teleporter and mind upload arguments are already insufferable to us, where it’s just a thought experiment and we’re free to imagine that somehow the procedures are infinitely reliable.
but any real technology sucks at first. consider what sound was like back when there was just crackling 78s shellac records and no vinyl yet. it took a while to figure out (or care about) high fidelity
the topic of progression power fantasy came up in a chatroom, particularly what the core appeal of the genre is and what distinguishes it. one user (one of my mutuals actually: hi) expressed opposition to it, in part because because the focus of the conversation gave a skewed impression of what was necessary (is it just the protagonist getting stronger, or must they never lose ever?)
there is a viral twitter post making the rounds in fantasy writing spaces. its chief claim is that George R.R. Martin’s failure to finish writing The Winds of Winter “killed off an entire generation of epic fantasy authors.” this claim comes to us from the partisan instigator of the Sad Puppies fiasco — which GRRM had spoken out against. not a promising start. but i won’t litigate that controversy, i only want to consider the claim.
going to call it there for the first day, i’m tired and the prospect of putting together another paragraph is daunting me. the other rolls were fun, admittedly.
“circumstantial poison manipulation else gates” lead me to consider the idea of someone who can only manipulate poison inside someone’s body and only if they’re consenting. the gates drawback is tricky. i started thinking along the lines of internal gates, crossing thresholds of poisoning.
group mind n. a single consciousness or intelligence formed by the union of more than one individual’s consciousness or intelligence.
1930 W. O. Stapledon Last & First Men 168: The Martians, it should be noted, had three possible forms or formations, name: first, an “open order” of independent and very tenuous cloudlets in “telepathic” communication, and often in strict unity as a group mind; second a more concentrated and less vulnerable corporate cloud; and third, an extremely concentrated and formidable cloud-jelly.
one way in which a plural take on telepathy and hiveminds would be interesting to see is that the defining trope we see over and over is that connecting brains together is presented as a way to promote peace and prevent the conflict caused by differences
but plenty of us already know sharing a brain with someone doesn’t entail agreeing with or understanding or even having awareness of them
had a game idea: sandcastles.
originally i thought of using d10s for this, but it might be most convenient to use a deck of playing cards.
at the beginning of the game, each player draws five cards. they can chose to discard and redraw any number of the cards first drawn. after deciding on cards, each player must arrange them into a ‘board’. once arranged, each card (except the last) is scored as follows:
The technique is called the troll’s parry. Consider it a form of rhetorical entrapment. The way it works is simple. First, someone shares something disagreeable. The victim sees this, and expresses an issue with it. Perhaps at first it’s hedged, a mere quibble (all the better if it is), but what matters is that by disagreeing, they invite counter-rebuttals. The stage has been set for the argument to come.
i’ve often been frustrated with the common impulse to opt out of discourse by dismissing it as two equal side fighting, it’s nuanced and complicated, both are wrong etc.
most things are more complex than the strawman of either side would contend, but so often it’s not black and white, just ashen and charcoal. extremism and centrism are both symptoms of ignorance.
this was an awesome video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2whuz6tkb0
but i have my own thoughts on designing rock paper scissors systems.
one of the drawbacks to “type” systems is that they’re a bit cheap. the essayist here implicitly values the high symmetry of RPS (cf. the section on pokemon), but to me, the symmetry sucks! it’s a necessary evil for the desirable properties of these systems, but pokemon having a matrix with a diverse eigenvector is what gives it a unique texture imo
i thought of a complicated combat system
at the beginning of the game, each player is given a number of d6 equal to the number of players. all players are ranked arbitrarily (e.g. clockwise from the referee, alphabetically by name, etc.)
before any turns are taken, a player may choose to roll any number of d6 and bid their sum (otherwise, their bid is 0). their bid is compared to every other bid. player rankings are resorted according to who bid the highest. ties are broken by the initial ranking.
one of the more annoying dilemmas i’m faced with is how long a should snippet has be before it deserves its own page
i have idea-fragments only a few sentences long. obviously these just be listed off on a miscellany page
i have shorts stories thousands of words long. obviously these get their own page
but where’s the cut off?
consider the i did last month. for about a week i wrote a short every day
i had a funny rpg idea, though i dont know if it would work
basically: you are cooperatively writing a story, and the main currency is word count. resolution happens by rolling 2d20, then you get to write that many words.
except the passage you write is considered ‘unresolved.’ after writing your passage, you point to someone else, perhaps asking them a question as an informal prompt, and they get to take their turn.
Helper Queens
Nehring et al. (2012) report that virgin queens (gynes) of the leaf-cutting ants Acromyrmex octospinosus (as Acromyrmex echinatior) and Acromyrmex octospinosus switch to carrying out worker tasks such as brood care and colony defense when they fail to mate and disperse. Thus, while morphologically queens, these individuals act as “workers” within the colony. Helper queens are also known in Probolomyrmex longinodus (where virgin dealate queens which fail to disperse may engage in non-reproductive activities) and Linepithema humile (where dealate queens are commonly found in foraging columns).
a few weeks ago, ambiguity in stories came up in a chatroom, and someone contended that 90% of stories that end right before showing the outcome of a character’s choice or the resolution of some dilemma would be improved by “just fucking showing what happens”
i disagree! now, conflict of interest disclosure, .
there’s a concept i want to put to words. i’ve considered various names for it, like slop-slipping or the slop slope. but neither of those feel quite right.
the idea was articulated in passing in a video i watched last year. but i want to hone in a particular point. the insight that got stuck in my head is that by its nature, slop is resting on your laurels. you don’t see many get their start cranking it out — rather, so often starts with high quality work and devolves later. the band make critically acclaimed albums then sells out, video essayist starts livestreaming and posting lazily cut clips
if i weren’t tired from trying to proof read all these posts today, i’d do a better job of selling them.
if you remember my last post about chrylurks (You awaken in chrysalis. Your mind hangs by a web, our web, our embrace.), i’ve written a new one-shot. longer, and less opaquely written. it’s also my first time flexing my action writing skills in a while
i gave the most minute dabbling in writing Silksong and Feng Shui Engineering fics, but i think if i would point to one thing as new, it was my experiments in interactive storytelling. ergodic literature, if you will.
