@nekobakaz / nekobakaz.tumblr.com
the worst thing about writing or any kind of craft is having an idea you're really excited to make a reality but then you sit down and realize how much work it's going to take to get to that point and suddenly you feel like those two little gay guys in the mountain in the lord of the rings
do you remember how good it was in our head mr frodo
Not someone who mugs you, or kills someone while driving drunk, those are just criminals. I mean VILLAINS.
Not like trump or musk, who are... cartoonishly evil. And not sexy villains, not grandiose villains, not even satisfyingly two dimensional villains it is easy to hate unconditionally. The real villains.
I had a client who was a retired executive for one of the big oil companies, i think it was Shell or Chevron. Had a home just outside of San Francisco that was wall to wall floor to ceiling full of expensive art. Literally. I once accidentally knocked a painting off the wall because it was hanging at knee height at the corner of the stairs, and it had a little brass plaque on it, and i looked up the name of the artist and it was Monet's apprentice and son-in-law, who was apparently also a famous painter. He had an original Andy Warhol, which should have been a prize piece for anyone to showcase -- it was hanging in the bathroom. I swear to god this guy was using a Chihuly (famous glass sculptor) as a fruit bowl. And he was like, "idk my wife was the one who liked art"
I was intrigued by this guy, because in the circles i run this dude is The Enemy. right? Wealthy oil executive? But as my client, he was... like a sweet grandpa. A poor widower, a nice old man, anyone who knew him would have called him a sweetheart. He had a slightly bewildered air, a sort of gentle bumbling nature.
And the fact that he was both of these things, a Sweet Little Old Man and The Enemy, at the same time, seemed important and fascinating to me.
He reminded me of some antagonist from fiction, but i couldn't put my finger on who. And when i did it all made sense.
John Hammond.
probably one of the most realistic bad guys ever written.
If you've only ever seen the movie, this will need some explaining.
Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990, and i read it shortly thereafter. In the movie, the dinosaurs are the antagonists, which imo erases 50% of the point of the story.
book spoilers below.
In the book, John Hammond is the villain but it takes the reader like half the book to figure that out. Just like my client, John is a sweet old man who wants lovely things for people. He's a very sympathetic character. But as the book progresses, you start to see something about him.
He has an idea, and he's sure it's a good one. When someone else dies in pursuit of his dream, he doesn't think anything of it. When other people turn out to care about that, he brings in experts to evaluate the safety of his idea, and when they quickly tell him his idea is dangerous and needs to be put on hold, he ignores his own experts that he himself hired, because they are telling him that he is wrong, and he is sure he is right.
In his mind, he's a visionary, and nobody understands his vision. He is surrounded by naysayers. Several things have proven too difficult to do the best and safest way, so he has cut corners and taken shortcuts so he can keep moving forward with his plans, but he's sure it's fine. He refuses to hear any word of caution, because he believes he is being cautious enough, and he knows best, even though he has no background in any of the sciences or professions involved. He sends his own grandchildren out into a life-threatening situation because he is willfully ignorant of the danger he is creating.
THIS is like the real villains of the world. He doesn't want anyone to die. Far from it, he only wants good things for people! He's a sweet old man who loves his grandchildren. But he has money and power and refuses to hear that what he is doing is dangerous for everyone, even his own family.
I think he's possibly one of the most important villains ever written in popular fiction.
In the book, he is killed by a pack of the smallest, cutest, "least dangerous" dinosaurs, because a big part of why we read fiction is to see the villains face thematic justice. But like a cigarette CEO dying of lung cancer, his death does not stop his creation from spreading out into the world to continue to endanger everyone else.
Sweetheart of a grandfather. Wanted the best for everyone. Right up until what was best for everyone inconvenienced the pursuit of his own interests.
And my client was like that too. His wife had died, and his dog was now the love of his life, and she was this little old dog with silky hair in a hair cut that left long wispy bits on her lower legs. Certain plant materials were easily entangled in this hair and impossible to get out without pulling her hair which clearly hurt her. When i suggested he ask his groomer to trim her lower leg hair short to avoid this, he refused, saying he really liked her usual hair cut.
