The Reading Room

« first day (4249 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (394 days later) »

verbose

12:49 AM

@Randal'Thor you should try American English. We conserve U's all the time

@BESW beezdub! We missed you, man.

BESW

1:41 AM

Hey. I don't do much on Stack these days, though I'm still in TRPG General Chat semi-regularly.

(Mostly just to plug indie games that the mainsite's never heard of.)

bobble

just checking - asking about how a cover relates to the book is on-topic, right?

verbose

2:15 AM

@bobble yes

@BESW Ah. I'm assuming these games are big in Guam but haven't caught on elsewhere yet?

Namaskaram, @Namaskaram

Namaskaram

Namaskaram @verbose :)

BESW

2:42 AM

@verbose No, TRPGs aren't a massive scene on Guam and new indie games aren't on a lot of peoples' radar. I'm following several indie scenes like RPGSEA and RPGLATAM on social media and discord, and helping amplify their efforts because I really like what they're doing and I think that their community/industry models are a lot healthier than the exploitative practices of big companies like Wizards and Paizo.

rpg.se is very focused on the consumer end of the hobby, with the exception of the development history of one particular franchise, and that leads to significant gaps in its institutional knowledge and its ability to understand what's happening in the hobby.

verbose

@BESW I see

@BESW oh yeah, I can understand why you would want to focus your efforts the way you are

BESW

I don't think that telling people in chat about this stuff is going to have any significant change on the rpg.se mainsite paradigm, but I know that individuals who see it benefit from the widened perspective and often find ways to engage with the hobby that are more fulfilling and better suited to their needs and the needs of their friends.

The joy of a plurality learning that there are games about being plural, made by pluralities; or someone with a bad LARP experience discovering that NordicLARP is normalizing mental safety and bleed management.

It's also inspired me to dabble in game design, writing things that I want to see in the world, or to discover what I think about something, or as a gift for a friend to say "I see you."

verbose

@BESW I remember reading that about NordicLARP. There was a story in the New Yorker? Or some other longform piece about a person who spent 10 days or so. It was pretty impressive.

Oh cool, now if only LitSE would inspire me to write a novel :D

BESW

Oh yeah, no, rpg.se had very little to do with my starting to write trpgs. It was finding design communities that were welcoming and supportive, respecting and sometimes sharing my values and goals without forcing conformity to their own standards. RPGSEA and Explorers Design in particular.

rpg.se, like lit.se, is a consumer-focused space, it's about engaging with the media that others make.

I've also started dabbling in fanfic, which I hadn't even considered for at least 15 years, again because of a supportive creative community; this time a TMBD community that recognizes the concept of "creating media" and "consuming media" is illusory, there's no creative cutoff point.

So, for example, when TMBD got me thinking about the social stratification and classism of mechanical mechanical augments in scifi as a way to explore the pressures of multicultural and biracial identities, I wrote a sestina about it and placed it in the scifi setting as a diegetic work for people to engage with from different perspectives.

(The Stack is designed to reward and incentivize activity on the Stack, and it only encourages exterior activity inasmuch as it grudgingly recognizes that experts have to get expertise from somewhere. There's an actual article about that from back in the day. So it's no surprise that neither of us have found engaging with the Stack a jumping-off point for extra-Stack activities.)

verbose

3:15 AM

Ah, I see. I would love to read your sestina, though I know nothing about RPG or SFF. I don't even know what TMBD is!

BESW

TMBD is The Murderbot Diaries, a series of short stories, novellas, and novels by Martha Wells. The first story, All Systems Red, was published in 2017. It's about a being made from human/machine parts specifically as a disposable and completely controllable security guard, and its (extremely grumpy, sarcastic, and anxiety-ridden) journey toward conscious self-agency through friends, found family, and reluctant self-reflection.

You'll need an AO3 account to read my fics; there's nonsense about training machine learning algorithms on AO3 content that's made fully public.

"Poetry installation: Untitled ('my friend always chooses the media')" by borth. This unlicensed installation is written in marker paint on the third stall in the leeward atrium restroom of the Landfall City Cultural Stadium (LCCS), and covers most of the stall’s interior walls. It is under consideration as a Protected Heritage Site. Viewing is currently by arrangement with the Landfall City Walking Tour.

verbose

3:54 AM

Thanks! I shall create an account, then.

3 hours later…

verbose

6:33 AM

I submitted my email for the account but AO3 says it won't be approved until April some time.

BESW

7:06 AM

Oh, right, AO3 is rate-limiting new users now.

If you tell me when you're about to read it, I'll unlock it for ya.

Bookworm

7:20 AM

Q: Why do all the three guys' names begin with M in Face?

In Benjamin Zephaniah's Face, the main character leads a "gang of three" at the beginning of the story. The three friends' names are alliteratively Martin, Mark, and Matthew. This led to some confusion among readers (see Goodreads reviews linked above), and a good author would know that having ch...

6 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

1:32 PM

I hope this late answer will get the upvotes it deserves. No disrespect to the top answer which is also well-researched, but this one really goes above and beyond to prove the point.

@BESW That's one of the great things about Puzzling SE (and pretty much nowhere else on the SE network AFAIA, except maybe the writing challenges on Writers SE meta): it encourages actual inventiveness and creation of new content on the site by the users, so there's some incredible original ideas there, not only engaging with already existing material like SFF/Lit/RPG/M&TV/etc.

b_jonas

2:04 PM

@Randal'Thor That would be even better if it were edited to be clear which numbers are yearly salaries and which ones are monthly (or weekly or hourly etc)

5 hours later…

Prince North Læraðr

7:00 PM

@Tsundoku After quite a nightmare to get back to the states, I have returned

1 hour later…

DLosc

8:05 PM

@Randal'Thor At its best, CodeGolf.SE is also this way, although most of the challenges there are pretty formulaic these days. We've debated for years over the line between "wonderfully creative" and "vague/underspecified/too subjective."

2 hours later…

Bookworm

9:48 PM

Q: Who is the protagonist and antagonist in the myth of Creation of Seasons by Dene?

I am a high school student who has to do a presentation on a myth. I have to explain the details of the myth such as the plot, conflict etc. It is very straightforward. Here is the myth: https://canadianfirstnation.weebly.com/sacred-stories.html#:~:text=The%20first%20people%20of,come%20to%20the%2...

character-analysis myths plot-element

verbose

10:16 PM

@BESW great, will do!

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Welcome home! I'm sorry the return was nightmarish. What happened>

DLosc

10:30 PM

@Bookworm I have thoughts, but I don't know whether I should post an answer because I don't have anything to back them up other than my own (mostly Eurocentric, amateur) reasoning.

verbose

10:47 PM

@DLosc I don't think questions of this nature need lots of citations to back them up. I gave an answer just now that doesn't cite any sources. Go ahead and add yours!

DLosc

My conclusion is essentially the same (the whole people are the protagonist and the bears are the antagonist), but I might write up some added thoughts as a supporting answer.

Prince North Læraðr

11:39 PM

@verbose We were supposed to leave and return by Sunday. We got back on Tuesday

Day 1 of trying to get back: Our flight from Milan got cancelled

verbose

oh ah. Being forced to spend additional time in Italy does indeed sound like torture. 🙃

Prince North Læraðr

Hold on, there's more, but I need to finish signing up for classes for next semester

« first day (4249 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (394 days later) »

all rooms