"You don't hate Universes Beyond, you hate capitalism!" Speaking as someone who routinely goes "You don't hate copyright, what you hate is regulatory capture and the pay-to-win legal system (i.e. capitalism)", this specific argument makes me hide my face in my hands, half-amused, half-despairing.

If I were remotely organised, I might have privately set myself some kind of goal to write about orcs for October. (But I probably used all my good orc bits already in that one story set in the Languedorc region.)

Handler (II) #writing#MechPilot

I wrote a Player Safety section for my longform TTRPG project, Rainworld, and consider it the highlight of an unremarked and unremarkable run as a games writer that someone else asked to reproduce it verbatim in their own game; and like much of the project, I now consider it substantially flawed.

The Head of Empire (VII) #writing

Trove #writing#Witch#Dolls

"I, an influencer, got a phone call with someone internal at bsky who pinky-swear-off-the-record says, so that I, an influencer, will repeat it in public — everybody should stop complaining about the TOS language because: trust us bro" gosh! someone you can't name! on a phone call and everything!

I kinda love "Your characters are all in [situation], who's doing what" memes, but uh. ls -l fic | wc -l, less a couple for admin, yields...573 top-level story-or-series. It's a lot of characters

Since it's coming up in other discussions, I really do feel like circling back and underlining: the different treatment of subs in kink communities predicated on "kink is because you're fucked-up & broken" conservatism is because conservatism finds victimhood morally good.

Y'all know the old never-acually-a-joke; conservative walks up to two lesbians and goes, "So which one of you is the man—" ...Do y'all know this was the *literal* 2nd-wave feminist dismissal to lesbians countering "um kink is Evil because it's all Men hitting Women" with "what about us?"

Oh, hello, Sudden Sickening Conviction My Presence And Every Word Is Harmful And I Should Quit Every Discord Server I'm In, haven't seen you in a couple of weeks

Crossjacked (IX) #writing#ScienceFiction#Cyberpunk#MechPilot

Wanting written T4T erotica and even indirectly implying it's somehow crowded out of existence by T4T genre fiction smut gets more dizzyingly weird the longer I think about it.

A giggling girl, face flushed from alcohol as she bared her neck towards the vampire. "Hahahah, go ahead.... I'm wide open!!~" Well, why not? It might be swill, but it is free food. You tear into that flesh, the blood touches your tongue- That isn't blood. That isn't blood at all.

"They probably won't kill you if they catch you," he says with a grim little smile, "which is a pity. They prefer making examples of us. That's what the drugs are for." "Cyanide in a false tooth? That's such a classic!" "Ah, no. Rather the opposite. They've gotten too good at finding things ..."

Crossjacked (VIII) #writing#ScienceFiction#MechPilot

The actual meaning of "normative" is also why I get distrustfully cynical when people start throwing the words "queernormative fiction" around

Listen, Tumblr post, you can ask for speculative fiction where [identity] is purely normative, but not which is ALSO about the struggles of being a young [identity]. I'd say the reason is left as an exercise for the reader, but apparently that hasn't worked so far,

The reason video games only tackle social issues via deniable and muddled metaphor is that the industry is run entirely to cater to, and the money in games comes from, selling to Gamers. You know. Of -gate.

I was saying just last week that my output is...varied, and the Endstone trilogy is shaping up to be illustrative. indecorosa: Elf Class System (Will Give You Fucked-Up Kinks) credenza: Fuck Religion (And Leave Bees Alone) fazione, so far: Dwarves is Bugs?

I cannot give better pithy advice for alt text than to remind you that that is short for "alternative": as in, this is what somebody gets as their *alternative to seeing the image.* The text should perform the same function for them that the image does for those who can see it. So, yes, contextual.

fazione (III) #writing

Before Brexit fucked it, a certain type of affluent English person loved to move to Spain — for the sun — and settle in little beachside towns of, as far as possible, Only Other English People. Someone would open a little shop selling Marmite and Weetabix and rightwing British newspapers.

I remain convinced that, if Cohost hadn't consisted of literally only 3–4 people + their one rich tech-salaried friend willing to hand them tens of thousands of dollars per month to piss away on Hobby Tumblr Clone, there would eventually be a tell-all book about working there.