I emphasized that she was in pain after every walk due to the plant debris getting caught in her leg hair, and a simple trim could put an end to her daily painful removal of it, and he just frowned like i'd recommended he take a bath in pig shit and said "But she'll be ugly" and refused to talk about it anymore.
Sweet old man though. Everyone loved him.
it's always "immortals always lose the ones they love!" and never "this family has had this incredible, powerful, loving figure present through generations of their lineage, all because they are descended from someone the immortal loved long ago" and i think that's a shame!!
When the players are about to visit a new town, pre-generate several NPCs who fit the demographics of the town, but don't give them jobs. Your town is Mostly human, with a number of halflings and gnomes? Make a list that's mostly humans with some halflings and gnomes mixed in, with names that match the vibe you're going for and maybe the barest description + a quirk of some sort.
So the list would look something like this:
Then, when the players are like, "Can I go to the blacksmith?" You look at your list of NPCs and the one at the top is Ophelia Bracegurdle. She's your blacksmith now. Then they want to go to the tavern, where Norabecka is the innkeeper and Geraldofinio is a patron having a drink at the bar. He's using a straw so he doesn't mess up his mustache.
If they had gone to the inn first, Ophelia would have been the innkeeper with Norabecka as the patron, and then Geraldofinio should have been a blacksmith with some sort of mustache guard to keep the sparks off.
Making the list ahead of time doesn't take much time, and you can often re-use the people you never got to at the next town.
Your world will seem vibrant and interesting and like you have everything planned out.
Have fun!
Since this post has been getting a lot of notes, I would like to clarify a couple of points. This method has a few different benefits I would like people to note:
I've been in games where literally every NPC except the pretty barmaid is a man, and pretty much everyone is a light skinned dwarf, elf, or human. I've also been in games with awesome diverse characters who bring the game to life. I know I want to be a DM who creates the latter, and this system helps push back against our unconscious biases. When you have the list of everyone in the town, you can see ahead of time if you have a good gender ratio, whether your descriptions include any people with disabilities or people from different points of view.
Hey! Welcome! Since my silly garbage truck anglerfish post is getting me a bunch of attention right now, check out a post I'm actually proud of while you're here
feeling so many feelings about all of this
brennan just going right ahead and saying the quiet bit out loud here
"How do you write such realistic dialogue-" I TALK TO MYSELF. I TALK TO MYSELF AND I PRETEND I AM THE ONE SAYING THE LINE. LIKE SANITY IS SLOWLY SLIPPING FROM BETWEEN MY FINGERS WITH EVERY MEASLY WORD THEY TYPE OUT. THAT IS HOW.
i care so much about fictional morality and ethics but not in a lame ass "is this character/ship problematic" way. i'm cringe for other reasons.
i want to know what the court proceedings for a trial where the defendant claims mind control or possession look like. what's the worst crime you can commit in a world where people can cast spell of curse your entire bloodline over a careless insult at the farmer's market. how are magical prisoners treated. what kind of values would a society whose honour code is built on glory through battle and warmongering uphold. what's public opinion on the death penalty.
grabs your hand. come worldbuild with me.
Ursula le Guin
Have been thinking a lot lately about how, when a new technology emerges, people who were born after the shift have trouble picturing exactly what The Before was like (example, the fanfic writer who described the looping menu on a VHS tape), and even people who were there have a tendency to look back and go "Wow, that was... wild."
Today's topic: The landline. A lot of people still have them, but as it's not the only game in town, it's an entirely different thing now.
(Credit to @punk-de-l-escalier who I was talking to about this and made some contributions)
Since you can't do secondary bullet points, I'll break a couple of these items out to their own lists, starting with Answering Machines.
And, of course, there's the nightmare that was long-distance.
Next tell them about calling "collect" and the commercials it spawned in the 90s.
Oh, right.
