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I will always reblog Sasha Racket moodboards.

rusty quill gaming - sasha racket

(… again)

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quoting RQG to express how languages are bad and evil??

Stumbled upon an amusing little moment while relistening to some random RQG episodes. I’m totally using the phrase ‘Where is the vernacular railway?’ (brought to us by Alex as an otherwise French-exclusively speaking gnome from ep.57) to describe how bad I am at speaking certain languages.

‘So you had Latin in university, didn’t you? Can you say something in Latin?’ ‘Well I can ask you where the nearest horse cart stop is’. ‘Sorry?’ ‘Oh wait, I can’t. I don’t know how to turn it into a question’.   

‘So you had studied Ukrainian?’ ‘Yep. You interested in trains?.. It’ll still be mostly in Russian though’.

‘So you are learning German?’ ‘Yes, and I can tell you all about how trains work, but I don’t know what a ticket is’.

And while my German is a tiny bit better than all the others mentioned, the principle is sadly the same. The vernacular railway principle, where you know one specific phrase or one weirdly specific topic, but can’t understand anything unrelated to it. And in my experience this kind of thing happens way more often than a solid beginner level of speaking a language. Rusty Quill Gnoming: more relatable than you’d think.

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This is creepy but also weirdly adorable. Sylvia Mc Donald: the suddenly sympathetic character??

Statement of Trevor Herbert, regarding his life as a self-proclaimed vampire hunter.

Vampire killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?

A full album of these can be found here.

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rusty quill gaming - sasha racket

(again)

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when your favourite character is the first one to leave the show

Relistening to Parting in Prague is so much worse than listening to it for the first time was. A lot of it felt genuinely funny back then, but now, knowing how it will end, knowing that we won’t hear from Zolf again (or at least not for a very long time, but even that’s a question with no answer), it is so different. Even all the jokes sound so damn sad.

I actually ended up crying on the bus (which is the one way I deal with any sort of emotions, but still :D). I love and kind of hate the episode at the same time. Huge thanks to Alex for repeatedly switching focus between the scene in the restaurant and Bertie causing his own scene, it would’ve been even more heartbreaking if not for those interruptions.

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The ‘my arm is stuck’ thing reminded:

Rough translation:

‘Don’t try to stop me, I’m leaving for the fumes of revelry!’ ‘Stop, moron! That’s the end of the picture there!’ ‘Oh damnation! My elbow!’

Sadly I don’t remember where I initially found it, so no idea who wrote the ‘dialogue’. The painting is a fresco by Philipp Veit called Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife.

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I hate how I can't stop myself from checking BNC/COCA or Google every other turn of phrase to see whether it sounds natural, even knowing all the while that in the end, it won't really. Oh yes perfectionism when you're writing something not in your first language. I tell myself that what I actually need to do is to get my point across, that I've got countless remarks on how my speech and phrasing are weird even in my native language (and I seem to have survived that). It’s not even that I'm embarrassed to seem ...what? I know I'm not stupid for confusing tenses or drowning in the wrong articles, or for not knowing the best verb to go with that noun to most accurately express my meaning. But I’m still waiting for the day when I feel confident enough to write a damned reddit comment without spending half an hour researching (do I have time to spare? do I have an assignment due tomorrow? yes, why are you asking?)

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The Magnus Archives episode 100

I have very… complicated feelings on this one. The best way I can phrase it is how I feel about the movie Brazil. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is a well crafted piece of cinema with artistic merit I can respect and appreciate that I absolutely despised watching. 

I hated *listening* to the episode.The secondhand embarrassment I got from the extreme awkwardness of the various conversations gave me a visceral case of full body NOPE. I simultaneously wanted to curl up to die and throw my laptop across the room in a rage. Just thinking about it now is making me irrationally angry.

HOWEVER

Underneath the Big Pile of Awkward, I found the episode to be very narratively rich. It lodged in the back of my brain and I kept teasing new things out of it. I want to like this episode, and I do, in theory. In practice I just can’t listen to it without wishing for death in a way only Tim would understand. 

There are things I actively enjoyed. The cameos by James and Bryn were lovely. Peter Lukas is a highlight, I’m very excited to finally meet a Lukas and find out about the fallout from his meeting with Elias. 