WMAC required the users to click a bunch read it in full, offering a nonlinear experience depending on how you go about it, but my most ambitious experiment was one almost no one actually got to see
my tumblr mutual cogandstar (neocities, tumblr) made a vaguepost. i replied not fully aware of what ze was referring to, though after-the-fact deduction suggests the inciting post is this one from notorious power user derin.
Click to transcription.
This phrase has already entered my vocabulary re: media criticism where like. The viewer has a concrete view of what they expect a story to be based on the tropes and cliches they're used to seeing together, and when that doesn't happen, they judge it as a failed depiction of what they assumed it was going to be instead of judging it as what it actually is.
i get into arguments from time to time, and there’s a certain type of confusion i keep running into among articulate posters, a disconnect that keeps them from engaging with what i’m saying. my intentions are inferred and preempted, implications flattened out alongside direct statements
i want to call this something like subtext suffocation. i think it arise from a half-literacy, an abortive gesture toward critical thinking.
we all love parasitoids, and you might’ve even heard of hyperparasitoids, whose larvae prey on other parasitoids. i have an idea for something weirder, though: brood parasitoids
see, you might’ve also heard of species that have different morphs of the same sex, which each pursue competing reproductive strategies (e.g., the rock-paper-scissors dynamics of side-blotched lizards)
to clarify what this means, the serious articulation of the mystery here is that i often sit down to edit something hoping to improve it but decide that what i originally wrote works just fine.
but why? am i concluding that writing is acceptable because it’s my own and i cannot judge impartially (it’s fire because i wrote it), or is did i write something acceptable and i’m simply observing that fact (i wrote it because it’s fire).
now combine this with a hornet who’s not interested in sex or romance either but has a much better understanding of herself. the fact that hornet is harder to perturb means lace has to try even harder to provoke a reaction from her - won’t it be satisfying to see that spider’s mask crack into a flustered mess?
hornet of course misreads this as lace having a big crush on her, and it’s not like hornet has never entertained courtship for another’s sake. (it can tolerable, even enjoyable, so long as the expectations are clear.)
i have been assailed with yet another AU idea
final battle ends in more of a stalemate. uzi triggers core collapse 2 or makes the planet destroying mat collection tendrils go haywire.
bottom line is, instead of imploding, the planet explodes
nothing but neighborhood-city sized chunks floating off into the solar system uzi et al have to regroup and build a new society in space
silksong spoilers — mostly act 2 and greyroot’s quest, i think
started thinking about a swap au where instead of a weaver queen, the pale monarch of pharloom is white lady
(initially because the idea of a pale king x grand mother silk power couple just sends me. can you imagine the type of trauma a silken knight created to bind the infection would have?)
Imagine Lace accompanying Hornet to one of the settlements in Pharloom, watching her help out the pilgrims, hearing them talk to her, stuttering and rambling about their struggles. While Hornet listens intently with a slow nod of understanding, Lace laughs in their face.
“Why are you wasting time with this, little spider? Why not show them your sting? Their screams would be far more entertaining than this prattle.”
it’s worth noting that the koboldification/dragonization process the exact same ritual by which a dragon becomes gravid with a child. (any gross biological mating process is but an unnecessary formality.)
and the ‘hrt’ question is literally the dragon’s own flame. their breath can destroy most things, but if an object is first graven by their claw, then it is also, on a deeper level, ‘carved’ into a vessel for their flame, granting them power over what the flames burn and how.
(A part of her notes that corporations were a lot like artificial intelligence, ruthlessly expanding at the expense of humanity; that at least made them more sympathetic, but they were still made of humans — no thanks.)
sometimes i think about the fact that verdant realm botanist’s “mainline” albums are numbered
and i didn’t think much of this at first — in between IV and VI, he released a split and two EPs, and between VI and VIII he released Collective: the Shape of He to Come; Ecosystem; and Photosynthesis. so you maybe think together those interregnal releases constitute 5 & 7
so, something i’ve observed is that with most tags on ao3, filtering for f/f cuts down results to about 10% of what they were initially — it’s almost a law of nature
today i took a look at the Artificial Intelligence tag, and was surprised to notice filtering for f/f only cuts down results to about 1/6
kind of exciting? W for lesbian robots, right? but i wondered, actually what fandoms are causing that? portal? that would be cute, but i don’t remember glados/chell fics being that numerous (esp. bc portal was big before ao3 became the go-to fanfic platform)
characters always wake up the day after big events and forget they happen for a few moments before it all comes back to them. this trope is everywhere. does that that ever actually happen
Time Splices, Retrocausally Deepening A*, and Toxic Yuri Selfcest
pitcher plant gf able to precisely control the strength of her digestive enzymes, so sometimes she grabs you, pulling you pass the ribbed lips of her peristome to engulf you in the warm, wet depth of her pitcher. veined walls of plantflesh tighten around your wriggling form as you’re drenched in fluid from antennae to cerci, acidic enough to scrub your chitin raw. you spend hours trapped there, massaged by the gentle and glacial movements of the pitcher, and you finally emerge, you’re left cleaner than any bath, smelling faintly of nectar and floral musk
Red sun, blazing horizon… those rays always looked like knife tracks. It fit, didn’t it? A deep gushing stabwound, bleeding out — engulfed entirely — into in calm waters. I’d have gone out like that, if it wouldn’t last so damn long.
Always they said that warmth above was some kind of love. Was it more like dying rage? The frantic tremors from muscles straining — a desperate heart not realizing its efforts only made it so much worse?
cordyceps headmate pleading spread me, spread me~ with the exact same whine as a sub begging to be bred
…though i guess that might be misunderstanding who has the power in this situation. hard not to wonder what it’d be like — it’s got to feel really good for one of you, right?
imagine spores clinging to your chitin, roots digging in with a sting like clawed groping or a lover’s bite, a fever burning like insatiable desire and need, headaches like you can’t stop thinking about her, trembling and weakness and a thirst that no amount of guzzling water can quench, and throughout it all, an itch that no matter how you rub or scratch it still leaves you yearning and squirming for… it hurts, and you’re so anxious for… for her.
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.
One year after the end of the world, the Hive begins to starve.