If you needed to call someone from a payphone and didn't have the quarter, or you needed to call someone long distance and not pay for it yourself, you could place a collect call. Originally, this meant talking to the operator, who would call the person, ask if they would accept the charges on THEIR bill, and if they did, put the call through.
Eventually, this got automated-- you'd call a number, punch in the number you wanted to dial, and record your name, and a computer would call the other person.
Charges for a collect call were higher than if you paid them directly.
Even before this was automated, people had ways of getting around the charges-- "If I give my name as 'Charlie' it means I arrived okay, but if I give my name as 'Chuck', decline the charges and call me back." Once it was automated, you could actually give a two-second message.
Oh, yeah, and payphones. Until the early aughts, there were phones everywhere that you could put in coins and make a phone call. The phrase "It's your dime" is left over from when it cost ten cents, and continued well into the age where the call cost a quarter. (In that age, we developed "Here's a quarter. Call someone who cares.")
Payphones were everywhere and completely unmonitored, making them the method of choice for lots of illegal or just annoying activities, since you could trace the call to the phone and still have no idea who placed the call.
Originally, payphones were enclosed in a booth for privacy, but between the fact that these booths got used for non-phone activities-- sex, drugs, changing into superhero costumes*-- and the fact that, with such privacy, people would tie up the payphone for extended periods of times, the concept of the "phone booth" got redefined to what we would call a kiosk today.
*this was a staple of Superman comics. I can't remember which movie it was, but there was a scene where Clark pulled at his tie then suddenly realized it was a MODERN phone booth-- a kiosk-- and that wouldn't work.
And all of this is for later landlines, from the 60s-90s. Before then, things were different!
You can see the characters in the Andy Griffith show using the Party Line to eavesdrop on their neighbors conversations, and everyone there was aware that their neighbors might be listening in. Most were okay with it, but if it was something very private or important they would specifically tell anybody else on the line to hang up. They anticipated their neighbors being nosy and not announcing that they'd joined the call.
The neighbors could eavesdrop on each other without getting caught by putting their finger on the receiver before raising the phone off of it, and then slowly releasing it afterwards. This prevented the other people on the line from hearing the telltale click of them picking up the phone. In order to remain stealthy they would have to carefully and slowly lower the phone back down when hanging up as well.
Urban Fantasy concept: Minotaur as an emergent phenomenon. Any sufficiently labyrinthine structure, left unattended for long enough, has a chance of generating a minotaur, if the area is properly “primed” by any kind of mass “sacrificial” death; from there the minotaur self-perpetuates by murdering Urbex practitioners, health inspectors, and dumb teens looking for a hangout.
Premodern Minotaurs were generated at human sacrifice sites and perpetuated themselves due to, you know, already existing at human sacrifice central. Contemporary Minotaurs are generated at the sites of major industrial accidents resulting from negligence, such as the triangle shirtwaist fire, mine collapses, and the Chernobyl meltdown.
with the news Gumroad is going to be cracking down on nsfw content due to payment processor pressure, reminder that itch.io is mostly known for games but explicitly allows books/zines/etc too and many nsfw creators swear by them as a host for their paid works. (with the caveat that they do limit this to nsfw content that is fictional, not eg irl porn work, among other content requirements; the full policy is here.)
itch.io is especially noteworthy because their approach to creator/platform split is incredibly flexible; you as the creator choose the split. you can in fact choose to take 100% and give itch.io nothing, only losing out on any payment processor fees. obviously itch does need people to choose to share some revenue with them to continue going, but if you as a creator need to retain your profits to keep going, you can set it wherever you like and itch honours that. and as itch has a culture of people choosing to set it above zero because the community wants to keep it going, if you need to reduce their cut, it's an option!
itch isn't as popular as a platform to share non-game works so promoting your stuff elsewhere is important for visibility. but as someone who regularly buys both comics and books off there, it is very, very viable. here is a basic 101 guide:
now: itch uses the same payment processors that prompted the gumroad changes, and may at some point be challenged on the same grounds. it's not inherently a safe haven. but itch.io has historically made its commitment to working to keep nsfw content viable on its platform clear (look up the epic store apple lawsuit nonsense sometime; it didn’t result in a nsfw ban despite everything) and as of now is still small and niche enough they are not getting challenged the way larger, more generally popular sites like gumroad are; they are not trying to be a big commercially viable site, just stable enough to keep trucking, so they are less likely to be subject to that much scrutiny, or cave to it.
