blackwingedheaven

[blackwingedheaven]

[blackwingedheaven]

literally my favorite type of tweet

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Could I ask where dungeons of the kind in D&D came about? Like they’re a cultural icon now, but I don’t understand their origins very well

The dungeon crawl is a pretty standard trope in 1960s and 1970s sword and sorcery fiction and its near ancestors. A lot of ink has been spilled about how Dungeons & Dragons has become so creatively insular that it's basically emulating itself, and while there's some truth to that, the claim that dungeon crawls are part of that is a misconception. That bit is lifted more or less directly from the contemporary literature which original flavour D&D was inspired by – modern commentators tend to miss that because nobody reads sword and sorcery anymore. If you look at Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Robert Howard, you'll see dungeon crawls aplenty; Conan the Barbarian* went on not a few!

Of course, that just kicks the can down the road a bit: if Dungeons & Dragons got the dungeon crawl from 1960s and 1970s sword and sorcery fiction, where did they get it from? That's a question I'm less qualified to address, since literary history isn't my area. I know there are several students of early to mid 20th Century popular fiction following this blog, though; perhaps a qualified party can weigh in?

* Yes, I'm aware that Conan the Barbarian was 1930s; I'm including him in the "near ancestors" of 1960s sword and sorcery fiction

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Men like to believe theyd be great in apocalypse scenarios but they dont even know how to sew

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Someone recently posted about how Tumblr clout doesn't actually translate into anything in real life, it just means X amount of people read your post, so what's the point?

I mean besides the fact that some people actually use their posts for good, like activism and combating misinformation, there's just posting for the sake of posting which is its own reward.

But also, sometimes you'll make an impression with your fucked up posting that someone decides to send you a DM to talk to you about elves or a podcast or a podcast about elves or something and now you've made a new best friend :)

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Man I love vine and I’m gonna miss it! I’m totally jumping on the bandwagon but hey why not? Here is some of my favs!

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excuse me im need a bite of whotever youm are eatinge pls

pls give me a bite righte neow pls

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Weird Al is insanely talented, and also one of the most genuinely decent, kind, and nice people in the industry.

The thing re Weird Al that I think is worth recognizing is illustrated by the Spike Jones Jr quote “One of the things that people don’t realize about Dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.“ It’s like really good parody has to do it all backwards and in heels, and Weird Al gets in there and counts the syllables and pours over the phrasing and word choices so that it all sounds precisely like the original, and then re-records the song, acknowledging the tiniest details of the recording, and also makes it a highly detailed spoof of an adjacent and absurdly unrelated piece of popular culture. I think really good parody has a love for the source materiel that’s impossible to fake. It takes real musicianship (or craft) to do and it usually gets tossed aside as “novelty” recording.

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