Traverse Fantasy

I drafted an (unused) rule that players can sacrifice their characters to let the rest of the crew escape whatever situation they’re in. It was requested by friends online and offline because they think of moments in adventure fiction where that sort of thing happens, and it’s epic and gets at your heartstrings. But it wasn’t used in practice. I think it’s because on some level it interrupts the ‘game’: not in the sense that it’s non-random necessarily, but in that it bypasses standard play procedure and imposes logic external to the situation. I don’t think we really want to cause Boromir moments as much as we want them to emerge from the game itself. Another problem I encountered pretty regularly while playing is that characters with spells and magic items use their inspiration pretty quickly, and then are restricted from doing anything for the rest of the session. I don’t necessarily want to increase how much inspiration someone has or make it easier to restore. You’re supposed to ...

Oh my God. That’s her. How about a double feature, baby? Black Athena It’s hard to explain to people how fucked the field of Classics is. There’s a guy who almost exclusively writes articles about how the Metamorphoses does not depict rape on the part of the gods and is actually about art and how it captures its object (uhh). There’s an article from I think 2015 which goes back and forth about whether we should see Greece/Rome as exceptional or not, because they obviously are (mhm), but it’s not woke to say that; and it’s written by a guy who argued that the Greek alphabet was invented (i.e., modified from Phoenician) specifically to record Homer’s poems. I was grateful to have had professors in college who weren’t freaks and saw that corner of the ancient world not as exceptional but as prototypical, and not because our “civilization” originates from them, but because they dealt with the same problems and questions as us—as did other people throughout the world at different points...

It’s not like I don’t have a VPN, but it’s not like I always have that shit on either. If BlueSky is going to comply in advance with the Texas government’s threat of internet censorship, I’m just not going to open it. Like, oh no, less social media for me! One less passive time sink. I’m not going to delete my account because I may log on occasionally but, besides that, you’ll know why I’ve gone quiet.

A specter is haunting elf-games… the specter of WORKER PLACEMENT! (Please, God, don't let people read this as if I was suggesting this was actually a manifesto and am not just playing to the theme.) Many years ago, I posted about an assumption of the original Dungeons & Dragons which was eventually forgotten: that characters are supposed to cooperate on difficult tasks and doing so is the only way the game makes sense . Think especially about opening doors or searching for secrets in a room. The likelihoods of those tasks are 2 / 6 or 1 / 6 for little folk, which means you don’t have a snowball’s chance of relying on the dice as an individual to get what you want. I think this, combined with the (fair!) advice that you should not allow infinite rerolls on a task, contributed partly to the so-called “old-school” play-style where dice are not your friend and you need to work outside the rules to get anywhere. That’s not OD&D , though. In OD&D , since three persons can...

I followed an independent tech journalist for a while because I don’t trust most big news firms to report on technology (or, really, most things) without falling in lockstep with the demands of the spectacular economy—that is, to manufacture demand because someone needs to buy all this shit to keep the lights on. And I liked this particular one since frankly I trust women in the field far more than men. Vocal fry has a disarming effect on me. But over the past few months, I noticed how she became increasingly cagey towards so-called artificial intelligence. Even in a video about how LLM firms are starting to target women, because the adoption of a technology by women is a sign of its adoption by wider society (which LLM firms had thus far failed to attain), she awkwardly gestured towards the poor average consumer who just uses LLMs to search and summarize online information, and that this is a genuine use-case which LLM firms prey upon (sure, why not?). I like to think of pop punk ban...

I’m considering this post to have been co-authored by my partner. She had seen the movie closer to when it had come out, and she told me it quite frustrated her because it felt like a movie gesturing towards a big statement—about school shootings in particular—without actually committing to a statement and doing something totally different instead by the end of it. All I had heard was that it involved children being turned into actual voudon-style zombies, and was surprised that what I thought was part and parcel with its premise was more like a twist out of left field. She didn’t spoil the whole thing in case I wanted to watch it later, but it took me a while because I am not super into horror movies (I would say except that now since horror has become the statement genre, but…), and I only just got around to it this weekend. Oh boy. So, it’s certainly trying to gesture towards school shootings, right? The narrator’s opening monologue clearly evokes the community trauma of a classroo...

Sorry in advance for shooting from the hip. This is a ramble. My friend Ènziramire shared with me a quote by some liberal economist or philosopher—can’t find it, so bear with me—that Marxist critics and politicians alike have all failed to consider the question of freedom, except for Marx himself. I said then that I would take the L on that because, yeah, [Mr. Liberal] got me there. But then we were talking about Reconstruction. There was a certain abolitionist, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who at first sided with the Radical Republicans in hastening emancipation, but during Reconstruction began siding with the Liberal Republicans because she believed that southerners should not have been deprived of their rights. Then the Compromise of 1877 hit, and Dickinson was so dismayed by the South’s reactionary barbarism that, even when she had gained the right to vote as a female citizen in 1919, she chose never to vote. It’s the basic bitch question of liberalism: how much freedom should be sa...