Category: Uncategorized

moltencalf:

I sincerely apologize for spamming you all with the Hamilton fanfic controversy, but it’s really giving me so much strength. It’s been a while since we’ve had the kind of scandal that only Tumblr can provide (like the person who robbed graves; the person who mailed their toe to another person so they could make a necklace of it; etc). This scandal is just so fucking good, you know? White American college girl pretends to be a nonbinary Chinese-Pakistani Muslim human-trafficking survivor AND their American WOC wife and they live in India??? And they suffered a miscarriage? And they both have HIV? All so she can scam people out of money and amass kudos on Archive of Our Own for her Hamilton HIV fanfic? And she does this for YEARS? And the person who uncovered it is doing it for revenge because the fake-HIV-fanfic writer made them delete a fanfic about Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Jefferson as cannibal mermaids performing oral sex and unironically accused them of gentrifying cannibalism??? I mean, this shit is fucking gold.

prokopetz:

Whether you’re writing for a video game or a tabletop game, the secret to effective lore is cow tools.

Back in 1982, Gary Larson drew the following panel for the newspaper comic The Far Side:

image

According to Larson, it was simply meant to be a faintly surreal joke about how cows would be bad at making tools; it intends no deeper commentary. However, in the decades since, it’s become by far the comic’s most asked-about panel. People want to know why cows are making tools, what aspect of society it’s commenting on, and most critically, they want to know what the tools are for. The one on the right kind of resembles a carpenter’s saw, which leads folks to believe that the other three must have some obvious function too, if only they could puzzle it out.

But they don’t. They’re just random shapes, and the comic as a whole was never intended to actually mean anything.

I’ve become convinced that that’s the real secret to effective worldbuilding in gaming media. Certainly, the “core” of the setting should make sense, but all the peripheral stuff surrounding it? Just throw in a bunch of incomprehensible bullshit seasoned with the occasional bit that almost makes sense, and people will seize on those bits and ratonalise all the rest of it for you – and what they come up with is generally going to be way more interesting than whatever your original plan was, if indeed you had one at all.

Then, once they’ve figured it all out, just nod sagely, congratulate their cleverness, and keep your damn mouth shut.