Collection of Insects Wearing A Fake Human Suit/Collection of Spiders Wearing A Fake Human Suit
I simply must interrupt for a brief moment to introduce you to a tool that has changed the way I make video essays: our returning sponsor Perplexity. […]
Perplexity is revolutionizing how we search. Instead of scrolling through a list of blue hyperlinks, you get instant up-to-date answers with just a question or a quick search. This is enormously helpful for me when I’m doing background for a video essay. I need to start at the very beginning, but I don’t want to read for hours and hours on end. I can get qualitative answers to questions like “when did Katy Perry fall off” instead of trolling through a bunch of often irrelevant articles and blog posts to help me draw my own conclusions.
embrace the dying of the light
people can make inferences & reason about you. this is sofucked up
replaying baba is you after all these years (i never finished it but i had dozens upon dozens of hours in it)
never been happier to have a bad brain, i dont remember any of these levels :D
i grasp the higher principles well enough that i’m doubtlessly running through faster than a blind player, but i’m not getting any spark of recognition for almost any of them, and i’m getting stumped here and there
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.
…actually imagining noubugs in the information age is really transfixing me rn
>neverending mantis flame wars
>chorus-roach posters that chatter verging on spam turning every other thread into 1000 post monstrocities that belong in Forum Games or Forum Roleplay
>euvespid hacker that pwns the server and proceeds to do nothing but seamlessly upgrade to the bleeding edge version of bugforo
but for real though, today’s chapter was so damn good it motivated me to at least try to write recommendation. i need more people to read it — someone who follows me has got to be willing to give it a try
Seek is an original science fiction story set in the radically distant future, updating roughly every week (or lately, closer to every two)
go back to sleep babe, nothing’s happened
there are so many bad takes and discourses you can neatly dodge by just not having people being annoying being an input in your judgment and opinions
no one will ever match my obsessive yet dignified freak
one of the odder hang-ups i have is that for me, porn can be plenty fun and interesting — except when it’s porn of characters i’m invested in. then in my standards skyrocket. even phenomenally well-executed pieced can leave me feel vaguely discomfitted, when i’d be all over it if i didn’t simply recognize the character. (the worst is when i don’t recognize the character, love the piece, then come back after getting into their source material and now the art’s kinda soured)
emotions are powerful. in fantasy, this is taken for granted more commonly than it’s justified. monsters feed on emotions, spells are fueled by emotion. why? how?
the unit of energy is the calorie; it’s in food, it’s in fuel. brains consume calories, they don’t produce it. yet in these worlds, a brain experiencing a powerful surge of emotion becomes an energy source able to do work.
remember chat. to beat the allegations you dont need a good defense, you just need a better defense than the sussiest baka on your squad. keep posting.
how today’s afternoon went: was trying to focus on coding while relistening to Monarch of Monsters and crying
genuinely impossible to pin today’s mental state on a linear scale
“how are you feeling?” i am
an embarrassing amount of my writing time tonight has been spent wikiwalking learning about endorheic basins and soda lakes
and through this, a reasonable series of worldbuilding decisions has lead me to the conclusion that the slums of this gritty, blood-soaked, crime-scourched biopunk city …might be filled with flocks of flamingos
and i don’t know if i should commit to the bit or not
imma be level with you, the way fandom talks about “angst” reeks of the contentification of media. reducing a rich panoply of emotional dynamics down to one ‘feels bad man’ label :/
“here’s some <character> angst.” “gimme <ship> angst.”
let me out of here
i’ve really got to get back to working on corrupt combustion. if yall thought the sandbox executions we’ve seen so far are cool, wait till you see ⸢Collector of the Ineffable and Forgotten⸥
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:
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.
diamantis gf who marks you with her mantibles, drawing blood and running keenly-tasting palps along it like paint-brushes upon her own canvas. she pins you, raptorial forelegs gripping you, vice-spines piercing you like a prey item. stridulating palps rasp out orders and insinuations and you’re eager to accept.
you can tell by the shadows in her eyes when she’s in a hunting mood or a dancing mood. sometimes she flares out her wing’s eyespots and fluffs her antennae-setae when she just wants to display dominance, but sometimes her feelers curl into tight balls and she lunges, staring you down like you’re nothing but an object or game to her.
juzi crumbs in the oven
if you cant afford therapy try getting a god run in binding of isaac. works for me
the brainworms are starving and cannibalizing each other now. torn between working any one of several murder drones projects or one of multiple original projects. this shit is agonizing man what the fuck do i do
the existence of praying mantis people is one of the things in black nerve where it’s really difficult to appreciate how weird it is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpR64j8qskM
these guys broke up and reformed as The Otolith, and their new album is pretty good (lowkey one song on there is a touchpoint for the new HT chapter). but i’ve been spinning Folium Limina so much i’ve let myself forget how unhinged SubRosa could get
this one is for the mentally unwell girlies.
if the back to back one-two punch of “Despair is a Siren” and “Black Majesty” doesn’t fuck you up, what are doing on my blog
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.
yes i’m here to claim my prize for scrolling through 45 hours of dashboard backlog. working hard clicking ♥ and 🔁 like the emperor giving a thumbs up at the gladitorium
hope yall appreciate the spam lmao
i was so tired after writing 15k words of corrrupt combustion in four days. i really needed the break.
which is why i spent the last two days writing 13k words of a brand new au
in case anyone’s been wondering where i’ve been, the short version is that at the end of last month, i had a single thought:
i had been struggling to get anything productive done for a few weeks at that point. my solution? if doing one thing is too hard, why not do all the things?
sounds stupid but it kinda worked? i was going to call it my ‘slop era’, where i just get things done even if the output was low effort nonsense. the first two days, i wrote a few pages of (which turned out kind of interesting), got a few sketches done, and composed two simple tracks.
