The Reading Room

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verbose

00:49

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

@BESW beezdub! We missed you, man.

BESW

01:41

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

02:15

@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

02:42

@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

03:15

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

03:54

Thanks! I shall create an account, then.

3 hours later…

verbose

06:33

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

BESW

07:06

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

07:20

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