remember, folks, if you're itching to do something ill-advised in d&d/similar TTRPGs,

low wisdom: poor impulse control

low intelligence: instructions unclear

high wisdom: a necessary risk

high intelligence: it looked better on paper

low wisdom, high intelligence: forgot to get the plan peer-reviewed

high wisdom, low intelligence: the risk i took was calculated, but man am i bad at math

high wisdom, high intelligence: if someone else in the party did it first, it would've gone so much worse (and you Know they were going to do it)

Yesterday our DM told me that my warlock can keep his skeleton minions in his bag of holding 💀

There is a lot to unpack on this post.

All throughout childhood, while my peers were socializing and making friends, I studied the blade read so many books that I am now almost legally blind, which left me with vast and deeply instinctual understanding of English grammar - and next to no ability to explain how it actually works. Friends will often ask me to proofread their writing and then get very mad when I say things like, "You need to completely reverse this sentence and cut this clause entirely; no, I'm sorry, i don't know why, I just know that the way it is now ITCHES 😭"

Now, what I want to see is a fantasy story where this plays out with MAGICAL grammar. Someone from a backwater town deeply steeped in folk magic arrives at Wizard Uni where all their fellow students are like "What do you mean, we should add another '𝞯∘⋇𝞿' to the incancation because it 'sounds better'? What do you mean, 'it could just be a regional thing'?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'THIS SPELL JUST FEELS LIKE IT NEEDS A LIVE RAT'????"

it's always so alarming looking at the notes on posts about people's cool experiences with ttrpgs and seeing the sheer number of people saying something along the lines "unfortunately this relies on the assumption that the players aren't huge shithead assholes who are actively trying to fuck each other over and make sure their gm has a bad time."

like. yeah, it sure does. that's kind of a baseline assumption for me, the same way that when I invite friends to a potluck I feel perfectly safe assuming that no one is going to spit in the food. do you guys actually like the people you're doing recreational activities with? blink if you need help.

Monster who eats your backstory.

It bites you and you've now sprang into being just now ex nihilo

This is going to be retroactively canon next time a player comes to me with a backstory-less character...

me: *rolls over and goes back to sleep*

the necromancer who just spent several days constructing and performing a ritual to raise me from the dead:

I was getting pretty fed up with links and generators with very general and overused weapons and superpowers and what have you for characters so:

Here is a page for premodern weapons, broken down into a ton of subcategories, with the weapon’s region of origin. 

Here is a page of medieval weapons.

Here is a page of just about every conceived superpower.

Here is a page for legendary creatures and their regions of origin.

Here are some gemstones.

Here is a bunch of Greek legends, including monsters, gods, nymphs, heroes, and so on. 

Here is a website with a ton of (legally attained, don’t worry) information about the black market.

Here is a website with information about forensic science and cases of death. Discretion advised. 

Here is every religion in the world. 

Here is every language in the world.

Here are methods of torture. Discretion advised.

Here are descriptions of the various methods used for the death penalty. Discretion advised.

Here are poisonous plants.

Here are plants in general.

Feel free to add more to this!

Bad idea: Age gap discourse but in a fantasy land where there's multiple races who have vastly different lifespans and life styles.

Is it wrong for a 27 year old human to date a 140 year old stone elf, considering most stone elves don't get out of diapers till their 30s?

Is it wrong for a 80 year old dwarf to date a two year old fire wisp, when fire wisps only live up to 5 years (between the eruptions) and have memories of their past lives, so in a way they're "born" at age 400,000+? That octogenarian dwarf is way younger than the fire wisp that's only physically younger than some of the socks the dwarf has!

Is it wrong for a chronomancer who was never born to date, well, anyone? They are zero years old and infinity years old and negative one hundred and seventeen years old all at once. They look like an old human, sure, with the long white beard and the wrinkly skin, but as far as anyone can tell, they've always looked like that. We've seen the cave paintings.

Is it wrong for a 30 year old lizardman (that's old in lizardman years) to date a human who is 60 years old in biological years (because of aging spells), 26 years old in lived-experience years, but only 13 years old in calendar years? (ie, they were born 13 years ago, but spent some of that time in sideways timelines, so they've lived more years than have passed in their home timeline?)

Is it wrong for a 12,000 year old dragon date a pile of 400 kobolds when kobolds only live like 10 years on average, but reach full maturity in one year? And if you disagree, can you do anything about it? You do know what happened to the last policeman who tried to arrest a dragon, right? Their city is still smoldering, 50 years later.