Just realize that in HT Doll and Lizzy can do the “we aren’t friends anymore” “that’s the worst way to tell people we’re dating” bit Avatar
“new TADC” real ones are talking about the new alien biospheres. neotect gang rise up
still not a fan of TADC but i am a fan of specifically zooble gangle and bubble. goose really popped off with le characters specifically
receiving dozens of boops but the boop button doesnt work for me. i am so powerless.
brain still fried after the mania off finished the gigachapter. doctor has prescribed yuri fluff. pharmacy had none :c
i was minding my own business today, idly thinking to myself, “as far as md fanfiction writers go, i like to think i’m pretty good!”
then i read As Above, So Below
Any tips on using fonts in ao3?
going to assume you’re familiar with the basics — creating a new workskin at Dashboard → Skins → My Work Skins, and selecting a skin on the Edit Work page. if not, AO3 has a tutorial for this
(though skimming the tutorial, it doesn’t seem to mention the <span> tag, which is your best friend when it comes to applying styles to a bit of text within a paragraph)
one of the things about the murder drones fandom is that there is just no consensus on how to write cyn. bold text? code tags? Capitalizing Every Letter? does the narration spell out her every emotion? every sentence, or once per dialogue block? is it wrapped in asterisks like a chat roleplay, or colons like a markdown emoji?
you can just open cyn’s dialogue and put whatever your heart desires, no one can stop you
new chapter for Hostile Takeover, my j/uzi fic :3
https://archiveofourown.org/works/51409288/chapters/134699305
in which n is fulfills a promise and j grapples with new feelings
juzi nation forgive me but i’m outlining a new fic instead of working on hostile takeover…
new essay, dissecting what it means for stories to have “fast” or “slow” pacing, and my own thoughts about why my stories are paced like they are. i wonder if this is obvious to everyone except for me
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.
This post is unfinished, but it’s 2025 2026 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.
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.
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.
After I shared the , it sparked conversation in a chatroom, which lead to this stream of ideas.
just realized you could probably do some tower of babel exclusion. that would be kinda neat
That would be cool! Do you think you’d want to emphasise the universal primordial language like the speaking in tongues from Snow Crash, or the tower that reaches the heavens like that Ted Chiang short story?
A decade ago, I ran a gimmick twitter account called Argument Of Function, imitating several other rationalist-adjacent accounts I had discovered. Ten years on, few of these posts remain amusing; still I find the endeavor as a whole than charming, if nothing else.
the topic of progression power fantasy came up in a chatroom, particularly what the core appeal of the genre is and what distinguishes it. one user (one of my mutuals actually: hi) expressed opposition to it, in part because because the focus of the conversation gave a skewed impression of what was necessary (is it just the protagonist getting stronger, or must they never lose ever?)
there is a viral twitter post making the rounds in fantasy writing spaces. its chief claim is that George R.R. Martin’s failure to finish writing The Winds of Winter “killed off an entire generation of epic fantasy authors.” this claim comes to us from the partisan instigator of the Sad Puppies fiasco — which GRRM had spoken out against. not a promising start. but i won’t litigate that controversy, i only want to consider the claim.
going to call it there for the first day, i’m tired and the prospect of putting together another paragraph is daunting me. the other rolls were fun, admittedly.
“circumstantial poison manipulation else gates” lead me to consider the idea of someone who can only manipulate poison inside someone’s body and only if they’re consenting. the gates drawback is tricky. i started thinking along the lines of internal gates, crossing thresholds of poisoning.
one way in which a plural take on telepathy and hiveminds would be interesting to see is that the defining trope we see over and over is that connecting brains together is presented as a way to promote peace and prevent the conflict caused by differences
but plenty of us already know sharing a brain with someone doesn’t entail agreeing with or understanding or even having awareness of them
had a game idea: sandcastles.
originally i thought of using d10s for this, but it might be most convenient to use a deck of playing cards.
at the beginning of the game, each player draws five cards. they can chose to discard and redraw any number of the cards first drawn. after deciding on cards, each player must arrange them into a ‘board’. once arranged, each card (except the last) is scored as follows:
The technique is called the troll’s parry. Consider it a form of rhetorical entrapment. The way it works is simple. First, someone shares something disagreeable. The victim sees this, and expresses an issue with it. Perhaps at first it’s hedged, a mere quibble (all the better if it is), but what matters is that by disagreeing, they invite counter-rebuttals. The stage has been set for the argument to come.
this was an awesome video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2whuz6tkb0
but i have my own thoughts on designing rock paper scissors systems.
one of the drawbacks to “type” systems is that they’re a bit cheap. the essayist here implicitly values the high symmetry of RPS (cf. the section on pokemon), but to me, the symmetry sucks! it’s a necessary evil for the desirable properties of these systems, but pokemon having a matrix with a diverse eigenvector is what gives it a unique texture imo
i thought of a complicated combat system
at the beginning of the game, each player is given a number of d6 equal to the number of players. all players are ranked arbitrarily (e.g. clockwise from the referee, alphabetically by name, etc.)
before any turns are taken, a player may choose to roll any number of d6 and bid their sum (otherwise, their bid is 0). their bid is compared to every other bid. player rankings are resorted according to who bid the highest. ties are broken by the initial ranking.
i had a funny rpg idea, though i dont know if it would work
basically: you are cooperatively writing a story, and the main currency is word count. resolution happens by rolling 2d20, then you get to write that many words.
except the passage you write is considered ‘unresolved.’ after writing your passage, you point to someone else, perhaps asking them a question as an informal prompt, and they get to take their turn.
a few weeks ago, ambiguity in stories came up in a chatroom, and someone contended that 90% of stories that end right before showing the outcome of a character’s choice or the resolution of some dilemma would be improved by “just fucking showing what happens”
i disagree! now, conflict of interest disclosure, .
there’s a concept i want to put to words. i’ve considered various names for it, like slop-slipping or the slop slope. but neither of those feel quite right.
the idea was articulated in passing in a video i watched last year. but i want to hone in a particular point. the insight that got stuck in my head is that by its nature, slop is resting on your laurels. you don’t see many get their start cranking it out — rather, so often starts with high quality work and devolves later. the band make critically acclaimed albums then sells out, video essayist starts livestreaming and posting lazily cut clips
in my few attempts to design games, i don’t think i fully appreciated the importance of strategic terrain. a system’s ability to represent anything is not a virtue
it’s long been observed that procedural generation can be a bit of a siren. the power to generate a million unique worlds may be no more compelling than a million technically-unique bowls of oatmeal. it blurs together into indistinct noise.
here’s a simple and unabashedly prurient question: where do you place the genitalia on a taur?
there are conventional answers to this question. in lewd works, centaurs often have their bits on their horse half, while lamias almost always them on the human half. arachne/driders can vary, though the deciding factor is probably whether it’s an oviposition thing or not
my tumblr mutual cogandstar (neocities, tumblr) made a vaguepost. i replied not fully aware of what ze was referring to, though after-the-fact deduction suggests the inciting post is this one from notorious power user derin.
