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so butch I was born bald and forklift certified happy lesbian week

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#fatt #lem king

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the future is not female, the future is an evil bug made out of plastic killing your ass

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Average medieval wives can wield giant swords. Don't mess with them.

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

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Even Biden supporters want this motherfucker gone like what are we doing here?

#like rule one is #if you want us to pretend to like you #you have to pretend to like us #and Biden just can't be arsed to do even that much

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Tiffany Aching was so real for lamenting how she wasn't a real witch because the wannabe witches were mean to her while simultaneously astral projecting because she didn't have a mirror handy.

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A loving, married couple wake up one day to find that they have returned to their high school days, when they were the most popular student and the class geek.

#aww yeah this is fun

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Can you help me undo my 1000 tiny buttons period piece romance fetish but for armor freaks

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Do you have any opinions on Scholomance?

I do! I like it a lot. I really enjoyed all three books, blitzed through them easily and was much more excited to see how the plots unfolded than I'm used to these days, as a jaded adult, and I also really appreciated them as works of craft.

Especially the first one, I spent the whole time being all 'wow!' at how simple it was. So easy to read, but no waste. You really need to know what you're doing, to get that kind of pared-down elegance of form to work and still fit so much content in.

Like these are dense, there's a fantastic stylistic minimalism that allows El's character all the space it needs to breathe by making absolutely every other thing and person in the whole novel also do character work for her, which is exactly where the first person voice shines.

Also great use of character perspective to make the pacing feel really natural, so the fact that the first book takes three weeks, the second book takes one year, and the third book is like. Five or so incredibly stressful days spread out over the course of a few weeks? Doesn't feel imbalanced.

I actually got distracted from the story a few times by noticing the strength of Novik's technique. 😂 This is a me problem, in itself it's the opposite of distracting. Very low-profile.

I think the Scholomance is a great example of how far you can go in specfic when you aren't cringing from the label 'derivative,' because the Scholomance books feel very fresh ad clean specifically because nothing in them is concerned with standing out as 'original,' whatever that's supposed to mean, only with being well-executed and suitable to its task.

Hm, maybe that's where Liesel was born, the intersection of the efficient narrative style and the vast proportion of the story that concerns the maximization of utility and the instrumentalization of persons by themselves and others, and the forces that incentivize these behaviors. Or maybe she's just the narrative counterweight to Orion 'Head Empty' Lake lmao. How's that for a principle of balance, Galadriel?

I really did enjoy how beautifully it was laid out, over and over, in dozens of shades of humanity, how no matter where you go in an exploitative system almost everyone is being driven by the same survival instincts.

Because I don't think I've ever seen made so cleanly clear why you just can't expect any person or small group of people, no matter their level of goodwill or status, to unmake one of these systems from the inside; how it's not a matter of people being bad but of every single person being very...small.

And then not retreating into the idea of a person who is Big coming and breaking the cruel system from the outside as some kind of panacea, because 1) that is terrible, even if it's necessary and done in the best way possible and 2) that's not a sustainable answer to anything. Getting a balance between the protagonist being able to effect change and not subscribing to the great man theory of history can be really tricky!

Also did I mention, I love El, and I love most of the cast, even the dreadful ones. How am I going around with this many feelings about Li Shanfeng who doesn't appear until the actual climax?

The romance murdered me a bit, but it took up no more space than it absolutely needed to do its job, and I respect that. Also I appreciated Orion as a love interest; Novik has a slight record at this point of a version of that style of male love interest who's like a caricature of Mr. Darcy but old, which was shaping up to be my least favorite thing about her body of work.

...Orion is kind of like if you took the human king from Spinning Silver and gave him an alignment flip come to think of it, so he's not coming out of nowhere. Lmao.

Which reminds me (re: romance character typing) I've heard Novik didn't want it to be known she was astolat, which this series has renewed my sympathies if so. Because if I were a published novelist I wouldn't want people going 'you know, that resolution was really emotionally satisfying! reminds me of that fic she wrote where optimus prime and megatron get stuck in a hole underground and hatefuck about it.'

I don't even like Transformers. That fic almost made me cry. Actually I suspect it reads better if you don't like Transformers because I'm sure it does not give a shit about canon.

Anyway, whoever pointed out that one of the things El has going on is she's Enoby (and we're going to sit down and explore what the true reason to put your middle finger up at preps is, and what are some constructive ways to channel that socioeconomic wrath, and what it means that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism) was right and I'm not entirely over that either.

Fucking love El's mom as a character. Spectacular level of parent relevance and usefulness. A+.

Aadhya and Liu are also characters who fucking delivered.

Re: minimalism though, I laughed at the start of The Golden Enclaves when I realized that none of the enclaver characters who'd gotten development in the the first two books were from London, the enclave El was theoretically shooting for when we met her.

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Visualizing @haveyouplayedthisttrpg's data

A while ago, I posted this over on the Indie RPG Newsletter but forgot to also put it here. If you haven't heard of Have You Played This, the blog runs polls about various RPGs and people can reply if they've played, read, just heard of it, or not even that.

Here's the highlights:

On average, these polls get 470 votes.

