Serpentine Squiggles

This is a blog post about technical considerations of markup languages — and I’m writing it on a site I built myself. If there’s an impulse more codified and vacuous than artists waxing poetic about the power of creativity, it’s programmers blogging about how their blogs work. In the years I’ve been erecting this monolith I’ve resisted that siren, but for once, I’ll indulge.

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By far my favorite plotline, and something I so desperately want to see executed better, is the parasitoid singularity.

This can take a lot of forms. Probably the most recognizable is when it leans mostly to the “singularity” side. This is the hard takeoff of misaligned artificial intelligence. Skynet, universal paperclips, and so forth. AI spreading itself across every medium it has access to, replicating and infecting computers, then leveraging its newly gathered swarm to expand its access further to gather even more resources, loop while true, break only when the planet’s devoured.

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A concept sitting in my head for years is the idea of a fantasy setting being wizard complete. Let me explain.

This is about magic systems. On the face of it, there’s so much variety out there — in this world, you speak the true names of objects to exert power of over them; in this world, you train your body to harness and mold magical energy; in this world, you bind demons and compel them to do your bidding; in this world, every song evokes a unique spell; in this world, your soul is a computer to be engineered and programmed.

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Close your eyes, breathe in deep, and bare your soul. Can you feel it yet? Open yourself up to the great beyond, and reach for the magic within you — draw from the well that was always there and bring forth power.

What does this power feel like? Which does it feel like? Mana comes in several types — not quite colors, and certainly not the shallow elementalism of earthly materials and reactions. It’s more… tangible than that.

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I think this sort of refusal and second guessing is blocking you from understanding the spirit.

Writers habitually overestimate how boring descriptions are and underestimate how helpful the specific grounding is. Personally, I’m pretty often wishing for more specification when I read amateur writing.

And this feeling you have that it isn’t accomplishing anything is self-fulfilling — if underwriting is a problem you have, then you probably aren’t spending a lot of time on detailed descriptions, and because you’re not spending a lot of time on detailed descriptions, you have less practice writing them.

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I might have just solved footnotes on ArchiveOfOurOwn? More specifically, I’ve developed tricks for displaying text popups using only HTML and CSS, so this works on sites like neocities too.

For the impatient, you can skip to the code & tutorial.

Now, I’m not super tapped into the state of the art for AO³ workskins, it’s possible and indeed very plausible to me that I’m not actually the first to think of some of this. AO³ is an old site and everything I’m using is just a clever combination of features HTML has had for decades.

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Here’s something that I read yesterday and liked: Atzi. Lesbian lizard girl scraping by with little pick-pocketing and buglary. Oh, and she’s about to wind up in a time loop.

It’s been a minute since I read something as fun and smooth to read as this. Quick pacing, compelling characterization, and continually amusing internal narration — so far, it makes for a satisfying afternoon read.

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Play it here!

If you’ve been wondering why things have been quiet around these parts, part of it is that a lot of my energies have been directed at game development rather than writing. In particular, my most successful game demo, the puzzle roguelike Pushro, has broken through a major stumbling block. I needed to rewrite the entire physics system, but that’s done, and everything has progressed so much smoother from there.

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Roko’s basilisk vexes me. But I’ve hit this beat so many times I might as well put up a full write-up for easy reference. This is mostly a collection of rants I’ve written in several different venues from 2023-2025, gathered together to gesture at my thoughts on that favorite punching bag of TESCREAL critics.

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The key feature of a forever discourse, I think, is a preponderance of weak men.

The topic in contention must be complex enough that there’s “good points on both sides”. The average member of either side is almost certainly wrong on at least one point, so astute members of both side wind up having something to argue against when meeting an opponent on the other side.

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abbreviated notes on improving conversations; it’s all about filtering and prompting

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This post mostly consists of a chatroom correspondence I engaged in on the listed date (2024-10-24), but extracted and edited in 2026-03-14, as a digression to be included in my post about markdown, but I ultimately cut it.