"That girl's here. Yes, the one you *like."* She smiles cruelly. "And just for tonight? Go for it. Full permission. Do what you like." She finished scrawling on your shirt, tucks the pen in your pocket, grips your chin. Uses The Voice. "I forbid you to discuss what's written on you." Smiles, worse.

Honestly, I get a *lot* of mileage out of looking at writing prompts that clearly think of themselves as harmlessly cute and going "...dunno if you've really thought about that one, chief." "A dragon adds a knight to its hoard—" yeah there are words for that it's literally chattel slavery

I only realised when I finished it that the end of Captive is a sort of reversal of the end of Dragon-Dolls. Some days you hump the dragon,

Captive #writing#Fantasy#Monster#Smut

I truly do not understand artists being "here's an art!" and it's like seven thousand pixels wide and the only way to get any of it actually viewable as intended is to View Picture In New Tab *and then the extensive text on it is still handwritten at sixteen fucking illegible pixels high*

girls who are aching 👩‍🌾🌱👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩 570 words, entirely on my poetic bullshit www.tumblr.com/okaywolf/795... www.patreon.com/posts/139599...

Apparently today's last straw is someone talking about dragons who can't pick between horde/hoard corrrectly I will be lying face down, despairing

"oh yeah our service was down because bluesky's was" that would be your "it's Good because it's Decentralised uwu" service, yeah?

Oh well *mine* is that every time you post "my least popular opinion is that YOUNG PEOPLE are RUDE!!!" shit for clicks, that's literally your answer to "what would you be doing if Nazism came back"

fazione (II) #writing#Elf#Fantasy

fazione (I) #writing#Elf#Fantasy

You know when a programming language is Hot and New and picking up a lot of excited twentysomethings with time on their hands to do hobby stuff in? And they write a lot of "Thing, but in NewTech!" projects? I feel a way about "how can we make our ATProto thing more useful? Build a NIH AO3 on it!"

Need to write something about mechs with an entire crew at some point, because the People's Fleet jeepmechs are always making me think about shit like the B-17 ball turret

Oh, right, my brain doesn't work, so I only just made the connection between the several flavours of adorable "what if two pilots from different kinds of mech story made friends" going around and Handler. Nothing says adorable friendship like "suck my mech's flightstick, anonymous bar hookup"!

Realised that if I were to write a third thing set in the End of the World, Cosimisa the Worst Elf is probably the strongest connecting thread *again* The Cosimisa The Worst Elf Shits on Everyone's Day trilogy

credenza: Epilogue #writing

The concept of a "magic system" attracts a certain amount of scorn because it's really attractive to Tediously Exhaustive Fanwiki types, who love enumerable trivia to the active exclusion of good stories. The thing, though, is that magic in your story, like the characters & setting & *all of it*—

Handler #writing#MechPilot

Oh, I could probably *actually* get away with the line, "Trouble oop t'mech," in context if I did some kind of followup to Princess Borzoi— No. No, I shouldn't do that. Who writes things just for the opportunity to include the worst possible joke? 👀

The thing is, there's a stage of development where it's pretty standard for a kid to walk up next to someone, I dunno, drawing a picture of lesbians kissing in front of the flat-roofed farmhouse on their ostrich ranch and scream in their ear:

There's a fun* game you can play when somebody posts something like "Samus Aran should be fat!", where you go "I bet if I check profiles, most of the inevitable shitheads in the comments are men" and then you're right (*fun may vary, void where prohibited)

"what do you write, Otter" *this* week? postwar middle-aged mech pilots having PTSD, cyberpunk disaster lesbians trying to get their shit together, vampires as metaphor for dom guilt, fantasy adventurers with doll kinks, stupid wordplay with tech jargon, and a faux-academic-footnote disaster report

Endnote 29A #writing#Wizard

“Information workers only want one thing, and it’s discuss things.” Archetypal combo of wordplay & stupid. Would probably take several exhibits to fully convey my writing, but 💯 this is one of them. Feels like someone ought to yank me offstage with a vaudeville hook. Can't stop giggling about it

Depressing to see smut artists, whom you might expect to have any sense of self-preservation, enthuse about "consent stickers". Not only a total divorce of the term "consent" from any actual concept, turning it into an "I am a Good Person because I make the Correct Noises!" fetish object—

Dear very large spider: Please can you run away from my startlement in a direction that makes me *less* likely to squash you kthx