Click to transcription.
This phrase has already entered my vocabulary re: media criticism where like. The viewer has a concrete view of what they expect a story to be based on the tropes and cliches they're used to seeing together, and when that doesn't happen, they judge it as a failed depiction of what they assumed it was going to be instead of judging it as what it actually is.
i get into arguments from time to time, and there’s a certain type of confusion i keep running into among articulate posters, a disconnect that keeps them from engaging with what i’m saying. my intentions are inferred and preempted, implications flattened out alongside direct statements
i want to call this something like subtext suffocation. i think it arise from a half-literacy, an abortive gesture toward critical thinking.
silksong spoilers — mostly act 2 and greyroot’s quest, i think
started thinking about a swap au where instead of a weaver queen, the pale monarch of pharloom is white lady
(initially because the idea of a pale king x grand mother silk power couple just sends me. can you imagine the type of trauma a silken knight created to bind the infection would have?)
Imagine Lace accompanying Hornet to one of the settlements in Pharloom, watching her help out the pilgrims, hearing them talk to her, stuttering and rambling about their struggles. While Hornet listens intently with a slow nod of understanding, Lace laughs in their face.
“Why are you wasting time with this, little spider? Why not show them your sting? Their screams would be far more entertaining than this prattle.”
Red sun, blazing horizon… those rays always looked like knife tracks. It fit, didn’t it? A deep gushing stabwound, bleeding out — engulfed entirely — into in calm waters. I’d have gone out like that, if it wouldn’t last so damn long.
Always they said that warmth above was some kind of love. Was it more like dying rage? The frantic tremors from muscles straining — a desperate heart not realizing its efforts only made it so much worse?
cordyceps headmate pleading spread me, spread me~ with the exact same whine as a sub begging to be bred
…though i guess that might be misunderstanding who has the power in this situation. hard not to wonder what it’d be like — it’s got to feel really good for one of you, right?
imagine spores clinging to your chitin, roots digging in with a sting like clawed groping or a lover’s bite, a fever burning like insatiable desire and need, headaches like you can’t stop thinking about her, trembling and weakness and a thirst that no amount of guzzling water can quench, and throughout it all, an itch that no matter how you rub or scratch it still leaves you yearning and squirming for… it hurts, and you’re so anxious for… for her.
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.
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.
but for real though, today’s chapter was so damn good it motivated me to at least try to write recommendation. i need more people to read it — someone who follows me has got to be willing to give it a try
Seek is an original science fiction story set in the radically distant future, updating roughly every week (or lately, closer to every two)
emotions are powerful. in fantasy, this is taken for granted more commonly than it’s justified. monsters feed on emotions, spells are fueled by emotion. why? how?
the unit of energy is the calorie; it’s in food, it’s in fuel. brains consume calories, they don’t produce it. yet in these worlds, a brain experiencing a powerful surge of emotion becomes an energy source able to do work.
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:
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.
diamantis gf who marks you with her mantibles, drawing blood and running keenly-tasting palps along it like paint-brushes upon her own canvas. she pins you, raptorial forelegs gripping you, vice-spines piercing you like a prey item. stridulating palps rasp out orders and insinuations and you’re eager to accept.
you can tell by the shadows in her eyes when she’s in a hunting mood or a dancing mood. sometimes she flares out her wing’s eyespots and fluffs her antennae-setae when she just wants to display dominance, but sometimes her feelers curl into tight balls and she lunges, staring you down like you’re nothing but an object or game to her.
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.
Any tips on using fonts in ao3?
going to assume you’re familiar with the basics — creating a new workskin at Dashboard → Skins → My Work Skins, and selecting a skin on the Edit Work page. if not, AO3 has a tutorial for this
(though skimming the tutorial, it doesn’t seem to mention the <span> tag, which is your best friend when it comes to applying styles to a bit of text within a paragraph)
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.
This post is unfinished, but it’s 2025 2026 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.
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.
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.
After I shared the , it sparked conversation in a chatroom, which lead to this stream of ideas.
just realized you could probably do some tower of babel exclusion. that would be kinda neat
That would be cool! Do you think you’d want to emphasise the universal primordial language like the speaking in tongues from Snow Crash, or the tower that reaches the heavens like that Ted Chiang short story?
i get into arguments from time to time, and there’s a certain type of confusion i keep running into among articulate posters, a disconnect that keeps them from engaging with what i’m saying. my intentions are inferred and preempted, implications flattened out alongside direct statements
i want to call this something like subtext suffocation. i think it arise from a half-literacy, an abortive gesture toward critical thinking.
my tumblr mutual cogandstar (neocities, tumblr) made a vaguepost. i replied not fully aware of what ze was referring to, though after-the-fact deduction suggests the inciting post is this one from notorious power user derin.
Click to transcription.
This phrase has already entered my vocabulary re: media criticism where like. The viewer has a concrete view of what they expect a story to be based on the tropes and cliches they're used to seeing together, and when that doesn't happen, they judge it as a failed depiction of what they assumed it was going to be instead of judging it as what it actually is.
i gave the most minute dabbling in writing Silksong and Feng Shui Engineering fics, but i think if i would point to one thing as new, it was my experiments in interactive storytelling. ergodic literature, if you will.
WMAC required the users to click a bunch read it in full, offering a nonlinear experience depending on how you go about it, but my most ambitious experiment was one almost no one actually got to see
if i weren’t tired from trying to proof read all these posts today, i’d do a better job of selling them.
if you remember my last post about chrylurks (You awaken in chrysalis. Your mind hangs by a web, our web, our embrace.), i’ve written a new one-shot. longer, and less opaquely written. it’s also my first time flexing my action writing skills in a while
here’s a simple and unabashedly prurient question: where do you place the genitalia on a taur?
there are conventional answers to this question. in lewd works, centaurs often have their bits on their horse half, while lamias almost always them on the human half. arachne/driders can vary, though the deciding factor is probably whether it’s an oviposition thing or not
there’s a concept i want to put to words. i’ve considered various names for it, like slop-slipping or the slop slope. but neither of those feel quite right.
the idea was articulated in passing in a video i watched last year. but i want to hone in a particular point. the insight that got stuck in my head is that by its nature, slop is resting on your laurels. you don’t see many get their start cranking it out — rather, so often starts with high quality work and devolves later. the band make critically acclaimed albums then sells out, video essayist starts livestreaming and posting lazily cut clips
in my few attempts to design games, i don’t think i fully appreciated the importance of strategic terrain. a system’s ability to represent anything is not a virtue
it’s long been observed that procedural generation can be a bit of a siren. the power to generate a million unique worlds may be no more compelling than a million technically-unique bowls of oatmeal. it blurs together into indistinct noise.
a few weeks ago, ambiguity in stories came up in a chatroom, and someone contended that 90% of stories that end right before showing the outcome of a character’s choice or the resolution of some dilemma would be improved by “just fucking showing what happens”
i disagree! now, conflict of interest disclosure, .