Famously, when authors make even the smallest typographic error with their dash, I always notice.

That’s a link to my tumblr, and for posterity, it’s a thread with the following posts:

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I tried tackling this a few years ago, as a much less experienced writer, so here’s a more concise take.

You step into a teleporter, every atom disintergrated, and then reconstructed a new at your destination. You plug a wire into your skull and your brain is dissected and destructively uploaded into a computer. In short, you clone yourself — but which one is really you?

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A fallacy I’ve engaged in, now that my writing has achieved some success, is to turn that success into the goal. When I contemplate writing, too often I’m no longer thinking about the story, I’m thinking about what I want the story to be. How I want the audience to be impressed with me, how I want them feeling about what I’m writing.

But all my best stories happened because I simply had an idea that I wanted to convey and so I explained it. No pretense, no expectation.

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So, my kneejerk reaction to the finale climax was sure, that looks cool, but it’s kind of underwhelming and underbaked. What does any of this mean in the end?

But I decided to actually give it a moment of thought and no, the show actually does hangs together thematically; this is what it’s been building to all along.

I did ramble on discord about this a bit. I take it anyone here is interested? Be warned though, it’s not a very clever insight, just a basic bitch analysis.

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Dear reader, we need to cook.

I’ve written about characters before, and I’ve written about plots at quite some length.

The word of the day is arc, that progression of a character from nascent beginnings to some more realized form. But need I say any more after pointing you at those posts? Does an arc not simply turn in the same fashion as any other plot, only with character traits as one of its gears?

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When seeking to understand and replicate the human body, artists — especially traditional artists — make use of anatomical figure models. You see one particular type used a lot, simplified and stylized like:

What’s valuable about this construct is that you can physically pose it. Trying to actually draw a human freehand in 3D space — respecting both proportion and perspective — is fiendishly difficult without years of experience. So a figure model helps hugely if you want a draw some action pose more complex than a three quarters T-pose.

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How do you write blurbs?

My philosophy, when I’m reading or writing blurbs, is that it needs to say a) what the protagonist is like, b) what they spend time doing, and c) the direction the story is going on.

If the story you’re writing is any good, there’s an answer to those three questions that, when a target audience member hears it, will go “yeah, that sounds interesting, tell me more.” The true appeal might be too subtle or complicated to convey in a blurb, but for at least one or two of them, you should be able to pique my curiosity in a single sentence.

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This post is unfinished, but it’s 2025 at this point; it won’t be finished.

2023 probably marked the year of my most active engagement with music since first getting into the hobby as a teenager. (In those days, I would listen to half a dozen new bands every day after school; I’m not sure I’m ever getting back to that).

Enough that I felt compelled to assemble the fruits of that exploration into a end of year review — the first I’ve ever done. And yet, after all of that… I do find myself disappointed with my progress. When I conceived this project, I hoped to give at least a cursory listen to all the major metal releases of 2023, skim the top of RateYourMusic or something. But I have other hobbies, and a growing need to dwell in my comfort zone. As a result, there are only 45 albums I feel familiar enough to slot into rankings.

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I opened up a random chapter of Mother of Learning, and I have come to decision. MoL’s prose is alright. In fact, with a very reasonable definition of what “prose” is, I would outright concede that MoL has good prose. But.”

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The idea is simple: suppose you have detected a paperclip maximizer emerging on Alpha Centauri.

It’s already developing fast enough that there’s no way humanity will be able to mount a real resistance by the time it arrives in our solar system.

However, you can reason that if a maximizer is intelligent enough to destroy humanity, it must grasp concepts like performing instrumental steps to achieve a goal.

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A few days ago, the youtuber Big Joel released a video about Godzilla (1954) called “We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot”. What did he mean by this?”

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The Preposteriat, an agent from a doomed timeline, returned to erase the spire from history.

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I’m writing this post as a response to a specific person on a specific server, but this is a public site, so I’m going to lay groundwork that might seem elementary in the original context. Given how fundamental our differences are, it may yet be fruitful anyway.

