brotheralyosha

[brotheralyosha]

Chimera Falin + Monster edit

#amazing #dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon #dungeon meshi spoilers #delicious in dungeon spoilers

[brotheralyosha]

studio trigger understood the assignment. i would let her wreck me.

#hooooooly fuck they absolutely nailed it #dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon #dungeon meshi spoilers #delicious in dungeon spoilers #gifs

[brotheralyosha]

“Salvage” created for Critical Chips 2, published/edited by Zainab Akhtar~

#comics

[brotheralyosha]

I have been listening to the Hobbit audiobook while working. Bad idea. I didn't work, I drew Bilbo and his fancy home ♥

#the hobbit #tolkien #fantasy art

[brotheralyosha]

Tattoo tribute to my girl Rachel

#!!!! #animorphs

[brotheralyosha]

every autistic person watching this episode of dungeon meshi:

#dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon

[brotheralyosha]

Chen Chen

#poetry #twitter #chen chen

[brotheralyosha]

Deeply dispiriting post: testimony from a DOJ antitrust action reveals the entire book publishing industry is celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors like James Patterson, children's books, Bibles, and back catalogues (e.g. Lord of the Rings). Publishing new authors is not even a rounding error; you get the sense it's only done anymore out of a vague sense of obligation, and the moment one of the Big Five decides on the defect strategy, and stops doing that to save a few more bucks, it will end entirely.

#ah. well. #lit tag #publishing

[brotheralyosha]

some transparent marcille points for your emote needs

#excellent #dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon

[brotheralyosha]

Periodically commenting discourse will cross my dash not least bc I follow a lot of fic writers and while I do understand the urge and even the emotional need for validation and feedback, IDK sometimes the tenor of these posts come across as vaguely offputting to me and it can create a fannish atmosphere laden with guilt and which can paralyse people in some unpleasant ways and I just want/need to say the following:

One. As a writer, you'll be so so much better off if you actively work towards cultivating a sense of confidence in your own writing and rely on internal motivation/emotional resources for writing rather than external validation. For one, you'll be writing what you actually want to write (and finding an audience of enthusiasts who actually want to read that) and for another, you'll develop a lot more emotional resilience around your craft/work which will help when you write something that you've poured your heart into and it's met with crickets.

Two. No one is obligated to leave anyone comments. No one is obligated to interact w the things we've made. No one is obligated to, after interacting with them, give us feedback? Anything else is a gift, much in the same way that us writing is also a gift. Feedback is a gift to us. People are allowed to interact with our art in the ways in which they enjoy and sometimes this involves not talking to us directly: it may involve talking to each other, or talking about it on their own blog, or even just thinking about it by themselves later. Just like fic or art is nice to have, feedback is also nice to have.

If fandom is to be a comfortable space for people, we just have to accept that people are going to interact with the things we make in ways we don't always appreciate. Short of people directly being shitty to you (rude comments, plagiarising things we've made), it's fine? But all this comments are payment (I wasn't aware that fandom was an actual economy), or if you liked it then say something, or vague emotional guilt-tripping about how this keeps us going is Not It. Let the people lurk. Peace.

#writing #fanfic #fandom

[brotheralyosha]

Worst friend group to ever exist. Reblog to throw rocks at them

#luv them #dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon

[brotheralyosha]

In recent posts I've complained that a lot of tabletop RPGs which toss around the term "fiction first" don't actually understand what it means, and I've been asked to expand on that complaint. So:

In my experience, there are two ways that game texts which want to position themselves as "fiction first" trip themselves up, one obvious and one subtle.

The first and more obvious pitfall is treating "fiction first" as an abstract ideology. They're using "fiction first" as a synonym for "story over rules" in a way that calls back to the role-playing-versus-roll-playing discourse of the early 2000s. The trouble is, now as then, nobody can usefully explain what "story over rules" actually entails. At best, they land on a definition of "fiction first" that talks about the GM's right to ignore the rules to better serve the story, which is no kind of definition at all – it's just putting a funny hat on the Rule Zero fallacy and trying to pass it off as some sort of totalising ideology of play.

A more useful way of defining "fiction first" play is to think of it not in terms of whether you engage with the rules at all, but in terms of when they're invoked: specifically, as a question of order of operations.

Suppose, for example, that you're playing Dungeons & Dragons, and you pick up the dice and say "I attack the dragon". Some critics would claim that no actual narrative has been established – that this is simply a bare invocation of game mechanics – but in fact we can infer a great deal: your character is going to approach the dragon, navigating any inclement terrain which lies between them, and attempt to kill the dragon using the weapon they're holding in their hand. The rules are so tightly bound to a particular set of narrative circumstances that simply invoking those rules lets us work backwards to determine what the context and stakes must be for that invocation of the rules to be sensical; this, broadly speaking, is what "rules first" looks like.