And again, from a narrative and meta standpoint, this is a VERY juicy episode. I could (and have) spend hours picking apart the implications but GODDAMN I CAN’T ACTUALLY LISTEN to this meandering pile of verbal pauses and awkward bullshit! It’s like nails on a chalkboard for me. It went on for Way Too Long.

I’m sure it won’t bother me nearly as much in retrospect and 6 months from now if I do a relisten I doubt I’ll skip it. I understand why they did it, it is a very well crafted episode, it just clashes *hard* with my aesthetics. 

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Nothing is reason enough to be late for dinner.

shoutout to the man who managed to escape the spiral bc he was going to be late to dinner 

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This episode was full of questions and exclamations for me. Very unexpected, very strange, at one point I thought the Spiral ate someone and there was a recursion, and a lot more funny than I’m used to from TMA. I was half asleep but trying to take notes, which I don’t usually do, but looking through them, they are mostly along the lines of ‘please don’t kill this character’ and ‘now I recognise James Ross’s voice’.

The questions I was asking myself most during the episode were:

1. Is everyone going to make it out of the interviews alive? 2. What are these stories?

(Longish, rambly and slightly spoilery further down.)

And, well, we got more or less definitive answers I suppose? Almost no one died. In particular, none of the assistants died. I really hoped they wouldn’t kill Bryn's character, and, I mean, technically they didn’t, but he got thrown into Isolation, didn’t he. (And I was worried about him most of all, especially after his 'w.h.a.t' which he said in such a way that it sounded like he in distraction and confusion was dropping individual sounds. Made me a bit more afraid for him. Also was kind of hilarious. And the stumbling was glorious too.) 

As for the stories, while listening I had three major ideas for what they could've been. My first thought was that they were mundane statements. It would sort of make sense narratively, they could serve as a way of showing how the same phobias, fears and sinister objects can be interpreted both as supernatural and as completely normal. That would've been a weird point to make for episode 100 though. And also in that case, why the recorder? 

Another thought, one I had when that woman asked about money, was that the people were lying. Can you lie on record in the Magnus Institute? Can you do that when the Archivist is not present?.. Most of them sounded genuine enough though, and one of them got eaten by an entity in the end, so this half-theory dissipated soon. It was still interesting to me, as I’ve thought about whether lying in a statement is possible, and my reckoning is ‘probably not’. 

Or maybe these stories were different because they weren't compelled. The archivist wasn't there. All the assistants can do is ask questions, they cannot extract out of someone a story that would be magically neatly organised. I've had the theory that the Archivist is something of a story editor for a while. They don't just compel somebody to tell their experience, they lend them eloquence, help them highlight what’s important and don’t let them skip anything that is related, and ultimately turn the string of events into a narrative. Maybe part of why giving a statement feels good is the fact that you understand what happened to you a little better. It seems like this interpretation is quite likely to be true, and if that’s the case, I’m really glad to have my theory confirmed. 

As an aside, I think relistening to this episode will be more fun for me than listening for the first time was. This particular kind of unexpected didn’t resonate very well with me when I was half asleep and waiting for either drama or spookiness. I like the episode a lot more already in retrospect, thinking over my sleepily incoherent notes and quotes, and regardless of my initial feelings I think it’s a really fitting one for this 100 episodes milestone. 

Bonus silliness. When that woman Martin was interviewing went ominously silent, in the atmosphere of my general confusion (and mild dissatisfaction, I'll admit) I had a sudden terrifying thought that all the statement-givers in the episode were agents of the Stranger that came for the assistants now that they had the Archivist. I should've been paying attention to the dates of the statements. Or, in fact, I should’ve just waited until morning to listen.

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Tag yourself as a statement giver, I’d be the spider-terrorized dude.

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sacraments & participles

In my first year at Uni I had a course on Internet Technology, and at one point we were discussing machine translation. The main thing I took from that was that auto-translators, while undoubtedly useful, are also hilarious when they’re dealing with... well, actually, with anything, but especially languages significantly different in grammar. I’ve been abusing this knowledge for my own enjoyment for a while now, and Twitter in particular gave me a lot of material.