Oh, and be warned: this has nothing to do with fiction, unlike my usual fare.

(For transparency sake, I will link my interlocutor’s summary of the ideas, which is shorter by far and less rambling.)

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Ra is a critique of itself. Ra is a proof of its rationality, a justification of its setting, that doubles as a argumentum ad absurdum that it could never have been otherwise.

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So, the first thing to get out of the way. This post concerns two stories:

Importantly, TSoH was conceived and started before most of Black Nerve as a setting really existed, meaning little of it will cohere with its canon, other the vaguest generalities like ‘there are mantids and evil bats and magic’.

Black Nerve: Silk & Ember was a revision of TSoH, reimagining its events within the more modern canon of black nerve.

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Whether it’s pokeballs in Pokemon, sealing scrolls in Naruto, or any number of other ‘hammerspace’ or ‘pocket dimensions’ effects, the ability to store large objects inside a much smaller volume is a common trope in speculative fiction. But it presents problems, if you want your setting to be consistent and systemic.

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The story goes like this:

These are the opening lyrics to Archspire’s “Seven Crowns and the Oblivion Chain”. Throughout three albums of excruciating tech death, this band tells a sprawling, disjointing multiplex of a story. It’s not always easy to discern what’s going on in the lyrics to one song, let alone piecing together every piece of the puzzle. But it’s intrigued me, and this article is me trying to do just that.

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Greetings, earthlings. Let’s talk about identity.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s years and decades in the future. Technology’s advanced to the point where we have honest-to-god teleporters. To the point that real people (instead of just lizardmen billionaires) can afford to jaunt around at not quite the speed of light.

You hop in your car and ride out to what — long before you were born — had been an airport. You pay for your teleportation ticket and you step into the science fiction machine of chrome and blinking lights. The automatic door whirs shut and locked behind you. You take a seat inside the teleporting, and the machine proper switches on.

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Curating my favorite fanfics for my favorite web series about angsty murderbots.

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Some stuff I read and thought was good. Will organize this page more At Some Point. There’s so many things to add and so many thoughts to put down. I may not make this as comprehensive as my murder drones rec page.

Right now it’s a couple of my favorites plus a couple of random things from my bookmarks.

(Also on Royalroad)

Evocative and thrilling, cathartic and emotional resonant — this is my favorite story. My usual pitch for this one goes:

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Your character is victim to a terrible curse that will eventually consume them. To create a character, write a short paragraph describing them, and pick out traits. Rate the traits 1-3, where 1 is a significant aptitude and 3 is a near-supernatural affinity. The referee may veto characters deemed inappropriate for the game.

Once you’ve described your character, decide which curse afflicts them. (see below)

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I wrote several snippets of fiction in my high school composition notebooks; most of them are lost to time, though a few can be found in the old fragments page.

My writing career really began in November 2017, when I wrote the first drafts of what would become Endless Stars. My chief influences were MLP fanfiction and wildbow’s writings, and I had the ambition that I would “be like wildbow” in some way I never thought too deeply about. I sought to learn more about writing, and spent the next year revising ES, until around November 2018, where correspondence with Wizard-of-Woah! and Rhythminthemind convinced me to finally publish in November 2018.

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This text is taken from the Monster Manual V for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e. Stat blocks omitted; this is just the flavor.

If you want a sense of how much I like Illurien, read this piece I wrote about her.

A dancing array of droplets swirls before you. In the midst of this storm stands a slender but extremely tall female clad in gray robes. She has no facial features other than her vivid blue eyes. With a graceful motion, she beckons to you.

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Chapter Twenty-one of The Element of Eloquence by Mark Forsynth has the best explanation of poetic meter that I’ve encountered. I strongly recommend the full book as a delightful toolbox for the refining one’s understanding of prose style and figures of speech. (And I do mean delightful: each chapter goes down like a piece of intellectual candy. Or better yet, a potato chip — because you can’t have just one.)

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