Writing fixit fic for problems I introduced myself.
Modern television season lengths being what they are, the classic "monster of the week" is really more a monster of the month now, and let me tell you, being the worst thing that's happened to a person all month is a lot more pressure than being the worst thing that's happened to a person all week.
Now imagine this; a monster shows up once a month, guaranteed. This month, your monster shows up on the very last day of the month. That's pretty inconvenient, you've spent all month anticipating some disaster.
But what if you fail to take care of it in a timely manner and now suddenly that's your monster for August too. Is it a bigger, badder monster? Does it get a rollover power up for existing in two months? Or even worse: your August monster spawns on the first day of the month and now you've got a monster BOGO sitch. They're gonna have to work so hard to live up to that kind of event
I totally understand the sentiment behind applying the "I want shorter games made by people who are paid more to work less" meme to tabletop RPGs, but speaking as an editor and project manager, convincing tabletop RPG authors to write less is often precisely the problem. Like, no, Steve, a special ability whose mechanical effect is "you get to reroll a die" doesn't need 275 words of flavour text. Put the worldbuilding bible down, Steve – don't make me get the garden hose.
Like, I get that nobody wants a tabletop RPG that reads like stereo instructions, but on the other hand, RPG manuals are a kind of technical reference, and people need to easily be able to look up what shit does. There exists a happy medium between the RPG-as-stereo-instructions and a sea of italics were half the time the name of an ability and its associated rules toy end up on different spreads because the associated lore forced a mid-sentence page break.
(At one point I tried to compromise with an author like "well, what if we keep the long version, but also include a bullet-pointed quick reference sheet?", and they were like "but I want people to have to read the microfiction". I had to let that one sit for a full 24 hours before I trusted myself to compose a sufficiently diplomatic response.)
#god yeah ttrpg books are often so poorly designed #trying to read vtm 5e and half the time an ability is split and there's a whole splash page between when the sentence starts and ends #tabletop rpg (via @friendlyfirestarter)
Mid-sentence breaks are bad enough by themselves (I don't even like to allow page breaks to fall mid section if I can help it – in a perfect world each spread is the start of a new subheading), but as far as I'm concerned there's a special circle of Hell reserved for games where a break falls mid sentence and there's a full-page table or illustration in between the two halves.
(I think the worst offender I ever encountered was a game I'll not name here which frequently allowed columnar sidebars in the outside margin to break across pages; i.e., you'd be reading along, see a pertinent sidebar, have to flip the page to read the second half of the sidebar, then flip back to resume reading the main text column from where you were diverted into reading the sidebar in the first place.)
I love it when Icelandic sagas attribute every microscopic inconvenience that befalls a hero on his journeys to “witchcraft”. It makes me picture a really bored witch just micromanaging the hell out of this one particular guy’s daily travails.
My favorite bit of Icelandic saga is when one dude’s house is invaded by not one, but two bands of zombies (because he pissed off a witch, obviously), which did such terrible zombie things as taking the best spots by the fire and throwing clods of dirt at each other.
The homeowner, being a fine upstanding Icelandic farmer/warrior type, did what you’d expect a Viking warrior to do when faced with invading zombies.
He sued them. In court. With lawyers. As one does.
Honestly, it’s kind of a relief that the column width and font size Pillowfort’s post editor have no obvious relationship with how posts are actually displayed. On Tumblr, the editor’s stylesheet matches the dashboard’s stylesheet just closely enough that line breaks usually fall in the same places, which causes my copy-editor instincts to rise from their slumber and groan “must… kill… orphans”.
whilomm
…please explain to me why killing orphans is apparently a copy editor instinct
Sometimes, the way a paragraph is laid out causes the final line to consist of a single word. Most style guides consider this a problem, if only because it’s an inefficient use of whitespace. If you’re on desktop, this paragraph is itself an example.
