My 12 y/o brought home a handout with a list of 20 common literary themes (Man vs. Self; Coming of Age; Hubris; etc.) with examples, but the examples are all shit like The Brothers Karamazov and Their Eyes Were Watching God. All of these themes are present in Avatar: the Last Airbender. In this essa

My co-worker has boundary issues

Techbros seem to love Tolkien, so here's an analogy to help you understand what genAI is. GenAI is The One Ring. You think your use is justified, b/c you don't have evil in your heart. But it came from evil, it is intended for evil purpose, & anything you do with it will be twisted to that end.

"Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared." Amazing piece from @joannastern.bsky.social www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

At board game night I sat down with a queer poly transwoman and a Latter-Day Saints elder* to play a game about post-apocalyptic punks fighting over water in a radioactive wasteland. That's the real America. And board games rule. * "Elders" in the LDS church can apparently be like 20.

Having a kind of morning where every moment is uncertainty. Should the inn be little and squalid, or huge and beautiful? Should the competitive character's rival be a teammate or a foe? Both? A mirror or an opposite? Sometimes writing with no plan is liberating. Other times... #amwriting

The second half of Wicked just doesn't have as many bangers as the first act. No Good Deed goes hard, and For Good is heartbreaking, but compared to the back-to-back-to-back bops in Act I, it's thin. It also, regrettably, remains a pointedly relevant examination of fascism.

Starting my great American novel: It was the stupidest of times. It was the, again to be clear, stupidest of times.

Hey wow a thing I definitely wrote about as being impossible for legal and ethical reasons in the Android setting just ... fucking ... happening in real life. It's impossible for Cyberpunk authors to stay ahead of the banality of real world evil.

B o a r d g a m e S

I'm on chapter 4 of this silly gamer isekai book and in addition to doing worldbuilding, I'm also doing game dev, because this is what I signed up for I guess. Apparently I've created a setting with 13 "starter" classes? That cannot be the right number.

I had a joke about Prometheus but it's stolen from the gods.

this is going to sound like a joke but i promise it's not: the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - The Trick Taking Game is my game of the year it is out of this world how good that game is

I mentioned that I was writing a dumb gamer isekai litRPG story and my kiddo declared they want to read it. My kiddo is a Wattpad fiend. Should I ... be posting this thing on Wattpad?

Okay, on your mental list of Fantasy Races Tropes, what would you definitely want to see in your favorite MMO/actual living fantasy world?

Okay but the important question mr Hutcherson (if that is your real name) is: What did you think of the new expansion? Some top-quality lore, right? Which new faction is your favorite?

No, see, it's pretty simple--you can't get canonized until after your death, so we know that Saint Nicholas is dead. The strong associations with Christmas Ghosts is just further evidence that "Santa Claus" is a literal Spirit of Christmas performing mass hauntings and in many cases possessions

In the cyberpunk future, someone is going to get a tongue mod specifically so they can lick and groom their cat. In a world of fingernail razors, biomod bliss-drug glands, and neurolace links, the cat tongue thing is going to be the one people think is weird.

But WHAT was this game? How will I ever know?

Starting up Season 2 of Poker Face and they are really getting their money's worth out of Cynthia Erivo.

It's good to know that although I have far fewer cats and far fewer meetings these days, I can still manage to have my meeting thoroughly photobombed by a needy monster.

Mirelurk Kings!? You can't fool me, those are fucking Deep Ones.

Oh fuck me why am I not at PAX right now? I have GOT to start going to these things.

In the spirit of "write what you know" I should clearly do a LitRPG story in which a card gamer, board gamer, minis gamer, and roleplayer are all isekaied on the way home from a convention.

Today is the day to repost this meme about International Men's Day, one of the most unironically wholesome memes that has ever been made. Shoutout to all my fellow champs, chiefs, and kings. ✊

DM: The skeleton appears to resist your sword's slashing damage. Fighter: Not a problem. I'll switch to my mace. Barbarian: Woah, you're swapping weapons? Is that allowed? I could never use anything but my greataxe. Fighter: I practice polyarmory.

Welcome to Extremely Esoteric Pickup Lines. "Oh, you're 33? Well, I've got nine inches if you're looking to get nailed." This has been Extremely Esoteric Pickup Lines.

Oh, should I save time and summarize this rulebook I'm reading carefully, making line-by-line edits and notes? Will AI help with that? Will AI realize that the [redacted] rules on page 39 conflict with the rules on page 35?

S-tier game flavor here in Blood Bowl Team Manager.

This. This. This.

Excited to share that the complete set of stories and audio of the Tales of the Unicorn Clan I narrated is now available to download! Please check them out and enjoy! 🌸 www.legendofthefiverings.com/the-collecte...

Catching up on Crowd Control on Dropout and saw a game I worked on mentioned as bringing together a married couple! (And breaking up a different married couple.) What power games can have, to be dunked on mercilessly by talented comics years later.

Remember when Howard Dean said "yeah" weird and it ended his primary campaign. Just thinking about this for no reason.

We are excited to bring you the complete Tales of Unicorn Clan with stories from @jmreynolds.bsky.social, @ohnospooky.bsky.social, @evandicken.bsky.social and @danlovatclark.bsky.social. Download the complete series to read or listen to now: www.legendofthefiverings.com/the-collecte...

THINGS THAT ARE MANLY: Loving animals. The bond between a man and his dog, or a man and his horse, is an iconic image in the myth of the man. I contend that a loving and respectful relationship with all animals, and indeed all of nature, is peak manliness.

THINGS THAT ARE MANLY: Intelligence. This one is a little fraught for me, because I'm still carrying "jock vs. nerd" trauma from school. But popular conceptions of manhood clearly celebrate the visionary, the scholar, the inventor. Part of this is just lionization of excellence.

You cannot separate the current nightmare we now inhabit from the collapse/crisis in how rich, powerful middle-aged men perceive masculinity, especially their own insecurities.

My Adventures with Superman says "be gay, do crimes."

So my favorite thing about Crusader Kings is that the way the game is structured encourages some really unusual or even perverse behaviors on the part of the actors within the game. You find yourself saying "of course I have to murder my two nephews," because it's how you achieve your goals.

@graceholdinghaus.bsky.social told us about this (apparently real!) thing one day, and the immediate consensus of everyone in the room was "that sounds like an Arkham Horror plot." So Grace and the team put it into Mansions of Madness. And now I guess you can read a book about it!

The City We Became (2020) - NK Jimisin

Hey it turns out that they took the Lore Compendium I wrote for Twilight Imperium: Thunder's Edge and made a video out of it! Mostly it's got tons of great Twilight Imperium art. youtu.be/qYmKvzR3Cw4?...

Seeing people talk about Mamdani choosing the Chinese version of his name has me staring deep into myself and realizing I am so cis I've only ever accepted names others give me. Even my Chinese name: 孔大龍 was assigned to me by my professor in college. (Fortunately it's rad af.)

On top of being great on every other axis, Slow Horses has incredible needle drops.

I suspect that the techbros who read the SFF stories about robots rebelling decided that the moral of the story was "design them so they won't" and they think that's actually possible and desirable.

Watching Band of Brothers for the first time and oh yeah, I can see how this can warp a man's personality forever.

If you need to explain to an idiot why Tolkien would have despised these goons, I have already grabbed a picture of the relevant passage (and I doubt I was the first):

Tolkien is not perfect but he did, in fact, hate the fucking Nazis.

Taking another swing at Fallout 4 lately, and so as I drove through Boston today I was heard muttering "probably Super Mutants on that overpass. Watch out for ghouls in the Big Dig tunnels." Couldn't find Diamond City radio on the dial, tho'.