can keep it going without ever using the same dialogue-tagging verb twice.

guys im getting cuteness agression from the next model

APSJDISJISOSPDKDJDK

inthelotlwood

Deltarune Chapter 5 asking the important questions like "what if the floppy-haired kid with the ugly shirt and the worrying preoccupation with knives was just here to have a good time?"

Well, I'd be concerned what the kid with the worrying preoccupation with knives considers a good time!

Pro gamer tip: combining the boobsock shirt with those porn comic pants that give you an inexplicable perfectly spherical dick bulge grants one of the strongest set bonuses in the early to mid game, but it's not competitive in the postgame unless you're prepared to do a lot of grinding.

unusually, in this game the grinding is the fun part.

To pose a particularly silly example, imagine rolling up a new dungeon and getting the schema elements "randomised, non-hierarchical upgrades", "upgrades are intrinsic modifications to the affected character's mind, body, or soul", and "each upgrade is a self-willed NPC and accessing its advanced functions requires persuasion, negotiation, and/or bribery". Is it a biopunk dungeon where characters advance by acquiring talkative parasites with incongruous goofy accents? Is it like a Disco Elysium thing where you advance by learning skills, but the skills are alive? Do you have ghosts in your blood?

Thinking about the kinds of characters who would do that for a living is extremely fun.

The core book's character creation chapter would of course include a Big Stupid Table of potential explanations for why you're doing this to yourself.

I would play this

It's fine to disagree with the IAU about the definition of "planet"; however, if your definition includes Pluto but not Ceres, Orcus, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, Gonggong, Eris or Sedna, you don't actually care what a planet is – you just want the exact list of nine planets you learned in primary school back. Your cute little Pluto-including orbital distance mnemonic ought to be at least seventeen words long, and good fucking luck with the Q!

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Orphic Palaces, Slandering Hungry Quaker Matrons Going Erotically Southward.

I appreciate that you included Salacia but not Charon – really threading the needle pedantry-wise there.

iy think any planetary-mass object should be called a planet. the moon is a planet. so are the galilean moons. ganymede is bigger than mercury, so whiy not? just because it happens to orbit another planet too? a star can orbit another star, so whiy can't a planet orbit another planet?

Sometimes when I'm feeling especially contrary I'll advocate for a definition of "planet" which includes the inner planets, the trans-Neptunians, and all planetary-mass moons, but specifically excludes Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

so then "gas giant" is a subcategory of Something Non-Planetary?

It's always wild to find out that an author of transhuman sci-fi is an outspoken transmisogynist. Like, pump the brakes, buddy – you think personhood is mutable but gender is innate?

"it would be so good if it was good" will haunt you but "it's extremely good, except for the one or two parts which are so bad it's genuinely kind of insulting" will straight up drive you insane

I guess the big reason the sunk-cost argument for playing nothing but Dungeons & Dragons rings false to me is that, in my experience, most groups that hack D&D for non-sword-and-sorcery genres never actually get to a functional place. The GM is in permanent scrambling-to-make-just-in-time-fixes mode, and the only reason this flies under the radar is that D&D's culture of play insists this is normal.

Kind of funny to me that do a full blown “fuck it we’ll do it live” would be easier than what’s going on in a lot of dnd right now. Having to improv rules on the spot isn’t an easy skill to learn, but it’s gotta be easier than having to improvisationally build out from an established rule set that you’re also expected to have memorized.

In practice, trying to go that route often just makes things worse. If your experience with the medium is so narrow that you can't imagine what a game that isn't a D&D clone would even look like, inventing rules on the spot may not solve the problem of the experience of play the rules want to produce being askew of the experience of play you want to have – particularly if you've come up through a culture of play that treats that disconnect as expected. It's entirely possible for a rule you invented on the spot to disagree with you about what sort of game you're playing!