Is it wrong for anyone to date the time worm? It's the same age, every year. So the age gap can only intensify. If you start dating the time worm when you're both the same age, when do you break it off because you've become too much older than them?

And most confusing of all... What about the fairies? They could be anything between a thousand and a day old, they would lie about their age either way, and they can look like whatever they want. There's fairies we know for a fact have been around since the founding of The City of Towers, who met the silent mother herself, and also look like they're at most ten years old. Is it wrong to date them, or just really uncomfortable for everyone who sees it? And on the other side there's fairies who are "born" (hatched? They come from plants, I'm not sure what the verb even would be. Seeded? Sprouted, maybe) this week who are already appearing like middle-aged men and dancing with widows in what looks like a scheme to run off with her fortune but they never take the money, because what would a fairy want with worthless metal discs? Maybe fairies have a hive mind or genetic memory or reincarnation with full memories, they'd never tell you or give you a straight (or consistent) answer anyway.

Stone golems are really the only inter-race dating situation anyone can agree on. They're unthinking & unmoving solid rock during the day, so those hours don't count. Thus their "real age" is a nice even half of their true age. So if you meet a stone golem who was dug out 30 years ago, watch out: that's a 15 year old, and if you're a 25 year human, that's too young for you, even though their dig-date is five years before your birth-date.

Oh this is easy actually you can only date if you're within one or two challenge ratings of each other, otherwise you need to double the species with the weaker CR. So a level 10 adventurer can date 1,024 orcs or a juvenile dragon, and a commoner can date a housecat (but watch out for bites)

Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.

Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says "There's no consensus about the origins of skydoves" when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that's uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they're an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT'S AN OPEN ISSUE.

Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won't work, and you can't call it a "theoretical exercise" just to cover up the fact that you've not been able to cast it. You can't combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that's just not how magic works, in all due respect.

Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.

Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.

Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student... You keep getting called to go on "quests" which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor's project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor's project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.

if you give “stupid” characters rural/southern accents i don’t like you and if you give “smart” characters rural/southern accents but it’s a punchline i don’t like you even more

the other day I was out at lunch with some people I don’t know too well & they got talking specifically about West Virginian accents in the context of a movie that takes place there & that the movie opted out of doing accents & one of them laughed and said “I mean, can you imagine if characters sounded like that in serious moments??” I was like yeah I can because everyone where I’m from does sound like that. Y’all are so annoying.

no need for a more specific word because it all falls under classism and/or racism.

west virginia is home to some of the strongest labor & union movements in U.S. history, from miners’ strikes to the 2018 teachers’ strikes (where 20,000 teachers went on strike together with community support).

For the last 100 years it has become very beneficial to those in power for the rest of the country to think of us as very stupid, backward, “inbred,” etc. It’s not an accident. there were real efforts made to create & proliferate the stereotype of the stupid hillbilly.

Likewise it’s not an accident that dialects like AAVE are treated as a joke. Easier to dismiss civil rights leaders if you think what they say is inherently comedic or uneducated.

a lot of people in the tags saying they live in places where they hear people mock accents & dialects a lot & it upsets them. just want to remind you that it’s up to you to challenge that in the moment. when someone makes a shitty joke at the expense of someone else, someone else has to tell them it’s not funny & why. we don’t learn in a vacuum. maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. still gotta try.

at some point you likely had an “ah-ha” moment where you realized an unconscious bias you held needed to be unraveled. likely someone else pointed it out to you, whether that was in a conversation or something you read/watched online.

it’s not enough to learn your own lesson and move on. you have to pass the lesson along.

All of the following is IMO, so YMMV.

"Accent bigotry" - Irish = stupid & possibly a drunk; Northern Irish = bigoted & possibly a terrorist; RP English = educated & probably trustworthy (though also nowadays possibly a villain) - is one of the reasons I'm ... let's call it "ambivalent", about what TVTropes calls "Funetik Aksent".

"Phonetic" misspellings and dropping letters in favour of apostrophes happen at both ends of the literary social scale, but there's seldom any doubt about who's in "Who's Who" and who isn't.

The person who said this:

didn't go to the same school as the person who said this:

Further lot development may and should reveal that neither of those speakers are what they seem - salt-of-the-earth working class or disdainful peer-of-the-realm - but what they SEEM is telegraphed instantly by the way their speech is set in print.

(Sharon McCrumb did this in "Zombies of the Gene Pool" - a big burly man who sounds like a hillbilly villain from "Deliverance" is a linguistics professor born in the region and doing it deliberately to mock the assumptions of the people hearing him.)

