And I think having spaces for all that is good. I think that building a world at different speeds and focal lengths is necessary. I like doing it. I wish we had more time for Patchwork and better venues for hypertext and metawork, but we live in a sprint society and are poorer for it.

We’re meant to have different gears, and part of the reason that modern culture moves anxiously, exhaustingly fast is because we’re only given the one gear: sprint.

GW episodes are 800m Dashes. Patchwork is meant to fill those shorter sprint phases. Spinning stuff together in the gc is the Mile.

I think part of why TikTok is hyper-memetic is because the shortform content business model relies on this churn with no market to parlay that into a desirable long-form.

I think Asimov is talking about the same thing, and while novels are dominant because they create a bigger ROI for publishers, literary genera evolve and diverge in their short-form, which in turn yield headier, more interesting novels.

The SF short story lets you dick around with An Idea. Not a bunch of ideas, but break off one piece and ✨do something✨ with it.

“The Belonging Kind” is about the alienation of social adaptation. Spider Robinson’s “The Time Traveler” is about the world changing while you were stuck in your own head.

I think this is the real fun of being a professional artist who can make a living doing short pieces between novels. In the intro to the short story collection *Burning Chrome*, Gibson talks about an ideal form of a genera, saying that for Rock-n-Roll, it was the 45 - it lets rockers do their thing.

What work of non-fiction expresses how you world build?

For me, it’s Dan Olson’s 2021 polemic against NFTs *Line Goes Up* for how it expresses the interlocking social and political conditions that created the quagmire while dragging the villains as pathetic losers who shouldn’t have power.

Given the state of the world at the time, the fact WWI happened at all is not surprising or unlikely. The comedy of errors that made up the Assignation of Archduke Ferdinand is, however, absurd.

Guy who opens for comedians who’s act is ominously implying things about the jokes to come and they call him the Harharbinger.

Gang of herb-themed wizards where you’ve got your Thyme Lord, The Sage of Sage, Parsleydigitator, and Rosemary, who’s called Rosemary because that’s all she asked to be called and are you going to argue with a witch called Rosemary just because she asked to be called that?

You’re not Picasso or Tolkien *yet*. Learning the rules will help get you in that direction.

And there’s something to tossing the rules out and doing what’s in your heart, projecting your mess out into the world, but you’re not entitled to love for it. You’ll have to soak that rejection.

Nobody can outrun the devil forever, but Old Scratch is gunna choke on my dust until at least tomorrow morning.

Tyler is a piece of shit because he’s trying to find a lane in expressing masculinity and dominance, and it just doesn’t work for him. I think part of why seeing him just get bodied by Mei is satisfying to me is because it puts him closer to his place, where he might find himself.

Her mom is desperate to be affectionate, but as symbolized by how big her panda is, but look at *her* mother. She wants to be passionate and expressive, but feels she ought to be reserved and professional, and the stress of that is why she stalks her daughter and wrecks the stadium.

Something Turning Red depicts with a deft amount of subtlety is now not being allowed to be yourself makes you a worse person. Not a bad person, but a less good one.

We’re sympathetic to Mei lying to her parents, but that’s not good, and the stress of that is part of why it breaks bad at the party.

That kid Tyler from Turning Red deserved his licks as much as Myrtle from Lilo and Stitch.

Chase is also just fucking boring as a character. They just left that slate blank, a serious and dutiful guy, which is also copaganda because that’s a mask cops wear. It’s their customer service face.

There’s a particularly egregious example where they feel the need to have everyone riding in Chase’s police boat, which is crazy because Zuma is right fucking there and generally has nothing to do because how often is, ‘Guy with a boat,’ a good super power? Not often, but necessary when needed.

To zoom in for a critique, it gets cleared up a bit as the series goes on, but in early episodes it becomes clear that involving Chase, the cop dog, is mandatory, and you can see the writing strain to come up with bullshit for him to do. He has the widest array of tools, and none of them feel copish

Two points:

1. This is very easy to cut around by not telling stories where people have sex, though they can also trigger on non-sexual intimacy but this is not the point moving on.

2. The sex move for The Show - a rock-star type character - is “If you and another character have sex, sweet.” A++

Hell yeah let’s goooooooooooo!!

And if it is broke, it’s probably that pompous dolt Rogal Dorn’s fault.

Domino effect .meme Little domino: a guy gives a girl a cool rock Big domino: the monarchy is dissolved

Actual @gamewoven.bsky.social lore:

Fantasy No. 1 For two to four players and game master Foreword This text is given in earnest. With any hope this foreword will be sufficient context for the game to follow which is written in an absolute tradition. To this end, the game is presented without setting, programmatic, or narrative elements. Should such an element appear despite all efforts it is the role of the table to interpret and replace as they see fit. Because this text is built of raw mechanics devoid of input from their designer, the best outcome for any table is to attempt to follow and interpret these mechanics with care - as the experience of learning the game is considered an element of play.

Chat is this anything?

I pointed him in the direction of the alchemical circle and I’m very proud of that.

You also need a straight edge of some kind and, he’s nixed my ideas that would have required a protractor and compass, but maybe someday.

In a critique of Republic, Bophadese - one of Plato’s contemporaries - compared debates with intellects so confident that they were unlikely to be persuaded away from bad options to men who kept almonds in their cheeks, insisting it was equally as nourishing as chewing and swallowing the almonds 🧵

Mocking it doesn’t help the nut cheeks because shame is likely to drive them deeper, but it might keep other people from taking it seriously, and that’s ok. You do just kind of have to let them starve, and/or present them with better food and hope they come around.

They do need to be contended with, but direct opposition is kind of mud wrestling with a pig; you can’t win because the fight is the point, and fighting rhetorically legitimizes their presented idea by letting it soak up time. It also calls to mind the recent Birthright Citizenship SCOTUS case.

I recon it’s a useful concept to have in terms of a type of guy it’s not useful to argue with, especially online.

Kind of synthesizing concepts from Dan Olsen’s In Search of a Flat Earth and FD Signifier’s recent B-Side about the 4 Tiers of Black MAGA, it’s folks with a dumb idea to be contrarian.

All this is to say, if you hear someone talking absolute nonsense, you don’t really need to correct them, just tell them to go suck on Bophades Nuts.

(5/5)