I fucking escaped The Narrative but it’s nothing but developer textures out here and the level looks like shit from outside so I’m starting to wonder if I can clip back in somewhere. Plz advise

#open the developer console (should be ~) and try to find a commands list. Probably under 'help'#you're probably gonna wanna either noclip back#or respawn at level start if you're too far away#or just change maps entirely.

If you went to all the trouble to escape the narrative in the first place, changing maps is probably the most appealing of those options. But! Make sure you are using the right command -- in many cases there is a distinction between the command for moving to a new map as you are, and for reincarnating in a new map as a blank self, empty of all the joys, sorrows, and inventory items of your past life, preserving nothing of who you once were save the intangible connection to user input some call "the soul".

Which is a valid choice, it's just important to not get them mixed up.

Also look carefully at the developer console - it should look kind of janky. If it's too polished, it might be diagetic and you might have a metanarrative you need to break out of first.

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."

GNU Terry Pratchett

The full quote is fascinating though, and adds an interesting context as it's Angua (a werewolf) and Carrot (human, but raised by dwarves) discussing a dwarf colleague, Cheery.

"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."

Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"

This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...

... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.

Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)

Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.

Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.

And to Terry Pratchett's credit what started out as a throwaway joke about dwarf sex, gradually becomes a multi-volume subplot which is a fascinating exploration of gender and social identity as more dwarves start to "come out" as being female, and not just identifying as female, but changing their form of dress to something which matches who they are (they keep their beards though, because to a dwarf, that has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with being a dwarf) and how their society has to adjust, with differing levels of comfort, to this new reality.

Carrot was also prejudiced against the undead early on as well. And the fact that he unlearns these views is a good example of a common theme in Pratchett's work

The overwhelming theme of Pratchett's work is change. Not good vs evil but progress vs stasis/going backwards. The protagonists of Pratchett's stories are people who can take on board new ideas and change and grow and adapt. Some of them start out as very stupid people with very stupid views in fact until they learn and grow and improve. The villains on the other hand are people who desperately want things to either stay the same or regress back to some imagined "Good old days" that they prefer.

While we're talking about Terry Pratchett gender, there's also golems, who are basically lumps of clay that have been brought to life but don't actually have any gender or secondary sexual characteristics so everyone defaults to male and he/him. As the books story goes on some of them decide to try being women just because.

Feet of Clay came out in 1996. I cannot overstate how pronoun discourse wasn't anywhere on the radar then. I'm fairly terminally online, active in fandom, and the first I can remember is some timid discussion of neopronouns in the mid-2000s, where "how could you tell other people to use them for you" was a major puzzle. (I still love neopronouns - zie/hir appeals to me in a way they distinctly doesn't, genderfluid though I am.)

ALSO also also

1) I don't have the book to hand, but when Cheery comes out she changes her name to Cheri, because "sometimes, when you shout who you are to the whole world, you need to do it quietly." It's such a beautiful expression of coming out being a process, and one that needn't be undertaken all at once.

2) Pterry had the best goyische take I've ever seen on golems, and I will die on that hill. It's not perfect, but it is really well-done, and it was done with respect, and to me that might be even more important than perfection.

I had the book to hand because I reread it recently. The quote goes:

THERE we go.

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how?  How does he know it?”  Interrogate your witnesses.  Cross-examine them.  Make them explain their reasoning.  It pays dividends.

All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.

This is your "show not tell" advice explained!

Editor here.

First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.

What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.

This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*

If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.

*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.

This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.

“It was rainy.” Versus: “The rain pounded against the roof.” Or “The rain howled like an injured animal.” Or “The rain tapped against the window like an anxious lover.” All of these are inviting the reader deeper into the experience of the story by using stronger verbs and similes. And, at the same time, they stir feelings (instead of TELLING feelings). And feelings keep your reader engaged. Engaged readers keep turning pages; engaged readers become FANS.

This is also where

you want to pay attention

to verbs of being.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

The most valuable advice that Author Ex gave me through the years that we wrote together was this: the problem with all these filter words is that they create distance in the POV.

That means that when you read a line like

It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.

You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.

You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?

Simple as that.

Oat milk was discovered much more recently than you may have known. Like many now-familiar technologies, it was found by accident during the Apollo program when NASA learned what a zero-g environment does to goat milk.

Why do they even make apps for ADHD. You want me to use my 24/7 handheld immediate distraction device? To manage my 'gets distracted too easily' disorder? Ooooh we developed the perfect tool for managing your anemia. Its hosted in Dracula's castle. 👍

Picked up my phone to consult my task list for today and now I'm reblogging this instead, case in point

i have ADHD! I've learned that the name of the game is to introduce DELAY and FRICTION in the short term, and work out ROOT CAUSES in the long term.

there's an app called one sec which BLOCKS all other apps on your phone. It can also restrict specific apps. It injects a delay in opening the apps - you can customise the message and delay length.

Android (One UI, maybe just samsung, I'm not sure) phones have settings that can whitelist specific apps during specific times or when a particular "mode" is active. This is under Modes and Routines.

In my experience these are the only ADHD apps that work.

More ADHD pro tips: uninstall as many apps as possible

Set your browser to close tabs automatically after a certain amount of time inactive (mine is 7 days I think). If you REALLY need the open tab, bookmark it.

If you really need the delay, set your phone/ computer browsers to clear cookies daily. This will force you to need to log in to websites every day. This introduces DELAY and FRICTION between you and the easy, habitual distractions.