Because of the fact that the language in the app is set to English while I only tweet in Russian, it automatically always suggests to translate. And it mostly does exactly what you’d expect: it funnily messes up your grammar, so that as a result your subject divides in two, you become inanimate, your emotions become the thing that experiences you instead of the other way around, etc. And all that makes me kind of forget just how bad auto-translators are sometimes with things like homonyms. There’s no consciousness behind the statistical method (as established by the tragic grammar transformations), so it won’t stop to think that the participants in the situation it’s constructing are sliiightly weird.

Now for what happened today. There’s a silly Russian joke about a word that is both a Christian ritual and a part of speech: that word is причастие (translates as sacrament and participle). And someone who is a linguist might, you know. tweet about parts of speech from time to time. The auto-translator does not know what I study though and doesn’t think before it makes decisions. So what I ended up with was this:

Now, I don’t know where it got the word ‘mass’ from either (hopefully not from Catholicism?), it’s supposed to be formative, if I’m not mistaken, as there is such a thing in Russian verbs in the past tense as a formative -l- suffix. But the end of the sentence just kills me. What I meant to write was just a reference to the history of the language, where the verb form that uses the suffix in question used to be a different part of speech and now, due to some historical difficulties and dropping some copulae, stopped behaving like a participle and became a verb. Instead something way more ominous came out. I’m sorry, am I now supposed to assign letters to church rituals? As if ‘it used to be a participle’ isn’t a bad enough thing to say about a word, we’ll now claim ‘it used to be a sacrament’.

And then we’ll never use that verb form again.

I wasn’t expecting that.

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I mean, she's got an axe, what else would you ask for even. (Hugs. Hugs is the answer. You would ask for hugs, and she gives good hugs.)

reblog if you would also like Azu to be your mighty cuddly orc wife

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That sounds really awful. Good thing it became apparent soon at least :/

I absolutely agree. I like to joke sometimes about RQ shows being an inadvisable place to start because of how good they are, but, first, that's more in relation to the actual content quality (plot, acting, and such), and second, it still doesn't mean high standards or just pickiness can't be a good thing when you're a listener. It may help you recognise what's worth your time and what isn't, it might also reduce the number of situations where you regret how much energy you spent on a show you realise you didn't enjoy that much after the fact.

(What especially upsets me is the notion that wanting a show not to be, for example, sexist is already 'standards'. But, well, that's where we are.)

Thank you for your extended recommendation! A gay fantasy royal wedding sounds wonderful. And I usually really love behind-the-scenes stuff, so that's excellent news as well. As are transcripts. While I tend not to use them in general, for another AP podcast I might do. If RQG had transcripts, I certainly would turn to them from time to time, if only because of things like jokes I don't catch and just stuff that gets lost somewhere between slang, crosstalk and me being a non-native English speaker. I can't imagine the nightmare of transcribing long unscripted AP episodes though. It's incredible someone does that.

anyone has actual play RPG podcasts to recommend that are not too hard to process? with good audio, tight editing, limited crosstalk, reasonable episode length? preferably with a not-all-cis-straight-white-dudes cast?

it’s a genre i love in theory but in practice it’s just. so. fucking. cognitively inaccessible

i keep trying new ones and dropping them pretty quickly because i have no idea what’s going on, or it’s costing me all my brainpower just to sort-of follow, and i’m having, like, the opposite of fun

the only two i’ve managed to stick with and really enjoy so far are Rusty Quill Gaming and Join the Party. i’m sure there are others i’d love just as much but trying to find them on my own is starting to feel like a major waste of time and spoons :/

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It’s been such a problem for me too :/ I think I’ll take your post as a recommendation and go try Join the Party. So far I’ve had little luck trying various AP’s. It’s like you read a lot of good stuff about a podcast but then someone casually mentions in the comments that there’s players loudly eating and drinking. Or you read a lot of good stuff, subscribe, and then the introductory episode has two sexist jokes in the first 25 minutes. Or you read a lot of good stuff, and then the first player introduced describes their character’s appearance using the worst cliches possible. Or you click play... and stop, because the quality is so bad it’s near unintelligible.

I’ve genuinely never had this much trouble searching for something listenable in any other genre, as picky as I am. Maybe the problem is that I started with RQG and they just spoiled me? 

