Traverse Fantasy

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...

Alright, my babies. We need to talk about Attack on Titan . I’m not an anime head but, in 2013, the same friends who showed me Sword Art Online also showed me Attack on Titan which was that year’s big anime. I watched it, and so did a lot of others—cultural phenomenon—and I feel like a lot of us forgot about it (or, like me, just don’t follow anime bullshit) when the second and third seasons came out years later from 2017 to 2019. Ruben Ferdinand, months before the premiere of the third season in 2018, published a blog post about the story’s fascist aesthetics , as if the author was drip-feeding Hitler particles to his audience. A lot of us took it at face value, in my case because I wasn’t watching the rest of the show and the first season was already fascist enough in hindsight, with or without the analysis submitted by Ferdinand. Polygon picked up the baton in 2019 and extended Ferdinand’s analysis to the twist ending of the third season : that Eren’s father Grisha is a neo-fascis...

I've finally posted an updated version of my homebrew heartbreaker  Cinco!  having accepted that it is a living document and that there will always be gaps whether because I'm still working on a thing or because I wanted extra space in case it came useful later. I've been posting a lot lately about changes I've made while playing or thinking about stuff that's bothered me while playing; I may have missed something below: Lackey Rules Conversations Ancestry Feats Experience Feats Stationery & Maps   Have I mentioned that travel now sees the entire crew allocate their efforts to different tasks, instead of it being one person's turn to dictate what happens in a leg of travel? Similar to Ty's worker placement approach to skill challenges , except it's binary I guess. Oh, or how the document is A4 now so I can resize it and print it on Lulu as an A4 booklet? I've also switched to physical item cards totally separate from the character sheet, so the l...

Last night, Instagram showed me a reel by @roseistheart : btw, the b*blical Adam & Eve story was taken from the ancient Sumerian myth, the tale of Enki & Ninhursag around 2000 BCE. the man eats the forbidden fruit and was told NOT to by the goddess. they flipped it around when adding it to abr*hamic books to push a patriarchal agenda, turning powerful goddesses & sacred serpents into villains, and a goddess who HEALED his rib into a woman made from his rib instead. Eve wasn’t the problem or secondary. she was the *superior* main character. Rose links to a World History Encyclopedia article about the goddess Ninhursag which goes into more detail about her myth with the god Enki and its confluence with the myth found in Genesis 2–3. The former is a very interesting one. If I may paraphrase the article: Enki fucks Ninhursag who gives birth to Ninsar; then Enki fucks Ninsar who gives birth to Ninkurra; then Enki fucks Ninkurra who gives birth to Uttu; then Enki fucks Ut...

I got new rules, I count 'em. I liked my existing rules for conversations, being basically the same as in D&D Fifth Edition , but I felt like they lacked structure up to the final roll. I kept hearing about how intuitive the rules from Draw Steel were, but the team at MCDM are such maximalist rules writers that my eyes glazed over the constant weighing of situational permutations on the page—most rulebooks should really be like 70% shorter, huh? So I didn’t fully get them until I watched my queen  Ginny Di’s video where she boiled down the structure in a way that could be extended into principles beyond Draw Steel ’s verbose mechanic framework. It’s basically like: We should have an idea of where the NPC already stands. The goal of negotiation is to shift the NPC’s perspective towards yours. At some point, you have to stop pushing the question. So rather than having a unstructured conversation leading up to a climatic roll where the outcome is finally decided—not t...