Changeling is available on Itch.io, and I set the payment split to be the same as the other, larger, platforms I publish on for exactly this reason.
The mere fact that they LET me set the payment split, means I'm much more willing to let them actually keep an appropriate portion.
Random writing thought: the best stories are often the ones that only you could have written — but also the ones that you could only write at this one moment.
I couldn't write All the Birds in the Sky from scratch now if I tried. But the me of 2013 couldn't have written The Prodigal Mother either.
When people ask if I'd change anything about a book I've already written, I want to explain to them that I'm not the person who wrote that book any longer, and even if I tried right now I'd write a different one. Everything you make as a writer* is a combination of what you want to say and who you are at the time you are telling that story.
*possibly also as an artist or as a human being
One of the best tips for writing descriptions of pain is actually a snippet I remember from a story where a character is given a host of colored pencils and asked to draw an egg.
The character says that there’s no white pencil. But you don’t need a white pencil to draw a white egg. We already know the egg is white. What we need to draw is the luminance of the yellow lamp and the reflection of the blue cloth and the shadows and the shading.
We know a broken bone hurts. We know a knife wound hurts. We know grief hurts. Show us what else it does.
You don’t need to describe the character in pain. You need to describe how the pain affects the character - how they’re unable to move, how they’re sweating, how they’re cold, how their muscles ache and their fingers tremble and their eyes prickle.
Draw around the egg. Write around the pain. And we will all be able to see the finished product.
Keep seeing that post where OP starts like 'Thinking about...grieving the undead' and then adds on about like. Real life situations where people have not died but have left your life and you would have reason to grieve them.
All respect, that's an important concept, but that is not what I am thinking about when I read 'grieving the undead'.
No need to keep this in the tags, you're completely right about this scenario!
the “bad guys” in hallmark movies end up always being the most respectful men ever.
because they will find out their girlfriend of 3 years (that they were about to propose to) went off to a random farm in minnesota, hours away from were the two of them built a life together, and she decided to just… stay there without even consulting him.
and then he decides to take a trip to make sure she’s okay, because this is generally alarming behavior, and then sees that she literally fell in love with her ex within one (1) week- and he wasn’t there, but you can TELL that they’ve made out a couple times.
and then she just strings him along for a few days, until fucking christmas eve, when she just breaks up with him and is like “i know we used to have the same values, but i’ve never loved you. mark makes me happier than you ever did. and you ONLY care about work, whereas i like christmas and fun, like a Good Person.”
and then, after finding out his entire relationship was a lie and he had his life turned upside down in a week and he got dumped on christmas, this guy’s just like “ok yeah that makes sense. i only wish you the best of happiness with mark. i hope you guys build a great life together in christmastreefarmville. thank you for everything.”
An AU where two Hallmark Christmas Bad Guys are both getting flights back to New York after being dumped by their respective Smalltown Blonde Girlfriends, and they bond over their shared experiences and fall in love in the departures lounge
@teashoesandhair your wish is my command :)
Probably, Levi should be more upset.
Probably he is still in shock. Right? He looks out of his taxi window (it's not technically a taxi, just some guy named Corey who offered him a ride to the airport, because Uber doesn't operate in fucking Tinyville, Bumfuck Middle-Of-Nowhere, Utah) and tracks water droplets racing each other down the glass, because of course it's raining, and his bad knee is killing him.
Levi sniffs and rubs at his eyes and then pulls out his phone and books a ticket back to New York, wincing as four hundred and twenty-six dollars are deducted from his bank account.