Helper Queens
Nehring et al. (2012) report that virgin queens (gynes) of the leaf-cutting ants Acromyrmex octospinosus (as Acromyrmex echinatior) and Acromyrmex octospinosus switch to carrying out worker tasks such as brood care and colony defense when they fail to mate and disperse. Thus, while morphologically queens, these individuals act as “workers” within the colony. Helper queens are also known in Probolomyrmex longinodus (where virgin dealate queens which fail to disperse may engage in non-reproductive activities) and Linepithema humile (where dealate queens are commonly found in foraging columns).
i had a funny rpg idea, though i dont know if it would work
basically: you are cooperatively writing a story, and the main currency is word count. resolution happens by rolling 2d20, then you get to write that many words.
except the passage you write is considered ‘unresolved.’ after writing your passage, you point to someone else, perhaps asking them a question as an informal prompt, and they get to take their turn.
one of the more annoying dilemmas i’m faced with is how long a should snippet has be before it deserves its own page
i have idea-fragments only a few sentences long. obviously these just be listed off on a miscellany page
i have shorts stories thousands of words long. obviously these get their own page
but where’s the cut off?
consider the i did last month. for about a week i wrote a short every day
i thought of a complicated combat system
at the beginning of the game, each player is given a number of d6 equal to the number of players. all players are ranked arbitrarily (e.g. clockwise from the referee, alphabetically by name, etc.)
before any turns are taken, a player may choose to roll any number of d6 and bid their sum (otherwise, their bid is 0). their bid is compared to every other bid. player rankings are resorted according to who bid the highest. ties are broken by the initial ranking.
this was an awesome video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2whuz6tkb0
but i have my own thoughts on designing rock paper scissors systems.
one of the drawbacks to “type” systems is that they’re a bit cheap. the essayist here implicitly values the high symmetry of RPS (cf. the section on pokemon), but to me, the symmetry sucks! it’s a necessary evil for the desirable properties of these systems, but pokemon having a matrix with a diverse eigenvector is what gives it a unique texture imo
i’ve often been frustrated with the common impulse to opt out of discourse by dismissing it as two equal side fighting, it’s nuanced and complicated, both are wrong etc.
most things are more complex than the strawman of either side would contend, but so often it’s not black and white, just ashen and charcoal. extremism and centrism are both symptoms of ignorance.
The technique is called the troll’s parry. Consider it a form of rhetorical entrapment. The way it works is simple. First, someone shares something disagreeable. The victim sees this, and expresses an issue with it. Perhaps at first it’s hedged, a mere quibble (all the better if it is), but what matters is that by disagreeing, they invite counter-rebuttals. The stage has been set for the argument to come.
had a game idea: sandcastles.
originally i thought of using d10s for this, but it might be most convenient to use a deck of playing cards.
at the beginning of the game, each player draws five cards. they can chose to discard and redraw any number of the cards first drawn. after deciding on cards, each player must arrange them into a ‘board’. once arranged, each card (except the last) is scored as follows:
one way in which a plural take on telepathy and hiveminds would be interesting to see is that the defining trope we see over and over is that connecting brains together is presented as a way to promote peace and prevent the conflict caused by differences
but plenty of us already know sharing a brain with someone doesn’t entail agreeing with or understanding or even having awareness of them
group mind n. a single consciousness or intelligence formed by the union of more than one individual’s consciousness or intelligence.
1930 W. O. Stapledon Last & First Men 168: The Martians, it should be noted, had three possible forms or formations, name: first, an “open order” of independent and very tenuous cloudlets in “telepathic” communication, and often in strict unity as a group mind; second a more concentrated and less vulnerable corporate cloud; and third, an extremely concentrated and formidable cloud-jelly.
going to call it there for the first day, i’m tired and the prospect of putting together another paragraph is daunting me. the other rolls were fun, admittedly.
“circumstantial poison manipulation else gates” lead me to consider the idea of someone who can only manipulate poison inside someone’s body and only if they’re consenting. the gates drawback is tricky. i started thinking along the lines of internal gates, crossing thresholds of poisoning.
there is a viral twitter post making the rounds in fantasy writing spaces. its chief claim is that George R.R. Martin’s failure to finish writing The Winds of Winter “killed off an entire generation of epic fantasy authors.” this claim comes to us from the partisan instigator of the Sad Puppies fiasco — which GRRM had spoken out against. not a promising start. but i won’t litigate that controversy, i only want to consider the claim.
the topic of progression power fantasy came up in a chatroom, particularly what the core appeal of the genre is and what distinguishes it. one user (one of my mutuals actually: hi) expressed opposition to it, in part because because the focus of the conversation gave a skewed impression of what was necessary (is it just the protagonist getting stronger, or must they never lose ever?)
teleporter and mind upload arguments are already insufferable to us, where it’s just a thought experiment and we’re free to imagine that somehow the procedures are infinitely reliable.
but any real technology sucks at first. consider what sound was like back when there was just crackling 78s shellac records and no vinyl yet. it took a while to figure out (or care about) high fidelity
emotions are powerful. in fantasy, this is taken for granted more commonly than it’s justified. monsters feed on emotions, spells are fueled by emotion. why? how?
the unit of energy is the calorie; it’s in food, it’s in fuel. brains consume calories, they don’t produce it. yet in these worlds, a brain experiencing a powerful surge of emotion becomes an energy source able to do work.
