Traverse Fantasy

Gee, it sure is boring around here— 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. —aw. Okay. Ugh. I hate when that happens. One summer in college, I took an online STEM Ethics course because it’s the sort of thing required by the school to be like, “We’re not just training anti-social freaks.” Because I’m a different kind of freak, obviously, I wrote my final as a critique of the course’s overarching ideological framework. Stakeholder theory is an approach to business management that a firm must not only consider shareholders in its decision-making, b...

Been having a stressful time lately. These are things I’ve read or seen lately and have had thoughts about (if short). Just need to exorcise. Primetime (2026) by Lance Oppenheim Was okay. Robert Pattinson is fun. I keep confusing Skyler Gisondo with Nicholas Braun. It frustrates me that people keep interpreting it as being solely about how Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator faltered by making a spectacle out of (attempted) sexual violence; like that is one thematic axis, but the other equally or more significant axis is about powerful people deflecting from their abuses by pointing at others’ over whom they wield control. Not only is Chris Hansen using his pursuit of justice to deflect from his own extramarital affair, but Bill Conradt (the local Texas politician who committed suicide as he was about to be raided on the show) is depicted as weaponizing anti-pervert politics the same way. Some months ago, I bought shorts from the Bummer Shop, and accidentally received the wrong pair...

There have been a lot of really thoughtful takes on magic lately, centering on significant ritualistic interactions (or even/especially transactions) with powerful beings—and I had just even gestured towards this being an angle for a tabletop Pokémon adaptation. Sorry to say that this one isn’t going to be particularly thoughtful. I realized that besides being sucky when my players run out of inspiration and can’t do magic anymore—for which my special game mommy inspiration has worked well—it feels weird for inspiration to work differently for magic than for the typical case. Magic is just fundamentally a tool, right? Tools make impossible tasks possible, and tasks already possible more so. I already have a rule that using an arcana (item which stands in for some D&D spell or school) as a normal weapon, basically like a cantrip, costs the user no inspiration; and rolling 20+ already gives a free enhancement (like casting at range or targeting all enemies in one area of effect). ...

We love to chase the idea of tabletop Pokémon, or Tablemon if you will. It’s like Pokémon but with your imagination. Who doesn’t want to escape the pixely grid of the video games (or the nasty-looking worlds of all the 3D ones except Arceus my beloved), step between those two-by-two trees blocking the world, and do fun things with those simultaneously cute/cool/lame creatures that only the realm of language can allow? Many such cases, of people trying to capture that feeling or outright adapting Pokémon (in its setting or even its rules) to a tabletop format. It just unfortunately never really pans out. I think this is because Pokémon is structurally difficult for a cooperative game. Pokémon is generically speaking a classical JRPG: you as the player control a party of characters in various situations (especially turn-based combat). Where Pokémon differs from similar games in its genre is that the player themselves has a representative outside of the party of characters: the Pokémon ...

I think I was halfway through a five-hour drive when my mind, keeping itself awake, took a strange train of thought. I’ve joked over the years (maybe not on this blog, but…) that if some consider themselves pro-life and others pro-choice, then Gxd might just be anti-life, in the sense of “fuck them kids”. Like yes, Gxd is said to know (certain) people before they are born and to even form them in the womb; but even besides (just like Adam) the point of personhood seeming to when his breath first enters them, and even besides the Torah considering the death of a fetus to be a crime of property destruction rather than murder, Gxd seems to be just fine killing people of any age cohort including adolescents, children, and infants. No judgment here. Walk with me. I wondered, then, about the plague on the firstborn in Egypt. Now, I do disagree with how most media depict the myth as specifically targeting children—since a firstborn son here is either a present or future patriarch, someone wh...

I’ve been talking with my friends and partner about this sort of thing. Often I’m not even the one to bring it up. There’s a preponderance of hustlers lately and it sucks seeing both suckers and bad-faith agents eating it up. These are some thoughts I’ve gathered from my conversations as well as from past experiences. Personal Persecution Hustlers often express paranoia that they are being personally persecuted by an institution, an abstract force, or some vague agent. It’s one thing if you’re fucking Fred Hampton and you’re doing work which materially (like, actually) threatens the order of things in a meaningful way. The feds aren’t coming for internet microcelebrities unless they were to post stupid shit which the feds always look into regardless of the poster’s online following. Usually the hustler’s apparent reaction doesn’t make sense given the stakes of the persecution. If the feds are actually coming for you, why post that online? Or if there was a knife-wielding psycho on ca...

From the hip. I’ve noticed for a few months that I’ve distanced myself from the label “socialist” and have even started using it to refer to some political position besides my own. I think for a while I’ve been bothered by the idea that there are true or false socialists, that Nazis and similar sorts appropriated the label to deceive an idiot general audience for whom ‘true’ socialism was actually attractive—but still, for some reason, couldn’t distinguish one from the other. It’s hard to square this narrative with the fact that fascism not only emerges from socialist currents such as syndicalism, but that these currents (and their associated tendencies like antisemitism and national chauvinism) predate Marxist “scientific socialism” and persisted throughout the history of workers’ movements. It’s not difficult to see why: workers’ own immediate interests are as sellers of labor-power, and the most common form of workers’ organizations function as cartels regulating the sale of that p...