DELAY and FRICTION are short term solutions. The habits run pretty deep and humans can get used to anything; you'll figure out ways to go around the blockers you put in place in time, and you'll need to create new blockers. Use the time to address the longer term ROOT CAUSES, because that's what's gonna actually make it stick.

ROOT CAUSES is harder. What would you rather be doing, if you weren't on your phone? Journal. Journal a lot. Take long solitary walks (LEAVE PHONE AT HOME!) and try to figure out what you really think, what you really want, when you're not on your phone.

I find I tend to use the phone to Escape. I have worked pretty hard to build a life I don't always want to escape from, as well as some mindsets. I know another very common mode is Seeking, and whatever you're trying to find in Phone chances are it's not there.

You need to retrain your brain to try looking somewhere other than Phone for whatever you're Seeking. This is hard. Might take forever, might never entirely break the habit. But the degree and frequency of me being on my phone for way too long has reduced a lot, in a relatively quick timeframe (1-2 weeks). Don't let slips become slides here.

Genuinely I think a lot of the apps marketed for ADHD are scams targeting a population which is most likely to forget they signed up for a free trial and won’t have the attention span to go through the cancellation process. There’s simply no other justification for a glorified to-do list app with a premium version that costs 30 dollars a month.

I will second One Sec, though! The delay on opening apps is helpful when you’re stuck in that loop of opening an app, closing it, and then immediately opening it again. Plus they have ways of blocking apps that are harder to get around than the built in screen time limitations.

The other thing that’s been huge for me is turning off viewing history on YouTube. Without tailored m recommendations it’s a lot easier to mindlessly move on to the next thing, but the biggest benefit is that it breaks shorts. You can still view them on specific channels, and they come up in searches, but you can’t get the infinite scroll. Also with times being what they are, denying a company any data you can feels like a small win!

I am a HUGE proponent for the app ScreenZen. It is extremely customizable and has a ton of different applications of friction and delay that I can set at different times for different apps. For example, apps that have short form video that I might want to use for something else, like Facebook and Instagram, are set so that I can use them for an unlimited amount of time BUT every seven minutes I get cut off to a screen with a message I chose (a cute picture of my kitty and the phrase is this how you wanted to use your time?) and have to choose to open it again. That means if I go to find something on marketplace but get sucked into reels, I’ll get nudged out of it after seven minutes and I’ll have a chance to regroup and try again until I do the thing I needed to do. I can do this as many times as I want. However, I can also change the settings to limit how many opens I have in a day, or how long I have to wait between opens.

I like to read fanfiction in bed and will stay up all night. If I have it hard block after a certain time, I’ll get all grumpy and defiant and decide I don’t need to listen to that and turn it off. So instead, starting at a certain time, I can only open the app for fifteen minute increments, but as many of them as I want. I have to wait 12 seconds between opens and a screen comes up to encourage me to do a round of box breathing, and then I can open Firefox again. After 8 opens, I have a new setting to only allow five minutes at a time, AND each time I open the app it adds 10 seconds to the wait before I can open it again. That means if I really really want to finish a chapter I can buy the friction gets worse and worse each time until I’m waiting well over a minute to open it again. Usually once it’s over a minute I’m out of “the zone” enough that it’s pretty easy to decide I can stop reading and go to sleep.

Anyway I’m a huge fan, it helps so so much and has dramatically improved my quality of life around phone use.

It is available for apple and android.

For the @dashcon-two Crow Exchange, I made custom DashCon/Magic the Gathering trading cards. They were a huge hit! Unfortunately, it was my first convention I've ever gone to and I accidentally handed them out wayyyy too fast and had people tracking me down all day and had to send them away empty handed. So to make up for it I've decided to publish the files for them here! Feel free to print them out and stick them on your own cards. If you end up playing any games with them I'd love to see. (Also included is the Tumblr University card that no one got because I accidentally left them behind in the U.S. lol)

(Download)

Business : Operates from a Bus :: Villainess : Operates from a Villa

No sorry boss, I didn't get a call back number. She just said something about a dragon soul and hung up

I was born with the dragon soul. you will not put me on hold

call me a patron of the ass library the way I'm checking out that butt

there was a cheat code in KotOR that made you run really fast and I always used that on Tatooine to make the back and forth across the dune sea faster and I just thought of it because I was listening to Yakety Sax and it's got that exact kind of energy

couldn't really find a video of that because all that comes up are speedruns but you just gotta imagine

found it!

You just need a few more doors, a dog, and the Scooby Doo theme.

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ day was yesterday. Today, it ends.

WIP Wednesday

It's somehow Wednesday again, and the Wednesday before I plan to post the first chapter of Shattering at the Helm, my Difanghua longfic (which I'm working on the last chapter of now and will be 200k when I'm done with it!), on Sunday Aug 9th, the 3 year anniversary of when the last episodes of Mysterious Lotus Casebook aired!

So, to celebrate, here's a short excerpt from one of the later chapters. Enjoy the sweetness with a dash of humor and a sprinkling of knives?

Di Feisheng nodded and let the medicine start to drag his mind to the bottom of the sea. He paused, frowning. There was something he was forgetting. Something important.

Something about the medicine.

Oh, right. Fuck. Xiangyi didn’t know what it would do to him.

He struggled back to the surface. “The medicine,” he mumbled, his mouth fighting him with every word. “Fucks with my mind. Gets me stuck in the past. Makes me see things. Say things.” He winced. “Forget things.” He managed to locate his own hand and squeezed what felt like Xiangyi’s knee under his palm. “Don’t want to forget I found you.”

if The Sopranos is so great why haven’t they made The Altos?

this post is just too deep, man