go back to sleep babe, nothing’s happened
there are so many bad takes and discourses you can neatly dodge by just not having people being annoying being an input in your judgment and opinions
no one will ever match my obsessive yet dignified freak
one of the odder hang-ups i have is that for me, porn can be plenty fun and interesting — except when it’s porn of characters i’m invested in. then in my standards skyrocket. even phenomenally well-executed pieced can leave me feel vaguely discomfitted, when i’d be all over it if i didn’t simply recognize the character. (the worst is when i don’t recognize the character, love the piece, then come back after getting into their source material and now the art’s kinda soured)
but for real though, today’s chapter was so damn good it motivated me to at least try to write recommendation. i need more people to read it — someone who follows me has got to be willing to give it a try
Seek is an original science fiction story set in the radically distant future, updating roughly every week (or lately, closer to every two)
…actually imagining noubugs in the information age is really transfixing me rn
>neverending mantis flame wars
>chorus-roach posters that chatter verging on spam turning every other thread into 1000 post monstrocities that belong in Forum Games or Forum Roleplay
>euvespid hacker that pwns the server and proceeds to do nothing but seamlessly upgrade to the bleeding edge version of bugforo
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.
embrace the dying of the light
people can make inferences & reason about you. this is sofucked up
replaying baba is you after all these years (i never finished it but i had dozens upon dozens of hours in it)
never been happier to have a bad brain, i dont remember any of these levels :D
i grasp the higher principles well enough that i’m doubtlessly running through faster than a blind player, but i’m not getting any spark of recognition for almost any of them, and i’m getting stumped here and there
One year after the end of the world, the Hive begins to starve.
Collection of Insects Wearing A Fake Human Suit/Collection of Spiders Wearing A Fake Human Suit
I simply must interrupt for a brief moment to introduce you to a tool that has changed the way I make video essays: our returning sponsor Perplexity. […]
Perplexity is revolutionizing how we search. Instead of scrolling through a list of blue hyperlinks, you get instant up-to-date answers with just a question or a quick search. This is enormously helpful for me when I’m doing background for a video essay. I need to start at the very beginning, but I don’t want to read for hours and hours on end. I can get qualitative answers to questions like “when did Katy Perry fall off” instead of trolling through a bunch of often irrelevant articles and blog posts to help me draw my own conclusions.
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.
cordyceps headmate pleading spread me, spread me~ with the exact same whine as a sub begging to be bred
…though i guess that might be misunderstanding who has the power in this situation. hard not to wonder what it’d be like — it’s got to feel really good for one of you, right?
imagine spores clinging to your chitin, roots digging in with a sting like clawed groping or a lover’s bite, a fever burning like insatiable desire and need, headaches like you can’t stop thinking about her, trembling and weakness and a thirst that no amount of guzzling water can quench, and throughout it all, an itch that no matter how you rub or scratch it still leaves you yearning and squirming for… it hurts, and you’re so anxious for… for her.
Red sun, blazing horizon… those rays always looked like knife tracks. It fit, didn’t it? A deep gushing stabwound, bleeding out — engulfed entirely — into in calm waters. I’d have gone out like that, if it wouldn’t last so damn long.
Always they said that warmth above was some kind of love. Was it more like dying rage? The frantic tremors from muscles straining — a desperate heart not realizing its efforts only made it so much worse?
characters always wake up the day after big events and forget they happen for a few moments before it all comes back to them. this trope is everywhere. does that that ever actually happen
Time Splices, Retrocausally Deepening A*, and Toxic Yuri Selfcest
pitcher plant gf able to precisely control the strength of her digestive enzymes, so sometimes she grabs you, pulling you pass the ribbed lips of her peristome to engulf you in the warm, wet depth of her pitcher. veined walls of plantflesh tighten around your wriggling form as you’re drenched in fluid from antennae to cerci, acidic enough to scrub your chitin raw. you spend hours trapped there, massaged by the gentle and glacial movements of the pitcher, and you finally emerge, you’re left cleaner than any bath, smelling faintly of nectar and floral musk
so, something i’ve observed is that with most tags on ao3, filtering for f/f cuts down results to about 10% of what they were initially — it’s almost a law of nature
today i took a look at the Artificial Intelligence tag, and was surprised to notice filtering for f/f only cuts down results to about 1/6
kind of exciting? W for lesbian robots, right? but i wondered, actually what fandoms are causing that? portal? that would be cute, but i don’t remember glados/chell fics being that numerous (esp. bc portal was big before ao3 became the go-to fanfic platform)
(A part of her notes that corporations were a lot like artificial intelligence, ruthlessly expanding at the expense of humanity; that at least made them more sympathetic, but they were still made of humans — no thanks.)
sometimes i think about the fact that verdant realm botanist’s “mainline” albums are numbered
and i didn’t think much of this at first — in between IV and VI, he released a split and two EPs, and between VI and VIII he released Collective: the Shape of He to Come; Ecosystem; and Photosynthesis. so you maybe think together those interregnal releases constitute 5 & 7
it’s worth noting that the koboldification/dragonization process the exact same ritual by which a dragon becomes gravid with a child. (any gross biological mating process is but an unnecessary formality.)
and the ‘hrt’ question is literally the dragon’s own flame. their breath can destroy most things, but if an object is first graven by their claw, then it is also, on a deeper level, ‘carved’ into a vessel for their flame, granting them power over what the flames burn and how.
Imagine Lace accompanying Hornet to one of the settlements in Pharloom, watching her help out the pilgrims, hearing them talk to her, stuttering and rambling about their struggles. While Hornet listens intently with a slow nod of understanding, Lace laughs in their face.