And, like, he should definitely be more upset.
He just got broken up with. He was engaged, for God's sake. A four-year relationship… over. Just like that.
Corey says, "Ten minutes to the station."
I wanted to do more, but this is all I had time for:)
the “bad guys” in hallmark movies end up always being the most respectful men ever.
because they will find out their girlfriend of 3 years (that they were about to propose to) went off to a random farm in minnesota, hours away from were the two of them built a life together, and she decided to just… stay there without even consulting him.
and then he decides to take a trip to make sure she’s okay, because this is generally alarming behavior, and then sees that she literally fell in love with her ex within one (1) week- and he wasn’t there, but you can TELL that they’ve made out a couple times.
and then she just strings him along for a few days, until fucking christmas eve, when she just breaks up with him and is like “i know we used to have the same values, but i’ve never loved you. mark makes me happier than you ever did. and you ONLY care about work, whereas i like christmas and fun, like a Good Person.”
and then, after finding out his entire relationship was a lie and he had his life turned upside down in a week and he got dumped on christmas, this guy’s just like “ok yeah that makes sense. i only wish you the best of happiness with mark. i hope you guys build a great life together in christmastreefarmville. thank you for everything.”
An AU where two Hallmark Christmas Bad Guys are both getting flights back to New York after being dumped by their respective Smalltown Blonde Girlfriends, and they bond over their shared experiences and fall in love in the departures lounge
@teashoesandhair your wish is my command :)
Probably, Levi should be more upset.
Probably he is still in shock. Right? He looks out of his taxi window (it's not technically a taxi, just some guy named Corey who offered him a ride to the airport, because Uber doesn't operate in fucking Tinyville, Bumfuck Middle-Of-Nowhere, Utah) and tracks water droplets racing each other down the glass, because of course it's raining, and his bad knee is killing him.
Levi sniffs and rubs at his eyes and then pulls out his phone and books a ticket back to New York, wincing as four hundred and twenty-six dollars are deducted from his bank account.
And, like, he should definitely be more upset.
He just got broken up with. He was engaged, for God's sake. A four-year relationship… over. Just like that.
Corey says, "Ten minutes to the station."
I wanted to do more, but this is all I had time for:)
oh you're in a horror film/book and your phone died/has no bars? how boring. I think phones in horror SHOULD work. they should ding only to have the protagonist check and find nothing. they should get calls from somebody you don't know but is still somehow in your contacts. google maps should lead you to one place, no matter what address you type in.
phones are such a big part of our daily lives, removing them from horror removes the horror from our experience. what if the horror felt like it could happen to you, right here, right now? what if it felt like it was already happening?
call 911 and something that is definitely not a person picks up.
call 911 and get an operator only for the call to become increasingly weirder and more sinister until you realize that whatever picked up is not there to help.
text messages from someone who's dead. voicemails that sound like dead air until you turn the volume all the way up.
emergency alerts for weather that doesn't happen on earth.
Your phone rings - but it's your phone number on the screen. You answer it, but all you hear is heavy, laboured breathing. You go to say something, only to hear your voice on the other end tell you "It's too late," and hang up.
You get a message from a number you don't recognise. It's a picture of you from behind. You turn and see there's nobody there. When you look back at your phone, you see the sender has sent another text - "Sorry, wrong number."
Your phone rings - it's a private number. You answer it, only to feel the sensation of something licking your ear.
You wake up to find a voicemail. You play it back, only to hear an autotuned version of your own voice reciting a Bible passage - 1 Peter 2: 18-20.
You get an emergency alert. It says "I'm sorry."
every time you try to call anyone, the version of you that didn't get trapped in the hell maze picks up instead, and she's getting increasingly scared and angry to hear from you
Or have it work perfectly fine! You call 911 the operator answers, they take your call seriously, they says they’ll send help but based on location it will take aprox 90 min (movie duration) so through the entire movie we see protagonist look down at the clock on his phone, just counting down the minutes as they try to survive until help arrives, make the very last scene the police lights.
