Been Playing Red Dead Redemption 2 Recently, And Boy Did I Miss This Amazing Game. My Horse Is Named

Happy Birthday jesus 🥳

it's my birthday, bitches, love meeeeeee

This is Puff.

I found him in a box at a vintage fair a couple days ago and in those couple days he has made me unreasonably happy every time I look at him.

So now you guys all get to bask in Puff's glory as well.

You're welcome.

Happy Halloween y'all! Hope anyone who reads this has a wonderful day! ✨️🎃✨️

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

jackdaw appreciation post

This is exactly why he's my favorite fantasy character of all time.

guys do you get it when i say aragorn is the definition of the words "gentle", "love", and "beauty". not in the conventional way, but i think aragorns existence itself defines those words. the ranger in him grins, as free as the winds and you see that chaos in him and yet you also feel his quiet strength that makes him uniquely aragorn. the whimsy of the elves as estel grew up to be the man now known as aragorn. gentle as he sings to the trees, sings to his horse.... his calloused hands cradling everything with such tenderness someone might wonder how he does that when it's been hardened by years of fighting with a sword and shouldering burdens.... aragorns love at the same time is something beyond either romantic or platonic, its the type of love that you just give out to the world. love built on courage, and kindness, and faith, and hope, as what his name estel means.... and to be able to love like that..... i think is what you call a being who embodies beauty.....

AND WE'RE LIVE~~~

Help us fund this funky softcover edition of Winter's series of short stories featuring queer knights: PRISM KNIGHTS!!

The stories are a bit of a 6 shades of Gay situation where each colour of the rainbow follows a different queer identity in the shape of knights and royals. They're a messy bunch. Here's our quick pitch of the series at cons:

Coqelicot -- a redux of Rapunzel featuring evil lesbian knights. Bronze -- a redux of The Princess & The Pea featuring a nonbinary, ace knight caught in a time loop. Lamplight -- a redux of Beauty & The Beast featuring a trans knight learning to love and forgive herself. Juniper -- a redux of Cinderella featuring a tragic gay knight running from his past and right into a blacksmith's arms~ Sapphire -- a redux of Sleeping Beauty featuring a polyam ship between a dragon (she/her), a knight (she/they) and a royal (they/them)~ Velvet -- a redux of 12 Princesses featuring a bisexual knight overcoming grief.

We're funding a softcover anthology version of the series and I get pretty much nothing but high praise from folks who have read (and reread???) these books time & time again! We'd love to get your support for the project this time around (or a bit of a share if its something you want to see even more of)!

Check it out here!

why have i not seen anyone talking about how fundamentally nihilist no man's sky is? like.

the entire story of the game revolves around the fact that the entire universe is ending soon and that you don't know how long you have left to live before everything you know and love is completely and utterly gone. and there is nothing anyone or anything can do to save it.

and yet the game tells you: go. explore. make the most of the time you have. discover new things and make friends and create wonders. not because they'll last, but because they won't. because the things you find and create are worth seeing even if no one will ever remember them.

and when the time comes? sit back with your buddy at the end of everything, pour yourself a drink, and toast to oblivion.

youre offline because you have an irl life and miss one load bearing post on here and all of a sudden you dont understand any of the vagues on your dash for the next week

Happy birthday to me!!