In typesetting jargon, this sort of dangling one-word line is sometimes called an “orphan”. The terminology isn’t well-defined, with some sources reserving the term “orphan” for cases where the dangling word appears by itself at the top of a page or column (i.e., such that the first line on the page dangles from the previous page’s final paragraph), while others define an “orphan” as the opposite scenario, where the first line of a paragraph appears alone because the rest of it crosses a page or column break. Discussing the precise definition of “orphan” is a good way to start a flamewar!
There are “orphans” and “widows.” One is a standalone word at the top of a page or column; one is a single line at the end of a page or column.
Wars have been fought over which is which. Much red ink spilled. Contracts broken. Publications recalled. Promotions refused. Tenures denied.
Microsoft places itself outside of the debate by having a “Widow/Orphan Control” option in its paragraph settings, without specifying which is which, and without the option of fixing one without the other.
That doesn’t even cover the half of it. Some mediums have no concept of paragraphs (e.g., comic book word balloons), no concept of page breaks (e.g., most forms of web publishing), or both, yet they still use the terms “orphans” and “widows” in their own medium-specific senses – and sometimes those senses cross-pollinate back to traditional print publishing. The fact that nobody can agree which end of the text is a “widow” and which end is an “orphan” is just icing on the cake!
In my capacity as a project manager I often have to coordinate communication between writers and editors, and I one of the more common exchanges I see goes something like this:
Editor: I don't think this word means what you think it means.
Writer: *pulls out a dictionary and points to, like, definition 3* Well ACTUALLY it can mean exactly what I think it means, because this dictionary says so.
The issue here is that the writer is technically correct, but they're (perhaps wilfully) overlooking the actual issue. Yes, words can have multiple definitions, but some usages are more common than others. If you're using a word in one of its uncommon senses, and you're doing so in a context where one of the more common senses is equally plausible, most of your readers are going to assume you meant the more common definition and come away with entirely the wrong idea.
I think a lot of the skepticism and derision toward the idea of "gifted kid burnout" stems from the fact that a lot of folks have no idea what the gifted track in most high schools actually looks like; they've got this mental image, possibly informed by popular media depictions, of "gifted kids" as a privileged group of students who get to go on extra field trips, monopolise the teachers' attention in class, and constantly be told how special they are, but who are otherwise treated identically to all the other kids.
In practice, the gifted track in most high schools – most North American high schools, at any rate – has the same problem as any other educational program: the need to adhere to published metrics. These programs exist for the benefit of students only insofar as those benefits can empirically be measured, which leads to several common outcomes:
- Students on the gifted track being afforded fewer choices regarding elective classes – often to the extent of having no choices at all – in order to stream the highest-performing students into the subjects that are most valuable in terms of boosting institutional metrics.
- Students on the gifted tracking receiving restricted access to educational resources such as tutoring because it's perceived as a waste of funding. In many cases, gifted students are not only denied access to tutoring, but expected to serve as volunteer tutors and teaching assistants themselves, effectively becoming a source of unpaid educational labour for the schools they attend.
- Students on the gifted track being assigned considerably more homework, often literally doubling their workload in an environment where homework loads are already routinely high enough that kids have difficulty finding time to eat and sleep, simply because you get more measurable academic performance data that way.
The upshot is that the gifted track is often less about fun perks and constant praise, and more about receiving less freedom, fewer resources, and heavier workloads than one's peers, getting strong-armed into providing unpaid labour to the school on top of it, and constantly being told one should be grateful for it – and that's without touching on the fact that the unspoken secondary purpose of many gifted programs is to serve as a quarantine for all the neurodivergent kids the school couldn't find an excuse to institutionalise or expel.
Like, shit, there's a reason kids on the gifted track exhibit elevated rates of alcoholism and substance abuse compared to general student populations. That doesn't arise in a vacuum!