For the majority of these polls, more than 50% of respondents said they’d never heard of the game.

Out of 81 games that have been polled, only 33 games had even reached the eyes and ears of more than 50% of the respondents. Most people haven’t heard of most of the games!

And here's the image:

The image is a bit compressed. So if you’d like to read it comfortably, you can head to my google sheet and see it at full scale.

While this far from definitive (there’s also a huge variance in the number of votes for each game), it’s interesting to get a sense of what games are relatively popular. For example, Thirsty Sword Lesbians seems to be about as well-known as Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay on tumblr. Would you have guessed that? Actually, maybe, you could’ve. But would you have expected to see that Mouse Guard and Mausritter are roughly as popular – maybe tumblr just loves mice equally.

Also bless everyone who said they’d never heard of Pathfinder.

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idk who needs to hear this rn but suffering is not noble. take the tylenol

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This is cool, but also there might be some narrative confirmation bias happening too. Consider, eg., vampires or werewolves -- dangerous, frequently deadly, best avoided by humans, etc. If you look at stories about them, in what percentage do you think the vampire wins, by killing their victim and getting away with it? Or do you think a majority might have a human triumph? (Counting kissing as triumph, for the usual reasons...)

I think this might be a case where we tell the stories that would be exciting, heroic, or unexpected - not the ones we think would "actually" happen if we met.

I find it interesting that people talk and write about fairies these days like they're these horrible, Machiavellian monsters that you mustn't ever risk dealing with. Even saying your name near them will forever put you in their thrall, forever! (Or something to that effect) But when you dig into the folklore, you find countless stories of fairies just getting dunked on in just the daftest ways.

I've been reading "The Lore of Scotland", by Jennifer Westwood and Sophia Kingshill, and when I noticed this trend, I started taking count of who wins in fairies vs. human confrontations. I'm only about a fifth through, and while it's not clear cut, the humans are winning by three points!

By way of example, let me tell you one of my favourite stories so far. Once upon a time, a young woman was abducted by the fay and carried away to a fairie mound. There, she was placed in the arms of the great fay giantess who ruled those halls. "I've got you now!" said the giantess, "I'm going to hold you as tight and as close as vine on tree, forever more!" Certainly in a pickle, the young woman considered her dire situation and simply replied, "I wish it was shit you were holding." The fay giantess was so completely appalled and disgusted by the coarse manner of the young woman that she let her go immediately and had her taken back to her home.

Not only do I find this really funny, I enjoy the fact that even centuries ago, the forthright manner and direct problem solving of Scottish women was well established.

#stories #fairies #fae #kissing vampires

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overstimulated and anxious at the zoo until I looked up and saw an angel dancing in a beam of light

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one unfortunate problem if largely doing away with the concept of aristocracy is that people don’t fucking know how titles work anymore. The idea that William III of Prussia was both a King or Margrave depending on the context would melt their brains. Clergymen holding land in right of their office? Inconceivable. The British Monarch ruling the channel islands as the Duke of Normandy because they aren’t legally part of the Unites Kingdom of GB and NI? Madness.

These days, people don’t even know that Christ isn’t the guy’s name. It’s a mocking title bestowed upon him by the Romans, who REALLY did not understand his whole deal.

You’ve heard of a Shougun? Well check this out: Shougun is an old military title that was given to a nobleman commissioned to do colonialism against the indigenous people of Northern Japan. Knowing that as well as what the office would eventually come to entail tells you something about the history of title and how its holders leveraged it to gain power over the centuries.

The final boss of understanding titles is learning about Personal Unions. How could William III be King and Margrave? Well, he was both King in Prussia (ask me about that in sometime) and Margrave of Brandenburg, but these offices were not one office. Prussia and Brandenburg had distinct laws, customs, and governing organs. Thus, he was both King and Margrave. Btw, this is how the United Kingdom became united. A Scot inherited the English throne and then a century on, his descendant rationalized the government of both countries by unifying their parliaments. However, this never formally dissolved Scotland, just its parliament, which is why it still has its own laws, nobility, and a few other concessions to self rule. Theoretically, Scotland leaving Britain wouldn’t necessarily undo the Acts of Union if the independent country became a republic. This would mean that Charles would remain King of Scotland, he just would lose de facto jurisdiction over the land that Kingdom rules. And yeah, every republic in Europe still sits upon land that a bunch of still living aristocrats continue to lay claim to. The last German Emperor didn’t die without an heir, so there’s still a Prince of Prussia and the French royal throne has a bunch of claimants from a number of branches of the Bourbon dynasty. The French imperial throne also has at least one, maybe two, Bonaparte claimants. I turns out that kingdom (or duchy, archbishopric, county, and so on), is not a place or a set of laws and customs or even the people who inhabit the former and are ruled by the latter. No, a kingdom (or duchy, archbishopric, county, and so on) is a mental construct defined by a title and a person who holds it (or could theoretically hold it).

#fun #informative #I've been playing a lot of CK3 lately #which is largely about messing around with titles

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anthy pranks utena with the same fondness with which you would put a silly costume on a dearly beloved cat to make them look stupid. anthy pranks nanami the way a cartoon character would hit another over the head with a comically large hammer