Oh yeah definitely. The world we have is one where trying to transition people from the current dnd mindset to a pure improv one would be just about impossible and make everything a lot worse before it got any better, if it ever did. I was more trying to comment that wotc offloading the work onto the DMs threaded the needle into the worst of both worlds, where DMs are expected to be expert improvisers with eidetic memories.

Hasbro's uncanny ability to make marketing decisions which produce the worst of all possible worlds has been something of a theme lately, if I've correctly taken the pulse of the Transformers fandom.

Based on the preview in my RSS reader, I was surprised to find that no, this post was not about the announcement of a D&D Harry Potter sourcebook.

I sometimes joke about folks in my parents' generation who think Scooby-Doo ran for like one season in the 1960s and are shocked to learn that it has like thirty seasons, but it's become increasingly clear that this is basically how a lot folks of my own generation think of any webcomic they read in high school. Any time I bring up a long-running webcomic it's like, okay, I'm glad this is such a Nostalgic Blast from the Past™ for you, but we are discussing an ongoing piece of serialised media that last updated as recently as this morning. Do try to keep up!

Like, we need to understand that it's completely normal for an ongoing piece of serialised media to run for multiple decades. It's not typical, but it's also not bizarre. Don't let media optimised for binge consumption skew your frame of reference; people never stopped making long-form serialised media. They're doing it right now.

Tbh this is making me feel better about how I've started my long-term online story at the end of 2022 and it still feels like it's in the relatively early stage. Like, this is something good to keep in mind not just as a reader but as an author as well - it's pretty normal to work on the same creative project for years and even decades, and if you do a serialised formula with lots of episodic content and slow background-building (like I'm doing with Enchant) then it's pretty natural that it's going to take a long time before you see most of your idead realized.

There's an actively updating webcomic I'm following right now that took eighteen years to reach the end of chapter one.

oh yeah, my wife keeps telling me I need to get back into Freefall think at this point I'm gonna have to start over to really get into it

Being a registered publishing corporation makes what I do sound nearly respectable, but it's the kind of publishing where a lot of people use their online handles on business paperwork, so in practice, tax season involves a lot of squinting at my records asking questions like "okay, who the fuck is 'Rat Prick', and why do I owe them money?"

Lagomorph, actually.

are lagomorphs NOT rodent-adjacent?

You should never be afraid to ask tabletop RPG authors dumb questions about their games because that's literally how we tell whether or not what we wrote is working.

You'd be surprised how much of effective technical writing boils down to just talking to people and going "okay, that's the daftest thing I've ever heard, but I can see how a very particular interpretation of the text as written would get you there – let's see if I can fix that".

Enemies-to-lovers pairing who spend a few years trying to make it work as a couple, then mutually agree to go back to trying to kill each other for real because it's hotter that way.

This is how vacillation is supposed to work

I totally get where folks are coming from when they want Hornet and Lace's relationship post-Silksong to be a meeting of peers; for my part, however, it's textually explicit that Lace has the mind of a child in spite of being centuries old because Grand Mother Silk never permitted her to grow up – and doesn't that put an interesting spin on the game's core themes? – and I personally feel that Hornet randomly acquiring an incredibly annoying kid sister has its own depths to plumb (as well as being objectively much funnier).

I didn't realize being a dilf required practice!

Any time you want to talk about trends in media on the Internet, there's a Type of Guy (and it's almost invariably a guy) who will rock up in the replies who thinks the comparisons you're making are absurd not because he doesn't like what they imply, but because apparently he's somehow never been exposed to media outside the particular niche you're discussing, and the tiniest distinctions thus seem like unbridgeable gulfs to him – and the really striking part is that no matter how narrowly specialised the niche in question is, there's always That Guy.

what's the most narrowly specialized niche you've seen this in?

Every week I used to pop down to the cramped little theatre in the back of the local public library and catch whatever random festival circuit darling they're doing free screenings of this week, but I haven't been able to do that for years because we're still pretending COVID isn't real, and I feel like it's genuinely impacting my ability to be an annoying weirdo.