...Rant over, so, for what it’s worth, I’ve read really a lot of good stuff about Wanderquest. Only listened just now to about 5 minutes of 2 random episodes to find out about the audio quality. It’s not ideal, they seem to be playing over the internet rather than everyone at the same table, but editing feels good enough to me. They’re playing 5e, an original world from what I understand. And, among other things, they’ve got an all-female cast (and quite distinct voices!). Episode length is ~50 min. The backlog is only 20 episodes including origin stories (which they have 4 of, for every PC, each one labelled episode 0), and they seem to release new episodes often enough (approximately once a week?). So I’m planning on listening sometime soon.

anyone has actual play RPG podcasts to recommend that are not too hard to process? with good audio, tight editing, limited crosstalk, reasonable episode length? preferably with a not-all-cis-straight-white-dudes cast?

it’s a genre i love in theory but in practice it’s just. so. fucking. cognitively inaccessible

i keep trying new ones and dropping them pretty quickly because i have no idea what’s going on, or it’s costing me all my brainpower just to sort-of follow, and i’m having, like, the opposite of fun

the only two i’ve managed to stick with and really enjoy so far are Rusty Quill Gaming and Join the Party. i’m sure there are others i’d love just as much but trying to find them on my own is starting to feel like a major waste of time and spoons :/

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So the audiodrama subreddit is talking about the Black Tapes being back, while I kind of hoped not to hear from PNWS ever again?.. 

(Here are some of the reasons why. Spoilers — negativity.)

If that’s their damage control, good for them. Not that I would call it the ultimate right thing to do, but I understand. If that’s what they were planning all along, well, I personally am really not a fan of this particular type of ARG. Not here for it. Also, surprise, it does not help you make a good story. And my disappointment with the last season didn’t go anywhere, and from the comments I’ve seen, I’m, while not in the majority, not alone in this. 

I’ll keep half an ear out in maybe a year in the case it’s been suddenly good stuff, but for now, I’ll probably spend my time and energy engaging with other stories and listening to other podcasts. There’s a lot of great ones out there, ones that are really worth your time and will not try to play a weird game with you or fool you with actual real-world release troubles. When it’s the plot that’s trying to fool me into thinking I’m hearing what I’m actually not, that’s fair game. When it’s the creators... I feel that is disrespectful. 

And most of all, a dramatic performance like that isn’t worth anything at all on its own. It’s not especially clever, it’s not suspenseful (more like making people upset or angry), and the chances of the Black Tapes universe to pass for the real world are long gone anyway, so it’s not even actually immersive. It will not fix the story, because it does not have the power to make the plot coherent and interesting. The last six episodes, let’s be honest, were not good listening. Infodumps in general usually aren’t compelling, and neither is jumping to drama that’s trying too hard. And why should the supernatural suddenly be so real that every cult it actually the same?..  And I can go on, and on, and on about this (but it’s likely not going to be very compelling either). The point is, trying to resurrect my interest in the story of the Black Tapes isn’t something I care for. I’m still sort of glad for the people who are still invested. But I’m a bit concerned as well, because I don’t want so many people to get disappointed with TBT again, and I can’t not expect that to happen. So I just hope they’ll get at least as satisfying an ending as there can be.

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Oh, thank you for the info! Even more excited now. I’ll probably listen in the morning rather than before sleep however, it seems it’s going to be quite a ride. I’ll spend so many imaginary hearts on it...

Season finale, I know! I was already hyped, and now more and more news about how great it’s going to be. Can’t wait :) Also, I’m just over halfway through relistening to the entirety of RQG, so I’m not even afraid of the season break. It will be a liittle bit of a torture, but there’s a lot of craft to (re-)respect.

condition: very happy about podcast

Yes! YES! YEEEEESS!

The Rusty Quill Twitter brings the most wonderful news: Helen Gould is joining the RQG party, and apparently her first episode is tonight! I couldn’t be more happy, she was so great in the Beowulf special, and I’ve been hoping she joins the big adventure and doesn’t stay a one-time guest on the show. And I’m just really looking forward to a new character meeting LOLOMG. They’ve come a long way, but they might just be about to get even more fantastic *images of hearts flying everywhere*

HEARTS.

And of course, I’d also have included the picture of Ulf here, but I discarded it halfway through drawing having kind of forgotten where I had been going with it…