(To be clear, I'm not saying that people graduating from high school and immediately having an existential crisis upon realising they're not special after all isn't a thing that happens, but in my experience that's more usually something that happens to the kids who were on the football team, and reframing it as a nerd culture thing is really weird.)
I personally suspect it was also specifically designed to weed out the kids who couldn't perform at the desired level for an indefinite period of time. If you can't dance like a monkey, what good are you? Gifted kid burnout not just as a symptom, but the system working as intended.
I wouldn't say that's generally the case, based on my familiarity with such programs.
Sure, in schools where performance on the gifted track is used to determine eligibility for certain types of scholarships, the curriculum being deliberately designed to produce a high burnout rate in order to weed out the "unworthy" is definitely a thing that's known to happen.
However, my read is that far more often it's a plain accident; the school administrators are just trying to save a few bucks by, for example, weaseling around child labour laws and using kids on the gifted track as unpaid TAs, and they aren't really thinking about what that's going to do to those kids' academic workloads.
The real reason fantasy and sci fi book covers painted by human artists are superior to their AI-generated counterparts is that when the AI gets everything wrong it's almost always a trivial exercise to figure out what prompt it was given and how it free-associated its way to the result, but a human artist will hit you with an elaborately laid out black-velvet rendering of a scene which absolutely does not happen in the book, populated by people who in spite of their distinctive and wildly eccentric designs are not identifiable as any specific character, and the challenge of puzzling out what the fuck they thought they were painting is often more interesting than the actual book.
The book: Paint-by-numbers Tolkienesque fantasy.
The cover artist: Fuck you, here's a cowboy on a spaceship.
Me: This is the happiest day of my life.
The cover art spec: A medieval warrior with a magic sword fights orcs in some ancient ruins.
The art-generating AI: I drew a medieval warrior with a magic sword fighting orcs in some ancient ruins.
The human artist: I drew a dude wearing a Viking-themed BDSM harness wielding a lightsabre against a horde of jacked lion-men amid the wreckage of a crashed alien starship under the light of a triple sun. Also, one of the lion-men is being eaten by a pterodactyl. I don't remember why.
The debate over brutalist archtecture is always a fun ride because the "for" and "against" sides each think they're having a completely different conversation. The pro-brutalism folks are out there talking about theories of functional aesthetics and the human condition, and the anti-brutalism folks are like "please stop putting buildings with flat concrete roofs in high-precipitation regions".
Who the hell keeps signing me up for the Foo Fighters newsletter?
I don’t even like the Foo Fighters. I’ve unsubscribed from this thing dozens of times.
I have been receiving it since 2006.
Mottherf— it happened again.
If this is a practical joke, I kind of have to admire the tenacity of whoever’s doing it – it’s been eleven years and counting at this point.
And again.
At this point I kind of hope it’s just a weirdly persistent technical or administrative issue on the part of the band’s social media firm, because if somebody I know really has been re-subscribing me every few months for the last fifteen years, nobody should have that kind of time on their hands!
Welcome to another year of being inexplicably unable to unsubscribe from the Foo Fighters newsletter.
Welp.
I feel I should clarify for those just joining us that this has been going on for longer than Tumblr has existed.
A thing that bothers me about wizard schools in popular media – outside of the magic-grade-school stuff, anyway – is that they're typically depicted as being basically magic universities, but their actual curricula and pedagogical approaches look much more like those of a technical institution. Like, buddy, that's not a wizard university, that's a wizard trade school. You can't just slap university student culture on top of trade school pedagogy. It doesn't work like that – the one emerges from the other!
"Well ACTUALLY wizards are" wizards are made up. They can be analogous to whatever real-world class or vocation the author wants. Wizard-school-as-university and wizard-school-as-technical-institute are both perfectly fine; what I am grumping about is wizard-school media that doesn't seem to have a clear picture of how different sorts of educational institutions actually operate.
Okay but now I really want to know what a Wizard technician would look like. Would he wear magical overalls with all kinds of reagents and magic tools sticking out of his numerous pockets?