Conversely, let's say that your game of Dungeons & Dragons has confronted you with a pit blocking your path, and you want to make an Athletics check to cross it. At this point the GM is probably going to stop you and say, hold up, tell us what that looks like. Are you trying to jump across it? Are you trying to climb down one wall of the pit and up the other? Are you trying to tie a rope to the halfling and toss them to the other side? In other words, before you can pick up the dice, you need to have a little sidebar with the GM to hash out what the narrative context is, and to negotiate what can be achieved and what's at stake if you mess it up; this, broadly, is what "fiction first" looks like.

At this point I know some people are thinking "wait, hold on – both of those examples were from Dungeons & Dragons; are you saying that Dungeons & Dragons is both a rules-first game and a fiction-first game?" And yeah, I am. That's the second, more subtle place where game texts that talk about "fiction first" go astray: they talk about it as though being "fiction first" or "rules first" is something which is inherent to game systems as a whole.

This is not in fact true: being "fiction first" or "rules first" is something which describes particular invocations of the rules. In practice, only very simple games spend all of their time in one mode or the other; most will switch back and forth at need. Generally, most "traditional" RPGs (i.e., the direct descendants of Dungeons & Dragons and its various imitators) tend to operate in rules-first mode in combat and fiction-first mode out of it, though this is a simplification – when and how such mode-switching occurs can be quite complex.

Like any other design pattern, "fiction first" mechanics are a tool that's well suited for some jobs, and ill suited for others. Sometimes your rules are fine-grained enough that having an explicit negotiation and stakes-setting phase would just be adding extra steps. Sometimes you're using the outputs of the rules a narrative prompt, and having to pin the context down ahead of time would defeat the purpose. Fortunately, you don't have to commit yourself to one approach or the other; as long as your text is clear about how you're assuming a given set of rules toys will be used, you can switch modes as need dictates. However, you're not going to be capable of that kind of transparency if you're thinking in terms of "this a Fiction First™ game".

(Incidentally, this is why it can be hard to talk about "fiction first" with OSR fans if you're being dogmatic about fiction-first framing being an immutable feature of particular games. Since traditional RPGs tend to observe the above-described rules-first-in-combat, fiction-first-out-of-combat division, and OSR games tend to treat actually getting into a fight as a strategic failure state, a lot of OSR games spend most of their time in fiction-first mode. If you go up to an OSR fan and insist that D&D-style games can never be fiction-first, then attempt to define "fiction first" for them and proceed to describe how they usually play, they'll quite justifiably conclude that you have your head up your ass!)

#ttrpg

[brotheralyosha]

#tade!!! #dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon #gifs

[brotheralyosha]

It occurs to me, looking through a bunch of DNI lists and carrds (although it has surely been observed before by others), is that what the people who make these want is not unreasonable per se. Rather, what they are asking for is unreasonable, because what they want is to not be using social media. They want to be using forums, or group chats, or instant messenger, or blogs; they want online communication spaces that are moderated, that are topic-specific, that are limited to existing/vetted members. And these this desire is not unreasonable, but it does not match modern social media.

And because so many of the people who make these seem so very young, I wonder how many of them even realize that spaces that do what they want can (and used to, and still somewhat do) exist, realize that social media can't do what they want it to, but that social media is not the only way for the internet to be.

#internet #social media

[brotheralyosha]

John Blanche is an absolute legend. As an artist and art director, he essentially steered the rudder of Warhammer and, through it, British fantasy art, for decades. Among a pile of important work, my favorite is probably his illustrations for the four-volume Sorcery! gamebook series by Steve Jackson.

I’m not sure how the Hollow Press edition of Voodoo Forest (2022) got on my radar, but it did (and thank goodness, because through it I found Vermis). The first version appeared in 2015 and was the product of a decade of work. This edition includes additional plates and was resequenced. The back matter says it’s the project’s definitive form.

It’s impressive! There are 46 full-page illustrations, each accompanied by a second, smaller one, and one 2-page spread. In a lot of ways, Blanche’s style seems unchanged, which is a curious thing for an artist with a career spanning multiple decades (compare to Ian Miller, who has had a number of stylistic periods). It’s strange to see his work without any direct references to the worlds of Warhammer. There are subtle, perhaps reflexive visual references, like the way the demon woman’s claw hands resemble the canon Slaaneshi demonette, or how all the secondary illustrations depict a variety of folk carrying banners. Those banners serve as cryptic titles. Many are quotes from Macbeth. I assume many others reference other works, but I haven’t quite figured them out. The doomed atmosphere of the Scottish play sort of overrides all other associations for me (though there is very little in the visuals that would make me think of Shakespeare, though there is one man in a kilt).

Taken as a whole, the thing is unsettling, a sort of dream or nightmare landscape that clearly conforms to some organizing principal, but the logic of which remains obscure. There is not much gore or violence, but violence seems imminent in nearly all the plates. I would not want to explore this particular forest, but I am glad to have it on my shelf.

#ttrpg #fantasy art

[brotheralyosha]

"A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google[...]

Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."

Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.

...

Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.

Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"

They broke the deal." -Cory Doctorow

Read the whole article: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

#tech #google #internet

[brotheralyosha]

City of Tears

#hollow knight