Traverse Fantasy

With respect to my last blog , I want to clarify: I am not a medical student. I know many medical students, but I'm not one. I'm just nosy and vengeful. Either you know me, or you don't. Don't worry about it. Let me think of a way to 'prove that'. Hmm. I don't think doctors, or anyone, should make more than $100,000 in salary. Patients, besides being sucked dry by parasitical insurance firms, suffer from healthcare being privatized and thus driven by shareholders and doctor-capitalists. The way certain doctors treat nurses disgusts me, due to the employer-employee and/or superior-subordinate relationship they have. I appreciate people who enter the medical field to serve others, while I don't respect people who enter the medical field as a business venture—which is a lot of people, since the schools are also business ventures which concentrate access in the hands of nepo babies and other in-groups. I think these dynamics are responsible for the gunner c...

Before I say anything else, I want everyone to know that Joshua E. Lewis is a terrible human being who (allegedly): Got dropped from his med school for cheating on his exams with a burner phone he left in the restroom and whose ringer he forgot to turn off because he's (allegedly) really stupid. Misused travel funds meant for medical conferences to travel to vacation hotspots like New York City, Las Vegas, and others. Recruited gullible first-year students, who wanted in on his prolific reputation, to mass-publish slop articles with help from generative AI. Told his girlfriend that he was checking himself into a mental hospital while just exercising at the gym, and also cheated on his girlfriend with a Grindr account. Edited screenshots of conversations over text with another student whom he reported for harassment. Lied about both of his parents being plastic surgeons to garner influence on Instagram and real life. But this isn't about Joshua E. Lewis. This is about every au...

Happy Holidays! It's funny writing this after having de-emphasized my presence here over the past year as I had intended. The thing is, having a blog is nice to vomit one's thoughts under the pretense that you are writing for an audience, even if you're not writing for an audience at all. Why not start a diary? Because diaries are lonely. Where's the Other? Hobbies I've committed myself to three projects, in addition to whatever time I spend reading books or baking or whatever else. My brain seems to work in bursts, so having these activities helps me easily find something to do after burning myself out on what I had been doing. The Brimstone Gospel: Biblical epic about women whose passion and loathing drives them toward apocalypse and self-annihilation, guided by desires and destinies beyond their own reckoning. Inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses , it attempts to retell, reframe, and reinterpret the Christian canon by casting politics through erotics and vice ve...

I've been working in a pride org at work to advocate for a better understanding of health benefits for trans people and more representative, humane language for trans people in general. I've been blessed to not have had to deal with much bullshit in my life, but nowhere have I dealt with as much bullshit than from: consultancy firms who ask for millions of dollars to misrepresent trans people's experiences and throw them under the bus for political convenience; HR demons who invoke those consultancy firms to speak over actual trans voices; and gay people who already got their bag and want to retire to drag brunch for ever and ever, amen. I'm tired of this shit. I'm irritated that conservatives, liberals, and leftists alike willfully misunderstand our experiences. I'm angry that this 'misunderstanding' is the ideological foundation of how society mistreats trans people . Correcting the misunderstanding will not correct the mistreatment; rather, the misund...

Thank y'all so much for y'all's interest in the last one! Will respond when I can, just preparing for a (nice) busy week and weekend :) in any case, yep... they're back ! Been using them. Just slightly different. Bracket Hearts Power Aptitude Defense Speed Grunt 2 1 +1 11 3 Elite 4 2 +2 12 4 Champ 8 3 +4 14 5 Boss 16 4 +8 18 6 Minion* 1 1 +0 10 2 To translate each of the columns: Hearts: How much damage they can take. Power: How much damage they can deal per turn, possibly split into multiple attacks or spent on special effects. Aptitude: Attack bonus, or more generally for D20 checks if applicable. Defense: Roll against for D20 checks to attack. Speed: Initiative score to beat . Then, you can quickly build encounters by spending heart budgets on opponents (hold off on minions): Difficulty Heart Budget Easy 1/PC Medium 2/PC Hard 3/PC Deadly 4/PC Having used this to plan sessions an...

Procedure? I hardly know her! Harharharharhar. Travel, exploration, combat. That's what we're talking about. Wait, what's this? DISCLAIMER The author wrote this article out of her interest in this hobby, and also to synthesize this with her other interests in literary, mathematical, or political theory . Any criticism in this article was written in pursuit of that interest, and it is not intended as ammunition in factional disputes nor as a personal denouncement of the individuals whose works are being criticized. The author also has no interest in petty arguments on any topics discussed in this article. What the fuck? Anyway. Art by Norn Noszka !! Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah The word ‘procedure’ is interesting in that became a sort of buzzword for marketing rulebooks without people necessarily agreeing on what the word meant or referred to. Some held the notion that ‘procedure’ referred to the discursive, non-written structures that which encode how a table interacts wit...

Okay so basically last Friday I was going to post about play procedures—the basic bitch shit for travel, exploration, and combat—but then I was like busy with nice real life things and didn't really care enough to post here. The truth is I wanted to participate in a blog bandwagon about economy shit just because I think it's fun? And the posts up until now were just to make it look like a coincidence? But again I don't really care enough to put the effort in to do that. I just care enough to write into the void and hit "publish". That being said, I am really happy with what I have going on with this. The campaign's goals aren't super oriented around treasure or money or stuff like that, but I think of it as like when you're playing Fall Guys (yeah) and you get special currency to spend on fun useless things. In this case, you don't really spend it on useless things, but it just feels fun and that’s more the point of it than anything else. Here...