A guy like that walks into your tower with a toothpick in his mouth, takes one look at your summoning circle and goes
“I see yer problem. You used chalk B12 instead of S3. B12 is only for transmutation circles. Gimme a sec I think I have a piece somewhere here.”
He fixes your circle, test summons an imp and goes.
“There ya go. Fit as a fiddle.”
"Which of your OCs would commit murder" is easy mode. I want to know which of your OCs is most likely to commit identity theft. I want to know which of your OCs is most likely to organise a Ponzi scheme. I want to know which of your OCs is most likely to engage in tax fraud.
Concept: animated workplace comedy about the servants of the Lord of Nightmares.
The servants are a mob of fancifully horrific nightmare creatures who go full out with their impossibly complicated backstories and their weird Jungian symbolism and their abstruse fourth-wall-bending skill-sets and their collective penchant for self-absorbed angst – but then the Lord of Nightmares is just a cackling cartoon villain with all the depth of a rain-puddle, who constantly gets their names wrong and thinks they're a bunch of bumbling buffoons because he doesn't realise that at least half the time his plans fail because his servants are deliberately sabotaging his pointless cruelty.
Just really play up the tonal incongruities which arise from the fact that the servants live in a 1990s Vertigo comic and their boss lives in a 1970s Saturday morning cartoon.
When a character is described as a "gremlin", one may be inclined to jump straight to "hyperviolent moron" or "riddlesome elf", but there's so much more to gremlindom than that. What about the character who's constantly saying unhinged shit with a perfectly straight face? What about the character who's outwardly reserved and methodical, but nobody else can figure out what principles guide the method? What about the character who's so unfazed by the extraordinary that if you didn't know better, you'd swear they were fucking with you? These, too, are gremlins.
"I have all this cool, complicated wordbuilding I want to use, but I don't want to slow the narrative to a crawl by constantly stopping to explain stuff" so just don't. Use made-up words without defining them. Let things pass without comment. Have the narrative voice remark on exceptions to the setting's norms without ever explicitly establishing what those norms are. Treat it like you're writing the fourth book in a series and the reader already knows all this shit, and if they can't figure it out from context, fuck 'em.
The reason fake Seinfeld dialogue is so easy to write is not only because each character has their own distinctive idiom, but also because each character is awful in their own unique way. In most sitcoms about awful people being awful to each other, their awfulness is kind of samey; in many cases you could literally reverse the roles in any given conversation and nothing would change – you might need to tweak the wording of the dialogue, sure, but the substance would be unaltered. Seinfeld isn't like that; you can look at any proposed indignity and immediately know "oh, George wouldn't do that – he'd disrespect your basic human dignity in a completely different way".
#i saw one where kramer was expressing shock like a decent person and i was like he would NOT do that (via @gracklesong)
Kramer would express shock like a decent person if and only if it's a setup for a gag where it turns out that he's indifferent to the horror of the situation and the thing he's actually dismayed at is some peripheral detail that nobody else would even remark upon.
One of my favourite micro-fandoms is folks who are preoccupied with fictional apartments. Trying to draw a floor plan of Sherlock Holmes and Watson's quarters that's consistent with every description of it ever provided by Arthur Conan Doyle (and largely succeeding, in spite of the fact that Doyle is so bad about consistency that Watson's war-wound keeps wandering), or exhaustively examining Jerry Seinfeld's pad from every available camera angle and concluding that the show has managed to depict a physically impossible space in spite of being obliged to construct an actual, physical set. If I ever write something involving an apartment, I 100% hope they call me out for fucking up the placement of the bathroom.
Every single narrator I write is technically unreliable at one or another point due to various reasons, but whenever I can, I try my best to make it impossible to discern where exactly this one is Not Right without hearing me ranting about plot irl
Knowledge of canonical sequences of events is going to help only in very specific situations. Ideally, it confuses further.