Unless there's a good reason for it (for example, a character revealing their true origins by accident or for emphasis) often the only thing writing speech like that does, is to indicate These People Here Speak Properly whereas Theyum Fohx Theah Tawks Funnih.

That comes complete with baggage which the writer either doesn't know about, doesn't care about - or is fully aware of and using deliberately.

*****

Other reasons for ambivalence: a little Funetik Aksent goes a long way; it's often tiresome to read (and to write); most of all, if readers are unaware of some important detail - such as what sounds the weird spelling is meant to imitate - it's pointless.

There's an example of Unaware right in the TVTropes article, which states:

No it doesn't.

For one thing, just looking at them would have shown that speech from Lovecraft stories (here "The Dunwich Horror")...

...is nothing like speech from "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar"...

For another thing - this is much more excusable - that writer clearly didn't know about "The Dagenham Dialogues", a series of British comedy sketches from the 1960s. performed by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

(Not knowing isn't a surprise. Those sketches aren't as famous as they might be because of the infamous BBC policy of wiping / reusing programme tapes to save on costs and storage. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" almost went the same way; a lot of "Doctor Who" and many other popular shows DID.)

What's actually being parodied are the "Dialogues" characters "Pete and Dud", playing two acolytes of Cthulhu. They're described thus:

Rather, or indeed very, like this.

The Defence rests, m'Lud.

These acolytes discuss H.P. Lovecraft's style and vocabulary (overblown and eccentric), the location of sunken R'lyeh (just off the end of the pier, but handy for the shops), Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming (though temporarily deceased), and so on and so forth.

It's an excellent simulation of Pete and Dud and yet, apart from a couple of dropped-letter apostrophes, der's nun uv d'yoojul kunstruksh'n trikz. Instead it's done by matching the repetition, pace and rhythm of the originals.

*****

Incidentally, "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", the titular beer of the story, is itself a parody of Theakston's Old Peculier, a not half bad dark ale.

Note the difference in spelling: "PeculiAR" means strange or odd, "PeculiER" means a kind of Christian ecclesiastical court, so that's another beery association with a temporarily deceased god. Accidental, coincidental or deliberate?

Knowing @neil-gaiman, my money's on deliberate. :->

*****

Here he is, reading "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar": Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

And here are a couple of bits of "Dagenham Dialogues": One and Two.

"but if we made healthcare and food and housing and education and internet free then the economy would collapse" setting aside the whole "the very fact that you're saying that is proof your system is unjustifiably bad" thing for a second, like, dude.

let's get capitalist here for a second.

there's so many goddamn things to spend money on.

there's so many video games. there's so much music. there's so many movies to watch and so many streaming services to subscribe to. there's so many books to buy and nerdy fandom t-shirts to purchase. SO many nerdy fandom t-shirts. there's so many cool cars and backpacks and after effects plugins. there's so many water bottles and cute mugs and paintings. there's so much software. there's so many sculptures and tchotchkes and fresh coats of paint and fun blankets and graphics cards. there's so many fun socks and colours of sculpey. there's so many rad gaming keyboards and novelty salt shakers and leather jackets and cool umbrellas and hair pins. there's so many nerdy fandom t-shirts, dude. there are so fucking many nerdy fandom t-shirts.

there's so so SO much stuff that I am SLAVERING AT THE MOUTH to pay money for, there's so much fucking stuff that people desperately want to stimulate the economy by purchasing, but can't because their money is being burned on basic necessities.

you want to make the economy better? your precious capitalist economy that you jerk off to every night?

give people the opportunity to spend their god fucking damn money, dude.

like cmon dude

Fans' attitudes toward AI-generated works

Irina Cisternino, a PhD candidate of Stony Brooke University, is writing their research on topics related to technology, art and fandom. You can participate by filling out a survey and additionally, signing up for an interview. The survey is expected to last until at least the end of April, those, who signed up for the interview, will be contacted later. You need to be at least 18 years old to participate in either, be able to understand and speak English and identify as a fan.

After the completion of the research, it will be accessible as the dissertation of the researcher. If you have further questions, you can contact Irina Cisternino at irissa.cisternino@stonybrook.edu or Lu-Ann Kozlowsky at lu-ann.kozlowski@stonybrook.edu.

Aaaand ☀️🌤️⛅️🌥️☁️☁️☁️

*sigh*

The comic xkcd the other day.

If you are a fan of video games and owning them, I would really recommend giving this a watch. Reblogging this or posting the link would also be a great way to spread awareness.

Pin for survivors