“Why are you wasting time with this, little spider? Why not show them your sting? Their screams would be far more entertaining than this prattle.”
silksong spoilers — mostly act 2 and greyroot’s quest, i think
started thinking about a swap au where instead of a weaver queen, the pale monarch of pharloom is white lady
(initially because the idea of a pale king x grand mother silk power couple just sends me. can you imagine the type of trauma a silken knight created to bind the infection would have?)
i have been assailed with yet another AU idea
final battle ends in more of a stalemate. uzi triggers core collapse 2 or makes the planet destroying mat collection tendrils go haywire.
bottom line is, instead of imploding, the planet explodes
nothing but neighborhood-city sized chunks floating off into the solar system uzi et al have to regroup and build a new society in space
now combine this with a hornet who’s not interested in sex or romance either but has a much better understanding of herself. the fact that hornet is harder to perturb means lace has to try even harder to provoke a reaction from her - won’t it be satisfying to see that spider’s mask crack into a flustered mess?
hornet of course misreads this as lace having a big crush on her, and it’s not like hornet has never entertained courtship for another’s sake. (it can tolerable, even enjoyable, so long as the expectations are clear.)
to clarify what this means, the serious articulation of the mystery here is that i often sit down to edit something hoping to improve it but decide that what i originally wrote works just fine.
but why? am i concluding that writing is acceptable because it’s my own and i cannot judge impartially (it’s fire because i wrote it), or is did i write something acceptable and i’m simply observing that fact (i wrote it because it’s fire).
we all love parasitoids, and you might’ve even heard of hyperparasitoids, whose larvae prey on other parasitoids. i have an idea for something weirder, though: brood parasitoids
see, you might’ve also heard of species that have different morphs of the same sex, which each pursue competing reproductive strategies (e.g., the rock-paper-scissors dynamics of side-blotched lizards)
This post is unfinished, but it’s 2025 2026 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.
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.
new chapter for Hostile Takeover, my j/uzi fic :3
https://archiveofourown.org/works/51409288/chapters/134699305
in which n is fulfills a promise and j grapples with new feelings
juzi nation forgive me but i’m outlining a new fic instead of working on hostile takeover…
new essay, dissecting what it means for stories to have “fast” or “slow” pacing, and my own thoughts about why my stories are paced like they are. i wonder if this is obvious to everyone except for me
Any tips on using fonts in ao3?
going to assume you’re familiar with the basics — creating a new workskin at Dashboard → Skins → My Work Skins, and selecting a skin on the Edit Work page. if not, AO3 has a tutorial for this
(though skimming the tutorial, it doesn’t seem to mention the <span> tag, which is your best friend when it comes to applying styles to a bit of text within a paragraph)
one of the things about the murder drones fandom is that there is just no consensus on how to write cyn. bold text? code tags? Capitalizing Every Letter? does the narration spell out her every emotion? every sentence, or once per dialogue block? is it wrapped in asterisks like a chat roleplay, or colons like a markdown emoji?
you can just open cyn’s dialogue and put whatever your heart desires, no one can stop you
receiving dozens of boops but the boop button doesnt work for me. i am so powerless.
brain still fried after the mania off finished the gigachapter. doctor has prescribed yuri fluff. pharmacy had none :c
i was minding my own business today, idly thinking to myself, “as far as md fanfiction writers go, i like to think i’m pretty good!”
then i read As Above, So Below
Just realize that in HT Doll and Lizzy can do the “we aren’t friends anymore” “that’s the worst way to tell people we’re dating” bit Avatar
“new TADC” real ones are talking about the new alien biospheres. neotect gang rise up
still not a fan of TADC but i am a fan of specifically zooble gangle and bubble. goose really popped off with le characters specifically
in case anyone’s been wondering where i’ve been, the short version is that at the end of last month, i had a single thought:
i had been struggling to get anything productive done for a few weeks at that point. my solution? if doing one thing is too hard, why not do all the things?
sounds stupid but it kinda worked? i was going to call it my ‘slop era’, where i just get things done even if the output was low effort nonsense. the first two days, i wrote a few pages of (which turned out kind of interesting), got a few sketches done, and composed two simple tracks.
yes i’m here to claim my prize for scrolling through 45 hours of dashboard backlog. working hard clicking ♥ and 🔁 like the emperor giving a thumbs up at the gladitorium
hope yall appreciate the spam lmao
i was so tired after writing 15k words of corrrupt combustion in four days. i really needed the break.
which is why i spent the last two days writing 13k words of a brand new au
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpR64j8qskM
these guys broke up and reformed as The Otolith, and their new album is pretty good (lowkey one song on there is a touchpoint for the new HT chapter). but i’ve been spinning Folium Limina so much i’ve let myself forget how unhinged SubRosa could get
this one is for the mentally unwell girlies.
if the back to back one-two punch of “Despair is a Siren” and “Black Majesty” doesn’t fuck you up, what are doing on my blog
juzi crumbs in the oven
if you cant afford therapy try getting a god run in binding of isaac. works for me
the brainworms are starving and cannibalizing each other now. torn between working any one of several murder drones projects or one of multiple original projects. this shit is agonizing man what the fuck do i do
the existence of praying mantis people is one of the things in black nerve where it’s really difficult to appreciate how weird it is
diamantis gf who marks you with her mantibles, drawing blood and running keenly-tasting palps along it like paint-brushes upon her own canvas. she pins you, raptorial forelegs gripping you, vice-spines piercing you like a prey item. stridulating palps rasp out orders and insinuations and you’re eager to accept.
you can tell by the shadows in her eyes when she’s in a hunting mood or a dancing mood. sometimes she flares out her wing’s eyespots and fluffs her antennae-setae when she just wants to display dominance, but sometimes her feelers curl into tight balls and she lunges, staring you down like you’re nothing but an object or game to her.
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:
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.
imma be level with you, the way fandom talks about “angst” reeks of the contentification of media. reducing a rich panoply of emotional dynamics down to one ‘feels bad man’ label :/
“here’s some <character> angst.” “gimme <ship> angst.”
let me out of here
i’ve really got to get back to working on corrupt combustion. if yall thought the sandbox executions we’ve seen so far are cool, wait till you see ⸢Collector of the Ineffable and Forgotten⸥
an embarrassing amount of my writing time tonight has been spent wikiwalking learning about endorheic basins and soda lakes
and through this, a reasonable series of worldbuilding decisions has lead me to the conclusion that the slums of this gritty, blood-soaked, crime-scourched biopunk city …might be filled with flocks of flamingos
and i don’t know if i should commit to the bit or not
remember chat. to beat the allegations you dont need a good defense, you just need a better defense than the sussiest baka on your squad. keep posting.
how today’s afternoon went: was trying to focus on coding while relistening to Monarch of Monsters and crying
genuinely impossible to pin today’s mental state on a linear scale
“how are you feeling?” i am
A decade ago, I ran a gimmick twitter account called Argument Of Function, imitating several other rationalist-adjacent accounts I had discovered. Ten years on, few of these posts remain amusing; still I find the endeavor as a whole than charming, if nothing else.